At least, that’s what they’d have you believe. Titter. Tristan Louis, a guy who used to work at Boo.com and who writes an interesting and well-respected blog, argues that many of the the things that Boo.com did back in the day (1999) were actually prescient of the Web design features we’re now seeing in Web 2.0. I don’t think that much of it holds water – Web 2.0 design is all about usability, Boo.com suffered from being totally unusable.
Take a plunge into the Wayback Machine and you can get a glimpse of how Boo.com used to be.
Choose March 2000, for example, and the home page reads: “boo.com has been launched in another window. Nothing happens on this page, except that you may want to bookmark it.”
Open the pop-up window and you’re prompted to choose Simple Mode or Full Mode, and to choose your country. (What no IP-based geo-targetting back then?)
And then the Wayback Machine loses its thread – just as most people who tried to use Boo.com lost their way.
Simply put, there’s no room for revisionism when it comes to Boo.com. Read Boo Hoo and marvel at the idiocy of a company – no, strike that, of people – who spunked $135m up the wall in 18 months and then blamed everyone else apart from themselves.
It was market conditions, the lack of broadband, complicated tax regimes and international currency complexity that was to blame.
And not the idiot bosses who spent giant fortunes on Cocorde, champage, caviar and had a business model that called for 500,000 customers within six months of launch.
This, remember, was a business that needed “expert advice” on how the site’s cartoon icon Miss Boo should wear its hair. Says co-founder Ernst Malmsten in Boo Hoo:
“So we booked the world’s top hair-stylist, Eugene Soulemain, whose clients included top Hollywood actresses and fashion houses like Prada, Louis Vuitton and Hussein Chalayan.”
Here’s what you got for your money.
The amazing thing is that when he says it, it quite evident that he has absolutely no realisation – even in hindsight – that this was no way to go about designing a Web site, much less spend investors’ money.
And as if that wasn’t a ridiculous enough way of ploughing through someone else’s $135m:
“Miss Boo had to talk cool too… So at the beginning of October we brought the New York Style Commentator Glenn O’Brien over to London for a couple of days to make her hip but transatlantic.”
FFS! Even in the dotcom boom days that can’t have made any kind of sense.
So no, Boo.com wasn’t very Web 2.0. It wasn’t even Web 1.0. It didn’t work. It was a monumental mess and even bigger waste of money.
As far as the latest owners of Boo.com are conerned, they should hope that the only thing to new site shares with the old company is the domain name.
They certainly shouldn’t kid themselves into thinking the site and business was ahead of its time…
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boo 2.0? You’ll have to wait and see, but we think it will be worth waiting for
Wasn’t it ever the way with boo 1.0?
Mind you, that’s a nice bit of Flash you have on the boo.com holding page… But worth the wait?
Insider eh! interesting……saw those flash slider things alright and its definitely an improvement on the woman that was on it for the last 6 months. So are you going to give us any clues as to what the “new” http://www.boo.com will bring to the .com world this time around?????? Rekon i’m more overdrive than overture!
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