Second Life – Page 299

March 25, 2008January 12, 2014

Branding – It’s Much Ado About Nothing

I sat down this morning at work, the first day back after the easter holiday, switched on my PC, sipped my coffee and then in a scene reminiscent of the closing stages of The Usual Suspects the scenery around me told its own story.

There in front of me were logos for AMD, Microsoft, Nvidia, it all suddenly made sense. The evil empire wasn’t on the march to silence the minions, we weren’t all being told to be silent at the back, we were being asked to treat the Linden Lab brand as, well a brand.

Indeed, just like Microsoft insist on people who sell services on the back of their name require people to correctly use logos and refer to their products. Continue reading “Branding – It’s Much Ado About Nothing”

March 24, 2008January 12, 2014

Newspeak

According to George Orwell newspeak is “the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year”, which ties in nicely with the latest official blog from a company who run a virtual world because, heck our vocabulary just got smaller.

Am I even allowed to use these tags any more? Do they tick the right boxes, I think there should be a space in one of them. Oh woe is me.

Now remember children, reading the blog and the associated links will give you lessons in generic nouns, proper nouns, common nouns and verbs. Hey they who can’t be named unless I am grammatically perfect are well respected in education circles so this is another wonderful example of their steps in educating the world, so hat’s off the the company. There’s more, we’re told not to use the brand name in a possessive or plural context. Continue reading “Newspeak”

March 19, 2008January 12, 2014

Lights Go Out, Walls Come Tumbling Down

An article in The Economist points out that walled gardens get to the stage where walls need to come tumbling down. Drawing parallels between the mid nineties and the internet boom and services such as Second Life and Facebook they point to how proprietary services such as AOL and Compuserve were swept aside.

If Second Life is going to dream the impossible dream then there’s no doubt about it, those walls are going to have to come tumbling down. Unlike World of Warcraft and Age Of Conan (please be good) Second Life aims to be all things to all men (and women Sarah). This isn’t just a hack and slash world. This is the ruthless cutting edge of future business transactions for generations to come, boldly going where no man has ever gone before …..ok that’s a bit extreme but you get the picture.

Second Life is trying to trailblaze its way to being a standard for virtual worlds, but you can’t do that with huge walls and guards at the city gates. When Robert Scoble was kicked off (and quickly reinstated because he’s Robert Scoble) Facebook for running a data portability tool people were quick to quote the TOS, privacy breaches and such like. However whereas Scoble was wrong to break the TOS, he was in some ways right to point out that data portability is a feature users need. Continue reading “Lights Go Out, Walls Come Tumbling Down”

March 18, 2008January 12, 2014

Privacy And Robin Linden Will Not Be CEO

Just to clear something up, today’s tales from ambleside at the Robin Linden office hour, Robin Linden emphatically denied she was about to become CEO and indeed went further and said she will never be CEO.

This arose after some mischief making from me when I said we were awaiting Robin being crowned CEO and someone congratulated her. So, in case I’m quoted out of context anywhere else and to ensure there are no dirty rumours:

Robin Linden will not be CEO. Continue reading “Privacy And Robin Linden Will Not Be CEO”

March 17, 2008January 12, 2014

The Killer App

It took 116 comments on Uncle Phil’s blog before someone uttered the immortal line “Can I have your stuff”. Come on down Peasan Kuu, you saved the day 🙂

Alan Bamboo recently commented “SL needs a reason for 99.9…% of the population to even have a reason to use a virtual world.” I agree with him entirely. SL is lacking an ingredient. It’s an ingredient that Mitch Kapor is familiar with, it’s the killer app and SL doesn’t really have one.

The history of computing is littered with roads that lead to another road. An event that triggered another event with lots of people pointing to a certain point and yelling “I’m Spartacus”. However Visicalc is widely regarded as a killer app, it gave people a reason to use the Apple II. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston are the people credited with this, it gave purpose to the Apple II and launched an industry. This allegedly led to IBM believing that people would use computers in their home and office. This in turn led to the success of the operating system marketed by Gary Kildall Bill Gates. Continue reading “The Killer App”