Ship’s Biscuit — Flipping the digital landscape to portrait.

I was excited to be invited to try out Google’s new Ad Planner (more of this later) application today. I’ve used it a couple of times now and have suggested improvements and features. But that’s not important right now…

What is important is Google’s lack of interest in their 404 page.

10 years ago that little “Did you mean: ” was truly inspired. There was a time when I though “Wow! Google thinks of everything”. And that’s what great design should make you think and feel. At first you get that little warm glow when it seems to understand you despite the fact that you did something stupid and then after that you forget about it because it just fits in with your life. It doesn’t stop you on your journey, slap you round the face and then ignore you for getting something wrong. That kind of thing isn’t fun.

So I was pretty surprised to see this when I missed an ‘n’ off the word ‘adplanner’ in the the URL ‘www.google.com/adplanner’. Check this out:

This is a 404 page which, I guess is one of the most well-known error codes, given that we’ve all seen a couple in our time. Developers and designers often ignore them because they mostly feel that people should either get that kind of thing right first time or it happens so infrequently that it doesn’t matter. I was pretty appalled by this particular page. Of course it isn’t a critical user journey for Google but, being Google I guess 20 billion people see this every 10 seconds.

First, I though this was just because the Ad Planner application is in Beta. Turns out all of the applications lead to the same unhelpful 404 message. Take a look.

Okay, of course it’s not Google’s fault that I think slower than I type but there is an opportunity for Google to make me think “Wow! Google are wonderful, they think of everything”. It’s about forgiveness. To me, their 404 looks like this:

When surely, me and millions of other fingerly challenged people should be seeing something like this:

I know this is picky as hell but, take the Fail Whale as an example. Fail Whale is a lovely little picture that you see when Twitter is working too hard to process what you requested. People love that little guy and his birdies, there’s even official merchandise and a fan blog.

Never mind who failed, either way, it’s kind of insulting when a system tells you that you did something wrong and it’s not very friendly to simply say ‘An ERROR HAS OCCURRED’ - why so aggressive? When a system brushes over your inadequacies and attempts to guess what you’re after, you simply can’t help but love it. Despite lots of people being mighty upset with Twitter’s downtime, I can’t help think that The Fail Whale is responsible for saving Twitter’s ass despite the competition.

So, in conclusion, let’s just stop being so negative and think about The Fail Whale next time we’re thinking what to do with users who get things wrong.

Last night was the first ever live TV ad and it ran without a hitch. Take a look for yourself.

Honda are definitely living by their strapline ‘Impossible is nothing’ when they pulled this one out of the bag. It’s a wonderful ad, it’s got passion, determination and drama. It puts the recent trend in viral towards fakery a la Kobe Bryant to shame.

Last night Google launched their Application Engine. Nocturnal developer enthusiasts, get excited. It allows you to built applications that are hosted by Google’s robust infrastructure. This is fairly significant strategic change, not simply for the fact that it allows people to create ubiquitous web applications that never fall over and have unlimited space but because Google seem to have actually employed a trained designer to create a logo.

At the risk of sounding overly simplistic, it’s actually a bit like the way in which Facebook allows you to build applications. For most web developers the feature list will look positively erotic, however, one fairly massive drawback is that you need to know Python. Having said that, Python is one of the more simple syntaxes (there was talk of merging it with Ruby at one time). It will be a massive boon for the Python developer community. Hopefully they will ad new languages at some point, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

The level of integration with Google’s own apps is yet to be seen. And I’m yet to discover if they have a service level agreement (SLA) - this was the biggest drawback of the Amazon cloud as this prohibits application developers from providing any level of service for their own customers.

Pepsi are launching a new drink called RAW. It’s essentially made up of all natural ingredients. It seems that it’s only currently available UK clubs at the moment. It seems strange that a brand trying to convince us of its healthy and natural ingredients would try to diffuse itself in such an unhealthy atmosphere as a club or bar.

It sounds like Pepsi have recognised the success of Whole Earth’s Cola, which is all natural (the sugar comes from apple juice). I’m not a soft drink drinker personally but I have walked 5 minutes out of my way and queued up in Holland & Barrett for one of these;

I have a couple of problems with Ziggurat interpretation of the RAW product. The typeface looks really dated but at the same time very techie. And they have attractive nude people in their adverts. I’m never one to complain about attractive nude people but I think they would speak to their healthier consumers if they used something a little more erm… subtle?

Via Design Week

Microsoft is to purchase Yahoo! for $44.6 billion in cash and stock. In terms of searches, Google will still be king with 63.06% of all US searches against MSN and Yahoo!’s combined volume of 31.75%. But it’s not all about search. As pointed out by Hitwise, Yahoo! has an enormous amount of successful web properties, including Flickr, Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, most of which are higher in terms of visits than Google’s properties have, according to Hitwise.

It’s an interesting theory but the categories used by Hitwise aren’t complete. There is no mention of the social networking category i.e. Orkut and it doesn’t even mention the biggest video web site on the net, owned by Google. I’m not sure how the data would change but it would be interesting to see.