Hasta La Gadget!

After several days of online protest, Groupon today announced that it has finally pulled its controversial “Save the Money” ads. The commercials sparked an online backlash after airing during the Super Bowl, particularly the “Tibet” ad, which began with an impassioned plea from Timothy Hutton for the people of Tibetan, abruptly shifting to a message about the savings.

Viewers quickly took to Twitter and Groupon’s blog to express their outrage at the ads, which were largely considered crass and dismissive. When Groupon founder Andrew Mason responded to the complaints on Monday, it sounded more like an explanation than an actual apology.

“When we think about commercials that offend us, we think of those that glorify antisocial behavior-like the scores of Super Bowl ads that are built around the crass objectification of women,” wrote Mason. “Unlike those ads, no one walks away from our commercials taking the causes we highlighted less seriously.”

People quickly responded, still outraged, that, if the company had to explain the ads afterward, there’s something fundamentally flawed about the approach. Mason finally agreed writing in another followup,

We’ve listened to your feedback, and since we don’t see the point in continuing to anger people, we’re pulling the ads (a few may run again tomorrow – pulling ads immediately is sometimes impossible).

The ads have also apparently been pulled from the official Groupon account–the link in our original post is now broken. Fear not, though, the ad still lives on through other YouTube channels. Video after the jump

PC Air, a new airline based out of Thailand is looking to fill its crew with transgender flight attendants. According to Reuters, the decision came after the airline received more than 100 applications for transgender employees. The airline ultimately hired four transgender flight attendants, along with 19 female and seven male.

Transgender people, popularly known as “katoeys” or “ladyboys” in Thailand, are higher profile in that country than most. “They are especially common in cosmetics shops or health stores, which almost always have a ladyboy shop assistant,” says Reuters.

The airline insists that transgendered employs have “feminine characters,” adhering to the same standards as their female counterparts. Says the airline’s president, Peter Chan,

For male flight attendants, if I don’t want to hire them, it’s because of their attitude or their characters, like the way they walk and smile. For female flight attendants, if they have no patience and their character does not qualify, we won’t hire them. For transsexuals, we can’t just spend 5 or 10 minutes with them, we have to spend the whole day with them to make sure they have feminine characters.

Taco Bell tried the whole aggressive approach, after being sued for falsely claiming that its beef is, well, not actually beef. The fast food chain bought full pages in some of the country’s biggest papers, for a letter from the company’s president carrying the headline “Thank You For Suing Us.”

The company’s new approach is a lot more gentle–bribe people into liking it. Literally. The first 10 million people who like the chain on Facebook will get a free taco. Easy enough. The hard part, no doubt, will be leaving the restaurant with just the free taco–not to mention the next morning when you wake up in your car surrounded by Chalupa wrappers.

After rolling out a site-wide redesign on the 7th, Gawker seemingly became the most universally disliked thing on the Web since Kenneth Cole put down the BlackBerry and stepped away from Twitter. The site was almost universally deemed unreadable by users, prompting founder Nick Denton to tell his staff to, “stay cool: we’ve been through worse backlashes.”

And then site uncovered a picture of a Republican congressman flexing shirtless in fron of the bathroom mirror, MySpace style. Christopher Lee of New York, apparently looking for ladies on the “Women for Men” section of the site’s personals, sent the image to a woman asking to “prove to me not all CL men look like toads.” Lee’s e-mail stated that he was a “divorced…fit fun classy guy.”

Thing is, the congressman is married.

Lee resigned from office soon after, stating in a press release, “I regret the harm that my actions have caused my family, my staff and my constituents. I deeply and sincerely apologize to them all. I have made profound mistakes and I promise to work as hard as I can to seek their forgiveness.”

The New Yorker points out that the story has really gone a ways toward validating
Denton’s insistence that the blog format has the tendency to bury important stories. With the new format, Gawker has been able to continually promote what it has deemed an incredibly important scoop.

It’s what they call “the old shirtless congressman play” in football.

A total of 162.9 million viewers tuned into Super Bowl XLV, making it the most most-watched TV show ever, and apparently, a lot of those viewers were tweeting about it. During the last minutes of the game, fans set a new record for tweets per second for any sporting event.

At 10:07:16pm EST, fans sent 4,064 tweets per second (TPS), breaking the previous record of the 3,283 TPS sent when Japan defeated Denmark during last summer’s World Cup. Actually, throughout the Super Bowl, Twritters broke the sporting TPS record six times, including the early touchdowns by the Packers and Steelers and several times during the halftime show.

So who do you think was the most talked about person in all these tweets was? Well, Usher, of course. His surprise appearance during the halftime show earned him the second highest TPS stat and the crown as the most talked about person. In line after him were a slew of other pop stars with Aaron Rodgers claiming the sixth spot. Who cares about the players? The Super Bowl is about talking about all the commercials and pop star appearances, right?

The Super Bowl TPS stats didn’t come close to the current, overall record set just after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Eve with 6,939 TPS. Beat that tweeting party record, sports fans!