Verizon’s Intrusive Marketing
In preparation for a family vacation, I setup a blog that I would use to share pictures and items of interest with my friends and family. I decided, to make the most of it, I would use blogger.com’s mobile blogging feature, and send my photos and posts in to my blog through my phone.
After quickly setting it up, and testing a few messages, I noticed that at the end of each message was a Verizon marketing blurb. Actually it was more than a blurb, it was three paragraphs of marketing hoopla and advertisements.
This message was sent using PIX-FLIX Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!
To learn how you can snap pictures with your wireless phone visit
www.verizonwireless.com/getitnow/getpix.
To learn how you can record videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/getitnow/getflix.
To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime� 6.5 or higher is required. Visit www.apple.com/quicktime/download to download the free player or upgrade your existing QuickTime� Player. Note: During the download
process when asked to choose an installation type (Minimum, Recommended or Custom), select Minimum for faster download.
So, I decided not only was I not going to allow Verizon to ugly up my posts with crap, I also wasn’t going to allow them to advertise on my blog for something I have to pay them to use! I ended up putting together a script that automatically strips out Verizons spam when sending an MMS. In order for it to work, I must start my messages with a *, but I think its worth it.
function remove() {
var msgs = document.getElementsByTagName("P");
for (var i = msgs.length -1; i >= 0; --i)
{
if (msgs[i].className == "mobile-post")
{
if (msgs[i].firstChild.nodeValue.charAt(0) != "*")
msgs[i].parentNode.removeChild(msgs[i]);
}
}
}
Feel free to use this on your own blog, and if anyone has a better solution, that can dynamically delete the offending content on posting, that would be great. For the time being, I will just login when I have time and manually edit the posts after the fact.
