Bumble is everywhere!

This weekend Bumble was investigating some alternate social media networks on which to share his articles. Apparently Facebook isn’t the only one out there! Crazy huh?

You may notice, you can now follow on Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Delicious, Stumble Upon, Buzz, BuzzFeed, Diigo and some other one. Meet Mister Wong. No, really the red icon at the bottom left is Mister Wong!

Bumble had never heard of it either! The icon looks like one of those little logos they used at the Olympics in China though, so Bumble figured he would sign up anyway. Why not? Traffic is traffic right?

Bumble decided to check out this Wong character on Wikipedia first rather than Google it and likely lose his appetite. Here is what he found on Wikipedia.

Mister Wong

History

The website was a German start-up, established in 2006. Kai Tietjen had been running an ad agency for nearly a decade, when, in March 2006, he entered the field of web entrepreneurship with the idea to “take on Google”.  Investing mostly his own money, he created a website that allows customers to bookmark their favorite sites, and then uses those bookmarks as the basic data for its search engine : to find a popular site, a user can search all other users’ bookmarks.

(Bumble has to give Kai Tietjen props for the whole “take on Google” mentality).

The service is currently available in German, English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish and French.

Origin of name

The website extols its users to “Wong the Web!”, a reference to the practice of Wonging, often employed by card counters in Blackjack.

(Bumble cannot give props for that as it is insanely, and unintentionally funnier than anything that has ever appeared on infidel nation.)

Controversy

Mister Wong’s original logo, depicting a “cartoonish, nerdy East Asian man”, brought on protests from many Asian-Americans. The website’s creator subsequently issued an apology and removed the logo.

Having embraced the idea of an anti-Google search engine with a silly tag line, Bumble typed in mrwong.com in his address bar. Nope, not it. Fair enough. How about misterwong.com? This is where it gets really funny. There is indeed a misterwong.com! But it is not the social media site that is “taking on Google”. Instead, it is an awesome domain squatter!

Nothing is funnier than a domain squatter! Nothing! Especially one  sitting on the preferred domain of a company too silly to recognize it’s value. The real social networking/search engine is at mister-wong.com. Yeah, that’s awesome! Bumble is no marketing genius, but you aren’t going to “Wong the Web” with a hyphen in your domain name! Are you listening SyFy?

What is even funnier is that in this particular case it seemed that the domain squatter didn’t quite understand that he was being funny! The page content sounds like it is written in bad engrish.

MisterWong.com

Click to Enlarge

But wait! Bumble was not content yet. Bumble decided to do a whois domain look up to see just who this smart alec was that bought the domain. It’s not an Asian man with English as a second language at all! It’s some lady from Los Angeles  named Pam Brady, and the domain is registered through the sponsor on the site. Probably just because it is parked there, but it is still funny!

Bumble has a new heroine, and her name is Pam Brady. Pam, you get the infidel of the year award!