Fishing for compliments is something of a misdemeanor in most social circles — unless your circle is the Internet and you’re fishing with a shiny, new vanity app.
ThreeWords.me is making the rounds this week. It’s a simple app that lets you solicit three-word responses from your friends around the web. Each respondent simply goes to your unique ThreeWords.me URL and enters three words about you.
Your friends can also add comments along with their three words, and you can reply to any entries. In your dashboard, you can see which words people entered the most.
You might get a lot of complimentary words, but be warned, o ye of little self-confidence: The app allows for anonymous commenting, so steel yourself for trolls, profanity and put-downs. You can delete any of the entries at your discretion. You can also choose to make all your responses private.
The premise is ever so grade school, which adds to the app’s charm. While ThreeWords.me is without question a slightly narcissistic game aimed squarely at the perpetually insecure social media scene, it’s nevertheless cute and catching on like wildfire through
Its UI is simple, as well. You get to upload a background image and profile photo; other than that, the pages are decidedly bare-bones and lacking in the design department. Then again, the design isn’t what matters about this app; getting people to talk about — and hopefully compliment — you is what drives traffic to the pages in this case.
*Words blurred to preserve the author’s lingering sense of humility.
You can connect the app to Facebook, but sadly, you can’t use Facebook or Twitter to find your friends who are also using the app. You’ll have to do that part manually, a major shortcoming that’s likely holding the app back quite a bit in terms of adoption and growth.
ThreeWords.me puts us in mind of Formspring
The app was created by college freshman Mark Bao, a teenager who’s been trying his hand at web-based entrepreneurialism for quite some time already. While we don’t see ThreeWords.me as a money-making endeavor right now, we’re sure the exposure can’t hurt.
Have you tried ThreeWords.me yet or seen others in your circle using it? Let us know what you think in the comments.
For more Social Media coverage:
Today’s WSJ features the sad, sad story of retired churchman Fred Osborn, who might have to sell his family home. It only has single-pane windows, making it expensive to heat in the winter. And even after renting it out in the summer, Osborn ends up losing money on the old place. On top of that, his son has moved in, along with his four kids. If it got sold, three generations of Osborns would be kicked out at once.
“I want to enjoy retirement now, but I really can’t afford to do that,” Osborn tells the WSJ’s Anne Miller. “It’s a very conflicting, emotional thing.”
But here’s the rub: the story is in the WSJ’s real estate section. It’s basically about a home for sale. The price is $200,000, plus $1,000 a year in taxes. Will you help poor Mr Osborn out?
Hang on, I might have missed out a zero. Actually, the price is $2,000,000, plus $10,000 a year in taxes. A little bit less sympathetic now, I guess.
Wait, I’ve just found another order of magnitude down the back of the sofa. Osborn, it turns out, “will entertain offers above $20 million”, while taxes are “about $100,000 a year”.
Oh, and he’s the great-great-great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, which I guess makes his gambolling grandhildren Vanderbilt’s great-great-great-great-great-great-gran dchildren. But who’s counting.
Not Miller, whose math doesn’t make much sense at all:
Heating the 14-bedroom stone mansion can run $200 a day in the winter—too expensive for year-round living…
Mr. Osborn IV, a former Columbia University crew coach, rents out the castle for weddings between June and September. Day rates start at $55,000.
But it’s barely enough. The Osborns estimate the property consumes at least $500,000 a year, including taxes.
If the Osborns pay $200 a day every day for six months, that comes to about $36,500 a year to heat the old pile. A lot of money, to be sure, and a lot of carbon emissions too, but still a tiny fraction of those total running costs, which themselves can be covered by renting out the castle for nine days over the course of the summer. Beyond the heating and the taxes, there’s no indication of what makes up the lion’s share of those half-a-mil-per-year running costs, but it hardly seems as though $200 a day for heating would tip the scales enough to force the family to move out of the mansion.
All the same, there’s a hint of possible good news at the end of the story.
Over Thanksgiving, Mr. Osborn III learned that some younger cousins have done well in online ventures and banking. Maybe they will have the funds—and interest—to move in, he said, even if the property doesn’t stay in his direct lineage.
“I’m an equal-opportunity family patron,” he said.
Those younger cousins might not be named Frederick Henry Osborn IV. But their blood is still blue. And that’s what counts, surely.
robert shumake
Fox <b>News</b> Fails | worldwide hippies
The people over at Fox News have caused many laughs, cries and broken television screens in 2010 and usually in that order. The network has created so many blunders and mistakes that its mere existence as a news agency is in of itself ...
CNN's John Roberts Joining Fox <b>News</b> | John Roberts | Mediaite
CNN's John Roberts is expected to join FOX News Channel as a senior national correspondent based in Atlanta and will be reporting on major domestic and international stories for the network. Roberts came up the ranks of CBS News, ...
