The 90ies were an embarassing time for web design. Those of us old enough to remember what the web looked back in the 90ies cringe at the sight of blinking text, fractals, and yellow letters on black backgrounds. Basically, being a web designer meant knowing what the hell HTML is, so the best looking pages from that age were simply black text on white background.

Now, the thing is, I actually started to write a completely serious article about old, but great website designs, but I’m telling you, it was hard work. Not only did my eyes bleed from most of the pages I’ve visited, I’ve also had a few good laughs, looking at pages of huge, multinational corporations that look like they were created by a bunch of (poorly) trained monkeys. So, I’ve decided to shelve the initial article until next week, and have a few festive laughs at this jolly time of year at the big corps and their 10-year-old website designs.

The copies of old webs are brought to you courtesy of Wayback Machine. It’s a bit slow, but it works! So, let’s start!

Adidas - OK, this can be characterized as an ‘honest attempt’. It’s obvious what the guys at Adidas wanted: a really sleek, cool, techy black website. But they also wanted their logo, which was based on human foot, all over it. This is the result. On the second page of the site, the designer decided to slap the same background in tile mode, which may have been forgivable on 14” screens, but looks pretty damn hideous now. One more detail: the horribly placed German flag on the front page was thought in the 90ies to be the best way to give the visitors a way to browse the site in a different language; such flags were featured on many, many ugly websites.

BBC - It’s hard to decipher what BBC’s website really looked in 1996. because Wayback Machine is having problems chewing it, but I’ve tried most of the links and it seems that this archived page from 1997. is closest to the real look of the website. Never mind: even if half of it’s missing, I still can’t imagine any graphical detail that could make the site actually look good. I guess this was the time when web designers still thought the best way to make an image fit into the background is to make it ‘blend’ into it. Newsflash: it never looked good, and it still doesn’t. Note: if you try to click the link you’ll get the whole page every 30th time on average, so I don’t recommend hammering Wayback Machine’s poor servers.

BMG - OK, I’m cheating here, because this is from early 1997. But I just couldn’t skip it: I clicked the page, and only the text loaded at first, so I thought, ok, this isn’t that bad. But then came the background, and…well, you know the phrase ‘cheap photoshop effects’? They’re all here - the bevel, the emboss, the invert, the cheesy shadow - and it’s all put together in the worst possible way. This is the irony of the early days of the web: just keeping the background white would make your site look cool in 10 years, but I guess that white backgrounds were frowned upon by BMG execs back in the day.

Budweiser - Animated GIFs? Check. Badly cut out images? Check. Cheesy rock and roll motifs? Check. Put all that, together with a huge red font, on a black background, and you’ve got yourself one embarrassingly ugly page.

Kawasaki - remember what I’ve told you about yellow text on black backgrounds? This is the proof. For some weird reason, this was the ‘in’ thing back in 1995., and all the cool websites had to have it. Luckily, guys at Kawasaki skipped the fractals, but the page is still pretty ugly.

Lego - OK, Lego is a cool company, so don’t laugh. Seriously, stop laughing. I mean, the website isn’t that bad at all; it’s got a pirate, and a wizard on a bicycle, and… some bricks (!?), which were obviously too hard to draw so they just included them in text format. It’s interesting how the lowest brick isn’t actually a link; is it a sign or a puzzle of some sort? Also, they didn’t include an image for the ‘learn’ link, which totally destroyed the otherwise perfect symmetry and harmony of the design. To Lego’s credit, at least the background is not black!

McDonalds - If it weren’t for the eye-burning red background, this website wouldn’t be all that bad, but what sets it apart is the content. Let’s be honest here, kids in preschool give more relevant info on their MySpace pages than this. And, what exactly does ‘Dalmatian Location’ mean? Btw, this is the older version of the page; the earliest version doesn’t have the Dalmatian Location part, which makes it a little less funny but not at all less useless. Also, this page is a fine example of another common web design blunder from the nineties: making an image the main link to the rest of the site, and then having to explain it in text so people would know where the hell to click. Anyway, I’d seriously like to know how much money did McDonalds spend on this website. If it’s more than 10 bucks, I consider it to be one of the bigger financial mistakes in the company’s history.

