Talk Like a Pirate Day: Will The Web Audience Ever Grow Up?

Sometimes I have a feeling that the entire web industry is full of hip and cool kids - no matter how old they are and how expensive their toys like iPhone and Apple MacBook Air are. Today’s example is the Talk Like A Pirate day that seems to be absolutely everywhere.

I woke up today to hear the news of FriendFeed rolling out the beta version to everyone. Once I opened the lifestreaming service I realized something was wrong with the logo - it looked suspiciously pirate-themed. My first thought was that it was a part of the redesign intended for the new version but I quickly realized it was actually the Talk Like A Pirate Day with serious (usually) people creating pirate names and speaking something intangible (especially when English is not your native language) everywhere on FriendFeed. And it soon seemed to me pirates were absolutely everywhere around the web.

So what do we have here? First Facebook started the craziness by adding a pirate language to the selection currently available to users:

FriendFeed changed the logo:

Google rolled out a special search page in pirate language:

Even TechCrunch changed the logo for the day as well:

And we even have a special iPhone application ayePhone in the Apple store for $1 to speak like a pirate for you if you can’t manage it yourself:

The irony of this total craziness everywhere (and I’m sure we’ll see further examples during the day as well) here is incredible: only yesterday Tim O’Reilly called for a useful web 2.0 where the brightest minds in the industry are supposed to work on things that change the world and bring true value to life. And as soon as today everyone is telling pirate jokes and wearing pirate names with the best internet companies doing their best to participate.

And participate actually means money here, right? They pay for logo designs and they pay for translations to be implemented, for example - all for the sake of entertaining users for one day over some strange recently invented and popularized holiday. Is this what true value supposed to be?

I do see some value in it for FriendFeed with very active conversations today - it actually seems more active than what I’ve recently seen myself. And of course I do see a value for the iPhone application that does nothing but plays a few random pirate phrases - after all, the developers actually sell it so it’s not such a total joke for them at least.

But is there anything that Google or Facebook can achieve by giving proper attention to the pirates day? Honestly, I don’t see anything but entertaining users for a few minutes. After all, I highly doubt Google or Facebook need to work hard on user engagement - last time I checked both were pretty successful companies with millions of loyal users.

And while it is understandable that people do need to relax from time to time and having such a strange holiday may not be a bad idea, it is still very disturbing to see serious companies wasting money on such initiatives and the entire web audience behaving like kids despite their age and seriousness of businesses outside of this one day. Am I the only one thinking it is a little too much?

And to help me think it over now bring me one noggin of rum, won’t you, matey?