Ugandan High Court Bans Publishing Lists of Gays - AOL <b>News</b>
Gay rights activists in Uganda are savoring a rare victory after the country's highest court banned the media from publishing lists of homosexuals.
robert shumake detroit
Fox <b>News</b> Fails | worldwide hippies
The people over at Fox News have caused many laughs, cries and broken television screens in 2010 and usually in that order. The network has created so many blunders and mistakes that its mere existence as a news agency is in of itself ...
CNN's John Roberts Joining Fox <b>News</b> | John Roberts | Mediaite
CNN's John Roberts is expected to join FOX News Channel as a senior national correspondent based in Atlanta and will be reporting on major domestic and international stories for the network. Roberts came up the ranks of CBS News, ...
Ugandan High Court Bans Publishing Lists of Gays - AOL <b>News</b>
Gay rights activists in Uganda are savoring a rare victory after the country's highest court banned the media from publishing lists of homosexuals.
robert shumake detroit
Fishing for compliments is something of a misdemeanor in most social circles — unless your circle is the Internet and you’re fishing with a shiny, new vanity app.
ThreeWords.me is making the rounds this week. It’s a simple app that lets you solicit three-word responses from your friends around the web. Each respondent simply goes to your unique ThreeWords.me URL and enters three words about you.
Your friends can also add comments along with their three words, and you can reply to any entries. In your dashboard, you can see which words people entered the most.
You might get a lot of complimentary words, but be warned, o ye of little self-confidence: The app allows for anonymous commenting, so steel yourself for trolls, profanity and put-downs. You can delete any of the entries at your discretion. You can also choose to make all your responses private.
The premise is ever so grade school, which adds to the app’s charm. While ThreeWords.me is without question a slightly narcissistic game aimed squarely at the perpetually insecure social media scene, it’s nevertheless cute and catching on like wildfire through
Its UI is simple, as well. You get to upload a background image and profile photo; other than that, the pages are decidedly bare-bones and lacking in the design department. Then again, the design isn’t what matters about this app; getting people to talk about — and hopefully compliment — you is what drives traffic to the pages in this case.
*Words blurred to preserve the author’s lingering sense of humility.
You can connect the app to Facebook, but sadly, you can’t use Facebook or Twitter to find your friends who are also using the app. You’ll have to do that part manually, a major shortcoming that’s likely holding the app back quite a bit in terms of adoption and growth.
ThreeWords.me puts us in mind of Formspring
The app was created by college freshman Mark Bao, a teenager who’s been trying his hand at web-based entrepreneurialism for quite some time already. While we don’t see ThreeWords.me as a money-making endeavor right now, we’re sure the exposure can’t hurt.
Have you tried ThreeWords.me yet or seen others in your circle using it? Let us know what you think in the comments.
For more Social Media coverage:
Today’s WSJ features the sad, sad story of retired churchman Fred Osborn, who might have to sell his family home. It only has single-pane windows, making it expensive to heat in the winter. And even after renting it out in the summer, Osborn ends up losing money on the old place. On top of that, his son has moved in, along with his four kids. If it got sold, three generations of Osborns would be kicked out at once.
“I want to enjoy retirement now, but I really can’t afford to do that,” Osborn tells the WSJ’s Anne Miller. “It’s a very conflicting, emotional thing.”
But here’s the rub: the story is in the WSJ’s real estate section. It’s basically about a home for sale. The price is $200,000, plus $1,000 a year in taxes. Will you help poor Mr Osborn out?
Hang on, I might have missed out a zero. Actually, the price is $2,000,000, plus $10,000 a year in taxes. A little bit less sympathetic now, I guess.
Wait, I’ve just found another order of magnitude down the back of the sofa. Osborn, it turns out, “will entertain offers above $20 million”, while taxes are “about $100,000 a year”.
Oh, and he’s the great-great-great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, which I guess makes his gambolling grandhildren Vanderbilt’s great-great-great-great-great-great-gran dchildren. But who’s counting.
Not Miller, whose math doesn’t make much sense at all:
Heating the 14-bedroom stone mansion can run $200 a day in the winter—too expensive for year-round living…
Mr. Osborn IV, a former Columbia University crew coach, rents out the castle for weddings between June and September. Day rates start at $55,000.
But it’s barely enough. The Osborns estimate the property consumes at least $500,000 a year, including taxes.
If the Osborns pay $200 a day every day for six months, that comes to about $36,500 a year to heat the old pile. A lot of money, to be sure, and a lot of carbon emissions too, but still a tiny fraction of those total running costs, which themselves can be covered by renting out the castle for nine days over the course of the summer. Beyond the heating and the taxes, there’s no indication of what makes up the lion’s share of those half-a-mil-per-year running costs, but it hardly seems as though $200 a day for heating would tip the scales enough to force the family to move out of the mansion.
All the same, there’s a hint of possible good news at the end of the story.
