In early 2004 part of the AdSense team had an offsite in New York City where these excellent shirts were distributed. AFC = AdSense for Content.
While I don’t recall much of what was discussed (it was a few days before my wedding), we did check out De La Guarda (crazy acrobats meets Rent).
From a purely functional perspective, this might be my favorite piece of Google clothing. A lightweight black zip jacket.
I think it just magically appeared on my desk for helping out with some recruiting event.
Every time i read something like this from Caterina Fake it makes me wish she was working with us. Such a credible, smart voice. Even when i don’t agree, i respect.
And i recently found out she also went to Vassar so we’re sisters.
“Coaching is making players do what they don’t want to do so that they can become what they want to become.”
– NY Giants head coach Tom Coughlin in response to retiring running back Tiki Barber’s claims that Coughlin’s tough practice regimen helped was a factor in his decision to leave the game
YouTubers didn’t know what quite to expect at last month’s first local TGIF (the end of week all-hands meetings that Google runs). Turns out it followed the standard Google style – founders give update, note accomplishments of week, open the floor for Q&A – just sub in Chad and Steve for Larry and Sergey.
Everyone then learned of another periodic TGIF tradition – the mad rush to get some new t-shirt or other garment being distributed. This time it was a lightweight fleece pullover in red, green or blue.
Continuing the “Google Gear associated with CES” stories, here’s a long sleeve t-shirt that us booth babes, err staffers, were given to wear. They came in red, blue, green and yellow, each corresponding to a specific section — mobile, search, community and, uh, hmm, maybe media, i don’t really remember.
Google traditionally doesn’t do the “big booth thing” and I was kinda surprised by our presence here. It’s probably because we displayed at a Digital Life conference in NYC and there was some sunk cost is getting the booth built. Anyway, it was neat with giant Lego pieces.
If you believe articles like this one you might want to go long this Water ETF (PHO). I bought in last fall and it’s up a bit more than the Dow Jones Industrial Average since then.
Insightful article in today’s LATimes (behind registration) about some early members of the Second Life community becoming disenchanted with the growing virtual world. From the article:
Utopias never live up to their aspirations, even in the virtual world, and the more passionate will keep looking. “We all go from anticipation to anticipation,” said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley futurist.
Would you believe me if I said this disenchantment is actually a hallmark of success? Philip and I used to talk about the role of ‘3D true believers,’ those folks who immediately rushed into Second Life because it was exactly what they’d been seeking after years of almost-viable user-created experiences. Obviously these people were (and are) really important to the community – they were the first ones to push the platform to its limits. But at the same time they are clearly not indicative of the average user — on the whole this folks were more creative, more sensitive and more quirky than most niches of consumers.
In the end, it becomes the classic power-user vs common-user issue. When prioritizing features do you put more icing on the cake for your most vocal 5%, try to figure out how to get the other 95% happier, or design for the n+1 user (the next person to user your system)?
Lots of this has to do with what part of the lifecycle your product is experiencing. Second Life is still undergoing organic growth where the number of people who have logged in is far dwarfed by those who have not but might be interested. IMHO they’re in the “focus on the other 95%” portion of their development. And this means you’re gonna disappoint the 5% sometimes. But that’s okay.
Now what if some of them get so disenchanted they leave? I actually think that’s natural. A world like Second Life needs to be sustained by the scalable experiences of many, not just the dreams of a few.
Will Wright is a long time friend of Second Life via multiple points of connection. In the latest issue he gives a long interview about his upcoming game Spore and touches on Second Life. Here are some interesting quotations with my comments:
Most forms of entertainment don’t get that kind of gestation period ordinarily. It has to be at least five years. And all of a sudden my daughter said to me, “Say, have you heard about this Second Life thing?”
WW: Yeah, it’s probably more like six or seven years… I think the first version launched in 2001. And the important part of that development wasn’t so much what Linden Labs did, it was the user community. In fact they were very careful to nurture the right of user community and it took them three or four years to do that, and then the community were really the ones who grew it from that point.
>> HW: Our internal estimates were 4-7 years until the community hit critical mass. A “game” doesn’t have that luxury, especially when it’s packaged software that only gets shelf-space for a limited amount of time. We actually went alpha in 2002, not 2001.
So what we need now is to be able to bring your Spore creature into Second Life.
WW: Well really, they’re both tools-based, so it’s a matter of can we create lower and lower function tools for people in those environments to use to then create a collective experience.
>> HW: At the lowest common denominator level it’s just skinning a Second Life avatar to look like a Spore creature. Carrying over the attributes properties of that creature, especially relative to other creatures, is what’s most challenging in the general purpose SL environment where these things aren’t hard-coded — i.e. if you wanted to support the notion that Spore A was built to fly higher than Spore B and this should maintained in SL.