Why Wired Gave up on Second Life.

Chris Anderson of Wired says he's given up on Second Life.

Well, partly it was the whole "there's nobody there" problem, which is of course just anecdotal. Like everyone else, I had fun exploring the concept and marveling at all the creativity. Then I got bored, and I started marveling at something else: all the empty corporate edifices.

Come on, this is silly.

Imagine if you judged the real world this way.
1) You go to a football stadium. It's empty.
2) You go to Coca Cola's Corporate HQ 6 am. It's empty.
3) You go to downtown LA at 4 am. It's empty.

You conclude, "What's up with this Real Life thing? There's nobody there!

(More...)

We have vast acres of land and millions of buildings in the real world that are empty part or most of the time. So?

By day I'd speak at marketing conferences that usually had someone pitching SL services, complete with staged demonstrations (the "inhabitants" invariably paid employees). By night I'd go back to the same places, which had reverted to ghost towns once the demonstration was over. I couldn't understand why companies kept throwing money at in-world presences. Were they seeing something I wasn't?

People don't come in response to a marketing message. People come because they want something to do.

Pong proved that you can give them something really simple and they'll do it.

Toyota has a national informational tour about Hybrid vehicles going around the country right now... they get people to stay and go through the information by making it part of a game, with a rewards system. It works.

People come back to bars, movie theaters, casinos, and clubs night after night because they are offered something to do. People do not go to empty buildings where nothing is going on - why on earth should they?

The point has been made that marketing folks are trying to apply the wrong models to Second Life... but look at my last point: People aren't even applying the basic knowledge they've gleaned from the real world in Second Life!

Search me?

Interesting. After several years of having trash sites show up in Google searches, I was wondering how long it would take for an alternative paradigm to arrive... looks like it's finally here, thank god!

From Eric Jones Garage Sale:

With the advent of MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Imeem and the flock, things are a changing. I work for an internet measurement company with a focus on competitive intelligence so I am lucky enough to scope the evolution of the internet in real time. It's not uncommon to see a website's traffic be 20-50% from search (google, yahoo, msn, live, mamma, etc.) However, more and more the social networking community space is... contributing the same if not more....

This is revolutionary. Now marketers are forced to be experts on human behavior much more than algorithmic behaviors..."

William Gibson will be in Second Life, August 2!

From "New World Notes"

At the beginning of August, the man who gave "cyberspace" its name and its imaginative texture will visit the place that probably wouldn't exist, without him. As it happens, one of Second Life's very first regions is named in honor of William Gibson. Tyrell Corporation, one of SL's first groups, gave the place that title, then proceeded to build Nexus Prime, an ever-changing city with gleaming spires above, and mean, untamed warrens below, on top of it. An ideal tribute to the author's work, when you think about it, so I hope Gibson visits Gibson.

The appearance is slated for August 2. To attend, you first have to be Second Life member (free at SecondLife.com), then join the SL group "Penguin Readers" or IM Jeremy Neumann.

So... what is this "Second Life"?

Pixeleen Mistral writes:

Allison Fass reports that the metaverse can be a “can be a weird, chancy place for real-life brands” in a story for the July 2 issue of Forbes, and notes that avatars enjoy having sex and playing pranks instead of getting warm fuzzy feelings about real life brands. What on earth are those avatars thinking of - don't they understand they are meant to be compliant RL marketing hype recipients?

This article has sparked a bunch of interesting discussion... here, here, here.
People are starting to ask: what the heck is this Virtual World thing, anyway? And how on earth can anyone make any money in it?

(More...)

See: "The Web", circa 1999.
See: "Television", circa 1959.

Until someone figured out commercials, Television seemed pretty useless... how were you supposed to make money on it?

The answer was, for the most part you didn't... you provided content that people wanted to come see, and when you had enough eyeballs, selling ads became vastly profitable.

When the Web came along, though, people just looked at it and said, "Well, we can't do it the same we do TV, so what good is it?"

You're not going to get the same TV-ad-sales paradigm in SL, either, but you'll get something new. It's all at that amorphous formational stage right now. Which means that some folks will dis it for being lame... and some folks will make a whole lot of money by seeing the potential and running with it.

Will everyone make money? Of course not. There will be Googles, and there will be Worldcoms.

Aid to Pakistan: Not One Dime for Common Sense

The US reputation, in both the mid-east and the world as a whole, is terrible.

But look - we have a chance to redeem ourselves! A killer typhoon has hit Pakistan, 1.5 million people were affected, with 250,000 homeless and another 300,000 displaced... now's our chance to stand up and show what a Humanitarian Democracy can do!

