CNN almost did.
They were so close with their t-shirts recently but then had to go and spoil things by slapping their logo right on there. Less is more once again. In fact when it comes to branding, anything at all is starting to be considered brash when it comes to Web 2.0.
Google certainly do.
I happened upon a busy white tent Last Friday night in New York city. It was surrounded by some fantastic projections on the neighbouring buildings but there was no clue as to what was going on. That was unless you investigated and had a look inside. Cameras, computers and a couple of dogs quite randomly. Turns out it was a promo for iGoogle - the personalised version of Google. If you’ve been on the Internet for a while now then you may recognise this as the portal concept from the late 1990s and the “My Netscape”.
We’ve all encountered a captcha before (although you may not have known at the time). The “enter this obfuscated text in this form field” device that is supposed to stop automatic creation of user accounts or prevent comment spam postings by web robots.
That’s all well and good (unless you require an accessible version — many do not offer an audio alternative). However I’ve never come across them while simply trying to search Google.
I was trying to search for the keywords “php submit post” to get some references for some code I was writing and having trouble with. Everything was fine after entering the captcha but it seems that this only appears sporadically.
While in Tignes last week I had to break my practice of not touching a computer while on holiday. One of my friends had a work-related Word document he had emailed to him but thanks to the locked down web terminals in the bars, nothing could be saved, opened nor any program run. A combination of a USB flash drive and Google documents provided us with a work around. That only left us to find our way around the infuriating French keyboards!
I’m fairly certain that Google Apps will start to become a cheaper and genuinely viable alternative to the Microsoft Office lock-in in the very near future. It only remains to be seen how many people will trust Google with their documents.
