PALO ALTO – The Information Age suffered a significant
setback today, as Joind.com president and CEO Elina Lampert said the site was
closing down for the next six weeks to upgrade its servers and networking
hardware. Lampert attributed the cause of the e-gridlock to an “unprecedented”
amount of self-help books, e-learning courses, and other materials aimed at
helping, basically, “anyone do anything, without any consideration whatsoever
of whether it ought to be done or not.”
The site, which after its humble beginnings as just
another Silicon Valley startup 7 years ago traded at $359 this week after a May
2011 IPO at $75, apparently incensed its 40 million+ estimated users with what
appears to be a permanent posting of its all-too-well-known logo of a yellow
“Men At Work” sign and hardhat, modifying its customary “we’ll have things back
to normal momentarily” to “we’ll maybe hopefully have things back to normal in
approximately six weeks.”
“I can’t understand it,” said Tina Yardley, a 45-year-old
mother of four from Seattle whose recent Fifty Pounds Lighter on Egg Yolks
and Cake Batter reached #2 on the best-seller list in Kindle sales on
Amazon.com. “My sales all came from Joind – every one of them. What am I
supposed to do now?” Yardley was referring to her e-book Clogged Arteries
Work Better!, which she gave away for free to her 17,000+ business contacts
on the networking website and which was her sole portal to Yolks and Batter.
But the purveyors of e-counsel weren’t the only ones
grousing about the six-week glitch – the users were the hardest hit. Take the
case of Tommy Simons, an eleven-year-old in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Simons, a
nearsighted and papuliferous sixth-grader with a penchant for Hostess snack
cakes and Popular Mechanics, said the site’s going down has “horrible”
ramifications for his social life. “I don’t know what to do now,” said Simons.
“I have seven girlfriends, but I never learned how to get rid of them,” he
said. Simons, who memorized every word of the best-selling e-book How to Get
Seventh- and Eighth-Grade Girls to get Bieber Fever – For You!, said he’ll
now miss the release of the much-anticipated free follow-up e-tome Grade
School Break-Ups Were Never so Easy. Nor is that Simon’s only
problem, who also taught himself the best putdowns for eleven-year-olds to use
in taverns, learned the five most effective Brazilian jiujitsu submission
techniques, and established a worldwide import-export business in light
armaments. “I really don’t know what I’m going to do now,” he said.
Some authors are making the best of the situation. Among
them is Joel Redmond, the author of a new book on selecting profitable
investments and detecting accounting chicanery. Redmond, a Central New York
financial planner with over 1,700 connections on the site, says he isn’t all
that worried about the six-week hiatus. “I kind of look at Joind.com as a place
where you can make up for not having enough people signing your yearbook in
high school,” he said. “Do you know how cool it feels to have people from Kuala
Lumpur and Hyderabad saying nice things about you, especially when they don’t
know anything about you at all? Bonus,” Redmond said.
Redmond’s book Tradecraft: What Spymasters Can
Teach us About Investing, was released on Cyber Monday of this year on
Amazon.com. Asked if he felt as though he contributed to the Joind.com e-debacle,
he waxed bemused. “I don’t really post links to the book on Joind,” Redmond
said. “Joind is more of a place where I collect endorsements I mostly haven’t
earned from people I mostly don’t know, and hesitantly offer them in return to
make the system work faster so my computer won’t crash,” he said. “Facebook and
Twitter are for the book, mostly so my family and friends can say witty things
like ‘what’s it like writing a best-smeller?’ and wheedle their way into some
free copies.”
And what about Redmond’s e-learning mission? “I don’t
really follow a lot of that stuff,” he said. “I sort of have a rule that if the
author hasn’t been dead fifty years, she’s not all that interesting to me yet.”
The book Tradecraft is available at www.unlimitedpublishing.com/redmond.
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