So... where the heck are we? Search the news, and this is all you'll find:

"CARE Australia contributing $250,000 in assistance to the pakistan flood victims..."

"...">So far Canada has pledged some two million dollars in funding for relief operations in Pakistan and the United States 380,000 dollars..."

More...

What are they thinking in Washington? We're spending $280 million EVERY DAY in Iraq, but when it comes to a little compassion (which coincidentally might help a lot in the hearts-and-minds battle) all we can come up with is $380 THOUSAND and one Red Cross worker?

AMERICAN RED CROSS SENDS RELIEF WORKER TO PAKISTAN

Manhattan resident answers call for relief aid after flooding and cyclones hit western Pakistan

Travis Betz, a member of the Greater New York Chapter of the American Red Cross, will be deployed as a Field Assessment and Coordination Team (FACT) member to Baluchestan, Pakistan and surrounding flood areas this evening to provide aid on behalf of the American Red Cross...

This at a time when Pakistan is already spiraling into chaos... doesn't somebody think it would be a good idea to try to keep thousands more people from falling into destitution, poverty and anger? Isn't that the perfect breeding ground for suicide bombers and islamic militants?

And at a time when the Neocons are beating the drums of war against Iran, ostensibly to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Islamic Republic, wouldn't it make sense to spend a million or two (the cost of ONE CRUISE MISSILE) to help prevent the ALREADY EXISTING Pakistani nukes from falling into the hands of Islamist Rebels?

Suburban Distopia

There's a big ideas-fest going on over in Aspen (probably without Scooter Libby and Judy Miller), and Ross Douthat blogs on the Atlantic website about Joel Kotkin's discussion of renewed urbanism.

The notion that Americans are moving back to downtowns in large numbers is a myth, Kotkin announced; instead, they're moving ever outward, into new exurbs and rural areas. The traditional unipolar urban downtown isn't going to make a comeback: Young couples with families can't afford to live there, and aging Baby Boomers don't want to.

I think a lot of this falls under the category of "Where I sit everything is fine, or at least I've convinced myself it is."
I'm sure his sweeping generalizations are true for some folks - probably all the people he knows - but are significantly less true for millions of others.
More...

Telecommuting, not mass transit, is the wave of the future... The suburbs are a triumph, not a torture chamber... Suburbanites are happier and enjoy a more vibrant civic life than other Americans, and it's not just bigoted whites hiding out in gated communities... Post-industrial society will look more like pre-industrial society than anyone ever expected.

Well... my writerly two cents...
Telecommuting is fine if you're a writer or a pundit.

It's not so easy if you are, for instance, a chef. Or a barrista. Or a teacher, or a police officer, or a doctor, or just about any other job that involves something more than sitting in front of a computer all day.

I've done telecommuting from the suburbs.

It sucks.

If you want ANYTHING, you have to get in the car and drive. And that especially goes for human contact - you can make your own coffee, read the newspaper online, but that's just not the same as walking to the corner cafe and reading the paper over a cup of fresh-brewed and chatting with the neighbors and meeting new people (some of whom may end up being useful business contacts, hey!).

I now live in Santa Monica, where I walk to the coffee shop, the bank, the movie theater, restaurants, bookstores...

I have a cheap semi-reliable vehicle for running around town (and there are also buses), and for longer road trips where I'm more concerned about breakdowns (and gas mileage) I have five car-rental locations within a few blocks of home!

The one thing we miss here is land for a nice herb & vegetable garden... but I can tell you first hand that most suburbanites don't actually indulge in getting their hands dirty in that way.

Even my brother and sister, who have very similar sensibilities to mine, tell me they simply don't have the time for a garden, not with families and three kids each. They spend too much time in the car - driving to and from work, taking the kids to soccer games, gymnastics, music lessons...

Sure, there's more space in the suburbs, but you pay for the space with TIME - hours and hours of your life that you never get back. It's a truism of real estate that "Land is the one thing they're not making any more of", but that's just not true; time is at least as precious a commodity, but most people, thinking they have a lifetime's worth of spare moments, end up bleading them away minute by minute waiting at red lights, or tied up in traffic...

Imagine if someone told you, "You live in the suburbs, but in exchange you'll die 10 years earlier, lose ten full years of life."

Would you do it? Millions of people do every day, unthinking.

More commentary from Iglesias and Atrios

Also... a good piece about Seattle, Portland and Vancouver