Two Slashes

I figured I’d try a different approach for once and see where that got me.

Given the sheer number of products and services we hear about on a daily basis, it’s easy enough to forget the ones that couldn’t quite reach out and make themselves a universally-known (in some cases, literally) entity.  But that doesn’t mean they are any less deserving of our attention.  For your enjoyment, here are some of what I believe to be the most amusing failures I can recall throughout the history of technology.

• (Swatch) Internet Time - If there’s one thing we definitely have enough of here on Earth, it’s time zones and ways to tell time.  Time zones, 12- and 24-hour time, daylight savings time…  Alright, listing that is boring, and having to take all of that into account while talking with people on the other side of the world is like taking a needle to your eye.  Swatch, being the omniscient corporate entity they obviously were, decided that all of this could be resolved with the introduction of an arbitrary standard called Internet Time.  Internet Time divided the day into 1000 equal parts of about a minute and a half apiece and was designed to be consistent across the globe to eliminate the need for time zones.  However, when you take into the account the fact that this was introduced just as the Internet was becoming mainstream, the issue with scheduling things in “blips” with people who have no idea what you’re talking about makes you look like a fool to the majority of the world, there’s no standard for writing the day (just the time), and the fact that ‘@’ was (and still is) most often recognized as part of an e-mail address, it’s not hard to see why Internet Time never made it to the big time.  (Sorry, pun intended.)
• Cuil - I wrote about Cuil once already, and I got quite a bit of feedback both here and on Twitter about it.  But for those who aren’t in the know, or haven’t seen my previous post about it, Cuil was touted at one point as the Google-killer, the end-all-be-all to searching.  Backed by some venture capital and a few of the genius minds who helped shape Google, Cuil was supposed to redefine what a search engine was.  Instead, it ended up showing just how pointless it was to try and humiliate Google right out of the starting gate.
• Microsoft’s Seinfeld Ad Campaign - Microsoft insists that the ads were intentionally about nothing (after saying that they were supposed to be a longer marketing campaign), but if that were the case, why were they produced in the first place?  I’m sure Jerry Seinfeld has plenty enough to do without helping Bill Gates try on shoes.  The only reason I can think of for this travesty even ever being unveiled was because Bill had some random “Things To Do Before I Leave Microsoft” list which was topped by making a pointless ad campaign with Jerry Seinfeld.  Well, Bill, now that you’ve got your wish, “What pointless thing would you like to do today?”
• Online Currency - Just as with Swatch’s idea of converting everyone to a unified time platform, several companies thought the way of the future was to develop “online currency” that could be used as an alternative to the real thing.  Get some credits for visiting a website?  No problem.  Viewing an ad?  Why not?  Want to buy something or send some money to that far-off relative?  Why not send them some e-money rather than worry about things like exchange rates, especially since retailers accept this mock currency as a legitimate form of payment.  It sounds like it might have been a good idea, had they put some thought into why they sounded just like they were illegally printing their own money and then corrected it.  I think I’ll stick with Paypal, as at least they keep my currency in US dollars.
• Lively - It’s curious enough that I should have something from Google on this list, but Google never expected to be knocked onto their backside when they launched their answer to Second Life with little fanfare and little reason for anyone using Second Life (especially those investing in the game) to make the jump.  Lively shuts its doors at the end of the year (so it’s not dead yet), but being the top performer in one area doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be the greatest elsewhere.
• The Phantom - An apt name for this ghost of a console, The Phantom is perhaps the precursor to the downloadable content now available from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft.  In short, The Phantom was designed to be a console that acquired games over the web, eliminating the need for pressed disks, cartridges, and whatever other physical delivery method you can think of.  Unfortunately, the product never reached fruition, and the only part of their work to make it to market was their excuse for a keyboard.
• Windows ME - Alright, so it’s probably unfair to have two items by the same company on this list, but I really think that Microsoft managed to outdo themselves by even bothering to ship Windows ME.  Having spent several years living having to deal with this monstrosity, I can tell you that Microsoft should have thought ahead and given everyone prescriptions for headache medication with every license.  Between ME and Vista, I’m beginning to believe that Microsoft’s business model is to release a stable, usable operating system as a quick follow-up to versions that create plenty of uproar.  (See ME v. XP, Vista v. Windows 7.)
• Disposable (”Rental”) DVDs - What does fruit have in common with a DVD?  If you said that they both can rot, you’re not far off.  Who would have thought that people didn’t like the idea of paying for movies that expired like produce?  (I’d like to add that this idea seems to come up quite often; while The Register reports that the idea was spawned earlier this year, I distinctly recall Disney running a pilot program a few years ago.)

Do you have any other failures you’d like to bring into the limelight?  Is there something I’m forgetting, or do you think one of these is more worthy than the others?  Or, alternatively, is there something you believe to be one of the greatest developments since sliced bread?  Leave a shout in the comments and vote for your favorite.

