The Wired’s 11th annual Vaporware Awards are the annual roundup of the tech industry’s biggest, brashest and most baffling unfulfilled promises.

Wired staff selected from readers’ submissions the top 10 products that were supposed to ship in 2008 but ended up delayed, derailed or otherwise rendered in absentia. Hardware, software, games and vehicles were all fair game. Beta releases count, but as in years past, we gave Gmail a pass — it’s branded “beta,” but it’s widely used by millions. Like “Google” and “Twitter,” “Gmail” has even become a verb.

A surprisingly high percentage of last year’s winners actually shipped this year (Chinese Democracy, the Tesla Roadster and the world’s most expensive and useless keyboard among them), clearing the decks for a whole new stack of suckage.

So here it is: Vaporware 2008. Prepare to taste the waste.

10. Sony PlayStation Home

Sony’s virtual world for PlayStation 3 users, Home, earns a top slot, even though the service finally launched as an open beta in early December. But beta ain’t shrinkwrapped — so it’s fair game.

Home was originally announced in March 2007, but was repeatedly sidelined. And now that it’s kinda here, it’s woefully incomplete. Promised features like video sharing are absent, Sony has removed voice chat until further notice, and users from different countries can’t interact with one another — a major problem for an international platform.

Home doesn’t even succeed as a Second Life rip-off, owing to the fact that there simply isn’t much to do. You can walk around in the mall and spend real money on virtual clothes branded with advertisements, or you can hang out at the bowling alley and play crappy video games. That’s about it. Even the avatar creation system is incredibly scaled-down.

Sony keeps promising Home will get more features later, relying on the “it’s only a beta” line whenever somebody points out that it is a completely useless piece of crap that no one would ever use.

“There is of course no place like Home,” quipped reader Bob Krupinski. Read the rest of this entry »