I don’t know why Cuil is pronounced “cool”, but I might not have to worry too much about it, considering the new search engine doesn’t work at all at the moment.

You’d think ex-Googlers would have some ideas of how to make a service scale, but today they’ve alternated between being totally unavailable and having a “we’ll be back soon” page. Not a very good launch, it seems. Sure, getting lots of traffic is good, but they can’t be getting more traffic then what they should be able to handle, and they’re still most likely far away from getting the amount of traffic Google gets on a good day.

Still, I did manage to give it a spin, and it wasn’t horrible. Instead of showing the results in a vertical list, it shows the results in a grid. Going away from the old format is a gamble, and no one has succeeded with that yet. With more than $30 million in the bank, they should have some money to spend on experimentation, though.

The name leaves something to be desired, but coming up with company names isn’t easy, I suppose…

Oh, and one other thing. If Cuil does become popular, how will it be verbed? You can Google something, but can you Cuil it? “I cuiled for it, but couldn’t find anything.”

Years ago, a Norwegian columnist wrote how the Internet was just a passing fad. It’s easy to look back on that now and laugh at it, but predicting the future is difficult, and if you get it wrong you’ll be laughed at. This is why I’ll try to be a bit careful with my statements here. ;)

A friend of mine asked me recently what the point of browsing on your mobile phone really is. It’s a good question. Web browsing on mobile phones is getting a lot of attention these days, mostly brought on by the rise of the iPhone, which makes the browsing experience on a phone much more enjoyable than on many others. Opera Software is having success with their Opera Mobile 9.5 beta, which is a great product (now all they need is an equally great phone to run it on).

So, what is the point of web browsing on your mobile phone? After all, many or most people are usually nearby a computer, either at home or at work. And the rest of the time you’re on the go, perhaps driving a car. Sure, you could be taking the subway, in which case browsing is something you’d just do to pass the time.

So really, what is the point of web browsing on mobile phones? Unless some killer application is made (which may happen, of course) and critical mass is reached, mobile browsing may be doomed to be something that is just done once in a while. After all, there is a limit to how much browsing you need to do when you’re on the go. Isn’t there? There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but the killer app is still missing for it to take of completely.

Perhaps casual browsing is the point, though. With high quality browsers on our phones, with us at all times, the Internet will truly be ubiquitous.

It will definitely be interesting to keep an eye out on the usage patterns for mobile browsing in the coming years.

A friend of mine, Jesper Noehr, just announced Bitbucket.org (which he’s done together with Eirik Stavem, who did the user interface design and QA work). It’s a site that provides free hosting for Mercurial projects. If you didn’t know it already, Mercurial is a distributed version control system, and it’s pretty neat.

If you need somewhere to hosts your projects, go check it out, it’s a pretty nice site, and you won’t be disappointed.