French startups want the last laugh at France.fr disaster

Not to worry, France.fr is still down – not much has changed on that front – but turns out French startups want to join in the fun and be the ones who get the last laugh. Which is perhaps why a couple of French startup guys got together and built the hilarious mock-site France.fr.has-failed.com (everything you need to know is in the URL).

To cut a short story even shorter, Yoocasa co-founder Axel Cateland and some of his team (mainly Alexandre Delivet and Michael Jurena) threw the site together after the picture he sent to Michael Arrington via Twitter was published in TechCrunch on Wednesday. For all the non-French speakers out there, France.fr.has-failed.com is integrated with Twitter and essentially allows users to guess the date that France.fr will go live (if ever) and broadcast it to their Twitter followers. But hey, the site is so freaking straightforward that you don’t need to speak French to connect via twitter and click a date on the calendar.

The homepage also displays the “most popular” predicted launch date, December 21, 2012, which has been selected by 12 people so far.

Ah and not to forget the important point made at the bottom of the site: “France.fr is a catastrophe, but France also has some super startups” – followed by the logos of 5 French startups (including Yoocasa, obviously). Not a bad way to advertise and profit from the French government’s shortcomings!