Recent Comments:

Cinemassively: Virtual strike of IBM by employees yields real results

Massively

Feb 18th 2008 5:59PM Hmm. I think they crashed a few sims (even though their stated goal was not to grief). But no sims were shut down in response. You can't really shut down a sim unless you are Linden Labs, eh?
The "1800 employees and residents" number is highly questionable. It isn't confirmed by the metric collections done by Tateru's or me.
Lastly, there is no indication at all that the SL protest had any actual affect at all. Just because they achieved their goals in the talk doesn't mean that the SL protest had any contribution to them.
I know claiming the virtual strike made a difference grabs headlines. It's, ironically, seen as legitimizing Second Life. But in reality their use of Second Life to promote their cause is about as thin as the big companies that create a huge fancy sim, get on the cover of Business Week, and let it languish, empty. This is not a success for Second Life, this is a success for Second Life hype.

Why SL is better than video conferencing

Second Life Insider

Oct 29th 2007 10:20AM I've always touted the value of capturing these "water cooler conversations". I wouldn't have compared it to video conferencing. It's like saying "Lee Majors is looking better than William Shatner".
My general experience, having equal access to video conferencing and teleconferencing, is that very few people bother to go through the effort of video conferencing. And compared with Second Life, teleconferencing still wins. Right now, predominantly in my company, for confidentiality reasons. The only Second Life meetings I participate in for work are Second Life related. You end up with a whole bunch of avatars sitting there doing nothing while we all talk on the phone.
Or, more often, a bunch of avatars conducting side conversations about what is going on in the teleconference over IM. :-) But we do that with normal IM and teleconferences anyway.
I do get a great benefit by capturing the "water cooler conversations" for the non-Work meetings I do. But my time, and my colleagues times, are sufficiently tightly scheduled at work that we all have to run off anyway.
So I think it is going in good directions, and there are benefits there, but it's not the killer app for Second Life yet.
JC

Viewer forks - unforseen consequences

Second Life Insider

Oct 22nd 2007 8:42AM The success or failure of any software product does not just depend on the quality of the product, but also the ecosystem it lives within.
I read an article a while back about invasive species in Hawaii. Even though some of them were more efficient, they did not take over unless they were at least three times more efficient. They concluded that the native species had all of these other support links with the ecosystem that helped it survived.
The article went on to draw other analogs. For example the NeXT operating system was generally considered much better on many levels than Windows. But this alone was not enough to compete with the installed user base, software avaiable, and existing skill sets supporting Windows. (Alas.)
So onrez might look much better than the classic viewer. But in the long run it's success will also partly depend on in the same sorts of support structures you mention for the classic viewer. If we are going to take the biologist's article at face value, the question to as is "is it three times better?".

Engineers Will Love SL, But ...

Second Life Insider

Oct 18th 2007 12:19PM Hmm. I'm not so much it is about the tools being open or closed. It's Second Life's rendering system that is almost completely incompatible with any CAD tool's rendering system. Second Life made the design choices they did to minimize network traffic, not a concern for CAD tools. Orthogonal design goals have lead to orthogonal solutions. I came at Second Life building from a POV-Ray background. I spent my first three weeks trying to work out how to import POV-Ray models. It just wasn't possible. Not from a tool-to-world standpoint, I was able to hack that. But from a fundamental differences.

Patently surprised

Second Life Insider

Sep 27th 2007 11:02PM Hmm. I'm not sure that you can legally assert such a thing. Part of my job with IBM is to file patents for as many things as I can possibly think of. (We're all about innovation!) The only thing that can stop a patent is if there is "prior art". I.e. someone has done this before, or it has been done so in public for sufficiently long before the patent process has started.
And, in any event, half the trick of writing a patent is that fine line between making it so wide as to cover as many cases, and sufficiently specific not be thrown out for being too vague.
I've only had one idea that I've thought about filing on based on my Second Life experience. But if I write it up there will be no mention of Second Life in it at all. Just virtual worlds and 3D shared universes. I might cite Second Life implementations I've made of it to our internal review board to get past the "prove it is doable" hurdle, but for a patent proper you just have to show that it can be done, not that you've done it.
JC

Relaxing Old Paradigms Via SL

Second Life Insider

Sep 24th 2007 11:53AM I think that businesses that are unreasonably restrictive of what avatars from their company can wear in Second Life will find it hard to do well there. There was a lot of (internal) discussion about this when IBM came up with their Business Conduct Guidelines. Happily we opted for a wider definition than a narrower definition. Hopefully the stuffier people in the industry will take this as a lead.
JC

Coke campaign officially a success and not over

Second Life Insider

Aug 28th 2007 5:07PM It's all about return on investment. Return is measured in many different ways. You can measure their return in one way and say the failed. You can measure it another way and say they succeeded. The only one who can say for sure is Coke itself. Did they get the return they expected?

"Second Life is boring, nothing much to do."

Second Life Insider

Aug 27th 2007 10:15AM If you have ever smelled a durian you would understand why "intereting" is in quotes. :-)

IBM Makes Employees Play Nice

Second Life Insider

Jul 28th 2007 9:13AM Sorry, "here" being http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/roivw. I misunderstood how links worked.

IBM Makes Employees Play Nice

Second Life Insider

Jul 28th 2007 9:12AM I go on about it more here, but basically IBM isn't making anyone do anything. I believe the hope is that other companies will use this as a template or example when formulating their own policies.
I think the guidelines are most notable for what they encourage as opposed to what they discourage. My only claim to fame in the drafting (which was done collectively on an internal wiki) was softening the dress code from "business casual" to "appropriate". It may not seem like much (or seem like common sense) but if this does turn out to be an industry leading document, we've given license to corporate engineers everywhere to dress like chipmunks on the job! :-)
JC