Panasonic - Forget everything you know about Panasonic and imagine you saw this website today. What would you think this company is selling? My estimate would be either ’sex toys’ or ‘dubious quality healthcare products’. In any case, this page is very educational because it exhibits some details so characteristic of web ‘design’ in the nineties:

- horrible curvy background

- menu background image too small for the text

- animated pink letters on black background

- shadow of the animated gif doesn’t really work on the pink background

- jaggy separator lines probably drawn in MS Paint

- 10 different font faces on the page

Penguin - this page is not that horrible (hey, I’m not saying it’s good, just that it’s not outrageously hideous), but what’s funny is that this is the “full graphics” version of the site. See those those little 1338 bytes heavy penguin gifs? Those comprise the aforementioned full graphics. It actually speaks more of the state of the internet connections in 1996. than the site itself; when less than 10 kilobytes of images are too heavy for some people’s connection, you know the times have been rough. I guess we’ll talk about this stuff to our grandchildren: You’re having it easy, boy! When we were young, we had to get up at 3 in the morning, and walk 30 miles through the snow to reach a web cafe which only had a 2400 bps modem, and the connection was split between 6 computers!

Pepsi - Hello, LSD! What the hell were they thinking with that background? And those animations…in 1996., your best bet was not to try and have a flashy GUI because the technology to build it simply wasn’t there, but Pepsi didn’t care - they wanted bling, baby!. There’s also a cool warning at the bottom: If travelling at speeds less than 28.8 bps (yes, that’s bits per second, kids), then jump on the low road. I don’t know about the low road, but that background makes me wanna take the high road.

With these ten jewels of the past, I leave you until next year and wish you all happy holidays!

After the first reports of mass email deletions on some Gmail accounts, Google responded. They basically said two things:

1. It’s a small and isolated incident, only about 60 accounts had their emails deleted - which is good news.

2. There is no backup.  OK, this is scary. No backup? Or did the backup also got deleted? One way or another, I hope Google learns a lesson from this relatively small incident and add some additional backups and safeguards for their services, because if this happens again, users will be very angry.

When a site is growing as fast as Digg is, but doesn’t have a clear monetization model, then the owners basically have two choices: sell out to a bigger company or try to raise more money to further improve the service.

It seems that Digg has, for now, opted for the second option. VentureBeat reports Digg has raised additional 8.5 million dollars from their previous investors, Greylock Partners and the Omidyar Network which brings the total to about 10 million dollars.

There is a lot of speculation about how much is Digg worth and how much traffic they really pull, but there’s no denying that the site is unbeliavably influential and its worth is definitely counted in hundreds of millions of dollars. This is furthermore strengthened by the fact that none of Digg’s competitors, like Netscape, Reddit or Wikio are closing the gap; if they are growing, they’re growing at a rate slower than Digg. So, if they are going to sell out, they’re not going to do it for pocket change; and if we believe David Sze, an investor at Greylock, Digg is not going to be for sale anytime soon anyway.

According to this thread on the doom9 forums a person called Muslix64 has developed a small application called BackupHDDVD which can decrypt an AACS protected movie.

Now, this is a forum, and I haven’t tested the tool myself, so take this with a grain of salt until it’s widely confirmed. But if it’s true, it seems that breaking HD-DVD encryption took just 8 days and was actually quite easy to do.

People who just want to watch DRM-free movies : Movie Industry = 1:0.

Facing a 1.65 trillion dollar lawsuit ($150.000 per song), Russian MP3 selling site AllOfMP3 answered in the Pirate Bay manner, basically telling RIAA that they’re forgetting that the USA does not own the whole world.

The quote goes like this: “AllofMP3 understands that several U.S. record label companies filed a lawsuit against Media Services in New York. This suit is unjustified as AllofMP3 does not operate in New York. Certainly the labels are free to file any suit they wish, despite knowing full well that AllofMP3 operates legally in Russia. In the mean time, AllofMP3 plans to continue to operate legally and comply with all Russian laws.”

