Scoble is right about MSN Found, but partly for the wrong reasons

Published 25 February 05 01:18 PM | alexcampbell

Scoble got very upset about a bad marketing site one of Microsoft's product teams created.  He won't say which one it was but it is obviously http://www.msnfound.com.  Don't bother clicking the link and visiting the site - I am friends with more space aliens than people who could conceivably find something of value there.

His basic objection to the site is that it doesn't do anything for the user, and he uses their lack of RSS feeds as an example of this.  He is right about this but I don't see it as being that much of a big deal.  It's hard to imagine why anyone would subscribe to an RSS feed of this junk.  Even if they had RSS it wouldn't help because no "connector" would link to this site except to mock its inanity.

The scary thing is that this MSN Found site is wrong in so many more ways than Scoble identified.  Have a look at the sourcecode of the homepage - it doesn't contain a single word of content!  No search engine is ever going to index it.  The links to the individual 'blogs' (I use that term very loosely here) are image maps so are unlikely to be followed by a search engine.  There are no text links on the entire page.  Even the image links don't have ALT attributes.  Whoever did the HTML production on this site shouldn't just be fired - they should be subjected to Soviet style "consciousness raising" before they're allowed to touch a computer again.

Worse than the HTML and design is the apparent lack of purpose behind the site.  I can't even begin to imagine what the purpose of this site was.  It is marketing something?  Is it marketing MSN?  It is marketing CLR hosting in SQL Server 2005?  I've spent 10 minutes going through the site (much more time than it deserved, much more time than any normal person would) and still can't figure out what it's trying to achieve.  It blows my mind to think that some executive with budgetary approval let this one slip through.

Even if the aim of the site was to show that blogging is cool, it would have failed.  These aren't cool blogs.  No one is going to look at these blogs and say, ok, now I'm going to start reading Scoble and Dave Winer and Alex every night.  MSN would have been better off choosing a couple of the best bloggers from MSN Spaces and featuring them somehow.

I seriously doubt it was, but if the aim of the site was to demonstrate the cool applications that can be built with ASP.Net then it would have failed.  It doesn't use ASP.Net to do anything that couldn't have been done in 1994 using HTML and Notepad.  Again, MSN already have great sites that demonstrate this (Spaces and Hotmail).

A lot of people are throwing shit at Scoble for saying he would have fired the team responsible if he could.  But Scoble is right.  These people deserve to be fired.  The site is like a cruel joke - as if some PR types have made a list of all the things that are wrong with the web and then set out to build a site that exhibits all of them.

Cynical PS
MSN Found is almost so bad that I think it could have been a sad PR stunt by some renegade Microsofties.  Think about it - they build a really, really awful site.  Every blogger on earth links to it saying that it sucks.  It gets a million visits a day.  Then the people who built it take the site statistics to their out-of-touch boss and he gives them pay rises and great reviews for building such a high volume site.  Now that is scary!

Comments

# TrackBack said on February 24, 2005 02:12 PM:

Microsoft make life imitate art

# Robert Scoble said on February 25, 2005 01:29 AM:

Keep in mind I would have fired this team before I even saw the site.

Not having RSS is a symptom of a bigger disease. Not being customer centric.

This site is one of the worst marketing attempts I've ever seen us try.

But, you're right. By my attacking it it's gotten far more inbound links than it ever would have gotten.

The bosses will probably chalk this up as a huge success due to traffic log analysis.

Sigh.

# Chris said on February 25, 2005 04:41 AM:

Wasn't it there to promote MSN search with "easter eggs"? Ie. you do a search on MSN and at the top of the page appears something intruiging that takes you to a "funny" video showing how you really ought to use MSN search because of serendipity value or something ;O)

# Alex Campbell said on February 25, 2005 05:03 AM:

> Wasn't it there to promote MSN search with "easter eggs"?

I think if you have to guess what a marketing site is about then it has failed already.