Apologies for the downtime yesterday — my host decided to move me from one machine to another, more powerful machine. But they literally gave me no notice. I got the email telling me about it after the site was already unavailable to me! As a result I wasn’t able to warn anyone or put up any redirectors or anything.
Service seems to be back to normal, so we’ll see.
So everyone is talking about embedding virtual worlds on Facebook. There’s an article on Virtual Worlds News, for example, listing the few that are out there. I’ve written several posts about stuff like ActiveWorlds launching a Facebook app. There’s even an f13 thread wondering about ActiveWorlds versus Metaplace.
But one thing that hasn’t been pointed out is that really, nobody is using these very much. As of today, for example:
(Above, a photo of Ensenada’s harbor, with cruise ships docked, in the persistent light fog that is shrouding all of SoCal and Baja lately — you can click on it to get a larger image).
Yesterday I gave a magistral conference at CICOMP ’07, in Ensenada, Mexico. This was my first time to Mexico, first time driving through Tijuana, seeing Baja California, etc.
The talk was basically a reworking, in Spanish, of material from other talks centered on A Theory of Fun and game grammar. Given the audience of mostly compsci students, it was mostly new to them. It was fun giving a talk in Spanish — it’s been well over a decade since I had reason to speak the language regularly. I only had to fumble for words a few times.
I have many observations about the experience overall:
And I haven’t read ANY of them. Yikes.
Andrew Chen has a nice essay up on how Technology always changes, but people always stay the same, with a bunch of pics of old nickelodeon style amusement machines, with extrapolations to what their modern day entertainment equivalent is. It’s a great reminder that human nature and the sorts of entertainment we seek don’t really change.
