|
The Archives
-
04.15.10Are Virtual Pets the Future of the Music Business?The ever-inquisitive Eliot Van Buskirk, one of Wired magazine's best writers who covers the disruptive technology beat, has taken a close look at Music Pets, a new app for Facebook, in the context of virtual goods, social networks and music, and determined that it may hold the keys to a new model of business conduct. Buskirk notes that Music Pets' strongest attribute is its social network-like functions, where its recommendation systems "includes every element of the real-world music experience." You collect music for free by taking part in activities with your pet and spend money to cut the time it ...
-
01.25.10My World Performs Me: Heuristics in Second Life and Social MediaCode is not agnostic. Code is the accretion of a thousand small decisions and a few large ones. Code, because it is not agnostic, produces effects comparable to speaking another language. I 'lived in French' for a while - listening to it, speaking it, reading signs in French, menus, newspapers. At first, I thought it was me: certain sentiments, feelings or explanations seemed incredibly hard to articulate. I thought it was because I wasn't fluent enough. When I went home to my all-English town, I suddenly realized that it wasn't my proficiency that was the problem, but rather that the ...
-
04.15.08Facebook, in 3DWell, not really. But Vivaty, a start-up from California, is testing 3D virtual chat rooms in Facebook. In this mini-world, new socializing options become available, which is a good thing for chat rooms, which are in need of revitalizing. But it's also a step closer to the 3D Web everyone has been envisioning. And, the technology will be available through a browser rather than a download, which removes one tiresome aspect of installing new programs onto your computer. I'll let the New York Times' Brad Stone describe it: "Vivaty turns a flat profile page into a three-dimensional live chat room. Users choose ...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.