A webtoon that is 'User Friendly' on the Net

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.