mostly research stuff
i was reading all about x1.com over the past few months, wondering why anybody would bother buying, since both apple’s os and microsoft’s longhorn are releasing better integrated local client search utilities…oh, and also because there are already a bunch of other companies going after this market for desktop search…namely el Goog …oh, and also because hotbot has been doing this for free since ‘98. so yeah, figured i’d find a way to crap on it without even installing…so gosh, here goes!
first thing that i noticed when i perused their slow site (after the stupid $99 dollar magic price) was this little link to idealab, the parent company. not familiar with them? they’ve created tons of crapola companies - mostly just one guy, bill gross, who investors already tried to fire… they’re one of those incubators that basically takes the name of anything (from 97-present) and tries to make an online business out of it. kinda like if martha stewart could find a way to make lawn ornaments out of dog shit i suppose. i read a while ago that bill likes to copy old master paintings brushstroke by brushstroke and give ‘em to friends. please read that sentence again, folks. a serial entrepreneur with a passion for copying the work of others? exactly.
this brings us to x1. to understand the degree of potential suckitude, one need look no further than their very own forums. you’ll notice one for feature requests and gripes, with a description, “do you hate something about x1?“…and holy cow! it’s almost the busiest forum on there (after the one for poor documentation)! too many gripes and bugs to list here, but the biggest complaints are about slow speed and cpu hogging, inability to do ‘exact phrase’ searching, etc. this is a fat client app, like the old anna nicole.
oh, and if you are thinking about trying out x1, do be aware that this text is hidden away on their site (not kidding folks): “When someone buys a copy of X1, we give it a unique registration code. This code is sent to us (about once a day) when the user is on-line….X1 does not log any information about what specific files or email you view. It does track what kind of files you look at (PDF, Excel, Word, etc.) so we know what file viewers you find useful…” ouch. that hurts, huh?
this blog is mostly safe for work, though i sometimes throw around a 'fuck' or two. you'll find a bunch of my articles from CI Magazine, SCIP online, other research pieces and some other crap. enjoy. there's lost of content here related to getting information about, around, from and through people and organizations...
MikeD
July 9th, 2004 at 9:14 am
That privacy issue will go away for registered users who bother to reconfigure settings. But it requires an extra step, and that’s wrong!
WALEG
July 12th, 2004 at 8:49 pm
‘When someone buys a copy of X1, we give it a unique registration code. This code is sent to us ..’
What do you mean by that, how could that possibly legal??!!
dave
July 25th, 2004 at 7:12 pm
oh, it’s legal…it’s tucked away in one of this little click-wrap agreements that people never read on the way to the ‘next install’ screen when unpacking software…makes you wanna think twice about about skipping the click-wraps, huh?
Anonymous
June 8th, 2005 at 6:47 pm
nice site indeed