We enjoyed Michael Rey’s tell-all bitchfest in a recent GQ print edition. What did the bitchfest bitch out? Boo.com, of course! (Though this is nominally a Weblog, need we even bother providing links about Boo’s demise?) Rey described rampant overspending, a vagueness of direction that took on a scale almost singular in the history of the net (and then there’s Pathfinder), drug abuse in the office, and bonking à go-go. (Well, the last bit we can’t really hold against anyone. You’ve got all those Swedes milling about. It’s like your very own NHL team!)
The old Boo.com assets were bought for just under a mill, and the new owner has some kind of amorphous content plans that we cannot figure out on the basis of an Inside.com article.
Greeven’s advice for Boo.com: Ditch the Boom model of creating a magazine without any connection to the commerce portion of the site. “I thought it made more sense to get rid of an editorially separate content area,” she says. “I thought it should be the other way around – they should have used the content to make a really cool retail site. I imagine it would be content focused on keeping your sneakers fresh, or what uniforms do kids in Tokyo wear and where on the site would you find this? That’s what it probably should be. In general, it’s just such a weird time right now in terms of what people are going to buy online and tying that in with entertainment online.”
We know a mom-’n’-pop Web developer with a working prototype of a site that would do just that. Should we play yenta and hook the two up?
Posted on 2000-10-12