Over Thanksgiving, Mr. Osborn III learned that some younger cousins have done well in online ventures and banking. Maybe they will have the funds—and interest—to move in, he said, even if the property doesn’t stay in his direct lineage.
“I’m an equal-opportunity family patron,” he said.
Those younger cousins might not be named Frederick Henry Osborn IV. But their blood is still blue. And that’s what counts, surely.
robert shumake detroit
robert shumake
Fox <b>News</b> Fails | worldwide hippies
The people over at Fox News have caused many laughs, cries and broken television screens in 2010 and usually in that order. The network has created so many blunders and mistakes that its mere existence as a news agency is in of itself ...
CNN's John Roberts Joining Fox <b>News</b> | John Roberts | Mediaite
CNN's John Roberts is expected to join FOX News Channel as a senior national correspondent based in Atlanta and will be reporting on major domestic and international stories for the network. Roberts came up the ranks of CBS News, ...
Ugandan High Court Bans Publishing Lists of Gays - AOL <b>News</b>
Gay rights activists in Uganda are savoring a rare victory after the country's highest court banned the media from publishing lists of homosexuals.
robert shumake
Fox <b>News</b> Fails | worldwide hippies
The people over at Fox News have caused many laughs, cries and broken television screens in 2010 and usually in that order. The network has created so many blunders and mistakes that its mere existence as a news agency is in of itself ...
CNN's John Roberts Joining Fox <b>News</b> | John Roberts | Mediaite
CNN's John Roberts is expected to join FOX News Channel as a senior national correspondent based in Atlanta and will be reporting on major domestic and international stories for the network. Roberts came up the ranks of CBS News, ...
Ugandan High Court Bans Publishing Lists of Gays - AOL <b>News</b>
Gay rights activists in Uganda are savoring a rare victory after the country's highest court banned the media from publishing lists of homosexuals.
robert shumake
This paper is to hopefully help those lost housewives, job-seekers with bad luck, and others seeking extra income make mistakes and waste both time and money. I hope it is insightful and I hope my experience can help those from wasting their time like I did. I wrote this to inform because there is an endless barrage of people misleading the public into thinking there's a great wealth waiting for them when there's not. Hopefully whoever reads this will save time, money, and a little bit of his or her sanity. What's written here is from my own experiences in trying to make money and from crossing paths with others trying to do the same. This guide is for the beginner and novice who's not a big player but wants information to keep him or her from losing money in an effort to make it.
Every year millions if not billions of dollars are lost by people hoping to find work online only to find nothing. The FBI, the postal service, and other government agencies vigorously go after the fraudulent means of taking your money, but new scams always pop up in large quantities anyway. For the legitimate means of earning money, the competition usually tends to be too fierce for you to earn a decent living.
There are also many legitimate and honest means of earning money online that I do not wish to disrespect, but the issue with those tends to be the same with lots of people just like you trying to earn some honest money, which drives down what you can earn.
1. Online surveys.
We've seen the offers to pay us for taking online surveys. The truth is that they never ever materialize into cash. They're just scams intended to bombard you with a page full of sponsors. After you answer the questions, you get spam in your e-mail, and sometimes even get unsolicited calls, to get you to buy the stuff you selected in the surveys. They basically function the same way spyware does with collecting personal information, buying habits, and what items your buying tendencies lean toward in order to more effectively market more stuff towards you.
2. Get paid to click on pop-up ads.
Pop-ups are intended to get you to a site to BUY stuff, not casually browse then leave. I've read reports that some have gotten paid - pennies. Other than that, they're just another way to steer you into making money for someone else. Get the scam? You are lured in with the false hope of making money for the sake of trying to get you to make money for others by buying from them.
3. Get a free TV or video game system (or whatever).
Like online surveys, the "free offers" are intended to steer you towards pages full of sponsors. The catch is that you must buy a certain value of dollar's worth of goods and/or services from sponsors before you can get your "free" item. After completion, do you get the "free" item? No. There's always an "accidental" glitch in the system that keeps your fulfillment of the obligations from registering with the company making the free offer, the site closes and disappears, or they just blow you off completely. To add to it, the personal information collected will serve to spam you with more harassment to buy more junk.
4. Mailing lists.
There are scams involving making money off of mailing post cards or letters. They don't work. The only ones who make the money are the ones parting you with your money in exchange for information on how to buy lists to sell post cards with offers on them. Many mailing lists you partake in are illegal pyramid schemes that will land you in all sorts of trouble if you're caught, so do yourself a favor and avoid them.
5. TV Infomercial "get rich quick" schemes.
These are glorified scalping schemes. You hoard what's in demand and sell for a profit; often on EBay, Craigslist, or in the paper. It sometimes works, but the problem is that a lot of people do it, so whatever you're planning on selling, you can expect a saturated market. There is almost no market left on Earth that doesn't already have large players hoarding the lion's share of the profits. Some of them also involve opening your own online store in which they drop-ship under your name, and others involve government auctions, and they will be discussed later.
