Crappy Websites

I must be surfing over few hundred web sites daily. A lot of them are very popular. Even though the numbers say that these websites are doing very well, their interface makes me feel YUKS! Can't these sites afford a decent designer? Here's a quick list.

• Rediff.com - The famous indian portal which was considered as India's best website. Alexa rating currently ranks it at 78! The user interface for the website is crappy to say the least. On the front page, the total news worth a normal user's attention is less than 10% of the area. Remaining 90% is ads! Can you believe it? Next in line are the glossy ads. The site is so colorful that you are blinded by the sudden light from the gazillion ads (ok kidding!), but its still a very bad UI. Even though they have upgraded the email space to 1GB, but the moment you start typing in your username, a popup appears. Well what the heck is that for. Noticed right now that a pop-up appears even when you load the site (this was instantly blocked by my firefox, so didnt notice it earlier). I am not sure why people actually end up going to such annoying sites. More links - linuxreviews

• Timesofindia.com - It suffers from the same problems. Slow interface, too many shiny ads and the bitter truth - absolutely crappy news. Well technically, they have all the "masala" news (bollywood star's liaison's, the latest innovation that happened 6 months back (yaah as if no one knows about it), political scandals etc.) but speaking of anything worthwhile is probably not on their agenda.

• Sulekha - I am not sure if I should be writing about it. Just for the heck of it, I complained online about the site and their user-interface. Surprisingly they replied back and wanted my suggestions on how to improve the look and feel of site. Well let's see how they go about it. Their website does not work across different browsers. The ads are more shinier and glossier than those on rediff. Lot of spam ads/ messages posted on their site (I know its a tough problem) to clear out those, but for a site which has over 10k hits everyday, this should be a no-brainer.

If people know of any other famous sites that are equally crappy, please let me know :)

2006 - The road travelled. 2007 - The road ahead.

In the IT world, 2006 was undoubtedly the year of online video and social networks. The acquisition of YouTube by Google for an amount of $1.65 billion was the major headline. Several hundred sites came up with ideas similar to youtube for enabling users to share videos online. The recent ones also enpower the users to tag specific parts of video and edit / cut / copy /paste multiple videos together. Few of the famous ones are Gotuit, Metacafe, Motionbox, Revver, Blip.tv, iFilm, Eyespot etc.

Social networks mushroomed phenomenally in 2006. There are social networks for video sharing, playing games, meeting friends, sharing cabs etc. In other words, there is a social network for any and every thing today. Robert young wrote an interesting article on - "Social networks are the new media." Mashable has good reviews on all the latest social networks and their award list for 2006 can be found here.

2006 also saw the battle between PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. Right now, Wii seems to be high on the popularity charts because of its unique and innovative technology. The Wii Sports makes you excercise and you actually feel part of the game. Cnet was a little biased for Microsoft Xbox, but what the heck - they usually favor the big names anyway. I am yet to find an unbiased comparison of the three.

How can one forget the camera battle between Canon Digital Rebel XTi(400D), Nikon D80 and Sony Alpha A100. Its the first time in many years I have seen Nikon come up with a really good product (only if they can reduce the price and make it more comparable to XTi). Some good reading material on this can be found here, here and here.

So the big question still is - What will 2007 have in store for us. Keep me posted about your views.

Author - Sharad