Just Make It Sound GoodJust Make It Sound Good

People love a good rumor. Since we're in the technology business, juicy stories about Lindsay Lohan, LeBron James, or Lady Ga Ga don't quite fit in. That doesn't stop some tech stories from repeating things that seem just as crazy, and are totally unsupported by any facts.Let's pick a couple of things from the past week. One is the rumor that Kin sold only 503 phones. That's a really crazy-small number -- even for a failed phone with just a six-week lifespan. There is no named source for this rumor. Yet like any good rumor, it's so sensational that dozens of people pick it up and repeat it over and over and over and over again. One prominent source I could find that didn't bite was the New York Times, which stuck to a "fewer than 10,000" line.

So is there any way to figure out whether 503 could be a real sales number? Lacking some data from either Microsoft or Verizon, we probably won't know an official number. But there could certainly be some data points that could confirm or conflict with that number. The folks over at PocketNow.com posited a pretty simple check using the Kin's Facebook app, and comes up with a number just south of 9,000. Their logic seems reasonable: Kin's Facebook app is only available to Kin users, and thus this count should be close to the number of registered Kin users. Even if you were to assume a couple of thousand testers, the Facebook app would indicate that sales are significantly higher than 503. This isn't to say Kin was a success, but only that the 503 rumor seems crazy, unfounded, and unsupported by other reasonable measures.

Here's a second example. This week a message was sent to a security mailing list describing some new Microsoft security exploits. That alone isn't new, but the additional information in the message said:

Sounds pretty juicy, doesn't it? A group of somewhat-white-hat security professionals are circumventing the standard "responsible disclosure" process, supposedly because of Microsoft's antagonism towards them. So certainly the press will contact the members of this group and interview them about their ... oh wait a minute, there are no names in the message for obvious reasons. So we're not really sure at all if this "group" consists of more than one person. But that didn't stop several news sites from reporting about this "group" without once questioning whether it was a group at all. For all we know it's just one disgruntled guy. But that wouldn't sound as good, would it?