6. Real estate
It's a great idea. Buy a house on the cheap and flip it for a profit. The downside? Too many people do it, making for a saturated market even when the housing industry is doing well. As of this writing, it's not doing well at all. That makes for cheap houses, giving the advantage to buyers, but if you're buying to re-sell, re-selling is a problem. It could take a while to sell it in the current down market, and in the mean time you're paying taxes and maintenance that could eat away at any potential profits. If there are added complications like back taxes, liens, etc, then it's only that much harder to turn a profit. To add to it, when you buy real estate over the net, you have the extra issue of not being fully disclosed on everything that may be wrong with the property.
7. Buy at government auctions on the cheap, sell for profit.
Another great idea if those auctions weren't filled with bargain-hunters who drive up prices so high that bargains are seldom found. Still, people selling packages online promising huge amounts of cash for doing just that are everywhere, and even in infomercials too. Some auctions won't let you through the door unless you are representing a business. A lot of used car dealers frequent them to hoard up the cars for re-sale, and make it expensive for you if they don't win. A lot of house-flippers go there for the houses, driving up prices. Hell a lot of everyone goes to government and private auctions for everything to be found in them, and the end result is that there are seldom any bargains to be had.
8. Christmas time "it" item store raids.
We've all seen it: $1,000 Tickle-Me-Elmo's, $1,000 Nintendo Wii's, Furbies, Xbox's, PS3's, toys, etc. Waiting in line at a brick-and-mortar retail store to hoard up what WILL be a sure-seller is a long process, and competition is without mercy, so seeking to sell what is in high demand isn't as simple as it sounds. You have people maxing out their credit cards to buy as many as possible, and for stores who post limits, bring family members and friends with them. It's not just Christmas time either. It's easy to figure out when toy stocking day is at a given retailer because before it opens you see all the toy hoarders standing in line before sunrise, hoping to snag that short-packed (one per case or sometimes one per multiple cases) Hot Wheels car or Star Wars figure.
To make it worst, many low-pay store employees do the same thing, charging their credit cards to pay for it in order to make some money on the side. BUT they have the advantage because they can and often do prevent that one rare action figure from even reaching the shelves in the first place. Casual scans of EBay over the years have shown me many instances where the seller showed off his/her entire store case of high-demand action figures that he could not have possibly gotten without being an employee.
Now on to selling your Christmas "it" gift on EBay. You get lots of bidders, but many are low feedback or zero feedback buyers. That's because most are deadbeats. They're also often YOU using fake alternate accounts to bid up your own auctions to gain more money, which is dishonest. It's easy to spot shill-bidding because someone will keep bidding repeatedly even when he/she is winning, or the same two zero-feedback buyers will engage in a fake bidding war to drive up prices. Because of this vicious cycle of high reserves, buy-it-now prices, fake bidders, and deadbeats, very few Christmas "it" items get sold at a high price. Most people just aren't stupid enough to pay an insane price for something that will be in high quantities a month after Christmas. The end result: Christmas passes, you still have your "it" item (or stockpile of them), some child who wanted it didn't get it under the Christmas tree because of the prices, and you are left with either lowering the price or returning it to the store for a refund.
9. Create your own brand.
You can connect with a Chinese supplier to supply you with anything you can imagine. Some will even let you put your own name on whatever you're selling. Just add "China wholesale" or "China manufacturer" to whatever item you are interested in selling to Google or any other search engine. You will find sources, usually organizations made up of multiple suppliers and producers, who can help you, and signing up as a buyer is free most of the time.
Owning your own electronics firm sounds pretty nice and prestigious, and the start-up costs are the minimum number of units each producer requires (ranges from a few dozen units to just one unit) plus shipping. Electronics and musical instruments in particular are comparatively cheap to buy wholesale from a Chinese manufacturer. It's not entirely that easy, though. If it were, I'd be a millionaire. There is a problem and it lies in the customer. The average saxophone or guitar player would rather hold out for a $1000 name brand instrument than pay $200 for a no-name one, and it doesn't help that Chinese-made instruments of any kind are stared down upon by professionals, amateurs, and instructors alike as inferior. For electronics, people would be reluctant to buy a no-name HDTV off of an online auction instead of buying a brand he/she feels is reliable. Still, these items do sell well in overall volume, but there are lots of sellers, so profits are slim.
For other means of creating your own brand, like for goods you produce yourself, the situation of high competition remains. Still, if you can find a niche market, you can do OK. That's hard to do though. The internet is flooded with plenty of sellers for everything you can think of. There are also domestic suppliers of toys, candy, health and beauty supplies, clothing, and just about everything you can imagine. I have not seen any instances where domestic suppliers let you put your own name on their items, but I am sure they are out there.
