The Most Merciful Thing

Once again, it's the wee hours of the morning and I stumbled upon something incredibly cool. Behold the 128k mp3 internet stream of MIT's campus radio station, and their 1-2AM program on Mondays called "The Most Merciful Thing". Basically, imagine three nerds with microphones talking about odd science and politics while Holst's "The Planets" plays softly in the background.

Still A Unique Problem

I have noted in the past how I tend to find the coolest things on the Internet after 2:00AM. This explains why I was watching Abbott and Costello's "Who's On First" routine at 6:00AM.

What's In A Name?

For those of us who can't afford real Nixie Clocks, there's now a Konfa...err...Yahoo Widget Engine widget that simulates the experience.

See, this is the problem with them calling it Yahoo Widget Engine...Saying something is a "Yahoo Widget Engine widget" uses four words, one of them twice, where saying Konfabulator widget is rather more concise. You can't just say "widget" for simplicity, since there are something like a half-dozen incompatible ways of putting widgets on one's desktop.

Really, calling it Yahoo Widget Engine screams "we're marketing droids with no creativity". It screams "we're bundling all kinds of useless shit with this neat thing". It screams "turn off the lights, the party's over".

The whole point of the word Konfabulator was that while it was literally nonsense, it sounded exactly like a word that described what the thing did would sound like. "Konfab" gives one a sense of infinite possibility and "-ulator" sounds like machine. It's a machine that does lots of stuff, which is exactly what it was. It's a platform for making little doohickies.

The whole point of the word Konfabulator is that it sounds exactly like "widget engine" without saying somehting as needlessly dry as "widget engine". It sounds like something that Willy Wonka would be selling. It was the perfect way to position the product. "We're the slightly silly guys," it says. "We're the one's with the imagination". These are the people who use something called Spidermonkey. These are the people who offer a Werewolf Monitor. Konfabulator is Willy Wonka rolling down a carpet.

Yahoo Widget Engine sounds like something you try to sell a CIO. Willy Wonka becomes a PR flack. If they had the slightest bit of talent over there, they would have called it "Yahoo Konfabulator" or even better, "Konfabulator, by Yahoo".

"But, but, but..." the no-talent marketing hacks go, "Konfabulator doesn't really tell people what the thing does. Yahoo Widget Engine makes more sense". Does it? Ever actually seen anything in real life called a widget?

The whole problem is that what hese little desktop programs are too hard to concisely describe. Apple's Dashboard name tries to make an analogy to all of the meters on one's car dashboard with their widgets. It's not a bad idea, to a point. They're both small instruments designed to tell people things they want to know. You're current speed is a lot like the outside temperature in that regard. These widgets work well for "at a glance" information.

But the angle that the name Dashboard misses that the name Konfabulator attempts to hint at is that the information your receive is infinitely customizable. You can have a widget telling you where the ISS is right now. You can have a widget tell you where earthquakes are occuring. The possibilites are endless. It's crucial that the name of the product express those possibilites. That's why you need a creative name like Konfabulator, because the name Yahoo Widget Engine sounds like "we take a dump on your desktop".

Kristofer Straub Is Fully Responsible. He Is Sorry.

This Checkerboard Nightmare "Blamination" is hillarious. "I'm in prison" is the new "It's such the don't".