With all these amazing AJAX-ified websites these days that are so simple to use it's amazing when you come across a site that is from a major company that just doesn't work. In this case it's MSN's AdCenter. For work reasons all I needed to do was sign up and activate an MSN AdCenter account, but apparently that process is not one that is supported by the site.

At first I tried signing up using Firefox 2.0. AdCenter let me fill out the entire first 'tab', with username and email, but then on the second tab none of the dropdowns were populated - which made it pretty tricky to choose a credit card type. Thinking this might be a classic Microsoft "we're only supporting IE" issue, I fired up my IE6 and started again. This time it looked more hopeful, the dropdowns were populated. I guess the "if IE then populate dropdowns" function was doing its job. Oh no, wait. The dropdowns were populated, but every time the data is submitted it tells me that fields from the first tab weren't filled out - whereas I knew they had been. At this point I gave up, rather than go and install IE7.

Now the thought occurs that even Microsoft doesn't want to be so stupid as to prevent paying customers from signing up, purely to increase installs of its browsers. Surely? Or am I just being way too naive? Especially as now with IE7 when you mis-type a domain name it re-directs you to the MSN Live Search automatically, thus increasing MSN ad revenues. Either way, whether MSN has done this through 'business drivers' (read: 'pure malicious thoughts') or just by sloppy UI coding it is just plain bad, and in these days of open, usable web UI frameworks it's plain unacceptable.

Labels: bad ui, Microsoft

Earlier tonight I was watching some hilarious sketches from 'Smack the Pony', an overlooked British comedy show from the late 90s with classic sketches such as this:

Once I'd stopped laughing I realised there was something interesting going on here - the subtitles. This sketch had been recorded off a French channel so the video stream had subtitles in it, but what if I wanted Spanish subtitles? Then it struck me, that if you could put an overlay onto any video from a service like youTube that embedded subtitles you could extend the reach of any video. Maybe you could even help world peace... Maybe.

I filed this idea away for later, then about an hour later I was looking at metafilter and came across someone trying to do just this - dotSub. D'oh, beaten to the punch again. But then having reviewed the dotSub offering I still feel like there's potential here for someone else to do a lot better. For example it doesn't look like dotSub overlays videos from other sources, they stream them directly and embed their own pre-structured English subtitles to work from. They also don't seem to offer a rating system for thei subtitles, which given they're done by free from their audience seems a bit risky.

Labels: Idea, Power of the Network, video

Bit of a plug here - I've been using DreamHost for my web hosting for a while now and I have to say they're awesome! Cheap, responsive and with a good uptime - a perfect fit for my non-critical domains. The best part of hosting with them is you can host unlimited domains under the same account, so for just over a hundred bucks a year and I can host this domain and all my many others at no extra cost. Amazingly this cost is only slightly more than I was paying to host my old MattHobbs.co.uk domain back in the U of K. Crazy.

So go check them out and sign up with the hosting discount code BEST1 to get a discount on the price of the Yearly Level 1 service. Plus then I get a kick back as well and can buy you beers (or orange juices in Matt's case).

Labels: Recommendation, Tech

Andrew Weinreich, creator of SixDegrees and so one of the forefathers of social networking, is blogging about his latest startup meetMoi. MeetMoi is a mobile dating service that wants to get you an instantaneous hookup when you're out and about in town. Now whether this service will replace turning up to any bar and getting drunk enough till someone near to you becomes dateable is the big challenge Andrew faces and good luck to him, but in the meantime his posts give great insight into the process of starting a business. For example you can read about how he initiated sixDegrees at the start of his entrepreneurial life.

Labels: entrepreneurs, social networks, start ups