Web 2.0 Error Messages

These days, the Web 2.0 companies are very considerate about your blood pressure, they have used their innovation even when it comes to the dreaded “404 – File not Found”, or “Under Maintenance” errors. Listing some of the errors that I stumbled along when I was visiting the sites.

I think everyone has said “Hello” to the Bloglines plumber one time or the other. This was one of the initial Error 2.0 Message that I saw, and I was very impressed. Not for long though, he gets on my nerves now. I have found many better error messages than this one. Although I think this is where the “cool error message” thing started (correct me if I am wrong).



Jaiku has a humourous one liner.



Technorati tries too, but apart from “brb” nothing can be deemed Web 2.0 classy 🙂 Wish they had tried a bit harder…



Twitter‘s lolcatz. After all lolcatz is the current rage…

Flickr is getting a massage. You get massage, and more RAM… That is one swell deal 😀 There was another website where I had seen an error that said “Out on a coffee break” or something on those lines… Seemed to me a direct lift of the Flickr error message and so I did not include that in the list.

These errors were okayish… You read/see, smile a wry smile at not getting the page you wanted, and move on… Then there were three errors that could be deemed really funny.

Reddit’s alien is one of my favourites, and so is Reddit. Reddit has a bookmarklet “Serendipity” which comes to my rescue whenever I am bored – which is quite often 🙂 A click, and I am instantly taken to some random page. If the page is not available, Reddit does not hesitate to poke fun at itself. There are multiple variations of the same…

Google Reader team would have banged heads to come up with this limerick 😛 By the way is this a limerick? What ever it is, I liked it…

But the best of the lot is WordPress. With a short story titled “Confessions Of A Server”, WP takes the cake, and the cherry too… Click on the adjoining image for a readable version of the short-story, the 15 seconds of your life that you give to read that is properly utilized 🙂

Technorati: Web 2.0, Error Messages