Is there something inherent in running large user bases that stops you thinking about users as individuals?
I'd hope not, but on the strength of recent events - Facebook most recently, Google Chrome a few months ago I'm not so sure.
In case you didn't notice at the time, Google published Chrome, thie new browser with a license agreement that gave them the right to reproduce anything that was created using their browser. That could potentially include a wide range of things from you email, to you images uploaded to Facebook(!?) to you bank details. Google quite rapidly responded that this of course was a mistake and that the license was just a stock item that should have been changed, which they duly did. The thing I did hear at the time was that they Google had previously tried to use the same agreement with their online word processor. The thing that I didn't hear was any reason why they would have such a clause in their license agreement.
To read of Facebook trying to take a similar approach, and doing so without consultation or warning gives great rise for concern and leads me (and a sizeable chunk of the blogsphere) to start asking some serious questions. The ones that spring immediately to my mind are:
1. How did an organisation that has at least some knowledge of managing large web based populations manage to decide that this change in terms and conditions was best managed by avoiding consultation and transparency?
2. Did they not expect a backlash when people found out?
3. Was this a way of measuring how big that backlash may be? (Hence the rapid u-turn)
4. I wonder how many people actually cancelled their Facebook accounts while the changed terms were in place and how the IP ownership of their photos and posts stands now?
I'm sure that the debate over this will rage for some time, but as many others have probably already done, I'd like to provide a little free consultancy on managing communities: be transparent and consultative in all elements that will directly effect the experience and rights of the community, and beyond that, let you community take a role in shaping you on-going service development. They'll feel positive about the shared ownership and development, and be more invested because of it.
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
Thursday, 12 February 2009
Mandriva Linux and my Asus EeePC 900 - A follow-up review
Having now run my EeePC 900 with Mandriva Linux for something like 4 months, I thought it was time to do a follow-up review and let you know how it was going as a long term choice.
And to get right down to the headline: nothing to report.
That's it, right there. It just works, to the level that its essentially transparent as an OS and so far the limit of my required administration has been to type in my password to install any updates.
Perfect.
My EeePC is a daily companion the provides email, web, graphic design (photoshop under wine, gimp, blender and inkscape), web development (dreamweaver and flash under wine) and remote desktop. So it isn't getting off lightly just because its a netbook.
Unlike with my experiences of Ubuntu and OpenSuse, in another few months and I am confident that I'll still have nothing to report.
And to get right down to the headline: nothing to report.
That's it, right there. It just works, to the level that its essentially transparent as an OS and so far the limit of my required administration has been to type in my password to install any updates.
Perfect.
My EeePC is a daily companion the provides email, web, graphic design (photoshop under wine, gimp, blender and inkscape), web development (dreamweaver and flash under wine) and remote desktop. So it isn't getting off lightly just because its a netbook.
Unlike with my experiences of Ubuntu and OpenSuse, in another few months and I am confident that I'll still have nothing to report.
Monday, 9 February 2009
Low prim, high fidelity architecture for Second Life - The Heretic Pixies store
This is the first in a series of posts about the design and contruction of our new Heretic Pixies store.
For most people starting out with a building in Second Life, prim limits (the number of building blocks you can permanently place on a piece of land) are probably one of the most limiting factors. With an unlimited number of prims it would be easy to create an attrctive building, but when you may only have 30 or so, your options are fairly limited. Contents is always a factor in this - you want to have enough prims left to be able to put something inside your building.
At Pale Heretic we use a process that allows us to produce high fidelity buildings by pre-rendering things like complex shadows into the textures themselves. One of our products is a single room that has less than 30 prims, but the interior conveys a sense of light and space you wouldn't normally find in a small environemnt (the box measures 10m x 20m). You can see another example of this that we are constructing at the moment - our new Heretic Pixies store.