10. EBay
What to sell? There's always the Christmas "it" item, but that's seasonal. The problem of what to sell to make any money off of is a huge one. There are honest means, of course. There are many organizations that sell to EBay store owners and some that even do drop-shipping (you sell it, they ship it under your name). They are also easy to find on search engines. The problem of "saturated market" once again shows itself, which is the main problem. If you have something to sell, odds are dozens of people have the exact same thing bought from the exact same source. Finding something unique to have a niche market is the most desirable and the most difficult situation to have when trying to sell stuff online. If you're just barely making a profit off of what you're selling, the auction listing fees could and often does make those profits disappear.
11. Work at home.
Most "work-at-home" jobs are a crock. They sell "programs" that are sometimes just lists of potential clients for you to work for with no guarantees (like the get-rich-quick scams), and sometimes programs that teach you how to sell the same junk you just bought to other people for a profit. Some that are legitimate offer transcriber work that is so low-paying that you don't recover the cost of the service or net so little that it's not worth the time. Medical billing services in particular come up a lot when searching for work-at-home jobs online. They're nothing. They sell you worthless lists that won't make you any money.
There are legitimate ones though, like guru.com and other freelance sites, which hooks freelancers with people who need certain work done. They have free basic access to potential freelance work, but the big-paying jobs are for paying subscribers only. The catch: you have to bid, and the winner is the lowest bidder with adequate skills. That makes it difficult, especially if your resume is on the lacking side. There are also quite a few bidders for work at these sites. Freelancing is good honest scam-free work without a doubt, but you have to be willing to work many hours to make any money since the low bid wins. The type of freelance work varies from simple audio/video transcription to complicated IT, research, accounting, and finance work, so a college degree pays here. You won't get rich doing it, but at least it can pad your resume with a diverse selection of employers. Then there are sites like trialpractice.com and online verdict.com that pay you to listen in on mock trials lawyers perform as mock jurists so they can rehearse for a case. The pay is fair for the service, but not much work is offered.
12. Franchises.
Yes it's possible to buy a franchise over the internet. You can buy anything over the net. Most of the large firms require big money (from several tens of thousands of dollars up to a million dollars or more) and require brick-and-mortar store operations. It's very expensive and the start-up costs (thanks to the franchise fees) are beyond unrealistic. It takes a long time, often years, to recover the start-up costs. Loans are used most of the time to pay for them, and adding interest for the loans only compounds the difficulty of breaking even before you start turning a profit. Still, if you can bear it, a franchise can be a no-brainer if you pick a good location in a good market.
13. Referral sites.
There are tons of sites that are on the net for the sole purpose of kicking you over to another site. A classic example is Musician's Friend, a musical instruments store with probably hundreds of sites whose sole purpose is to kick you over to Musician's Friend when you find something you like. Adult sites are also notorious for using high volumes of referral sites. The purpose is simple: flood Google. How nice it would be for a store if most of the search returns took you to the same place. Stores who do this offer a referral service in which you are paid or get barter (trade) for their goods. The problem is that it takes an unrealistic amount of visitors to your referral site (thousands or more) to add up to any amount of money, and when considering that you're not the only referral site for the "mother site," you will make little to no money that often won't even pay for the fees to host your referral site.
14. Porn.
This had to come up because of the sheer numbers of people who get into the adult business with the hopes of easy money. They're usually done by offering access for a subscription fee. The flaw in them as a money-maker once again is a saturated market. There is no shortage of them, so the chances of you making any money are slim at best. It doesn't help that torrents, file sharers, and various adult version copies of YouTube make the average adult site patron not have to spend any money at all to see adult material.
15. Spamming message boards.
One of the oldest means of advertising is showing up on message boards to advertise a site in the discussions. Moderators ALWAYS delete spam and almost always ban the spammers. It's not done as much as it used to because of it. Still, there are some who are promised easy money to advertise in forums, only to find they earned pennies or nothing at all. It annoys the message board patrons, moderators will get rid of it, and it's easily one of the most dead-end ways of trying to make money.
16. Junk E-mails.
Junk e-mails are easily the most notorious and hated form of soliciting business. You bulk-send ads and hope for responses that lead to sales. You use multiple e-mail accounts to get past people's spam blockers. You even go through illegal means of using the e-mail accounts of other people and proxies to hide your identity from angry victims while bouncing the spam through multiple e-mail accounts. Spam e-mail is itself increasingly becoming illegal and bulk e-mailers are even prosecuted when they're caught. 99.99% of all people hate it, so you have to send out millions of spam e-mails in order to make that 0.01% profitable. Besides, above all else, people will hate you for this more so than any other online profession.
How do you get the list of victims to spam? There are many marketing firms who unleash email harvesters onto the internet to scour it for e-mail addresses, and the lists are acquired from them; for a price of course. There are also associations of direct marketers who share information that you could always join. Both have questionable ethics, but like people who make bongs for smoking drugs, they claim innocence and claim they're not responsible for what people do with their goods even though they know what their goods were developed and intended to be used for.
