From GigaOm:
Maybe it’s the foolish amounts of venture capital swirling around
Silicon Valley, but it often seems as though we are all playing a game
in which the contestants have to determine what is a parody
and what isn’t, and it’s getting harder instead of easier. Is the app
that sends a single word — “Yo” — to another user a parody or a real
company? Turns out it’s real. How about one that makes fake reservations
at restaurants and then sells them to the highest bidder? Yup, that’s
real too. But ReservationHop seems to have triggered a collective feeling of disgust that others haven’t, which may be a sign that there is still some hope left.
Creator Brian Mayer started the service as an experiment after he
waited too long for a burrito, and apparently wasn’t intending to make
it a big splash with it, but word quickly got out and Twitter had a
field day with the idea, turning it into what the founder called “a
maelstrom of hate.” The vast majority of the responses — as Mayer noted in a subsequent blog post about the blowback — called him a lowlife scumbag, or variations on that theme, and said his idea was morally bankrupt....MUCH MORE
Or, as one of Wired's SanFrancisco writers put it:
