You little whippersnappers are probably too young to remember a great website known as Suck.com, which was a killer blog long before the word “blog” had even entered the popular vocabulary. Back when Wired magazine was fresh and new, and people still struggled with this strange animal called HTML, Suck was a beacon of satiric wit that punctured the egos of Web 1.0 millionaires, poseurs and startup emperors alike. Unfortunately, it expired in 2001 along with so much else, and nothing has come along that compares (although The Onion comes pretty close).
That said, there was one voice that almost captured the middle-finger style irreverence and sarcastic hilarity that was Suck: a site called Uncov.com, written by Ted Dziuba, who happens to also be a startup entrepreneur. Just as it was becoming a must-read source of ego-popping rhetoric and wit, Uncov shut down so that Ted could focus on his startup (which, not surprisingly, has been greeted with more than a few Bronx cheers) but it has returned, better than ever, with bon mots like this:
“VCs are still making their rounds in the Valley, but they’re demanding at least two forms of protection. The pill just doesn’t cut it anymore. What I mean is that writing a social network for the tree squirrels living in your yard in Django is now only half of the picture.”
and this (about Windows 7):
“I have two issues with this. Firstly, geo-replication with Microsoft essentially means that SharePoint will be replicated on every client. In other words, the bowl of cereal you have been eating everyday will now come with razor blades.”
If I were Owen Thomas over at Valleywag, I would be more than a little nervous. Writing snotty and snarky jabs at Web types just got a lot more competitive. Time to raise your game, Owen. Update: Ted says he is leaving Pressflip, the startup he co-founded, because he is “tired of the fight” and is about to be a father.