This morning Google announced its new video chat capability with an eye-catching link at the top of the Gmail window. Clicking the link takes you to this page, where you can see a nifty video that makes video chat look pretty cool. But the link to “Get Started” takes you to a dead page (http://mail.google.com/videochat).
The interesting thing isn’t that the service coughed up blood on its first day out. The interesting thing is that, ten hours later, http://mail.google.com/videochat is still 404.
It can be hard to revive an overwhelmed application, but it’s really, really easy to put up a page to let users know what’s going on.
I wonder why Google is leaving this page 404? It doesn’t inspire confidence.