AllOfMP3’s legality is pretty dubious, however even if they were operating 100% legally their future doesn’t look rosy. The US government can put a lot of pressure on Russian government, and if necessary, laws can be changed. However, it’s always nice when someone gives the RIAA a geography lesson. While we’re on the topic, if you still haven’t seen Pirate Bay’s answers to legal threats, check them out - they’re funny as hell.

OK, I’m going to try and keep this short.

The IT industry is a fast growing one. It means lots of IT companies have surplus money in their marketing department. A fair amount of this money is spent on fancy press events and gifts for journalists. These gifts can be USB sticks or t-shirts but they can also be cameras, MP3 players or cell phones.

And, you know what? It works. Not many journalists will grunt in disbelief when they get such little payolas; quite the contrary: they will accept them gladly and there will be a significantly bigger chance of them coming to press events of companies known to give away goodies.

However, it doesn’t matter much because the traditional IT journalism is already pretty crooked. A paper IT magazine depends on advertisers. I assure you they will not bash some company’s products more than absolutely necessary if they depend on their money. You know all those big laptop reviews? The best overall and the best buy product won’t be from the same company. It’s better to please two big advertisers than one. It’s the way things work in the industry. It’s not some big conspiracy - it’s a series of nudges from all sides and the IT journalists and IT publications will bend ever so slightly, but they will bend and eventually invisibly bow to the will of their advertisers.

That’s why people read blogs. Most blogs don’t depend on anyone. Bloggers can write whatever they think is true. If I write a review of 100 laptops, I can put one company on the first 10 spots if it’s my honest opinion, and I can put another company on the lowest 10 spots if I think their products are horrible. Not all bloggers know what they’re talking about, but among the thousands out there some relevant blogs emerge and people start reading what they write because they sense the guy/girl behind the blog actually knows what they’re talking about.

And as bloggers gain influence, big companies like Microsoft are starting to treat them as they would treat any influential publication - they will try to bribe them. This is normal behaviour. This is to be expected. Here’s a laptop with your Vista - no strings attached.

But there are strings attached. Once you receive an expensive gift from a company, it’s going to linger in the back of your mind, and you’re going to give another chance to that crappy Zune, and you’ll write it might not be as bad as you initially thought it was, although deep inside you know it’s not true. And so the bribe paid off.

So, bloggers, if you’ve received an expensive gift from a company, ‘no strings attached’, I urge you to kindly thank the company in question and return the gift. It will make your mind clearer - I promise.

*Update: Scott Beale of Laughingsquid decided to auction the laptop on eBay and donate the money to The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Good call, Scott, I guess others will follow suit.

Two big social news aggregators which use advanced algorithms (instead of crowd wisdom, like Digg or similar sites) to choose the most important news, Tailrank and Megite, launched a new feature - video search - almost at the same time. Furthermore, the video search functionality is very similar, which you can check for yourself here and here.

These two sites, together with Techmeme, which focuses only on IT, are basically neck to neck as far as functionality goes, and when one adds a new feature, others follow. As social news sites like Digg and Reddit grow they exhibit more and more weaknesses, at least if you’re an IT professional looking for real news and not just fun stuff from the internet, so these three sites, together with some others like Sphere and Spotback, are gaining more and more credibility as news sources.

By the way, it’s interesting that Mike Arrington of Techcrunch chooses Techmeme as a clear leader of the three, probably based on Alexa rankings. A quick look at Compete and Quantcast rankings reveals a different picture. Check it out:

Compete clearly puts Tailrank in the first place,

While Quantcast only has data for Tailrank, which *might* mean that it has more traffic than the other two.

Of course, these numbers don’t mean much, but the results are in agreement with my previous analysis of Alexa rankings in the sense that Alexa rankings are completely off. It also shows Alexa’s usual bias toward IT/technology oriented sites. Based on these limited comparisons I can’t really say whether Tailrank, Megite or Techmeme is the leader (when it comes to traffic), but I sure as hell wouldn’t trust Alexa.

