Alien vs printer

[TC] Do The Right Thing: Save An Alien (and this startup) (Exhibit A):

perhaps Save An Alien, an Israeli Facebook-only startup, can reach their goal of 10 million users in six months. I sure hope they do, anyway. Otherwise a bunch of cute little aliens are going to die. … And if you really like your alien you can buy a tshirt with it on it. I imagine other revenue generating merchandising opportunities may be thought up later, too.

[TC] Epson Joins Sprint: They Suck And Their New Website Is Stupid (Exhibit B):

I’m pretty sure there are some consultants out there who are telling big, clueless companies that the way to engage with their audience is to engage with them on an interactive, emotional level. … now those consultants have conned Epson into doing the same thing on a new site called Epsonality. They ask questions like “You come across a bear in the woods, what do you do?” and “you find $199.99 lying on the ground, what do you do?” and use your answers to somehow determine the right printer for you. All in a sick, highly personalized Flash interface.

Save An Alien is a fairly well-crafted Facebook Ponzi scheme in a class of its own. Most Facebook apps can be classified into two categories: either amateur creations by college kids seeking their five minutes of fame, or promotional vehicles for startups looking to get a few more users and show something at the next investor meeting. Save An Alien is neither. It appears too elaborate to be crafted overnight in a dorm room and yet there is no product or service it is supposed to sell. Well, there are the t-shirts. If they’re selling as well as photo albums at Flickr, maybe they’ll unload a hundred of them. Big money, big money! All Save An Alien has to do is infect 10 million Facebook profiles.

Epsonality is just a corporate quiz site. Answer a few questions and they shove one of Epson’s printers in your face.

By installing the Save An Alien, you hand over all your the info stored in your Facebook profile. Sure, they’re not supposed to keep it, but who is going to enforce that? Epsonality is totally harmless. And now you know Epson makes printers. And if you’re more likely to buy one now. Yes, even if you thought that website was stupid.

I know one more difference between the two. Save An Alien guys will worship Michael Arrington if the site makes it onto TechCrunch. I doubt anyone at Epson even knows who he is.

Have we learned a lesson here today?

Bug.gd solves a non-problem

[TC] Bug.gd: Collaborative Search And Bug Solutions:

The idea is simple enough and addresses a real problem. A user is presented with an error message, they search bug.gd to see if anyone has solved it. If someone has a solution great, if no one found a solution then not so great; however Bug.gd is betting that when they can’t deliver a solution, the user will ultimately find one. Users get a reminder email in 48 hours requesting they post the solution (presuming they found one) so others can benefit from this knowledge, providing a fluid and regularly updated collaborative database of problems and solutions.

Gotta love the tagline: “bug.gd – Humanity’s Only Hope”. No comment necessary.

I have a simple idea. Stop reinventing the wheel. How about using Google to to see if anyone has solved your error? Bug.gd database got seeded with 60,000 entries from Microsoft Knowledge Base? Guess what? Google already crawled those plus millions of other tech help sites.

For some reason I have a feeling bug.gd people may have already realized this. After the user finds no help at bug.gd and ultimately turns to Google, they’ll get spammed in 48 hours and asked to submit the answer they found. If they couldn’t find the answer anywhere, it’ll be a nice reminder of how worthless bug.gd is.

Let’s pretend now that I am a tech savvy user that just came there from TechCrunch. Maybe I am feeling generous and helpful. I’ll just try to answer some unresolved questions. Oh wait. I can’t see those. If you are going to rely solely on user-generated content, at least make it easy to contribute. And I bet some people wouldn’t mind getting some credit as opposed to posting completely anonymously. Is this the police tip line? No snitching?

Here’s my contribution.

Meetro working to relive the 90s

[TC] Meetro Working to Make Forum Creation Dead Simple:

We’ve been informed that Meetro – provider of a location-based instant messaging service – is working on a stealth project that aims to make forum setup, customization, and moderation as easy as blogging with Blogger. The project, codenamed “Makaha”, has been in development since the beginning of this year. While many forums require users to find their own hosting and install software, Makaha will enable users to create and personalize forums through a point-and-click interface. Forums will have their own subdomains at the Makaha website just as blogs have their own subdomains at Blogger.

OMG!!1! Free forums for everybody! Totally disruptive! Watch out Google.

Discussion boards are all the rage these days. If only there was an easier way to get one going. Thanks Meetro for making my life so much easier. Oh wait. I forgot. We already went through this in 1998. Want a free easy-to-set-up forum? There are hundreds of them out there.

There is at least one problem with forums to keep in mind. You need a sizable community for them to be remotely useful. If you can deliver that, you are capable of finding hosting and installing software.

Also, you gotta love that one of the best things about this service is the subdomain promise. I thought that stopped being revolutionary before TechCrunch was around.