The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘respectful-head’

Every once in a while we go on a little rant here about something that bugs us. In the past we’ve done hit jobs on email, voicemail and business cards at various times. But there’s one thing that bugs me more than all of those things put together - the ubiquitous hand shake.

I’m not just talking about the sweaty palms handshake, which sends shudders down my back. I even take issue with the firm and dry handshakes that we engage in every day. I’d like to see the ritual ended.

Hand shaking goes back a long, long way. Wikipedia says it was practiced as far back as the 2nd century BC. The story I’ve always heard is that shaking a someone’s hand shows that you hold no weapon. Since most people are right handed and would hold a knife in that hand, we shake right hands.

Whatever the reason for hand shaking, it isn’t needed. Like the Qwerty keyboard (which is designed to slow us down so that the typewriter doesn’t jam), it’s a relic of an older time that’s not only no longer needed but actually causes inefficiency. I can live with the keyboard. But I’d rather not have to catch another flu or cold from a hand shake.

The fact is that hand shakes spread germs. You shake someone’s hand and then touch your nose or mouth and you can get sick. I don’t like getting sick. But to turn down a hand shake is such an insult that there’s little choice. The hand is out there, in front of me waiting, so like everyone else I grasp it.

Whenever I do shake a hand I’m completely aware of it, can’t stop thinking about it, until I can wash my hands. Sometimes in a meeting I’ll shake hands all around, then excuse myself to the bathroom to wash my hands, then return. It draws attention, though, and people have pointed it out to me as odd. My response is that it’s nothing personal but I don’t want to get sick. If I get sick I have to take time off and it hurts my business. And there’s a good chance I’ll get other TechCrunchers sick, too, which is doubly bad.

Anyone who pays attention knows that most people don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom, which should be a criminal offense. Probably ten times a week I don’t shake hands with the excuse that I’m “coming down with something,” even though I’m not.

So let’s start a new trend - not shaking hands. You can do a fist touch instead. or a solid, respectful head nod. I’ll even start bowing if I have to. Fox has a couple of other options, but I absolutely refuse to engage in an elbow bump. Other than that I don’t really care. But just like I don’t swap spit with everyone who walks into a room, I’d prefer not to swap germs via the ancient but disgusting habit of shaking hands, either. Deal?

Thanks to Laura Boychenko for researching hand shakes for me. It’s a fascinatingly heathen practice.

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Notify.me, a service that delivers instant notifications on your favorite topics the way you would like to receive them (i.e. by SMS, e-mail, IM, desktop app or on the web), is adding a new feature next week that should make its die-hard users primarily very happy. The rest of the world will probably care much less.

It’s not that Notify.me at its core isn’t useful, albeit not very unique. For a lot of people, instant updates for anything that has an RSS feed (not only blogs or news sites, but also classifieds listings, for example) with the ability to filter incoming by keyword makes sense, particularly if they need a lot of control over how the updates get delivered based on what the source is. Yet I can’t help thinking that the latest feature the startup is releasing, a browser toolbar, has ‘overkill’ written all over.

What the toolbar does is bring Notify.me’s core functionalities to a persistent toolbar whenever you’re browsing the web. Users can set delivery methods and filter rules directly from the toolbar, and the company has also integrated Ping.fm (which it recently partnered with) and AddThis directly to the toolbar so you can easily share and bookmark websites you’re visiting on a wide variety of social networking services.

Personally, I wouldn’t use this service as I would find it incredibly annoying to constantly have a toolbar on my screen that’s not only persistent but also pings me with new notifications every so often. There’s an abundance of new toolbars launching nowadays, and somehow I don’t think that’s what the next web is all about (quite the contrary, actually). I would love to get your thoughts on this as well.

Similar services include Yotify and Notifixious.

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