December 12, 2005
The Meeting
Screw Leibniz; forget monads. I am convinced that the fundamental ontological construct of the universe is The Meeting. The Meeting is one. There is only one Meeting. The Meeting is all. The Meeting is like The Force™ — it fills all things and all the empty spaces between them. At different times, you may notice that The Meeting is in a different place than it was before, or that there are different people in The Meeting with you, or that, somehow, the topic of discussion has changed. Sometimes, you step out to go to the bathroom, or eat a meal, or make a phone call, but The Meeting is always there, waiting, and in the end you always return to it. The Meeting remains, timeless, endless, eternal. Though it has many different aspects, many different agendas, in the end, there is only The Meeting. The Meeting is all.
That’s all I have time for today. I gotta get back to The Meeting.
November 21, 2005
A couple of 10 year-olds…
WorldsAway’s Dreamscape also recently celebrated 10 years of avatar community.
Of course, it all started with Lucasfilm’s Habitat and Club Caribe almost 20 years ago…
Of course, it all started with Lucasfilm’s Habitat and Club Caribe almost 20 years ago…
November 3, 2005
"Dude! We're gettin' the band back together."
Jeff (Vaz/Vaserius) Douglas has joined the Yahoo! communities team as the Product Manager for Chat. That makes two Habitat Lead Oracles, from two countries now on board: Vaserius in the US, and Layza in Japan.
As Cory Ondrejka said to me at a recent conference: “You think you might be concentrating a lot of the experience pool in one place?”
Damn straight!
October 19, 2005
Yume: A 15-Year Quest Completed
I’ve posted a little Fujitsu habitat history on my
Yahoo! 360 blog. Please leave any comments there.
Randy
September 9, 2005
Second Life Moves to Embrace Pure Consumers
Last year I wrote The Business of Social Avatar Virtual Worlds [Or, why I really like Second Life, even if their business is most likely doomed] in which I urged Linden Lab to consider that
Consumers want to be fed content, they may even pay for it and a good platform can enable many talented people to create content, it seems that the main missing components are a way to identify and promote the content the consumers want and a create way to deliver it to them with the least possible burden on the consumer’s part.
Well, today Linden Lab announced that Second Life membership is now free.
This bold move is the first step in allowing pure consumers in – those who will spend their participation-generated (and purchased for $) Linden dollars on the all that greated user-generated content. This reduces some of the skepticism I’ve had about their recent growth hype. Assuming they continue on this path, they may well reach 1m users in their timeframe.
Congratulations to those at Linden Lab!
Now they’re in for the next challenges: optimizing the interface for consumers (which has been incrementally underway for more than a year) and dealing with the new abuses (and abusers) that come with no-barrier-to-entry registration.
I hope they’re ready!
August 12, 2005
Dream Team Reunites
Doug Crockford has joined Yahoo!
Chip, Crock, and I have worked together on and off for 20 years and are together once again. The last few times we started/founded various companies together.
Getting smart start-ups to succeeed is hard. So, this time we’re going to try to change the world from within a large, successful, and smart company.
Now we’ve got vision, mandates, customers, and a budget. :-)
Woo Hoo!
[BTW, Yahoo! is now agressively hiring for the communities group…]
May 12, 2005
USC: Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds
From USC Center for Public Democracy has a new project:
New Technology and Public Diplomacy: “Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds”
The Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds project is a research project examining one aspect of new technology and public diplomacy: the role of video games, specifically Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), in public diplomacy.
The study explores the role of MMOGs in the following ways:
- For U.S. games, as extensions of the U.S. brand and their role in shaping how the world sees the U.S. (for non-U.S. games their role as extensions of identity, image and brand of their respective country);
- As online venues (or virtual worlds) in which people from different cultures come together and shape or form ideas about each other and their respective cultures;
- The unique role that ‘localization’ plays in public diplomacy (How does framing a game for a community outside the game’s country of origin play a role in its impact?);
- Game Design: As public policy play tools that can be used to educate (not train) people about how different cultures work and/or function (e.g. Roleplay Kofi Annan or the President of Russia, etc.).
…
Early research has confirmed that within these spaces, there is a unique opportunity to create, foster and sustain intercultural dialogue and that perception of national values, ideals, and character are both reinforced and altered by the real time interactions that occur in these spaces.
The results of this work should be interesting to read. I hope that it includes an accounting of such events as the anti-chinese-adena-farming bigotry. I think that Second Life might be a good place to expore some of the cultural education issues (at least for cultures that value personal land ownership), but I’m not clear what kind of methodology makes sense for this project – is this some sort of strange ethnography?
May 10, 2005
KidTrade-inspired designs…
My original KidTrade posting caused quite a bit of controversy, as the design clearly demonstrated that a eBay-resistant trading economy was possible, but the biq question remained: Could such an ecomony be any fun when applied to current MMORG designs? This call to action was heard by several would-be virtual economy designers.
Several people produced counter proposals at the time, including Jenni Merrifield, who posted some design suggestions on strawberryJAMM’s Thoughtful Spot and [link missing – Ted, where’s yours?]
The initial designs presented some interesting thoughts, but weren’t as deep as the developer community was looking for.
Last month, that changed when the first full-fledged eBay resistent trade/market design proposal that would work with a ‘standard’ MMOG was published by Barry Kearns as Draft of “No-Cash”: a commodification-resistant MMO economy and the followup Detailed explanation of “commodities market” under No-Cash system.
The design is pretty elegant and interesting. Anonymous markets for objects, and person-to-person interaction for experience/skill points. Pretty clever.
I’m looking forward to more variations and trying out someone’s initial implementation! :-)
April 27, 2005
Chip's A Yahoo!
One of the odder side effects of working closely with somebody else for nearly 20 years, which you only discover by not working with them for a while, is that a small but important fraction of what you know ends up being actually stored in the other person’s brain. I encountered this strange phenomenon in early 2003, after our most recent startup, State Software, ignominiously cratered in the face of our principal investor’s feckless amateurism as a venture capitalist. Suddenly faced with the need to get real jobs to put food on the table, our heroes were forced to take separate paths. Randy (after some exciting adventures that, as Michael Flanders says, we’ll tell you all about some other time) landed at Yahoo!, and I wound up in my present job at Avistar. It was after settling into the new job that I experienced the curious and disconcerting sensation of not being able to access some of the stuff I knew I knew, as it was in a different head 15 miles or so to the south. (I’ll let Randy speak for himself as to whether he experienced any analog to this weirdness.)
Thus it is that I am thrilled to announce that after next week I shall put down my hammer, tweezers, astrolabe, and other code refactoring tools at Avistar and become instead a fellow Yahoo! alongside my long-time collaborator.
Now nobody will be safe.
April 23, 2005
Prescience?
An addendum to Randy’s observation below. This triggered a memory of something our buddy Crock once wrote. He said:
There are three positions you can take on inevitability.
- Passive ignorance.
- Futile resistence.
- Exploitation.
Sony is moving from Position 1 to Position 2. eBay is in Position 3.
He was talking about Sony’s announcement that they were going to ban the sale of characters from their online games. This was in April, 2000.
But, as Randy said, just because they’ve decided to embrace reality doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily embrace it successfully.