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November 2009
The Archives
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11.30.09SLE Applications – What’s Needed?So, I ran a little User Voice test at the bottom of a blog post a few weeks back asking you to contribute ideas and to vote on applications that would make sense if packaged up with Second Life Enterprise. It was a fun little exercise although not exactly a massive wave of responses. A few probable reasons: having to leave this blog for another site is too painful. You're working on a killer app for SLE and don't want to let us in on the secret. Or, most probably of all - who cares anyways. :) But I am interested ...
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11.29.09A Virtual World with No People: Near Launches MondayA new virtual world launches Monday and will stagger the release of passcodes in order to deal with the mad rush of people who want to wander around a slightly better version of Google Earth in order to pick up coupons and look at shoes....or that's the impression given by the screen shots and videos of Near. The 3D shopping mall, er, world, was developed by NearGlobal and has Rivers Run Red as its creative partner. Rivers' prexy Justin Bovington, recently commenting on the launch of Second Life Enterprise, said that 3D content needs to be more relevant: ""It has be ...
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11.29.09Inflammatory Speech and Bumpy RoadsMy mouth was inflammatory. Or my gums were flaming my sense of well-being. Whatever you want to call it, I ended up with half my face in a state of paralysis for a week or so, dribbling coffee on my keyboard and leaving a trail of food crumbs behind after every meal. And that was easy compared to the rest of my unsettled life, everyone seemed to have health issues, I spent one morning helping someone choose their first course of HIV therapy, which left me feeling - well, it left me feeling quiet I suppose, and there were other ...
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11.19.09Setting the Stage for Mesh Imports: Second Life, XStreet Listings and the World to ComeLinden Lab recently announced policy changes on its popular XStreet commerce site in an effort to make the shopping experience more, um, friendly. The Lab cited extensive consultations in launching a "plan that all of our residents have helped us build." But not just the Residents held sway in the policy decision: larger considerations around how Linden Lab will handle mesh imports may have played a key role, and in this light the changes to XStreet have created the framework for future tiered pricing related to the value and type of goods and, perhaps, a long-awaited change to the premium/basic ...
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11.18.09Linden Lab Selects PR Firm?PRNewser, usually a reliable source for inside data on the PR biz, reports that Linden Lab has selected Edelman as its new PR agency of record, ending a months-long review process. The move, which the Lab would not verify, sends Lewis PR, who had previously managed the account, out the door. The business is valued at a million USD per year. I suspect that the account will be assigned to Edelman's digital division which makes lots of nice noises about that crazy social media stuff and has blogged about trendy topics like augmented reality. (I'd like to insert a rant here ...
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11.18.09Linden Lab Takes a Gamble On PaymentsLinden Lab's announcement of a partnership with Dragonfish for the provision of payment services had me thinking about this kid across the hall from my offices. He used to get in the elevator with me now and then, and in our building you have to wait 20 minutes for the elevator to come, which gave him lots of opportunities to leer at every woman who walked by and then, when they didn't respond to the glaring up-and-down gaze he'd revert to Blackberry mode and check his e-mail. Which is number two on my "wow that drives me crazy" list. There ...
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11.18.09Long live the broads, the Pods are deadThe pods are dead. Those little postcard box things on the Second Life home page have finally been put to pasture....not without the benefit, I suppose, of knowing what buttons people clicked on and that shopping was more popular than sailing or whatever it was. I called it a photo booth - and was never a fan: "Second Life is now a giant photo booth. A photo booth where you scrawl little words on the pictures or whatever so you remember them years from now, or you were too drunk that night, or you couldn’t really remember WHO the person was ...
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11.15.09Killer Apps, Second Life Enterprise, LindeLogic and the MarketplaceLinden Lab's SLEEK - or Second Life Enterprise as they prefer to call it, will rise or fall on its applications not its prims, although the logic of how 3D content is being handled has the sort of snake-eating-its-own-tail quality which drove things like homestead pricing or the illegality of nipples in the PG areas of Second Life: from where the Lab sits it probably makes sense, but put the thought process into the wild and you suddenly remember you're running a world not a platform. If what enterprise wants is a sim with a bunch of corporate builds and the ...
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11.13.09Philip Rosedale’s Artificial Intelligence (3): Avatar Agents?Philip Rosedale wants to move us closer to the Singularity, at least according to an interview with the New Scientist, in which he says that his new company will "takes the concept of virtual life a lot further. I'm looking at what else we can digitise. How can we evolve human experience?" Which is to say: how can we kick start the ability of computers to contain digital versions of ourselves or, if not of ourselves exactly then all the information that floats around us. This also lifts off of a comment he made to Time Magazine in which he said: "We're ...
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11.13.09Design Appeal and Second LifeI've been working on a longer post about design thinking...but as often happens I started writing it and the longer I wrote the more it seemed to meander off and take a life of its own, so I put it aside and will get back to it when I have the willpower to whip it into some kind of coherent thought, or the illusion of a coherent thought, or maybe I'll just publish it as is and you'll never know the difference. But against that backdrop, I ran across Hamlet's post on 'point-and-click' avatar movement in Second Life, and thought at ...
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