17. Letting others advertise on your site.
If you have your own site (maybe a fan site, an educational site, etc), you think you can help yourself to some extra cash by putting a small ad above and another one to the side, and maybe a pop-up or pop-under. The problem is they pay so poorly that they often just barely cover the cost of the servers, and no one gets rich off of them. They're good if you want support for a non-profit site of some sort, but as a money-maker they won't help. Another problem is spyware that YOU distribute, which can and does often come as part of the price you pay for letting advertisers in. Many banners for ads also collect information on your visitors too, so too many ads can actually keep customers and visitors away, especially if they have scumware.
18. Your own online store.
Ah.....the freedom and independence of being your own boss of your own store. Been there, done that, made no money. This, like so many other methods, is hard to make money at thanks to market saturation. You have to pay server fees that increase with traffic, marketing, fees to list in search engines, etc. For this to work, you really need to stand out and establish your site as a brand. Search for anything on a search engine. The majority of you will not make it past a few pages in the results to see the small no-name shops. Still, setting up an online store isn't as hard as it sounds. Many service providers offer simple-to-use templates that make setting up to be simple and quick.
19. Online shopping/mystery shopping.
Online shopping is just survey taking and follows the same scam as it does, so no money is to be made there. Mystery shopping in stores is a scam. People promise to pay you if you go to the store and do an incognito "survey" by buying goods and forwarding the prices to the surveyor. The problem is that they either never pay you, or engage in a scam (that could land you in jail) in which they give you a fake check, you give them your bank account information, you cash the check, they clear out your account, and you're there having to deal with the bank when it realizes it has a fake check that you signed and gave them. Avoid at all costs, even the ones posted on job boards that seem legitimate.
20. Your own auction house.
Yes it's possible, and there are quite a few independent auction houses on the net. To get one, you must first get a host, which is relatively cheap. Then there is the auction software, which varies in cost from $300 up to $1,000. Then there is getting attention to your auction site and away from EBay, which is hard. Having your own auction house works best when you are selling items EBay won't sell or makes difficult to sell, like for wine and other alcohol, guns, etc. These bear huge legal liabilities though, and can be more trouble than they're worth. For items readily available on EBay, it is simply not worth it and the odds of you even paying for the high cost of the auction software are really small.
21. Online casinos.
You have a "system" for slots, craps, roulette, or poker for increasing the probability of winning, so you think its easy money, right? Wrong. Online casinos rig the games in their favor. For Blackjack, Poker, and other card games, there is simply no way you the player can know the number of virtual decks being used, the shuffle rate, or if they're even stacked against you by rigging the good cards to go to the dealer and the junk going to you. For roulette, the probabilities are simply changed to rule in their favor. For example, the roulette table divides into three sections (1 - 12, 13 - 24, and 25 - 36). The statistical probability of each is a clear 1/3. If you place chips on two of them, you increase the probability of winning to 2/3. The casinos change what they're willing to pay to 2-to-1 in order to give a payout of zero if you win through that method. The probabilities of all the numbers are also lowered to reduce the payout and the probability of winning if you "spread" your chips over a large area. Even if you go ahead and try covering 2/3 of the board for a 2/3 statistical probability, the game will still beat you anyway. I tried it, and couldn't believe how many times the game beat the statistical advantage I had. It was to the point of being unrealistic.
I know the situation: you tried the free play they always offer, and did pretty well at it. You then tried to play with real money only to find yourself on the bad end of a losing streak. You think it was just bad luck and since the free play went so well you KNOW you can make money playing. So you add more money, and keep losing it. This is how online gambling addictions form. I tried it, and my only conclusion is that the game is rigged to be in your favor (or at least a little fairer) for the free play and rigged in favor of the online casino owner for the cash play. Avoid it. Losing money this way breaks up families, wrecks lives, and most certainly doesn't bring wealth. Don't forget it's their software, and software writers can write it to do anything they want it to do.
22. Selling travel packages
This scam does occasionally appear online. It involves you selling tour and vacation packages for someone else. The thing is that there are no packages, and what you're selling is a big pile of nothing or is a package that doesn't fully disclose what it comes or doesn't come with. This is another criminal scheme that you should not get involved with.
23. Online Investments
A classic way to wealth is to simply invest it in stocks, precious metals, business ventures, etc. Investing is also not short in the area of dishonest thieves tricking you out of your money. Always research any firm before you give your money to them, and be reluctant to deal with an investment firm you've never heard of before.
Still, there are honest ones, and can lose your money with the honest ones too because it's up to the markets as a whole and the companies you and your firm invested in to determine your profitability. To make a lot of money investing, you need to have a lot of money invested. Having a couple of thousands of dollars to invest will only yield you small returns of a few dollars. You also need time. Investors build their wealth over many years. Government bonds are generally considered safe investments, as they are steady, predictable, and reliable.
