OMG! U Gotz gchat?
Google owns your soul. Seriously! Who needs a separate AIM when you can just put your buddylist on gchat? Checkout the gmail blog.
I feel kind of weird about this. Do all of these separate entities — each with a little piece of my soul — need to necessarily merge so that my soul, too, can become whole?
Facebook rejects
America cannot get enough of a good thing … something is deemed decent and immediately everyone piles on top of it, until it’s diluted and tastes less like the original and more like water. Kind of like what Ben was saying about Red Sox Nation, or something. You dig? Anyway, apparently Makamaka, or Google’s social network, is actually called “OpenSocial” (and no one called me out on it, tsk tsk). If that was the poorman’s Facebook, then Yahoo!’s version is the … homeless man’s Facebook?
Valleywag provided a pretty good summary, so I’ll send you to them. Until then, enjoy the above cartoon from Toothpaste for Dinner. I’ve always loved that site.
Maka-Maka, wocka wocka, I’m confused?
Google’s apparently vying for a spot in your soul, too. Or maybe it just wants what’s left of your soul after Facebook ? the post-Facebook sloppy seconds. Nice.
Maka-maka (or makamaka, which is a name from manga, another life-stealer) will be launched in early November, and will pretty much be the poorman’s Facebook, with similar applications until someone comes up with something new.
As if Google doesn’t have enough control. It’s the original brand-name verb! “I’ll Google it!” came before “I’ll Facebook him!” lest we forget. Oh well. If you’ll excuse me, I’m just gonna go upload some new pictures of myself from my Macbook’s webcam onto Facebook. Any comments can be forwarded to my g-chat. PEACE!
Moneybook.com: One blogger says, “Mark, call me!”
I never wanted to marry Mark Zuckerberg for his money, I was always strictly interested in the power. But Facebook, his baby and one I wouldn’t mind treating like my own, is now worth oh, 10 to 15 billion dollars. Give or take. Anyway, I don’t know why he’s even selling 5% of the company to Microsoft. I guess to pay off that Harvard education, eh? Am I right?
Best thing about that page … scroll down to user sample032’s comment about how much our souls are worth. Niiiiice.
Partying with pixels
Tonight’s IC event, “Virtual Worlds: Real Connections” was basically just one big Second Life wine-and-cheese party. Henry Jenkins, a professor at MIT, and James Gee, a professor at the Univesity of Wisconsin?Madison, were the night’s main guests. Unfortunately, Jenkins missed his flight. But Gee was great ? more on him later.
The event was held in the physics lab, and students and faculty demonstrated the game on eight projection screens around the room. The space is perfect for this kind of thing. The designer, Michael Rogers, said the lab has a pretty great soundsystem, too, and one night he projected The Matrix on all eight screens and blasted the volume. That got me thinking, and, at the risk of sounding totally geeky, this lab would be perfect for a Halo party.
Photographer Jeff Morganteen and I just wanted to get some pictures and mingle, but somehow I ended up being one of these student demonstrators. The lovely April Korpi, who works in Park, lent me the use of her avatar, and for about an hour, I wandered the NBC island, which is just a virtual replica of Rockefeller Center.
While playing, I spoke with Joan Falkenberg Getman, the senior strategist for Learning Technologies at Cornell, and Gee. Gee told me he’s been playing World of Warcraft since it came out, and there’s a group of about eight faculty members and a bunch of students out at UW-Madison that play it all the time.
We talked a bit about PMOGs (which, you may recall, I talked about last week), and he raised an interesting point: That PMOGs are really just “awareness” tools ? they alert you to your Internet use, and point out what and how often you are using. PMOGs make you aware of the Internet structures you work within every day. So why not track your e-mail use and, as with some PMOGs, get points in a game for it? You’re going to be e-mailing all day anyway, might as well make it fun.
What was really great about the evening was the enthusiasm about the potential for using these online networks as educational tools. Professors from Cornell and IC, with little knowledge about Second Life, were willing to take 10 minutes to learn about it and even give the avatars a try. One of the Cornell business professors is now figuring out how to set up business classes that would teach accounting, stats and so on in a game that mixes Second Life and, what he called, “World of Bizcraft.”
