Second Life And Changing The Rules Of Capitalism

If you're not familiar with Second Life, the Wikipedia article will get you up to speed. In a nutshell, it's a virtual world where you can build an avatar (virtual character) and interact in the world, including socializing, buying property, doing business, and the like.

A weird pastime, you may initially think. But Second Life has another side to it. Consider that Second Life manages its own economy and resources. For example:

• Second Life has its own currency, the Linden Dollar.
• Second Life controls who can purchase land, including property taxation for the land.
• Second Life also controls how much land there exists for sale, and the quality of the real estate (Private Estates).
• Second Life controls what activities can or cannot go on in the virtual world, including gambling, pornography, and banking.

Sounds like a pretty totalitarian system, right? A "government" of sorts (Linden Labs) controlling most every aspect of life for its virtual residents. Now, imagine if Second Life breaks out of the fringes and into the true mainstream. As in, imagine if everyone you knew spent at least 30-60 minutes a day in Second Life. Now, imagine one company being the gatekeeper to all activities in this virtual world. Even more so, imagine one company being in control what is even virtually possible in this world. What would happen, or could happen, here?

Let's take an example: in the real world, if I have the resources and the labor, I can make cuckoo clocks and sell them in my shop. My shop is limited to whether I can have a license to open it, and the rent to lease it, and the staff to run it, and my clocks are limited by how much time my laborers and I have to put into the clocks, our wood and metal resources, and our skills. Fortunately our government lets us open a shop and sell our wares, since cuckoo clocks are legal, and fortunately there is a market for them (however niche).

Now, let's imagine this same example in Second Life. You may say, "Wow! Think of all the people you can reach with your products in this world!". Well, first of all, opening a shop is limited by whether I can lease or own the virtual property in order to present my storefront in the world. Who decides that? Second Life. Next, I need resources to produce cuckoo clocks. Who provides the resources (in this case, 3D graphic modeling and interaction modeling)? Second Life. Now, I need some people to help me make these clocks. Where do I find them? Second Life (although technically you can model outside of the world, chances are you want someone familiar with the world to build stuff for the world).

What if the modeling tools aren't up to snuff? What if I can't secure a good property? What if all of a sudden a prime location for my store becomes not so prime because of land being created and removed around it? What if the currency exchange rate suddenly changes? In essence, building and selling cuckoo clocks in Second Life is equivalent to doing business in a world where all rules are subject to be changed or broken, including the laws of physics.

Now, you may be thinking, "Ah, but it's not in the interest of Second Life to tick off its users." To some extent, I agree. But I'm sure Second Life will follow the money here, just like the real world: if a big company comes in and says, "Hey, I want to build a giant new store here and I want to advertise it with a big floating airship that you can't avoid seeing anytime, day or night," this is much easier to do in a virtual world than a physical one (no need for fuel, or a physical arsenal of airships, or figuring out how to be truly everywhere in the sky at the same time). I believe, for the right price, Second Life would comply with such requests.

Yes, there is a market of attention here, and people may choose to gravitate away from Second Life if they go too far. But a world (virtual or physical) where the rules can be so easily re-written is not a world that I would feel safe conducting myself in, or doing business in.

The New Yorker On A Piece Of Fallible Hardware

Almost every issue of The New Yorker now comes with an advertisement for the Complete New Yorker. You know, that deal where you can get all the issues in digital form on DVD since 1925? Well, I noticed recently that they offer the same deal on an external hard drive.

I think The New Yorker is pitching this for the following people:

• Those that have a computer, portable or otherwise, that is used offline.
• Those that want random access to any issue in the catalog.
• Those willing to cart around a fallible piece of hardware that stores their expensive content.
  

Hey, New Yorker, why not provide this as a service? So:

• You pay some monthly subscription (maybe on top of the magazine price).
• You have online access to the same digital catalog, via your web browser.
• If you expect to be offline, you can download some set of issues to read, with some time-based expiration to prevent people carting away the content without paying the subscription.
  

