/dev/null/kevin

Dilbert.com was relaunched last week and it's terrible.  The pointy-haired boss has won.  They tried for Web 2.0 but ended up with Web 2.Oh No!

Now that I've gotten the one-liners out of the way, here are the specifics.  With a plethora of new features that might have sounded good on paper, the new site looks like a MySpace page with hemorrhoids.  It's loud, obnoxious, filled with Flash 9, and causes an itching sensation.  Tim Bray said it best:

Tim's not the only one who doesn't like the new site.   Venky also doesn't like the new site, but the most negative comments come from Dilbert's own readers: 

Today's Sunday strip was particularly bad as the Flash application didn't even display the entire strip all at once.  I needed to page through the Sunday strip to see it all.  Whatever humor there was in the strip was lost as I had to deal with the navigation.  I'm lucky that the Flash even worked for me since many of the comments show that Flash 9 doesn't work on many platforms, including Solaris and some PDAs.

Perhaps Scott Adams needs to buy his own copy of How To Make Webcomics from the guys at halfpixel.com [1 2 3 4] who really know how to make a web site for comics.

Update [04/25/2008]: Scott Adams has revealed the "secret" back door page with just the comic.

Today's Scoble lament really hit home with me.  Riding the web 2.0 social networking wave is harder for a 40+ year old than a 20-something college student.

When I went to college in the 80s I could email my dad.  That was pretty much it besides other students.  Today, I've got the whole extended family using email (even grandma).  They also read my blog about my daughter, but they don't use RSS feeds.  I use the blogdrive.com service because it can be configured to send email to people when I post.  Otherwise, they'd never know to check.  Web 2.0 is about interaction but the family doesn't get that part.  They don't leave comments on the blog.  I might get an email from my mom that she liked the latest blog and pictures, but that's about it.  Twitter, Facebook, etc., are all foreign words to them.

Last night I spent part of the night explaining what Twitter was to my wife, and that I'm not having an affair with Veronica Belmont because I subscribe to her twitter feed.  She's a work in progress, my wife.  I finally got her to enable her IM client more regularly so that's helped to cut down on the one-sentence emails

I also captain a hockey team and our roster averages about 39 years old.  I use email and evite to coordinate the team.  I was looking to use some other Web 2.0 tools but after an impromptu survey I found that my team was as ignorant as my family when it came to new technology.  Besides email, the next "best" tool people used was IM, but only about 25% of the team.  Again, no one used Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and the like.  Many of these guys work in high tech, too.

The same can be said for my college friends.  I still see many of them when I play in my band.  Email and Yahoo Groups are enough for them.  Most of my social networking friends are from Sun and the blogger community.  That's not a bad thing, but it would be nice to be able to tell an inside joke every once in a while.

So, am I just ahead of my time?  Will my family and friends catch up like they did with email?  Or am I just an old man playing with kids' toys?