If you're one of the people working on a startup and your idea didn't work out and it's time to pivot here's a sure-fire idea.

Get a video camera, and a bright attractive person to come with you to hold a mike and a notepad (just as props), probably a woman (to put people at ease) and go to the center of your town and get ready to do man-on-the-street interviews.

But not just any kind of interview.

The question is this: Tell me about a company or product that sucks.

Spend a couple of hours doing these interviews. Go back to the office and review the tapes. You probably won't have to. One of them will stand out. That's the one you feature for that day or week.

Repeat.

We get enough messages saying this product is great or this company really cares, and we know it's all bullshit. They don't care, and we're not even customers, rather we're a business model. This came home to me yesterday sitting in a theater waiting for a movie to start. The theater is completely full. Not one empty seat. So we're not waiting for anyone to show up. And they play commercial after commercial. So much so that there were audible groans in the last couple of previews before the movie started. I'd not heard that before.

Life is filled with these kinds of humiliations. We love to hear these stories and we love to tell them.

How will you make money? Well, the companies will advertise. That's how little they care about what people actually think. It'll be a very very popular site.

If you want to throw me some stock, that would be great. Or hire me as a creative consultant. I'm in NYC and am available.

PS: Here's an example of a man-on-the-street rant from NakedJen. In this case the company-that-sucks is Humana.

 11/22/2011; 9:33:45 AM.   .

Half the comments I get on Twitter are part of a "media strategy."

Which means someone read a book that said if you want to achieve success you have to "engage" with people.

I bet Klout has something to do with it. If they get a reply from me, that counts as a certain number of points toward their score. Which theoretically I guess gets them consulting business, working on other people's "media strategies."

So they ask questions a machine could come up with. I recommend an author. They ask if they should read one of his or her books. I don't know.

People must realize, don't they, that this is all pointless. It's a bubble on a bubble on a bubble on a bubble. When you dilute things that much, is there really anything left?

And Twitter, please please please give us a way to delete items in our Replies tab. I've seen this insipid comment once. That's one too many times. And I'm going to see it twenty times until it scrolls off. This is seriously inhumane.

 11/22/2011; 9:20:52 AM.   .