Monthly Archives: September 2007

Two for Sunday: SL in NYTimes and Doonesbury

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Second Life mentioned in Doonesbury plus a nice frontpage Business section article in NYTimes about consumerism in the virtual world.

The article talks about how most of the women are spilling out of their tops and the men possess bulging muscles. Or at least the men and women who aren’t otherwise dressed as furries, dragons or robots.

The early days of Second Life saw a very distinct pattern in avatar construction. People would chose to go either representative or fantastic. The former was focused on getting as close to your real life self as possible. The latter again split into two forks: aspirational or extreme.

The aspirational usually hewed close to traditional definitions of beauty. The extreme basically wanted to go to the far end of what you could great – as tall (or short) as possible, as little or much hair, etc. Essentially moving the slider bars to the extreme.

Avoiding the Irreplaceable

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This weekend’s WSJ discussed how Cirque du Soleil recruits special performers but not so unique that they cannot be replaced or duplicated. After all, they spend millions on a show and intend for it to outlast any single performer plus travel around the world.

“Let me tell you, this is our nightmare. It’s quite possible there isn’t another person on the planet quite like him,” lamented the company’s Director of Casting with regards to a amazing Brazilian gymnast.

This reminded me of how I occasionally view Google’s evolution – we’re mechanizing. Turning the core parts of our business into well-tuned platforms. This doesn’t mean we don’t value the individual or have unique people on our teams. Just that when you encounter these sorts of people you want to try and institutionalize their greatness. If it’s a killer engineer, make sure their code can be maintained and evolved by others. A “black swan” salesperson? Well, once they close the deal you want to immediately support the partner with a broader team to ensure the relationship stays with the company and not just the person.

Scale relies upon replaceable parts so the machine can be replicated and maintained.

The $4k sticker

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My friend Mike is looking at used Prius and finding the California HOV lane sticker (85k issued – all gone) is worth ~$4k premium (as also noted here). Given this, i’m a-mazed that there aren’t more stories about counterfeit decals. Hmmm, a business opportunity?

Second Life: a backlash to the backlash

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Are we seeing the start of the backlash to the backlash? Ahh, press cycles.

Second Life: over-hyped or scientifically significant? [@Cnet]

“After all, what is Second Life and others like it but a first attempt at replicating our world in virtual space? That’s huge. The implications are no different from space travel, robotics, stem cell research, or any other significant advancement in science. As such, it warrants attention and scrutiny so people can learn from other’s mistakes and become inspired to take the technology to the next level.

Think about it. Not that long ago there was no internet, now we depend on it. A scant nine years ago, Google’s founders were having trouble getting funding for a search engine company. Now its market cap is $160 billion. Who’s to say we won’t find ourselves completely immersed in virtual reality worlds in ten years?

And Second Life – even in its present form – is a potentially significant development platform, not to mention a business opportunity to drive demand for internet infrastructure, processing power, memory capacity, software, gaming, and the like. I don’t even want to consider the implications for pornography.

Not only is imitation the sincerest form of flattery, it’s also a primary mechanism for the advancement of human civilization. Second Life may have a long way to go to fulfill its hype, but as the first baby steps toward imitating the real world in cyberspace, it demands close attention. After all, that’s how we humans learn.”

New on YouTube: broadcast your recently rated videos

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Earlier this summer I got more involved in leading core product at YouTube in addition to our mobile and API/syndication/distribution work. Video is becoming just another type of media (like text or images) — ubiquitous to create, share, distribute, monetize – so you can imagine how exciting it is to be the world’s largest collection and community of it. We get hours and hours of new content uploaded every minute!

So one of the areas where you’re going to see more features is helping our community broadcast more about how they use YouTube. Uploaders can become stars on YouTube but it’s difficult for people contributing to the community in other ways to become as discoverable.

Last week we started to dip our toe in the water here with a new module that can be displayed on your channel page – the “Videos Rated Box.” When you turn this on, it will display the last five videos you rated and the rating you gave them. Additionally it will qualify your rating to appear on that video’s playback page for a while after you’ve rated it. (if you’re a YT user, to turn this on go to your channel design page and click the check box. Yes, i know channel mgmt is confusing – we’re gonna fix that too.).

The virtuous cycle here is that if you rate videos, others can discover you through your ratings and then subscribe to your channel to see new videos you’ve favorited, etc. We want to give tastemakers the ability to implicitly and explicitly share.

Anyway, eventually our goal is to increase the types of social currency that all different user segments can accrue on the site – i.e. how to recognized and rewarded for your contributions to the community, even if you’re not necessarily someone who creates video.

hope you enjoy and always feel free to let me know what you think