Fail or Fab?

At a minimum, I always try and get up a blog post a week. Sometimes I’m really motivated (and have the time) and manage two or three. Given the fact that I recycled some old material in my post yesterday [transcript from my podcast with Mahalo founder, Jason Calacanis] I felt that it was only right to do at least one semi-original post.

Trust me, this one won’t be a real thought provoker… but it does summarize a few of my observations on recent web 2.0 and social launches/enhancements. As always, please feel free to disagree with me or share your thoughts on this week’s “Fail or Fab” post in the comments below.

• FAIL: Apple’s new music social network otherwise known as Ping. If you’ve tried it, you know exactly what I’m talking about. To get more specific:
• One of the first music recommendations it provided to me was the artist, Cher. Now I’m not offended by this but if you take a look at my library, 95% of it is made of bands like Phoenix, Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tool and The Exies. Yes, my kids do have a few Adam Lambert songs in there but really? Cher?
• There is no easy way to connect to my friends. I can hunt and peck for friends by searching for them. OR I can invite them to join Ping via e-mail. Not a good way to make this sticky or to encourage viral.
• Allowing me to connect with artists or to download the songs on their iPod playlists is just pathetic. Yes, I’m sure there will be a bunch of 13 year old girls that do this (and maybe 50 year old dads going through their midlife crises) but I don’t see a ton of people falling for the banana in the tailpipe trick.
• FAB: Google Instant. Now let’s not kid ourselves… this is nothing more than a feature. But it’s a damn cool feature. One that anticipates what you’re thinking before you think it… and then auto suggests it via your search window. Wait, are there little robots in my computer that are watching my every move?
• FAB: Facebook’s auto-translation pop up when you are on a foreign language page. The two things I like are: one, it’s subtle (the recommendation gradually drops down from the menu bar) and two, it recognizes that my language is English and that the page I was not. We need more smart technology like this (visual below).
  
• FAIL: Like Twitter, FourSquare has screwed with me more times than I can count… yet I keep coming back for more. Call it blind love. But at least Twitter doesn’t have a real competitor. FourSquare does. They need to cut back on the checkin fails… pronto!
• FAIL: Blogger’s new “I’m trying to be like WordPress” spam filter. While I like how it works, the fact that it notifies you that you’ve got a comment, if it’s flagged the comment as spam, you have no way of finding it unless you remember to go and look in Blogger’s special spam inbox. As a result of this new functionality, I made poor Jeff Cutler resubmit his comment twice (and almost a third time) before realizing what was happening. With WordPress, I’m notified every time there is a comment, spam or not. At that point, I can decide what I want to do with that comment by clicking on the link in the e-mail notification.