Linked In is a social media website built specifically for business networking. The list of industries is over 100 and covers a very broad range.
I've been making much more use of Linked In recently and have had a number of briefs, meeting and new, interesting contacts come from this activity. If you aren't registered, give it a go and feel free to add me to your network!
Showing posts with label social media integration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media integration. Show all posts
Tuesday, 11 November 2008
Friday, 11 July 2008
Google's Lively ... a missed opportunity?
A couple of days ago I started spotting the press-releases about Google's new virtual world offering called Lively.
I have to point out that this is a Beta and so we can expect some fairly major changes before the final version.
Lively, however, seems to fall somewhat short of the expectation put upon it by headlines like "Google's challenge to Second Life" which appeared on the BBC news website. Linden Labs really don't have much to fear from what is very much inline with my expectations of Virtual Worlds a few years ago and reminds me a lot of Adobe Atmosphere.
Coming from the company that brought us Google Earth, this seems miss-targeted and limited in it's conception. The concept of a 'virtual island on your webpage' is quite interesting as a nice extension to your website or blog, but the execution of it will I think type-cast it into a younger / teen market.
The other omission is the lack of any apparent developer or content creator support, or a roadmap for the plans associated with this. Given that Second Life has somewhat set the bar in this I would have expected Google to have attempted to address the developer community about what they can expect to get from Lively over the next year.
One final point is platforms. C'mon Google. Asus launch the EeePC and cannot make them fast enough to satisfy demand. Acer, HP and MSI (and possibly others) are all producing similar platforms. What do these all have in common? They all run on a Linux based OS (although a few do offer more expensive / less well spec'ed MS Windows versions). Launching a plugin like Lively and not thinking about a Linux version (the Lively site only mentions a Mac version in the future) seems to be cutting off a significant part of your target market. To make the example - I can easily run Linux Second Life on this EeePC 900. Lively? No.
So, Lively is on my things to watch list, but is something I hope will grow into something that I can use, because it falls short of my expectations at the moment.
I have to point out that this is a Beta and so we can expect some fairly major changes before the final version.
Lively, however, seems to fall somewhat short of the expectation put upon it by headlines like "Google's challenge to Second Life" which appeared on the BBC news website. Linden Labs really don't have much to fear from what is very much inline with my expectations of Virtual Worlds a few years ago and reminds me a lot of Adobe Atmosphere.
Coming from the company that brought us Google Earth, this seems miss-targeted and limited in it's conception. The concept of a 'virtual island on your webpage' is quite interesting as a nice extension to your website or blog, but the execution of it will I think type-cast it into a younger / teen market.
The other omission is the lack of any apparent developer or content creator support, or a roadmap for the plans associated with this. Given that Second Life has somewhat set the bar in this I would have expected Google to have attempted to address the developer community about what they can expect to get from Lively over the next year.
One final point is platforms. C'mon Google. Asus launch the EeePC and cannot make them fast enough to satisfy demand. Acer, HP and MSI (and possibly others) are all producing similar platforms. What do these all have in common? They all run on a Linux based OS (although a few do offer more expensive / less well spec'ed MS Windows versions). Launching a plugin like Lively and not thinking about a Linux version (the Lively site only mentions a Mac version in the future) seems to be cutting off a significant part of your target market. To make the example - I can easily run Linux Second Life on this EeePC 900. Lively? No.
So, Lively is on my things to watch list, but is something I hope will grow into something that I can use, because it falls short of my expectations at the moment.
Tuesday, 17 June 2008
Stitching things together - Second Life, Twitter and the web.
Stitching things together - Second Life, Twitter and the web. Second Life is a wonderful experience once you have acclimatised to it. Integrating it with your web presence is a little more tricky. The next release of the client will include the ability to integrate websites more closely with your parcel of land - more on exactly how that works when it's been released.
There are however other options for getting traffic flowing between SL and your website, tying your website more closely to your SL presence. SLURLs are a key component to this as they allow a web page URL to point to a specific SL location. This means that you can link to an SL location of your choice from your webpage. Thats a good start, but we can go further than that.
www. twitter.com is an increasingly popular mini blog (posts are limited to 128 characters) that has been designed to talk about what you are doing right now or give brief news updates. These is also a feature on the Twitter site that allows you to include your top 5 posts on your website simply by pasting in a little javascript or a small flash movie.
This makes for an interesting combination, when you add to the mix the fact that you can script a SL device that allows you to complete a twitter post from inside SL simply by typing a command into the local chat box. This is something I have been working on and I will be producing a small item that has some useful functionality packed into it. The effect is that you can blog to your twitter account directly, and easily include things like SLURLS (I have added some code that will create a SLURL for your current location) in your post so that people surfing your website or your blog can easily find the location about which you are posting. When I have a fully packaged device I shall post and let you know how I'm gonna make it available - I may charge a small amount and sell it, but think the price will be www.tumblr.com provides you with a perfect solution for blogging your experiences and the media that goes with them.
There are however other options for getting traffic flowing between SL and your website, tying your website more closely to your SL presence. SLURLs are a key component to this as they allow a web page URL to point to a specific SL location. This means that you can link to an SL location of your choice from your webpage. Thats a good start, but we can go further than that.
www. twitter.com is an increasingly popular mini blog (posts are limited to 128 characters) that has been designed to talk about what you are doing right now or give brief news updates. These is also a feature on the Twitter site that allows you to include your top 5 posts on your website simply by pasting in a little javascript or a small flash movie.
This makes for an interesting combination, when you add to the mix the fact that you can script a SL device that allows you to complete a twitter post from inside SL simply by typing a command into the local chat box. This is something I have been working on and I will be producing a small item that has some useful functionality packed into it. The effect is that you can blog to your twitter account directly, and easily include things like SLURLS (I have added some code that will create a SLURL for your current location) in your post so that people surfing your website or your blog can easily find the location about which you are posting. When I have a fully packaged device I shall post and let you know how I'm gonna make it available - I may charge a small amount and sell it, but think the price will be www.tumblr.com provides you with a perfect solution for blogging your experiences and the media that goes with them.
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