The Bad

Part two of my three part series on the web in 2008 focuses on what went wrong. What went bad this year? In these troubled times, a lot of sites have hit the skids, or some services just fell short either in customer service, brand promotion, or a combination of many other things. I'm saving the sites that hit the skids for tomorrow. Today I want to focus on sites and services that lost their steam this year.

First my honorable mentions for The Bad of 2008:

• Yahoo had one whale of a roller coaster ride this year. Their services were starting to give them an edge in social media with their acquisitions of Flickr and del.icio.us . Microsoft came in this summer to outright buy Yahoo at $31 per share. Yahoo and their board fought off this buyout and this fall, Microsoft pulled the plug and killed the deal. Yahoo's stock is now trading around $12 and the future is not looking bright at all for them. They've tried partnerships with Google and AOL, but their days are numbered, I think, unless Microsoft comes back in to pick up the pieces.
• As you read in an earlier post from me, I have not given up on MySpace . Their music service is the envy of all social networks, in my opinion, but the air is slowly going from the networking giant. Facebook has made major strides in securing the college age and now the post college age crowd causing a vacuum affect at MySpace. I think they can still turn it around, they are still the largest network worldwide, but this year showed that the giant has a big chink in their armor.

That leaves my pick for bad for 2008. This really should be listed with The Good because of their rabid success in 2008, and their now spread into infamy, but this year was so good for I Can Has Cheezburger that it wins for The Bad. Bad as in badass.

Eric Nakagawa was in the right place at the right time. He started the site as a central mainstream service to capture an underground joke shared among 4Chan groups and their lot, per say. The premise is simple enough, put a caption on a funny picture of a cat.

Now the site generates around 3 million page views per day and no one can escape having an LOLCat in their inbox, or on their shared items on their Google Reader page. The service has even spread to satire dogs and even politicians. You can even make your own LOLCat and caption it yourself.

Here's one I made from Topaz.

There may be no end for the goodness at ICHC, and I don't think most people mind a bit. Especially if they make their own language around it. So I guess if we all do our best, we can all has success.