SLASHFAIL - November 4th, 2009

I came across this steaming pile of fail today, and couldn’t resist the urge to say something about it. /SLASHCONTROL, or /CTRL, or /C, or however else you may find it badged, appears to be AOL’s newest and most pathetic venture into new and exciting world of Hulu ripoffs.

AOL is a highly transparent company, and by that, I don’t mean they have great accounting practices. I mean they make sad, shallow attempts to appear modern, while they’re in fact floundering in a sea of stale marketing. They were hated and backwards in their prime, and now that they’ve been relegated to the past, they suddenly want in on the post-1996 Internet.

/CONTROL aka /CTRL aka /C

Just what pisses me off so much about this seemingly innocuous site? It isn’t that the layout is cheap, or that along with it, they’ve basically ripped off not only the color scheme of Hulu, but even the feeds themselves. No, it’s nothing so obvious. What I find appalling, to the point of utter contempt, is the name.

It doesn’t even make any sense; you’ve got your /, and you’ve got your Control key, but neither one has anything to do with the other. It’s like your grandparents calling your computer “an email.” Honestly, it’s pathetic, and I can’t for the life of me understand how their own people (there had to be somebody intelligent enough to code the page, right?) never said anything about it before the site went live. To really top it off, they have three inceptions of the name. On another AOL site, I found a link ad that had /CTRL emblazoned across it, and the favicon of the site is /C. C! I’m not sure if anyone at AOL has ever used a keyboard before, but there’s already a C key. That key, as many of you may already be aware, doesn’t stand for Control, but is instead used to spell words — like contrived.

That’s not all. They actually named the site /SLASHCONTROL, not /CONTROL. That means they not only mixed two computer-related words into a nonsensical bastard of a site-name, but they’ve done it redundantly. So, I should really be ranting against SLASH SLASH CONTROL, which is almost better. At least if there had been two slashes involved, then I could have passed it off as a poorly executed URL pun. This, sadly, is not the case.

Shame on you, AOL

I would say that I expected better from them, but I honestly didn’t. They’re pathetic; they’re a joke of a company and I would turn down a job if they offered me one. That’s saying an awfully lot, since I’m broke.

Image via /SLASHCONTROL.