When dealing with investment firms online, always ask for securities licenses. A legal and honest broker will have NASD securities licenses. Series 63 and 65 licenses are usually the first ones they have, as they legally authorize a broker to sell financial services, and they're the easiest to get. The Series 7 license authorizes an agent to sell any type of security. A Series 3 license authorizes a broker to sell futures or options on futures. There are many more, so do your homework. I also repeat: always ask for licenses! I am sure some crooks out there will have licenses anyway and some will lie and claim they have them, but checking certification does help minimize risk.
Gold is another attractive investment that tends to be reliable and stable. People need to be careful because a newbie to investing can and often is suckered by unscrupulous dealers and by their own ignorance. There are TWO types of investing for metals: intrinsic and numismatic.
Intrinsic amounts to what I call inflated junk. You turn on the TV, watch the shopping channels, and see them selling coins at well above what you'd rationally think they're worth. The salesman swears they're worth the high price because they're "special limited edition" and because they're "proof" (uncirculated, sometimes with special finishes) coins that have been graded by an official grading service. I watched such a show a week before writing this, and saw a salesman swearing that since the value of gold is increasing, his graded coins selling for nearly twice the market rate for gold will increase. He was wrong; completely. You almost never get what you paid for graded coins when you try to re-sell them because graded or not they're only worth the market rate for their metals. They're a glorified scam that sells to collectors who see them as valuable in their minds even if the markets say something different. That's why they're called "intrinsic." I cannot stress this enough: avoid intrinsic coins. As investments, they're junk. The graded coin salesmen try non-stop to sell them as investment-grade collectibles when the truth is they're flat-out wrong. Every day uneducated new investors are suckered out of their money by buying intrinsic coins that cost above what they're worth while thinking they'll get a return that exceeds what they paid. Those coins are fine as collectibles if you're a collector and not an investor, but do not believe the sales pitches from the people selling them that they're investment-grade because they're not.
That is where numismatic metal comes from. Numismatic metals are the true investment metals that are worth exactly what the commodities market rate for an ounce is this very second. There are plenty of dealers who sell them, too. Dealers sell them at market rate plus a fee that decreases as the volume of that metal you buy increases. Still, like stocks and bonds, it takes time and lots of money to gain a good return off of the investment in gold and other metals, but more like bonds numismatic metals like gold tends to be very reliable and stable.
Well there is my 23 ways you won't make money on the internet. Sorry to be so pessimistic, but the reality is that for every good idea you have, a thousand others had the same idea already and are already in play.
There are exceptions though; there are always exceptions. Most online stores that do well are ones that are well-established and have a name brand to them, such as Amazon, EBay, etc. Not to forget that almost every brick-and-mortar store has its own online store to bring that name brand recognition over the net paired with locally available customer service. Many sellers on auctions and online store owners live off their online incomes as full-time jobs, but they do so through volume sales being high enough to where the small returns add up to a livable amount of money. This requires a level of work that some may not find suitable for their goals.
Your most idealistic situation for selling goods is one in which the number of sellers are low and the number of buyers is either high or consistently in demand of what you are selling. This is where niche markets excel. Those with the creativity to offer goods and/or services not tapped by the broader market for your goods do well. Having a name brand established always helps, and for someone just entering the market to do it, you establish it through persistence, quality of customer service, and reliability. For online jobs, IT work never goes into shortages. Most other online jobs either pay poorly, don't pay at all, or downright criminal scams.
If you do decide on an online venture to make some money, I recommend starting off doing as a means of supplementing your income only. Don't jump into depending on it as your primary source of income because that is just too risky. By all means you should avoid any and all criminal scams because going to jail isn't worth it.
If you ever question whether a venture you got involved with, there are sources to go to. One is the FBI, which does look into it and does go after perpetrators if a crime has been committed. Another is www.scam.com, which is an excellent message board for people to help each other avoid new scams.
The future is unwritten. When I was in high school, I foresaw the internet and most aspects of it like many science fiction fans did, bit I did not foresee the billions to be gained from all the good ideas that came with it. The best way to fortunes on the net is the same way fortunes were made in the 1990's: find and bring a new idea to the market and capitalize on it. There are still countless good ideas that no one has even thought of yet, and imagination is by far the greatest asset you can possess when it comes to sitting there and thinking of something that has never been done before. Living like everyone else is achieved by doing what everyone else does, while wealth is achieved by being the one who thinks differently. Tomorrow is only limited by your ability to imagine it, so don't be afraid to think outside what you consider to be normal.
robert shumake detroit
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robert shumake
robert shumake
Fishing for compliments is something of a misdemeanor in most social circles — unless your circle is the Internet and you’re fishing with a shiny, new vanity app.
