AOL's logo, "The Running Man" (not to be confused with the book of the same name, which in turn is not to be confused with the movie of the same name) is gone from the window in Rockefeller Center.

In my career as a web development I've seen a lot of brilliant and competent people, as well as a lot of utter incompetents, on all levels of the corporate ladder and working at all levels of productivity. Basically, if I were to make a competence scale, it would look something like this:

- <--10-9-8-7-6-4-5-4-3-2-1-0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10--> +

Let's say user data release by AOL would rate at negative 7; setting out to rewrite Netscape from scratch at negative 9; changing all the links of an established website in the name of SEO at negative 5; writing tons of spaghetti code that nevertheless functions and serves users at positive 1; coming up with PageRank algorithm and implementing it -- at positive 10. There are also those who come into the office and do nothing at all - that's 0. Ase we all seem to notice and remember negative things better than positive, sometimes corporate life seems like one big orgy of incompetence and bad ideas.

I've long had a theory, why even with so many negative contributions, American companies mostly prosper and thrive, despite incompetency. To explain it, I usually use an ant metaphor. See, when ants are carrying a bug or a caterpillar back to the nest, they almost always succeed. But the thing is, they do not cooperate very well. They all have different ideas about which way to pull, and some, instead of helping, actually climb on the cargo or collide with other ants. Others just watch from the sidelines and generally mill about. But even though ants pull in different directions, the resulting force vector generally leads to the nest, and the caterpillar gets there eventually.

Recently, an article about a designer Paul Frank caught my attention. He is fighting his former business partners who jettisoned him from the company bearing his name. He came up with the design ideas that made the company what it is, as well as lent it his name. The business partners accused him of not contributing to the daily business grind, bought out his shares and either fired him or drove him to resigning (depends on whose story you listen to). It's getting nasty:

" "Those guys are saying Paul Frank is not a person," says the designer, whose given name is Paul Frank Sunich. "I hear they're all wearing T-shirts that say 'We Are Paul Frank.' Well, you're Paul Frank Industries. You're not Paul Frank."

I've seen the monkey design that Paul Frank is so famous for, but did not know that it was a multimillion dollar business. Apparently it's very popular - and I definitely do believe that both the business partners that made this quirky brand into such a powerhouse and the guy who conceived it made positive contributions.

What I have the issue with is the person who's running their web department. It's not even the unusable obnoxious flash-ridden websites that don't work in Firefox. It's the fact that this person apparently never did something very basic - typed in "Paul Frank" into Google. Because when you do, you get this as a first result:

I don't have a problem with the programmer who used a stock client detection script from somewhere. We all do that. But putting "Client Detection Script" as the title of the first page of your site is rather idiotic. And nobody at the company even searched for "Paul Frank" in Google, even if to see what other Paul Franks there are out there!

Getting back to my ant theory, squabbles, badly designed websites and all those people who prolifically do bad things are balanced out by things done right. The website may suck, but the brand is so good that people will put up with it. Individual ants might be doing stupid and counterproductive things, but it all gets balanced out. The caterpillar gets dragged into the nest, whether it wants it or not.

1) Old entries are hard to get to: "back n entries" works only for a while, after that you need to go day by day. Which makes paging through a blog that is not updated daily a nightmare.

2) Can't run ads.

3) The degenerate "friends" system with it's stupid add/remove politics. It's better to read stuff in an aggregator.

4) Livejournal is widely known for drama and teenage angst. Having a Livejournal blog is similar to having an AOL email - it doesn't matter that the famous hacker JWZ has one. People will still think that you are a loser.

5) No categories. You have to keep a separate journal if you want to give your readers an ability to read only stuff that interests them. I want to write some entries in Russian, but do not want to have a separate journal for that. Also some of my readers might be interested in my photos, but not in what I think about Livejournal.

6) Constant outages, lost posts, slowness and other technical fun. What else can you expect if you share your servers with a million teenagers frantically refreshing their "friends lists".

7) No trackback.

8) Image hosting that is still in beta, but a fully released "phonepost" system that instead of using MP3 format uses OGG. I spent a couple of hours trying to find a player that would actually play these files when I click on them, but for the most part miserably failed. Those are a couple of hours of my life that I'll never get back. I mean, what the hell is wrong? You click on a file, the player opens, but doesn't play anything. You click play button - nothing. You click again.... Arrrgh, it's driving me nuts!

9) No web logs - you have no idea how many people actually read your stuff. The only indicators that you might have are how many "friends" you have and how many comments you get (both of which are poor indicators). Since you can't run JavaScript, you can't have a reliable third party tracker either. I've had a visitor from northropgrumman.com at my new shiny (well, not so shiny yet) MT based site, and I would not have know that if it was still at Livejournal. Hey, Northrop Grumman reader, who are you?

10) If you set an article with a future date in Livejournal, instead of showing up if your readers lists normally, it sometimes disappears. There's a bug there somewhere.

Livejournal does have a superior comment system, but since I don't get too many comments it doesn't matter that much.

Did you expect the Spanish Inquisition? No? Well, nobody does. But it brings you 11th reason:

11) No integrated search.