The Heretic Pixies store is constructed from 16 prims (for the floor, ceiling and walls) and measures 20m x 15m. It's going to be our store for a new character based range of products and we want to make it look as plush as possible on a low prim budget. The first part of this is making the interior itself look as good as possible and to do that we are using baked interior textures. Doing this allows us to both get realistic graduated lighting and shadows on the interior walls, but also allows us to put murals on the walls and for them to look like they are on the wall, rather than floating in front of it.
To do this we build a replica prim-for-prim in an opensource 3D application called Blender (www.blender.org). We then pick the faces that we wish to bake textures for and they are individually textured. The textures we use for these surfaces are sourced from photographs. The key is to avoid obvious tiling of textures. Seeing a regular repeated pattern in a wall or floor will break the illusion of reality. For example, the concrete texture for the walls in the Heretic Pixies store is created from a number of unique photos, layered and mixed to create a 2048 x 1024 texture that can be used to span the longest single wall with out any repeats. Onto this we add logos and other graphic elements, then bake out the textures, so that the local lighting and shadows are precomputed into the textures and we do this so that we get a good match with the lighting that we add in Second Life.
Generally, we will create a single 1024 x 1024 pixel texture for each 10m x 10m face. This increases your texture upload costs because you need a unique texture for every face (16 for the interior of the store) but then, that's still less than one US dollar. Using high resolution textures like this, while having some impact on older graphics cards, does allow the use of text and graphics directly into the wall texture without the need for additional prims and textures for signage.
The design and build for the Heretic Pixies store has so-far taken about 5 hours, since we already had the images and photographs that were used to create the textures. Over the next few days we'll be adding more to the store interior and exterior. If you would like to take a look, you can get there from http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dangun/176/77/143/ or by searching for 'Heretic Pixies'.
For most people starting out with a building in Second Life, prim limits (the number of building blocks you can permanently place on a piece of land) are probably one of the most limiting factors. With an unlimited number of prims it would be easy to create an attrctive building, but when you may only have 30 or so, your options are fairly limited. Contents is always a factor in this - you want to have enough prims left to be able to put something inside your building.
At Pale Heretic we use a process that allows us to produce high fidelity buildings by pre-rendering things like complex shadows into the textures themselves. One of our products is a single room that has less than 30 prims, but the interior conveys a sense of light and space you wouldn't normally find in a small environemnt (the box measures 10m x 20m). You can see another example of this that we are constructing at the moment - our new Heretic Pixies store.
The Heretic Pixies store is constructed from 16 prims (for the floor, ceiling and walls) and measures 20m x 15m. It's going to be our store for a new character based range of products and we want to make it look as plush as possible on a low prim budget. The first part of this is making the interior itself look as good as possible and to do that we are using baked interior textures. Doing this allows us to both get realistic graduated lighting and shadows on the interior walls, but also allows us to put murals on the walls and for them to look like they are on the wall, rather than floating in front of it.
To do this we build a replica prim-for-prim in an opensource 3D application called Blender (www.blender.org). We then pick the faces that we wish to bake textures for and they are individually textured. The textures we use for these surfaces are sourced from photographs. The key is to avoid obvious tiling of textures. Seeing a regular repeated pattern in a wall or floor will break the illusion of reality. For example, the concrete texture for the walls in the Heretic Pixies store is created from a number of unique photos, layered and mixed to create a 2048 x 1024 texture that can be used to span the longest single wall with out any repeats. Onto this we add logos and other graphic elements, then bake out the textures, so that the local lighting and shadows are precomputed into the textures and we do this so that we get a good match with the lighting that we add in Second Life.
Generally, we will create a single 1024 x 1024 pixel texture for each 10m x 10m face. This increases your texture upload costs because you need a unique texture for every face (16 for the interior of the store) but then, that's still less than one US dollar. Using high resolution textures like this, while having some impact on older graphics cards, does allow the use of text and graphics directly into the wall texture without the need for additional prims and textures for signage.
The design and build for the Heretic Pixies store has so-far taken about 5 hours, since we already had the images and photographs that were used to create the textures. Over the next few days we'll be adding more to the store interior and exterior. If you would like to take a look, you can get there from http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dangun/176/77/143/ or by searching for 'Heretic Pixies'.