It’s the end of the year, and it’s the time for journalists all over the world to embarrass themselves by giving out predictions for the following year which will eventually turn out to be completely false. Who am I to break this wonderful tradition? Here are my predictions for the development of everything Web 2.0 related in the year 2007:

1. Web 2.0 will not burst like the dot.com bubble. Many predict that the invasion of new web 2.0 services, 99% of which aren’t intrinsically monetized, must mean that these new startups will go public and/or get bought by big companies a lot and then the stock market will crash when the collective consciousness that the stock market is realizes that all these companies are worth nothing. I don’t think this will happen, and I give you one reason: Google AdSense. Pay-per-click advertising is now huge, and it earns a lot of money to a lot of people, and it reduces the need to gather money for growth by going public. Web 2.0 startups can make money as soon as they start building traffic. Secondly, the market learns (slowly, but it learns), and it won’t over valuate internet companies twice in such a short period in time, or at least not to the same extent.

2. Everyone, and I mean everyone, will add links to social content sites on their pages. New York Times was one of the first big mainstream news websites that did it, adding links to Digg, Facebook and Newsvine, and other big sites will follow. The reason is simple: vast amounts of traffic.

3. Microsoft will become a lot less relevant. Microsoft is a slow learner when it comes to the web - just look at Internet Explorer. It’s moving in the Web 2.0 direction, but if Google is a cheetah running from the ice age, then Microsoft is a mastodon, stumbling clumsily and falling behind. The tactics of delivering apps with your world-dominating OS to achieve market advantage will not work any more, because the playground is now the web and it’s much bigger than one tiny little OS. I’m not saying people will stop using Windows; I’m saying they will simply care about it much less. There is the slight chance that Microsoft will pick up speed and start thinking different (no pun intended), however when I look at Zune, or IE7, I’m not really convinced they have what it takes to leap forward (and it’s leaps, not steps, they need).

4. Security will (again) become the #1 issue. Although everyone knows that security is an important issue whatever you do, enthusiasm about moving to the wonderful new world of web 2.0 has prevailed and people have somehow forgot that their precious data is more and more often stored online and as such vulnerable to all kinds of privacy & security problems. The more serious we all are about Web 2.0, the more serious we will be about making sure our data on the web is secure and private.

5. A new breed of social content sites will emerge. If 2006. was the year of Digg, then 2007. will be the year of fixing Digg. Every day new I see criticisms of the way stories are pushed to Digg’s front page, even on Digg itself. On the other hand, automatic news sources like Techmeme, Megite, and Tailrank, have been growing, however they are embraced mostly by IT professionals and lack the virality and crowd support (and thus the traffic and importance) of Digg. In 2007., I expect new services (or equivalent changes in the current services) which will bring us content through a combination of crowd wisdom, smart algorithms and live editors.

6. Hundreds of Web 2.0 companies will fade away. We’ve reached the Web 2.0 tipping point in 2006. Unfortunately, it created and will continue to create so much competition that making some choices will become necessary. And once one company goes big, competitors get washed away. It won’t cause the stock market to crash, but it will make investors more cautious.

7. A mini-boom of social content sites will happen. As content management systems which offer out-of-the-box social content functionality, like Pligg or SuperGu, get more and more advanced, users will create thousands of mini-Diggs. I expect the vast majority of these to be focused around a certain - possibly quite narrow - topic, and I see less than 1% of them actually gaining a big following. If you’re interested why, read my analysis here.

8. Term web 3.0 is going to get pushed a lot every time a new, interesting service appears. This trend has already started, and it will surely continue throughout 2007. Although experts have been struggling to define what Web 2.0 is, the world is hungry for Web 3.0 already. People like big numbers, that’s all.

9. Google will release its online operating system - GoogleOS. And I base this on absolutely nothing. OK, there is one hint in this direction: competition is rising fast. If Google plans to release a similar product and connect all their online services into one whole, they better do it fast.

