Planet of Internet is down to just one street

It would be fair to say that everyone at Download Squad was amused when we stumbled onto Planet of Internet a year ago. The idea behind the site -- and its grandiose press releases about entirely changing the way you'll browse the web -- was that people and companies would buy houses in Planet of Internet's pixel-art cities, and use the site to browse and communicate with one another. Apparently, advertisers weren't rushing to colonize Planet, because it disappeared from the web sometime last year.

Much to our bewilderment, Planet of Internet seems to have been reincarnated in the form of the slightly less ambitious Streets of Net. There's only one street right now, featuring eight buildings. Only two are occupied. Somehow, I'm not sure that the problem with Planet of Internet's business model was the scale. Planet or Street, I just don't see people being attracted to what's essentially a pixel-art MMORPG without the massive, the multiplayer, or the game. The thing is, these guys aren't that bad at what they do. They could probably make more money in an hour designing outfits for some low-res kiddie multiplayer game than they'll make in the entire lifetime of selling $3-5 buildings on Streets of Net -- even if it does last, as they claim, "as long as the Internet exists."

Tags: advertising, bad-ideas, pixel-art, planetofinternet, planetoftheinternet, streets-of-net