When Niche Marketing Goes Too Far

There will be longer posts about this on the ABW and Laptop Mag later today, but I just needed to get this out of my system:

BlackBird, the browser for African Americans

WAT

Blackbird was developed on the simple proposition that we, as the African American community, can make the Internet experience better for ourselves and, in doing so, make it better for everyone. Primarily we believe that the Blackbird application can make it easier to find African American related content on the Internet and to interact with other members of the African American community online by sharing stories, news, comments and videos via Blackbird.

In turn, we can provide you with up-to-date information about what’s hot in our community as well as news and user recommendations related to all things African American.

Essentially it’s Firefox but tweaked to add some black-specific features like Black Search and Black News and Black Video. You think I’m exaggerating — I AM NOT. Just go look at the website.

I’ve been playing with it for a minute, and my first criticism is that the social networking button only includes MySpace and facebook. Even I–oreo that I am–know that Hi5 is the black social network. Why isn’t it included? I’m very suspect now.

Okay, back to work.

(Thanks Vylar!)

6 thoughts on “When Niche Marketing Goes Too Far”

Ok, I never considered myself an oreo*, but I had never heard of hi5 until today…so maybe I *do* need a black browser. Nevertheless, I’m throwing major side eye on this one.

*mainly/possibly because that’s a nasty ass cookie. If we HAVE to characterize people in this way [and apparently we as a community have decided that we must] can’t we call it a York Peppermint Patty, or something? Those things are delicious.