A webtoon that is 'User Friendly' on the Net

By Vishnu "Ramius" Mahmud

JAKARTA (JP): As a child, I always grabbed the newspaper in the morning to read my favorite comics: Garfield, Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes. Now (a few years on) as an information junkie, I troll the Net for news, views and reviews.

But sometimes I get bored after reading 16 different news sites from five different countries. I've basically read all the latest news from around the planet that I will later see on TV news broadcasts. I needed something else to read. Then I found User Friendly.

User Friendly is a webtoon -- a comic strip on the Internet. Created by J.D. Frazer (also known as Illiad in the Internet world), User Friendly at first was a practical joke of sorts. In late 1997, Illiad drew the first two cartoon strips and passed them around his office, a Vancouver Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Since the strips were based on actual experiences at the company, they were an instant hit. He scribbled more, posted them on the Web and left them there to languish, or so he thought, believing no one was reading them.

Then he started to get e-mails from total strangers. All of the messages begged him to continue with the strips since they noticed he had not updated his site for days. He complied and saw the pageviews and hits on his site skyrocket. In the summer of 1998, the pageviews were 250,000 a month, a figure that today is 13 million a month.

User friendly is about the life and times of Columbia Internet, a small ISP. Its cast consists of an eclectic sort of characters:

The Chief: CEO and top dog of the company but technologically inept.

The Smiling Man: the financial controller; the man who controls all the money in the company and frightens people with his constant grin.

Stef: the company's marketing manager and a Microsoft user (and the constant target of the techies' jokes).

Miranda: the only female techie in the company and who must constantly prove her mettle and knowledge to her male counterparts (she does it very effectively by beating them all in Quake).

Pitr: a network engineer with extreme hacker-like antisocial tendencies and delusions of taking over the world (he is currently reading Evil Geniuses for Dummies).

AJ: the company's graphic artist, competent in many operating systems and applications, but lacking all social graces (such as asking for a date).

Dust Puppy: a strange hairball creature with eyes and huge feet. Born in a UNIX server that was never serviced (since it never crashed), Dust Puppy is the mascot of the site.

Erwin: an artificial intelligence life-form programmed by Dust Puppy, currently housed in a Silicon Graphics computer after being moved around from a PC to an HP Calculator to an I-Mac look-alike to a Palm Pilot to the space station MIR (you have to read it to believe it).

The first time I bumped into the site I couldn't stop smiling. Like Dilbert, many of the stories and jokes on User Friendly are based on actual incidents e-mailed to Illiad. Some people would say the webtoon targets geeks (it talks about Linux, Napster, Star Wars, Microsoft, etc.), but it is also fun for those who simply use e-mail or the Internet. Regular people will love to see Miranda fall in love with a Frenchman over the Internet, the techies fight Microsoft with Nerf guns and Erwin's war with Stef.

User Friendly is so popular worldwide, people have taken the site and translated it into other languages. It is now available in Norwegian, French, German, Slovenian and Danish. Users who love the site call themselves UFIES (pronounced YOO-feez) and arrange meetings and parties. Illiad has even been invited by corporations to attend conferences and trade shows for book signings.

The most important aspect of User Friendly is the community. Ufies worldwide (I consider myself one, too) help the site by spreading the word, e-mailing new story suggestions and participating in message forums. Although the webtoon talks about many different things from the world of computers, it has one main focus that unites us all: fun.

While many Internet start-ups are failing due to questionable (or a lack of) revenue streams, User Friendly is making money through sponsorships and advertising. The site is an ad exec's dream since it attracts geeks who are more likely to buy things online and tend to have more money then regular users. Illiad has also published books based on the site (whose archives can be read online for free) and is planning an IPO this year to expand User Friendly.

But Illiad's true success is his ability to thrive without the help of conventional middlemen (such as venture capitalists, comic syndicates, editors or angel investors). With the help of his staff (WebDiva, Iambe, Yohimbe, Kethryvis and others), User Friendly has become an Internet success story. It may not have millions of dollars in cash at hand (well, not yet anyway), but it does prove the Internet can be an excellent way to promote and start a small business. The Internet dream is still alive!

You can log on at http://www.userfriendly.org to see Stef, Pitr, Amanda and Dust Puppy daily.