5 Most Useless Website Features On The Planet

1. Twitter’s Public Timeline - Brilliant, I mean who doesn’t want to see what some chinese person you’ve never met did 5 seconds ago? For those not content with the inane ramblings of your ‘friends’, you can stay up-to-date with a steady stream of bullcrap from complete strangers who insist on telling you about their sick cat in a foreign language.

What’s more, your updates never stay on the page for longer than a nanosecond because the geniuses at twitter think the last 20 posts is an adequate representation of about 40 squillion users.

2. Digg’s “Friends Activity” menu - This stroke of genius comes from the delusional idea that (a) ‘Friends’ on Digg are anything more than isolated vote-sharing syndicates and (b) anyone gives a flying crap about what other people are doing.

That aside, the menu itself is made completely redundant by the lack of any information other than a list of stats, and if anyone actually uses this retarded waste of pixels I’ll eat my own kidney.

3. Google Video’s Front Page - For what is arguably the biggest internet company on the planet, they sure don’t know how to engage their users. Google video is actually a pretty decent video site, offering large uploads and better streaming than YouTube.

The problem lies in their frankly pathetic front page, which offers no real incentive or ability to explore videos, short of a brief list of stuff I saw 2 years ago.

4. YouTube’s “Streams” feature - You might not have heard of this one as it’s still in beta, but the fact that nobody seems to be using it is a testament to the idiocy of whoever created it. This feature basically allows you to enter a ‘room’ where you can talk to other YouTube users in real-time while watching videos.

First of all, the average YouTube user spends his time calling everyone else gay, spouting horrific grammar and arguing in leetspeak like any of it even matters. Talk to these people live? No thanks.

5. StumbleUpon’s Video feature - Great for a few weeks, the service lets you discover random clips that actually fit your interests.

It all goes a bit pear-shaped when you’re kindly informed that you need to pick more interests before you can continue using it, which means eventually you get stuck watching all the stuff you didn’t want, like cat videos and crappy anime.

Complaints to the usual address, I’d also like to apologise in advance for any offense caused to the following:- Youtube users, Digg users, Cat lovers, Anime freaks and the entire population of China.

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