Minus the cost aspect, libraries do this with e-books today. Someone hosts the content (and maintains it, and backs it up, and all that). And I consume it. All this without having to cart around a hard drive (or a set of DVDs for that matter).

Still, I wonder how this is selling. Maybe I should package some blog posts on a limited edition collector's hard drive with my signature etched on the case?

I Have No Twitter Friends

I've tried to use Twitter, the reported panacea of all things "what are my friends up to?". But I can't seem to find any of my friends' handles, in order to add them to see what they're up to, or for them to see what I'm up to.

Which brings me to the question: if you twitter something that no one reads, are you just wasting time?

Yahoo Mail's Beta Is Just Not Doing It For Me

When Yahoo Mail's beta UI came on the scene, I gave it a shot. I stuck with it for months. And today, I switched back to basic mode. Why? Simple. With all the glitz, the AJAX, the animated characters, and the hootin'-falootin' big-time splash that they're making this app out to be, I found I could read my mail less well, and less quickly, by using the beta UI. Specifically:

• The new UI is S-L-O-W. I spent more friggin time watching that stupid animated cartoon guy break-dancing, running from an ostrich, or getting a 1950's belt-round-the-waist workout than I did reading my email. When the app finally did load, switching between emails and performing basic actions like, oh, I dunno..."sending an email" or "deleting an email" took forever.
• The new UI was buggy. Today, regardless of how many times I refreshed, I couldn't get past a half-unrendered welcome screen.
• The new UI wasn't all that. Sure, you had tabs. Sure, it looked kinda like Outlook circa 2000. But I didn't feel that the presentation was really all that.

In the end, I decided to switch back. Now my Yahoo email client is uglier but darn fast and stable. No thanks, Yahoo. I'll stick with the boring Web 1.0 version of your mail client. Hey, at least it works.

Bad Usability: US Airways Flight Status

So I go online yesterday to check on the status of a friend's flight on US Airways' website. We're picking him up, and we want to see whether the flight is early, on time, or late, to adjust when we leave our place to head to the airport.

I click on "flight status" and I get this simple form:


I enter the flight number, and I click on Retrieve. Then, I get this message:

We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.
Please enter a departure city in the 'From' field.

Well, I don't know his departure city. In fact, this is the second leg of his journey, so even if I knew where he was flying out of, I didn't necessarily know his connecting city.

What gives? US Air has the schedule for this flight number. Why doesn't it show me the full itinerary and let me figure out which portion I'm interested in?

Fortunately, Yahoo Travel both had this information and was willing to share it with me. Thumbs down, US Air. You took an obvious task and made it harder than it had to be.

So Long Bloglines, Hello Google Reader

A long while ago I wrote about using Bloglines to keep up with my online reading. Since then, I've tried to use a few other browser-based readers, but nothing really made me compelled enough to switch. That is, until, on a recommendation from a coworker, I tried Google Reader again. Now, I've switched.

There's a few reasons why:

• UI - Google Reader looks better. Sorry, but when it comes to spending time with something, I want it to look good. With feed reading, the presentation of the content is important. Would you read a newspaper or a magazine if the copy was not easy to parse?
• Reading experience - there's one irritating feature of Bloglines that I've never liked. As soon as you click on a feed (or a category of feeds), all the items in the feed are marked as read. Even if you haven't read a single one of them! Google Reader marks things as read as your read them. Just like email. Much more sensible.
• Importability/Exportability - All of these readers are hot to trot on allowing you to import and export your list of subscriptions. That makes sense for consumers, so you can easily move from one reader to another. This allowed me to switch without having to resubscribe to all of my feeds of interest.

What's ironic is that that last bit is what really made me switch. If I had to resubscribe to all of my feeds, I would say "no way", since I have about 150 feeds I subscribe to. Yet, with Bloglines supporting import/export of subscriptions (as most all newsreaders do), I was able to use this feature to abandon Bloglines. Compare that to Netflix: if they allowed you to easily take your queue of movies to a competitor, how many people would they lose every month?