(Also, I do believe I owe some thanks to The_Ugster for a suggestion or two.)

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(That’s ‘cuil’ pronounced cool…bah, you’ll read why in a second, so screw the explanation.)

It’s no mistake that I’ve been a longtime fan of Google…well, everything.  Just about all of my e-mail is handled through them (including through Apps for Domains), I pay $20 a year for extra space on Picasa because I find it so much more usable than Flickr, and I’ve at least tried just about every other service they’ve offered.  I’m also the person who needs to try “the next big thing” much in the same way I have with Twitter and a whole dictionary of other sites that I’ve tried, put to use, retired, or whatever.

With all the buzz surrounding Cuil, I decided to divert my first few searches of the day (and a few vanity/test queries for comparison) to them to see how much more benefiting the results they deliver were to me.  And sadly, Cuil is about as “cuil” (it’s pronounced cool, if you missed that aside) as a sackful of cucumbers in this warmish Chicago summer.  In other words, their current setup renders it useless for me.  (Screenshots have been used throughout this post because at the time of writing, Cuil was bouncing in and out of service.)

Taking a look at their homepage, it’s no doubt that there’s a touch of Google in the air.  It’s simple, with only a few links to their policy and about pages, and the text box.  (Wait a minute…that sounds oddly like a page I see every hour.)  In fact, I think the only differences I can point out between the two are the off-center alignment, the color scheme, and the logos.  Hardly anything unexpected.  But looks don’t change how it works, so I might as well explain what I think of it after using it for a few minutes.

Being one of the founding members of TechCentric, it’s obviously no surprise that I would compare our rank on Cuil with how we’re doing everywhere else (which isn’t too hot given our hiatus, but that’s another story).  On Google and Yahoo, for example, TechCentric ranks right on top as the first result, while we place third on MSN (behind our own Wikipedia entry, for crying out loud).  With Cuil, there’s no “ranking” so much as there is a menagerie of results thrown at you in a somewhat-cool, somewhat-overloading multicolumn layout, with what I assume are supposed to be related images thrown in.  Picture a random page from the classifieds, replace all the advertisements with the typical excerpt from that result, and dot in a few random graphics for spice.  That’s the idea I get from Cuil’s results page.

Now, when I say they add random pictures, I pretty much mean it.  Aside from similar occurances noted by my friends, one of the images suggested by Cuil for my TechCentric search was that thumbnail of the three girls right there next to the link to the Crew listings.  I’ve included myself, Steve, and Will next to the image for comparison, but I don’t think any of those (four if you count the half-head to the right) girls look a thing like us, and they don’t appear anywhere on the TechCentric site.  I do believe they’re trying to suggest I’m something I’m not (namely, female).  They also seem to believe we’re related to The Who, as they have a poster thumbnail next to the suggested result on Wikipedia.

While the lack of relevance towards TechCentric could have been because of our lack of production, I found it quite awkward that searching for ‘justincox’ (you should know him by now) turned up only his Twitter account and some stuff which he claims isn’t him.  And not a sign of his site in sight on the first page of the results, either.  At least Rachelskirts can’t complain about her placement.  Searching for myself by name was a complete bust, as it turned up more results from other users’ Twitter pages than it did anything remotely relevant to me.  (Though there are a few underlaying things I noticed that I’m not willing to discuss just yet.)  Searching for ‘two slashes’ was also an exercise in patience, though removing the space found this site instantly (along with another random image alongside the TechCentric crew page).

One idea I liked, though it wasn’t exactly useful to me in its current state, was the category box on the right side, which suggests people and things relevant to what you might be searching for.  TechCentric comes up with some IPTV-related stuff, as it should, and some of my other searches were categorized correctly, but the suggested additions to your query might not be as helpful.  For example, searching for Darren Kitchen (from Hak.5) offered the expected categories for podcasting and vidcasts, but some of the suggested keywords (like Leo Laporte) just turned what could have been a helpful search into a useless waste of Intertubes, combined by the fact that they’re mashed with your original query.  (I think I finally stopped myself after ‘Darren Kitchen Leo Laporte Patrick Norton FLOSS Weekly‘ turned up as much whitespace as it did content.)

Cuil also seems to be having a problem with staying usable at the moment, partially thanks to repeated waves of news flooding Twitter, and its placement on Digg’s front page at the moment.  Considering Google’s tried-and-true methods and the fact that they handle plenty more traffic in any given hour than Cuil will probably see in the next day or two, perhaps the Google-alum masterminds behind the site could have brought a little more to the table in terms of reliability.  (Though I guess a similar suggestion could be made to Twitter about now.  Failwhale anyone?)

The concept of a competitor to Google with the brains to suggest relevant content is hard to believe, considering Google does a decent job of filtering out the garbage already (in my experience), and it’s even easier to limit the junk when you search for something with at least a respectable idea of what you’re aiming for.  But as long as the results turn up to be this jumbled and unrelated, I see no reason to deviate from my zealous (over)use of Google.