Earlier today, our resident trend spotter Chungaiz sent me a link to a new(ish) website from UNIQLO, the Japanese clothes retailer.

It’s called UNICLOCK and is essentially a site that allows bloggers to have a flash-animated clock widget on their blog, which details the current time as well as the location of the blogger. It also includes some rather lovely imagery of dancers.

The main site then allows you to browse the blogs of those who have added the widget to their site, via a map of the earth (which looked very strange to my eyes, putting Japan at the centre of the map as it does, but that’s another matter entirely).

My initial reaction wasn’t particularly positive, essentially because I tend to be rather practical & I couldn’t really see the point of it; there are plenty of other clock widgets available, and I (personally) find the brash colours and very abrupt image changes to be a bit jarring. Chungaiz disagreed with me but his comments got me thinking:

[Being] pretty is the best [option] for a website when you’re not selling anything…[in this case] the way it looks that is more important than its actual function…Consumers don’t [care] about pragmatism online, not when it’s so pretty, so hip, so Japanese… just look at the dancing girls!

This is a pretty radical concept (or it is for someone from a search background, where functionality is often the most important factor), but it has a lot of truth to it as well. And it also made me realise what should have been obvious from the start: the whole point of this campaign (I would assume) is to create link bait.

So, assuming that the aim was to create a great piece of viral link bait, how have UNIQLO done? Well, not bad - but not as well as other, less pretty, sites of a similar nature.

According to the Yahoo! Site Explorer tool, the UNIQLOCK (or at least the site on which it sits) currently has 15,816 inbound links. Not bad, but not amazing when you consider how many the main site probably had to start with (and the fact that uniqlo.jp was registered way back in 2001.

ClockLink, which offers a similar service, but without the pretty pictures or the ability to see what users have written, currently has 102,706 inbound links. That site has been around since September 2003, so has gained a pretty impressive amount of links.

Another site which offers a very useful service, but without any pretty stylings, is xe.com. Their killer app is undoubtedly their universal currency converter, which gives you real time information on how much your foreign currency is worth. And in the 13 years it has been in existence for, it’s notched up a very respectable 3,069,822 inbound links.

But the site that proves once & for all that consumers do like pretty stuff, but not as much as useful stuff, is StatCounter. The free web analytics service has been around since 2000, so only one year more than the UNIQLO site, but has managed to build 117,821,297 inbound links. Or more than 16 million a year, more than the other three sites have managed in their combined existences.

So what’s the upshot of all this? People will always want to look at pretty stuff, and they always want to be entertained, but what they want more than anything is something that is useful. Even when you look at the recent increase in links, StatCounter beats the UNIQLO clock.

Now if only someone made a pretty version of StatCounter…

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