A last note: Bloglines never approached me for feedback, in the form of a "we care - tell us what you think" link for me to voice the above. There's no feedback link anywhere in their newsreading UI, on last check. Sure, the feedback cycle back into the product isn't instant. But people who are irritated tend to share their thoughts (as I am here).

Of course, I'll occasionally check Bloglines to see if they've improved. With import/export features in all readers, it's just as easy to switch back.

Seattle Fire Department Ignores Web Accessibility

For a while now, the Seattle Fire Department has been hosting a service that shows you real-time calls that are coming in. Well, recently they switched their "latest calls" view to be an image. John Eberly writes up the before and after and talks about the consequences.

"What's the big deal?" you may be wondering. Well, for starters, images are harder to process than text. You can use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to convert the textual information in the image to actual text, but that's a bother and not guaranteed to be 100% accurate.

But there's a worse consequence: images with information, without text alternatives, aren't accessible. In other words, blind or low-vision people can't read this information anymore.

Yes, we have laws and regulations to prevent this. I'm surprised that the SFD decided to ignore these precedents when changing to an image. It's a change that is very easy for someone to workaround who really wants the information in a computer-processable way, but penalizes those that browse with screen readers who are simply after the information.

On John's advice, I've sent mail to the Seattle City Council and the SFD chief. We'll see what their response is.

Always Documenting, Never Reading

I'm impressed by the number of ways there are to catalog one's experiences. There's Flickr for the photos of the recent party you visited last night. There's YouTube for posting videos of your pets doing funny things. Then, there's plenty of sites with user review sections like CitySearch where you can write a review of the new Thai restaurant you visited last week. There's forums like Craigslist where you can discuss the ins and outs of your hobby. And, you can journal your day-by-day life on your weblog, your video blog, and via podcasts. Heck, there's even ways to quickly record every thing you do in your waking life, with a mobile device and a service like Waymarkr.

With all of these cataloging options, where or when do you stop and read the information, not just your own but from others? I don't consider myself a proficient poster, yet I'm perpetually behind in reading the feeds I'm subscribed to in Bloglines (much like the stack of New Yorkers that taunts me from my bedside nightstand). With a handful of proficient posters' accounts, I don't see how someone who regularly records their thoughts, pictures, and videos online has time to read and view them all, and still have time to live the very life worth cataloging.

A big thing in the business world these days is roll-ups, or dashboards. Quick summaries of lots and lots of business data (sales, earnings, traffic, feedback) in easy to consume charts, graphs, and green/yellow/red key performance indicator displays. This approach (with the right heuristics behind it) can tell you which region is suffering with low sales, or which the most efficient factories are, or what the highest-reviewed product is, at a glance.

The world of blogging could take a page out of this book, and produce a way to view someone's collective blog/picture/video/audio output in one view. The idea isn't to zoom out to the point of seeing detail-less thumbnails and abstracts of what people are posting on their blogs, but instead to help me quickly see the salient bits of what someone is thinking, doing, and cataloging, and to help me focus in on what I want to read.

Not a month goes by without some newspaper, magazine, or blog writing about information overload and information management. Typically, solutions are along the lines of partitioning time and information, in order to see and deal with less at one time. I'm of the opposite belief; more information is great. Just give me a zoom slider so I can spend less time figuring out what to read or view, and more time reading and viewing it.

MySpace: Where HTML Finds Its (Questionable) Roots

Back in the day, when the World Wide Web was young, and HTML was still new on the tongues and fingers of many a web developer, web pages sucked. They looked bad. Bad color combinations. Bad layout. Bad usability. Let's not even talk about accessibility. Back then, it was friggin' cool enough to see a web page render on your screen, click on something, see something else load, and all that with images and text and such. It sure beat terminal graphics on the Legend of Red Dragon door, courtesy of your local BBS! Who needed good looking pages when the thing did what it did, when it did?

Slowly but surely, people woke up to the fact that web pages needed to be more than dancing bears. And, patterns and practices emerged. Navigation across the top or left. Logos that link to the home page. Text that wraps around images in a column. Decent color combinations. Alt text and tab order. In short, people figured out how to make fairly decent looking, usable web sites.

