Hitwise, which offers rather detailed and expensive competitive intelligence on website traffic, has the worst online store I’ve encountered in recent memory. Purchasing an off-the-shelf report is a multi-step process, and each step takes over a minute (for no obvious reason).

First you enter the url of a website you want information on, then you wait a minute or more, then you decide what geographic market you want stats for, then you wait another minute or more. I’m not sure what is next, because I’ve never made it that far. I end up doing something else, and by the time I come back to the Hitwise store and try to complete the next step, it has timed out my session and I have to start all over again.

Appearantly it’s been this way for at least a couple of days. What bullshit.

Update: 12 hours later, and it’s still a delightful experience. Appearantly the server is half way around the world from me, in Australia, but this goes way beyond communications latency. Regular page views on their store are slow, but not managed-hosting-on-venus slow.

Update 2: A month later, and I decided to check back because I saw that someone from hitwise seems to have checked this post. It still sucks. It’s taking forever. I have no idea why.

After noticing that the alumni group I created on facebook had spontaneously gained members, I decided to spend more time exploring the presence of Reedies on other online social networks, including Friendster, and I’ve reached an important conclusion: Friendster sucks is distinctly sub-par. This isn’t exactly an original insight, but it’s become meaningful to me.

In what ways is Friendster distinctly sub-par, you may ask:

1. It’s broken. For two weeks or more it hasn’t returned any results when I click the “Reed College” link in my profile.
2. It’s SLOWER than a very specific swear that I’m not going to use right now, since I originally used “ass” in the title of this post and then decided to clean up my language. When I use Friendster’s search to look for profiles that list “Reed College” it takes forever to display each page of results. It doesn’t help that…
3. It pauses and inserts fricking dating site ads in between every 4th entry in the search results for True.com. They are all targeted using info in my profile, because they are all women in or near Seattle and I’m a male in or near Seattle. Of course, they ignore an important part of my profile, which is that I specified that I’m “just looking around,” and that I didn’t check that I’m looking for a “relationship with women.” Also, the women they list don’t appear to have anything to do with Reed College, AND some of them are clearly not looking for men.

It may or may not be important to reach out to alumni using Friendster, but I don’t think I’m going to be the one to do it. It’s too irritating to use.

So, just for kicks, I go check out my blog on Technorati and find that, according the them, I haven’t updated in 32 days.

Thanks, fellas, I’m glad I’ve been pinging you every time I post. I thought we were friends.

John M. Lyons Jr had his abandoned boat commandeered by his neighbor, Mark Morice, who used it as part of an effort to rescue as many as 200 people in the aftermath from Hurricaine Katrina. Now Lyons is suing Morice, claiming that he suffered his own distress, in the form of “grief, mental anguish, embarrassment and suffering . . . due to the removal of the boat.”

Um, if you ask me, he should be feeling grief, mental anguish and embarrassment for filing the damn lawsuit.

Morice also commandeered two other boats for his rescues. No word on whether the owners of those boats are seeking to make this a class action suit