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Can your MMO really be an RPG?
I've recently rediscovered Oblivion on my Xbox 360.
Over the past few years I've spent some time playing a number of MMOs, and the experience varies somewhat between one and the next but consistently, they don't contain much roleplay.
This doesn't seem initially to be a critical aspect but it does hilight fundamental difference: MMOs seem to take a role more akin to team sports / social environment for the people that I know who play them ... kind of like an online pub, with orc slaying / raid dungeons thrown in. People play as themselves, disassociated from the characters that they play and with the advent of VOIP communications chatting as they do so.
This is no bad thing, the ability to socialise freely in an online environment, but it does show the marked difference between the MMO experience and the traditional RPG experince, where suspension of disbelief is maintained, and the players immersion in the story seems to be greater.
My open question about this: is it can you actually have an MMORPG that includes immersive roleplay, or is it the very nature of people that they bring their lives with them into the game and dilute the narrative?
Over the past few years I've spent some time playing a number of MMOs, and the experience varies somewhat between one and the next but consistently, they don't contain much roleplay.
This doesn't seem initially to be a critical aspect but it does hilight fundamental difference: MMOs seem to take a role more akin to team sports / social environment for the people that I know who play them ... kind of like an online pub, with orc slaying / raid dungeons thrown in. People play as themselves, disassociated from the characters that they play and with the advent of VOIP communications chatting as they do so.
This is no bad thing, the ability to socialise freely in an online environment, but it does show the marked difference between the MMO experience and the traditional RPG experince, where suspension of disbelief is maintained, and the players immersion in the story seems to be greater.
My open question about this: is it can you actually have an MMORPG that includes immersive roleplay, or is it the very nature of people that they bring their lives with them into the game and dilute the narrative?
Second Life ... the things we need to fix next
I'm an advocate of Second Life for a number of reasons: it's adaptability to a range of uses, the completeness of it's model and workable DRM, the friendliness and creativity of its population, and the richness of its experience.
Having said that, there are a couple of things about it that are becoming (in my opinion) a serious issue.
The first is the mature content. Now, I know everything has its place, but Second Life doesn't have enforced zoning to manage the spread of locations that include mature content or a content filtering solution implemented in the client viewer to allow you to filter what you see ... much life the safe search filtering you find in the image search tools on Google.
Second Life needs to learn some of the lessons that the internet as a whole, and the search engines especially learned a while back - people will keep on putting sex on the web, but you need to offer some workable tools that allow users to choose what they see before it arrives.
The next thing on my wishlist is some search integration outside the SL client - I'd like to see the content from within SL presented on a search tool that can be accessed directly from the SL website, and more than that, I'd like to see it done in a way that Google can index. My aim with this is that,for example, whenI search for 'IBM Training' on Google, included in the returned results are the locations of IBMs SL training facilities, and not because they took the time to add the SLURLs on their website, but because the small-ads associated with the locations are accurately indexed by the search engines.
My last wish? Proper web-page-on-a-prim. I want to effectively see the output of the browser rendered onto the surface of an object and that includes all the mime types my browser supports (flash, pdf,video etc). The one media / web page limit per parcel is too limiting. There is a huge volume of traditional web content and tools that would work very well if they could be displayed on an in-world object and have the functionality preserved ... scrollbars too.
But what I would like to maintain is that SL is very much a viable platform for us to take VWs forward - we all know it isn't perfect, but taken as a whole it is a viable, robust, well tooled and documented solution that has the buy-in of it's steadily expanding population.
Having said that, there are a couple of things about it that are becoming (in my opinion) a serious issue.
The first is the mature content. Now, I know everything has its place, but Second Life doesn't have enforced zoning to manage the spread of locations that include mature content or a content filtering solution implemented in the client viewer to allow you to filter what you see ... much life the safe search filtering you find in the image search tools on Google.