And then came MySpace, and with it came tools to help you customize your MySpace profile. And now we're back to where we started.

Here's apparently how you make the most bestest MySpace profile ever:

1. First, make sure you have a busy, static background image with a color similar to your foreground text. Or, if you'd like, an animated background image will do the trick.
2. Next, fill your profile with lots and lots of animations. More, seriously. Keep adding them. There's no limit.
3. Now, make sure you have plenty of color variations in your text, to ensure people have maximum trouble reading the content that you spent so much time crafting in your profile.
4. To keep people interested, and to think that you're clever, make sure you post some of your latest quiz results for all to see.
5. Finally, if you're concerned that your content isn't up to snuff, just use a font that no one can read. It's OK - that background song will convey your message just fine.

"Aw, come on, George. People are just having fun customizing. It's their space on the 'Net, and they can do what they want, right?"

Hey, I'm all for personalization. But there's a line between personalizing your presence on the Web and making it look plain awful. I consider the Web a source of lots of information (some factual, some opinion, some personal, some funny, some crude). But if the medium with which this information is conveyed involves flashing marquee neon purple text on a dark purple background, songs like The Chicken Dance playing in an endless loop, and an animated cursor trail stating "BCHS 4EVER!!!@!", then count me out.

I wish MySpace would draw some sort of middle ground, with pre-built templates that are customizable to some extent, without letting people delve into the RGB mismatch, static background abyss that is bad Web design. Yes, personalization is cool, but please don't make me want to plug my ears and shield my eyes as a result.

Hey Kids! It's The Federal Reserve Board!

And now, a transcript of how this Federal Reserve Board for kids web site was designed:

-------------------
Bureaucrat #1: You know, the Federal Reserve Board is filled with stuffy old men who talk economics. How are we going to get young people engaged in the work that we do?

Bureaucrat #2: I know! Le'ts make a web site!

B1: Yes! Kids love the Internet! Just look at MySpace. They just love that web site.

B2: Great! First, we need some sort of character. Cartoon-like.

B1: How about a stuffy old man?

B2: Hmm...nah. How about an eagle?

B1: Yes! The Fed just screams eagle! How about this one?



B2: Perfect! Now...we need something interactive. Kids have a short attention span.

B1: How about a quiz? That way they can test themselves to see how much wonderful Fed Board knowledge they attain using our web site.

B2: Brilliant!

B1: Wow, our site kicks major butt. I can't wait to see the kids visit it and laud our efforts.

B2: From now on, the Federal Reserve Board is way cool. Groovy, some may say.

B1: Right on, my man.

-------------------
You have to love the way image alt text is spelled on this site. "Governers" is systemic throughout all images' alt text, even though it's "Governors" in the regular text. For example:

Online Pug Sightings

We have two cats, and no dogs, but we still really like pugs. While we won't get one anytime soon, we encourage all of our friends to get one so we can dog-sit for them. All the petting and none of the clean-up, right?

Regardless, I recently spotted a couple of pugs online that were way cute and deserved mentioning:

• Nickey the Pug, over at Google, has a little first-person write up.
• Lil' Sophie, from CuteOverload, has a great close-in picture.

There's quite a few pugs in our neighborhood. Everytime we spot one getting walked we go out of our way to pet them and chat up the owners. The pugs are always eager to interact with us and receive lots of petting.

Google Is Not Immune To Security Bugs

I heard today that Google released Google Base with a cross-site scripting bug (reported here, here, and here. For the non-geeks, this basically means that, for a period of time, you could use Google Base to get at a user's GMail or other personal information hosted on (something).google.com. Comforting, huh?

"But, George, no one is immune to security bugs!" you may say. Sure, bugs exist, especially in beta software. But these are basic, well-understood bugs we're talking about, not some obscure security hole that is hard to exploit.

Security is something that should be part of the "checklist to release this Beta on the web" list. It should be part of the team culture to ensure that these security tests happen. It's something that is typically learned the hard way, but something that is invaluable to learn once, and then leverage often.