AT&T “Pogo’s” into browser war

Does Ma Bell really have nothing better to do than to poke her 100 year old head into the browser market? Hey, stop wasting your time trying to glam up the browser and instead spend some more time upgrading my cell coverage and making my broadband connection faster. Are you kidding me? This is so destined to fail it ain’t even funny. And who the heck is Vizible…that guy Rushton has the charisma of an IRS auditor. This had deadpool written all over it.

Well, for once, the Tech Captain-Cruncher’s, seem all stuffy, and I have to agree. But I’d note if this came from Palo Alto and had some swarny Web 2.0 sounding throat-gagging name like Pingo or Pongo, holding some swarmy invite-only announcement party, everyone would be clamoring for it, thrown into hysterics, the new new thing, but being AT&T, the 250 crowd goes (predictably) cynical.

Fancy eye-candy UI’s get tiring, and even in their best state (iPhone) they are never much productive, iPhone’ers goign back to their Blackberry’s or keeping old phone. This is just a way to sneak in ads, covered in a fancy UI. Spoonful of eye-candy makes the adverts go down.

The ATT folks that green lighted this are out of their freaking minds.

Who would use this(besides att employees)?

Haha. I’m watching the latest episode of the Cranky Geeks right now. Sarah Lacy and John Dvorak are speculating that the reason Scoble uses Twitter so much is because you are a really a introverted exhibitionist. Sarah backed up the exhibitionist part by mentioning your naked pics. Dvorak is upset because now he has an image of a naked Scoble in his head. Good stuff.

Vizible? These guys have been floundering for years with absolutely no direction or vision. At least they found their sugar daddy in AT&T. But you know how this story ends up…a chalk outline of Todd Finch in the deadpool.

This is the worst timed, craziest waste of time and money effort I’ve ever seen. And I thought Flock was a bad idea. Ha!

Pogo=No go.

I loved this browser. Thank God it isn’t opened to hordes of widget-makers that only slurp up your privacy anyway.

It was so funny hearing Scoble cover this, because he could barely restrain his boredom and impatience. As the guy ticked off the features, he could only answer abruptly in near annoyance “yes, yes” — none of this enthusiastic rhapsodizing as he would if it were widgety start-up opensourcey stuff. That was hilarious to see. We should could tell there would be no tear from Robert Scoble over this new browser lol.

I liked the 3-D images and the ability to move the icons of the pages around and fan them out yet control the fan (unlike Mac Safari). There is a lot that could change from your perception of yourself as on only one side of a wall browsing with this, if it becomes more tangible and immersive and if it starts connecting other people on browsers inside of it.

I was wondering, did they put any virtual worlds or social media networks on to it but then I thought it is in a sense making a little virtual world itself.

Pogo — We have met the browser and he is us!

Has anyone noticed that if you have two firefox 3.0 browsers open and you type in http://www.foxnews.com into the one on top it gets sent to the back?

This is a good example of how AT&T gets the web in a wrong way. At least they would have done some vertical browser. Do they ever reach 1% market share? Do they know Dev community around IE and FF?

mm

I did one of the very early 1994 web porjects in BT and aprently one bit of BT (probaly commdynet) wanted to develop its own version of html – some one senior at the Labs did some shouting and that was shut down thank god.

Nothing really exciting here. Plus i didn´t like how they kept using the word “consumer” instead of “user”.

This is definitely not just to see “how far they can take it” as they say on the video, they are developing it just to stick some ads in front of people.

They are wasting their time (and money) here.

Why all the pessimism. I’d very much like to be able to see my current open tabs. At the moment, I’d consider a firefox extension more useful, since that’s where I live now, but I like the idea.

could I get an invite?

Sounds interesting, but I’m not sure how useful this would be. I agree with Issac, I think a Firefox extension would be more useful. That would allow the program to be cross-platform too, which it currently is not. I’m running Ubuntu, so this doesn’t look like an option for me (at least right now).

It’s too bad many of the comments above are so snippy. All the clever insults seem to miss the point though. This is a research group showing us some of their ideas on how to better organize data. They’re using bookmarks as an example, but organizing and presenting links and chunks of data has been a huge problem ever since the file cabinet was invented.

My advice to the ATT/Vizible group: Don’t mention a “new browser”. Don’t talk about ads. Talk about the technology and how it helps you keep track of your info. Everyone has disorganized bookmarks, and most people’s files and folders are a mess. Navigating a history or picking a tab is much easier with a pictorial representation. We all want to jot down notes about links and pages as they occur to us. Drag-and-drop is much easier with good graphics. Etc.

This is where you guys shine – helping people manage complexity. You need a lot of snake-oil if you’re going to talk about ads, but you guys have something real. It’s important, and it speaks for itself. Focus on it.

Maybe Pogo is really a means to broadcast multiple TV broadcasts for future versions of it’s U-verse IPTV service offering?

Neal,

picture thumbnails of things like documents and webpages are overrated, because they’re so small you can’t get any useful information from seeing them. go look at how microsoft used webpage thumbnails on the microsoft.com site navigation. completely dumb and useless.

i’m looking for an invite…