Second Life needs to learn some of the lessons that the internet as a whole, and the search engines especially learned a while back - people will keep on putting sex on the web, but you need to offer some workable tools that allow users to choose what they see before it arrives.
The next thing on my wishlist is some search integration outside the SL client - I'd like to see the content from within SL presented on a search tool that can be accessed directly from the SL website, and more than that, I'd like to see it done in a way that Google can index. My aim with this is that,for example, whenI search for 'IBM Training' on Google, included in the returned results are the locations of IBMs SL training facilities, and not because they took the time to add the SLURLs on their website, but because the small-ads associated with the locations are accurately indexed by the search engines.
My last wish? Proper web-page-on-a-prim. I want to effectively see the output of the browser rendered onto the surface of an object and that includes all the mime types my browser supports (flash, pdf,video etc). The one media / web page limit per parcel is too limiting. There is a huge volume of traditional web content and tools that would work very well if they could be displayed on an in-world object and have the functionality preserved ... scrollbars too.
But what I would like to maintain is that SL is very much a viable platform for us to take VWs forward - we all know it isn't perfect, but taken as a whole it is a viable, robust, well tooled and documented solution that has the buy-in of it's steadily expanding population.
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
Limited Editions For All
I'm old enough to remeber numbered, limited edition vinyl EPs and boxed-sets of singles. These things had a huge value in a niche way, because the were exactly that: limited editions. They were usually lavishly packaged compared to the regular edition, included extra tracks often unreleased anywhere else and other items such as postcards.
Things are changing as internet technology and online personalisation reaches out into the consumer products market. For a long time now, you've been able to purchase your iPod direct from Apple and have a message laser etched into the back of the case. More recently Timberland have added a feature to their website where you can customise your boots as you order them, including an embroidered monogram. Moon Pig are now offering to custom print greetings cards with the message of your choice. Bob Books will print and bind a hardback book of your choice from images you upload via their website.
It strikes me that this is then end of the limited edition as we know it - or possibly a proliferation of the range of limited editions.
Either the mass accessibility of personalisation with consumer products will reduce the interest in 'designed' limited editions *OR* the easy access to the new design tools for this new generation of personalised products will lead to an increase in the number of amateur designers using these new tools to produce their own limited runs of pre-personalised products. I'm watching closely to for which way it goes, but I hope the latter, not the former.
Things are changing as internet technology and online personalisation reaches out into the consumer products market. For a long time now, you've been able to purchase your iPod direct from Apple and have a message laser etched into the back of the case. More recently Timberland have added a feature to their website where you can customise your boots as you order them, including an embroidered monogram. Moon Pig are now offering to custom print greetings cards with the message of your choice. Bob Books will print and bind a hardback book of your choice from images you upload via their website.
It strikes me that this is then end of the limited edition as we know it - or possibly a proliferation of the range of limited editions.
Either the mass accessibility of personalisation with consumer products will reduce the interest in 'designed' limited editions *OR* the easy access to the new design tools for this new generation of personalised products will lead to an increase in the number of amateur designers using these new tools to produce their own limited runs of pre-personalised products. I'm watching closely to for which way it goes, but I hope the latter, not the former.
WoW, Celebrity Sponsorship and being the ipod of the MMO world
I've moaned about WoW and it's stifling effect on the MMO genre. It strikes me that we are seeing the new ipod of the mmo world here. How many of the competitors for either product run TV advertising (let alone use celebrity endorsement when doing so - WoW and Ozzy Osbourne being the most recent).
The simple fact is that with this scale of product, with this level of marketing behind it, with this size of established user-base, how can the next big thing get its message through and survive in the face of the inevitable WoW2, in the same way that I doubt there will be a serious contender for the ipod for quite some time (or until Apple messes up)?
The simple fact is that with this scale of product, with this level of marketing behind it, with this size of established user-base, how can the next big thing get its message through and survive in the face of the inevitable WoW2, in the same way that I doubt there will be a serious contender for the ipod for quite some time (or until Apple messes up)?
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