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The Archives
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05.01.10Second Act for Second Life? Adobe, Apple and Linden LabLinden Lab, under the guidance of folks like Tom Hale (ex Adobe) have become less like Adobe, and more like Apple - or that's the premise of Ari Blackthorne in a well thought out post that lifts off the current controversy caused by Steve Job's decision to exclude Flash from the iPad and iPhone platforms. Now, for those of you who don't follow the tech or business pages, the decision to exclude Flash from Apple's mobile devices was positioned as a purely technical one by Steve Jobs in a compelling argument for the decision: Flash was created during the PC era – ...
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04.29.10Fix List: Virtual Worlds and Why You Can’t Create Tomorrow from YesterdayThere are two triggers for a heated discussion with designers and creative types: the phrase "design thinking" and Bruce Mau. Both are either considered window dressing on something that doesn't need it, or figureheads for a movement to make the process of design more accessible to more people, including the people inside an enterprise who may have more money than the guy who needs a new product package or an annual report. So I'll take both with a grain of salt and in recognition that there will always be something magical about "design". You can give it fancy names or you ...
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03.07.10The Fast and the Furious II: Second Life By DesignI've pinned myself down. I'm stuck in a corner. And I'm trying, frankly, to find a way to blog my way out of it. Maybe this is the reaction we're SUPPOSED to be having now that Second Life is over and we're on to Second Life Social, or Second Life 2.0 (which makes it feel like it's merely trying to catch up to the rest of the Web), or Second Life the Operating System. I'm in one of those "on the one hand, but on the other" moments and it feels a little like one of those ethical exercises they made us ...
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01.15.10Second Life and the Cultural Revolution (II)There's a cultural revolution going on in Second Life facilitated by a shift in approach by Linden Lab. Whether you think this revolution will scare away its core community or build its appeal to a wider audience depends on how you parse the future. What's certain is that Linden Lab is in the middle of a multi-year process which may end up being a textbook case of how to manage massive change in online communities. I recently wrote that Linden Lab was "at war" - but the war was with itself as the cultural mindset and organizational practices that made Second ...
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01.15.102010 Looking Back: Second Life and the Cultural RevolutionSo the year started with a bang and in between airports, hotel rooms and forgetting where I put the coffee once I DID make it home, I was still trying to piece together some kind of uber-post wrapping up 2010. You see, with so few days left in this year, there's still hope that my predictions for the year will all come true and I'll score 100%, but for now I'm looking at a pretty good hit rate. OK, so the truth is my predictions seem, in retrospect, unimaginative and lame. What with M Linden (Mark Kingdon) coming out with his ...
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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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