It looks obvious

I love the fact that Israeli companies are in the front of innovation and high tech and my first intention is to support development made in Israel. However, and as bad as I feel, I cannot avoid writing that Zlango is a service that nobody need.

If it wasn’t bad enough when young people’s language and ability to write properly  is ruined by shortcuts and emoticons Zlango suggest to degrade our written language and eloquence to the level of cave man . Michael  Arrington is right when he write :

(although he meant to compliment Zlango)

And the real scary part is that Zlango and its hieroglyphics will become a success story.   

Tech crunch reports on round A financing for PageFlakes . I’m already lost with all the personalized pages that look basically the same and are un-useful in basically the same level.

Quick  and incomplete count of similar pages will include Live , NetVibes , Eskobo ,Protopage , Myhommy and the personalize page of Google . I guess that the VC money is given not because of the AJaX but because of the hope that these service will be the Web 2.0 version of the mythological portals . However, and as cool as all these pages are, they are going to follow the footsteps of the web 1.0 portals and fail.

The problem is that these pages, like most armies, fighting the previous war instead of the next one. Attempting to build a portal is futile regardless the richness of the user interface. Sadly all of this pages are very nice but they don’t solve any real need. The real challenge is how to make sense in the flood of content. How to deliver content that interest the user, when they want it. It is obvious that none of these pages even tries to confront this challenge.

My dream page will not ask me to subscribe to RSS , since RSS is a tool for the application not for the user. Instead it will offer me content, base on my interest and my priorities. It will find the content, not only the specific post but the entire content.

Until then I’m doomed to go through my hundreds of feeds, which none of these pages can handle in convenient way. What a waste of money.

I wrote in the past about companies that rely solely on users to generate data on their site. I argued that they do not solve the user problem. Yesterday I was glad to see that this idea was the first on the list of 50 reasons why “People aren’t using your web site”

1. Because they don’t want to generate content, they want better life
2. Because it solves a problem they don’t have
3. Because it won’t help them with their problem
4. Because oprah didn’t mention it
5. Because everyone they know isn’t using it
6. Because it doesn’t let them spy on people they care about
7. Because they just don’t care about what they see
8. Because nobody at work said they should use it
9. Because it’s not fun enough
10. Because it doesn’t make them smile

Great minds thinks alike 

The guys at Megite are really nice and they apologized for spamming my Inbox with this message:

But the curious person that I’m, I tracked what led them to me. Apparently they run a search in Technorati on Memeorandum and that how they find me. I assume that they didn’t bother to actually read what I wrote but trusted the Algorithm they created.

If they only read they would have known that I’m not a fun of automated algorithms as my news editors. However by trusting their algorithm they proved my point.

Thanks guys  

GFY asks:

What’s the difference between eventful and upcoming?

Who cares? both aren’t going to stay for long… 

Things like this making me uneasy; in fact they have nothing to do with freedom of speech. They are only hitchhikers on fashionable trend, trying to make quick buck. They remind me the people selling merchandize near the World Trade Center site. Both represent poor taste and lack of values.

I didn’t believe it when I read about it in this Israeli blog , but that is correct  - someone actually selling tags . It is web 2.0 at its best with minimal design, tag cloud and API’s all over the place but the bottom line is: they are selling tags.

And why should you buy tags from them?

“Also, it may send a lot of visitors to your web site. After all, you’ve already landed at this site and you won’t be the last one. That also means that the sooner you book a tag, the more visibility you’ll get.
Besides, we’re not just going to let the page sit there. In fact, we have tons of ideas that could easily be implemented: offering an API so other sites can exchange data with 1000tags.com, add a search box, provide lots of stats (we’re already keeping track of them, just haven’t made them available but will do soon) and many other things… “

Now here is the translation –

Traffic - we maybe will have someone wondering through our site, and maybe he will click by mistake on the tag you bought. After all you made the mistake and landed here, so will other.

API – we will cooperate with other useless sites, exchange API and hope to capture victims that will generate traffic.

These guys are simply pathetic.

I never liked Symantec’s anti-virus . When I had it installed on my old Sony Vaio it use to be very generous using the computer resources, making it difficult for any other thing, and wasn’t so efficient detecting viruses.

Today I found out that not only it wasn’t great anti-virus it was harmful and increased risk for users:

“The anti-virus vendor acknowledged that it was deliberately hiding a directory from Windows APIs as a feature to stop customers from accidentally deleting files but, prompted by warnings from security experts, the company shipped a SystemWorks update to eliminate the risk.”

The only way to convince companies like Norton and Sony to stop from harming their customers is to stop buying them. Being humble is the first rule, and if they forget it we should remind them.

Awhile ago I wrote about a TravBuddy and I argued (here and here ) that the main concept of having the users submitting content into TravBuddy database is fallacy. Today, however, I found a company that top Truvbuddy .   
Apparently MyTripJournal.com offers similar services with one huge difference. Not only they hope that the public will submit content to their site, instead of using blogs, the guys at MyTripJournal.com want us to pay (and it isn’t so cheap ) for things that we can get free somewhere else.

Cool isn’t it?

One of the things that bother me with the hype of web 2.0 is the lack of real innovation. Following the first wave, of companies that create new product or successful business, the next waves are rarely developing anything new.  As I wrote in the past I like competition and I like to have choices. However, many companies, that offer different flavor of exactly the same thing, are not a real competition.

This type of criticism was usually limited to people that were skeptical about the web 2.0 phenomena. However, it seems that when one can point to 13 different companies that offer calendar applications or 20 different companies that offer on-line bookmarking the uncomfortable feeling start to spread.

It is spread enough that even Michael Arrington, one of the prominent member of the Web 2.0 workgroup, wrote today :

“But at the end of the day I’m not sure how many social bookmarking sites can make the cut.”

I’ll be much more thrilled when I’ll see so called web 2.0 applications in more than 11 different categories…