Party pictures after the jump. Read more
A muthafo’ing P-M-O-G
Passively multiplayer online games, or PMOGs, were a hot topic at March’s South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas. And the guy leading the panel discussions was Justin Hall, who explains the concept behind the social networking sites best:
Passively Multiplayer Online Games is a proposal to create play around our data. Playing with our data will help us learn to understand and manipulate our trails, and give us a greater sense of how we spend our time. And what if we could cooperate and compete during this time we spend on the computer? Not just arranging ideas over email, but sharing tasks and racing to complete something. It would be like we were playing a multiplayer video game!
Let’s use the PMOG bud.com, Hall’s site, as an example (check out other PMOGs here). You create a profile and fill out a survey about your Internet habits. The program then tracks where you surf. This may seem like a goldmine for marketers, but Hall doesn’t have plans to sell the information ? his intentions are purely academic.
You can also talk on discussion boards and participate in “quests,” which are just little games that teach you about a topic. For instance, someone in my video games seminar created a “pants quest,” so he provided links to Web sites where you could buy pants. Silly, but amusing.
Depending on your habits, the site categorizes you as a player: you can be a seer, a destroyer, a pathmaker, a hoarder. I’m guessing this plays into the player types defined by Richard Bartle (and later expanded on by Nick Yee) a little while back: achiever, explorer, socializer and killer.
With regular ol’ MUDs, I’m a killer ? clearly. As for PMOGs, I’m a hoarder, with a little bit of seer. A hoarder is apparently someone “concerned with amassing embedded objects along the network roads, but not building the roads themselves.” I’m guessing these “objects” are information? The description goes on to say hoarders frequently check out social networking, video and music-sharing sites. And a seer “reads art zines and sports scores, shop online, and use social networking sites.” Not far from the truth.
The best part about these user profiles is you can access graphs that chart the types of sites they’re checking out and how often. This, of course, means joining these networks makes it that much harder for you to hide your porn addiction.
Waddle on
So this is what the kids these days think about us 18 and overs: hunched over penguins with canes. At least, that’s what the users in Club Penguin, an online social networking site for tweenyboppers, think.
Quite popular among the young folk, the site lets users interact with other penguins their age and play real-time games. The rules are simple: 1) Be nice to other penguins; 2) Don’t give out personal info; and 3) No inappropriate language. The genius behind Club Penguin: Who can resist making a penguin avatar? They’re so damn cute!
So last night I opened a Club Penguin account (for reporting purposes, obviously). You can sign up for one of four age groups: 8 and under; 9 through 12; 13 through 17; and 18 up (see picture above). Unfortunately, Brink, the user name, was already taken. I had to immediately scratch my plans to hunt down the fake Brink (Rule No. 1 insists on penguin civility and No. 3 warns against profanities) and settle for the name Condi (see pink penguin bustin a move in the middle of the dance floor above). Condilicious ? I’m not joking ? was already taken.
Users can gather “coins” by either playing games with other penguins or exchanging real money for them. These coins can eventually buy you items for, say, your igloo. And it gets better: Your penguin can throw snowballs. There’s an aim and everything.
Within two minutes of landing in the frosty tundra, I made my first friend. The conversation went like this:
Friendly penguin: Hello.
Condi: Hello! How are you?
FP: Good. You?
Condi: I am well, thank you.
FP: You are nice. Are you new?
Condi: Yes I am.
FP: I?m not. Come.
To self: Come? Come where? *Cue creepy music*
FP: Come.
After a moment’s hesitation, I gave in to the weird, snowy world of Club Penguin and followed this waddling blob of pink pixels directly into a connect four game ? and totally got my butt kicked by who I?m sure was a 12 year old. I did, however, earn five coins just for playing.
Why is this cool? Well, millions of kids have already made virtual friends in Club Penguin, and there are millions more on the way. The Internet isn’t just for the older crowd in WoW, Second Life and Facebook anymore. The younger generations are more media savvy than ever. And I thought I was cool for having a MySpace five years ago ? some of these fourth graders probably know html. If kids are being exposed to this type of stuff early on, they’re going to design some pretty kickin games years from now.
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