10. Synchronization, organization and syndication will be the buzzwords of 2007. Everything is on the web. And almost everything already exist in its web 2.0 form. For example, instead of the old static application for storing and organizing your photos you now have a living, breathing entity consisting of information and connections between its users called Flickr. However, all information was not created equal. YouTube and Flickr and Writely and del.icio.us and Gmail aren’t exactly compatible. Now it’s time to figure out a way to access all that stuff from one place and share entire organized structures of data among users. Instead of sharing a video, users will want share their whole collection of music videos, concert photos and lyrics that go with them, with one click. I’ll name one company that goes in this direction: Netvibes and its ecosystem. As far as synchronization goes, check out Sharpcast, which Read/Write Web chose to be the most perspective little Web 2.0 company of 2007. Related to this, I expect major upgrades to the RSS standard (Google has already been dabbling with it, creating some of their own variants).

So there you go - I may have gotten it all wrong, but it was fun. A couple more predictions which aren’t directly (or are they?) related to Web 2.0: Firefox will continue to gain market share because it’s, simply, still better than IE7. Many new MMORPGs will appear, and some of them are bound to gain a big following when WoW starts waning at the end of 2007. And people will continue to talk about mobile web 2.0 as the next big thing, although the sheer fact that screens of mobile devices are too small to do most web-related tasks will continue to prove them wrong. Feel free to bash my choices or add new ones in the comments!

I’ve just received a tip from one reader (thx, Jad), that the site doesn’t work correctly in IE7. And indeed it doesn’t. Apologies to all IE7 users, I’m working on a fix right now.

*update: fixed.

You know the joke about the holy bartender? Never mind. I guess when I say ‘Holy Windows’ no further explanation is needed. And that’s what’s happening to Vista. Now that the hackers have had a few weeks time to dabble with it, guess what - Vista has just as many holes as its predecessor, Windows XP. Despite all the new security measures in Vista,  you can still find ye olde browser flaws and other vulnerabilities in it.

So, whoever was naive enough to think that Vista will offer protection against viruses, trojans, worms and hacks out of the box, this is your wake up call: you’ll still need third party firewalls, antivirus, antispyware and antiadware software to make the Vista experience reasonably safe.

In other news, a couple of days ago news about a way to permanently activate a pirated copy of Windows Vista emerged. The method included a gazillion of steps and some registry tweaking, making it basically unusable except for the most fanatical of users. Now, a new method had emerged. I’m not condoning software piracy here, but news is news.

RIAA is suing AllOfMP3.com for $1.65 trillion. The lawsuit somehow calculates that AllOfMP3 should pay EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music $150,000 for each of the 11 million songs that were downloaded from the service in the last six months. However, I’m pretty sure that the lawyers at Recording Industry Ass. of America (thanks, Inquirer) have simply learned a new number - trillion - and now they’re showing off.

I’m all for sharing music, but AllOfMP3 sells music without paying royalties to the artists (which is, they don’t give money to the recording industry which should in theory go to the artists but it usually doesn’t), so I’m not really on their side. However, this lawsuit is fun because of the insane amount of money that RIAA is asking. I hope they win the lawsuit, and then get the money delivered - in coins.

As you can see in this patent application, Microsoft is trying to win a patent on RSS. Although it’s pretty hard to decipher what exactly this means if you’re not an expert, Wired and Techdirt offer some insights into the matter.

Basically, it’s probably just Microsoft trying to protect themselves if a third party decides to file a patent for something obvious which they use in their products, like RSS. Something like this already happened when Eolas sued Microsoft for $500 million for patent infringement, claiming that Microsoft had used their technology to embed videos or applications into websites.

Still, it makes you question the US patent system which has obviously become a giant mess, where companies are forced to file patent applications for obvious technologies which are in general use for years. For an initiative that tries to solve this mess, check out this page.

*Update: the most detailed overview of Microsoft’s RSS patent application has been done by Niall Kennedy here.