Top 10 technology flops of 2008

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By Tim Danton

Posted on 24 Dec 2008 at 12:50

7. Google Lively

Look, don't be embarrassed. If you haven't heard of Google Lively, you're not alone. Launched in July, it was meant to be Google's answer to Second Life. "What if you want to express yourself in a more fun way, with 3D graphics and real-time avatar interactions?" asked its creator on the Google blog. "Um, Second Life?" responded the world.

"The Lively team wants to help people experience another dimension of the web," she continued. That's an excellent idea! Let's call it Second Life! Oh.

She went on. "Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions." Hang on, that reminds me of...

But enough of this fun - the Lively Team were less than lively in November when they were forced to post: "despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year."

If you want to see what you've missed, you have literally days left to download the software from Lively.com. If only there was some other similar site to go to from January.

6. HD DVD

Okay, I admit it: an obvious choice. Bizarrely, though, after the death knell for HD DVD finally sounded in January 2008, the format gained a kind of kitsch following. I've spoken to Toshiba employees since who've marvelled at the success of their HD DVD players, which gained a second life all of their own due to their skill at upscaling DVDs.

So who's the winner, eh, Sony?

Sorry? Oh, yes, quite right. Sony.

5. T-Mobile G1

Why!? Why does it have to be this way? What should have been the phone that finally gave the Apple iPhone a run for its money turned out to be so very, utterly, completely... average. I tried to like the thing, but it's too heavy, too cumbersome, too fiddly, too expensive and it has as much staying power as Paula Radcliffe in an Olympic year.

The only bright spot is that Google Android itself turned out to be extremely promising. Click here for our verdict on both.

4. Apple's push-to-click trackpads

The trouble with laptops, you see, is all those buttons. They get in the way of that lovely clean design. Which is why those delightful people at Apple's research centre (I like to think of them all as being ugly and deformed, because it pleases me) decided to rid the world of the curse of the mouse button on the release of its latest MacBook Pro.

The principle sounds perfectly reasonable. Rather than have Evil Buttons mess up that delightful slab of metal Apple calls design, the trackpad itself becomes the mouse. You press on it, to select the program icon (or file) you want to click. Clever, right?

There's only one problem. You see, it turns out mouse buttons are useful! Imagine you want to drag and drop something. Now you can do this with Apple's new system, but you have to keep the pressure on the trackpad... while just moving it over... almost there... fingers starting to bleed... to here. Phew.

End result: the laptop looks lovely and slick, its user looks faintly ridiculous and ends up with an odd form of arthritis in five years' time. But thank goodness the MacBook has one fewer button.