ThreeWords.me is making the rounds this week. It’s a simple app that lets you solicit three-word responses from your friends around the web. Each respondent simply goes to your unique ThreeWords.me URL and enters three words about you.
Your friends can also add comments along with their three words, and you can reply to any entries. In your dashboard, you can see which words people entered the most.
You might get a lot of complimentary words, but be warned, o ye of little self-confidence: The app allows for anonymous commenting, so steel yourself for trolls, profanity and put-downs. You can delete any of the entries at your discretion. You can also choose to make all your responses private.
The premise is ever so grade school, which adds to the app’s charm. While ThreeWords.me is without question a slightly narcissistic game aimed squarely at the perpetually insecure social media scene, it’s nevertheless cute and catching on like wildfire through
Its UI is simple, as well. You get to upload a background image and profile photo; other than that, the pages are decidedly bare-bones and lacking in the design department. Then again, the design isn’t what matters about this app; getting people to talk about — and hopefully compliment — you is what drives traffic to the pages in this case.
*Words blurred to preserve the author’s lingering sense of humility.
You can connect the app to Facebook, but sadly, you can’t use Facebook or Twitter to find your friends who are also using the app. You’ll have to do that part manually, a major shortcoming that’s likely holding the app back quite a bit in terms of adoption and growth.
ThreeWords.me puts us in mind of Formspring
The app was created by college freshman Mark Bao, a teenager who’s been trying his hand at web-based entrepreneurialism for quite some time already. While we don’t see ThreeWords.me as a money-making endeavor right now, we’re sure the exposure can’t hurt.
Have you tried ThreeWords.me yet or seen others in your circle using it? Let us know what you think in the comments.
For more Social Media coverage:
Today’s WSJ features the sad, sad story of retired churchman Fred Osborn, who might have to sell his family home. It only has single-pane windows, making it expensive to heat in the winter. And even after renting it out in the summer, Osborn ends up losing money on the old place. On top of that, his son has moved in, along with his four kids. If it got sold, three generations of Osborns would be kicked out at once.
“I want to enjoy retirement now, but I really can’t afford to do that,” Osborn tells the WSJ’s Anne Miller. “It’s a very conflicting, emotional thing.”
But here’s the rub: the story is in the WSJ’s real estate section. It’s basically about a home for sale. The price is $200,000, plus $1,000 a year in taxes. Will you help poor Mr Osborn out?
Hang on, I might have missed out a zero. Actually, the price is $2,000,000, plus $10,000 a year in taxes. A little bit less sympathetic now, I guess.
Wait, I’ve just found another order of magnitude down the back of the sofa. Osborn, it turns out, “will entertain offers above $20 million”, while taxes are “about $100,000 a year”.
Oh, and he’s the great-great-great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, which I guess makes his gambolling grandhildren Vanderbilt’s great-great-great-great-great-great-gran dchildren. But who’s counting.
Not Miller, whose math doesn’t make much sense at all:
Heating the 14-bedroom stone mansion can run $200 a day in the winter—too expensive for year-round living…
Mr. Osborn IV, a former Columbia University crew coach, rents out the castle for weddings between June and September. Day rates start at $55,000.
But it’s barely enough. The Osborns estimate the property consumes at least $500,000 a year, including taxes.
If the Osborns pay $200 a day every day for six months, that comes to about $36,500 a year to heat the old pile. A lot of money, to be sure, and a lot of carbon emissions too, but still a tiny fraction of those total running costs, which themselves can be covered by renting out the castle for nine days over the course of the summer. Beyond the heating and the taxes, there’s no indication of what makes up the lion’s share of those half-a-mil-per-year running costs, but it hardly seems as though $200 a day for heating would tip the scales enough to force the family to move out of the mansion.
All the same, there’s a hint of possible good news at the end of the story.
Over Thanksgiving, Mr. Osborn III learned that some younger cousins have done well in online ventures and banking. Maybe they will have the funds—and interest—to move in, he said, even if the property doesn’t stay in his direct lineage.
“I’m an equal-opportunity family patron,” he said.
Those younger cousins might not be named Frederick Henry Osborn IV. But their blood is still blue. And that’s what counts, surely.
robert shumake
Fox <b>News</b> Fails | worldwide hippies
The people over at Fox News have caused many laughs, cries and broken television screens in 2010 and usually in that order. The network has created so many blunders and mistakes that its mere existence as a news agency is in of itself ...
CNN's John Roberts Joining Fox <b>News</b> | John Roberts | Mediaite
CNN's John Roberts is expected to join FOX News Channel as a senior national correspondent based in Atlanta and will be reporting on major domestic and international stories for the network. Roberts came up the ranks of CBS News, ...
Ugandan High Court Bans Publishing Lists of Gays - AOL <b>News</b>
Gay rights activists in Uganda are savoring a rare victory after the country's highest court banned the media from publishing lists of homosexuals.
robert shumake detroit
robert shumake
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