Cool Stuff

Graphic artist Ricky Linn created an awesome new Star Trek infographic, 15 Things About Star Trek You Probably Didn’t Know About Star Trek. Check it out, after the jump.

Read the rest of this post on SlashFilm.com…

Here are some possibly related posts:

• Cool Stuff: Anatomy of a Tribble
• Movie Trailer: Star Trek Documentary Trek Nation
• VOTD: Vintage Behind The Scenes Documentary For Star Trek: The Motion Picture
• VOTD: How JJ Abrams’ Star Trek Should Have Ended
• VOTD: 50 Movie Spoilers of 2009 in 4 Minutes
• LOL: Worth 1000’s “Mate a Movie 15″ Movie Poster Mash-ups

LOL: Star Wars Weekends 2010 Advertisements —

To promote this year’s Star Wars Weekends, Disney has published a new set of print advertisements showing Star Wars characters enjoying Disneyland. Check them all out after the jump.

Read the rest of this post on SlashFilm.com…

Here are some possibly related posts:

• Last Tour To Endor
• Real Life Weirdness: Back to the Future Marriage Proposal, Spider-Man Traps Comic Book Thief, Actors Almost Shot By Real Police During Robbery Scene
• VOTD: The Star Wars Trilogy Retold Using LEGO in 2 Minutes
• Cool Stuff: Star Wars/Space Invaders T-Shirt
• Cool Stuff: Star Sabers T-Shirt
• VOTD: Original Empire Strikes Back Trailer With Harrison Ford Voice-Over

Georgia-based artist Gideon Slife loves Lost, and has decided to make a movie poster for every episode, from every season, leading up to the finale. As of this article being published, he has created minimalistic poster designs for every episode up until mid-way through the fourth season.

That is 78 posters thus far and counting.

Talk about an awesome but extensive art project. Flipping through the posters is like a trip down memory lane. I’ve included some of my favorites after the jump.

Read the rest of this post on SlashFilm.com…

Here are some possibly related posts:

• Posters: Iron Man 2, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, Nightmare on Elm Street Motion Poster, Despicable Me, Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric, True Blood, Lost
• Cool Stuff: Lost-Parody “Smoke Buster” T-Shirt
• Cool Stuff: Gilligan’s Island/Lost Mash-Up T-Shirt
• Cool Stuff: Jared Stumpenhorst’s Lost-Inspired T-Shirt “922044:16″
• VOTD: If Saul Bass Had Created The Openings of Lost and Tron
• Lost’s Final Episode Gets a Title

There has been plenty of talk about what Facebook would announce at the f8 conference this week, but the full magnitude of what the company has in mind didn’t really hit home until after the keynote by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a related presentation by chief technology officer Bret Taylor (Liz has a great overview of the issues here).

Both carried a single, unmistakeable message: Facebook wants to own your activity on the Internet. Zuckerberg did his best to portray this as a great thing for users, but the corollary is inescapable: Facebook will be everywhere you are, watching what you do, keeping track of that data, and talking about what you’re doing to your friends and companies you “like.” A quick survey of the Web shows that some seem to see this as a great idea (“hey, I can show lots of cool stuff to my friends!”) and some are less enthusiastic (“Facebook is going to be following me and tracking my every movement!”).

The reaction from some observers on Twitter was positive: the LA Times said that it would “make sharing easier,” while Deborah Schultz of the Altimeter Group said: “A world that is more open and connected — always a good thing (despite some snarky comments); thanks FB for pushing open!!!” Her fellow Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang was less enthused, however, describing it as Facebook’s “crusade of colonization.” The New York Times’s response was somewhat more tempered, calling it “Facebook to Go.”

Silicon Alley Insider called it a plan to “infiltrate the web,” and Silicon Beat said Facebook wants to “conquer the world.” Kevin Marks of BT, a former engineer with Technorati, said that “Facebook wants to replace links between sites with a database stored on their servers that they control access to,” and Eric Marcoullier (co-founder of Gnip and MyBlogLog) said “Coldplay’s “when I ruled the world” playing at F8. Interesting, if appropriate, choice.” Dan Gillmor of the Knight Center for Media Entrepreneurship summed it up by saying “Facebook wants to be the Internet,” and Chris Dixon, co-founder of Hunch, said “we might look back at the 00’s as the golden age of the web, when we were ruled by Google, a benign dictator.”

As Liz has pointed out, the key to what Facebook wants to do is to control the hooks and tools that allow it to understand and participate in the social web, the “people-centered” web. By watching and indexing your “likes” and the likes of millions of others — Zuckerberg said within 24 hours of his keynote, there would a billion “Like” buttons and plugins around the web — the company can create an incredibly powerful map of the relationships between people and their friends, and between people and the things they like, whether they are movies or bands or dishwashing detergent.

That’s a tremendous power to have, and the youthful CEO of Facebook makes it seem friendly and appealing. Why wouldn’t you want to share with your friends? But to use a popular phrase from Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. Let’s hope Zuckerberg chooses to use his powers for good instead of evil.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Andrew Feinberg

Chirp , Twitter's big developer conference, begins tomorrow in San Francisco but if you can't make it, you can still see all the big announcements, hot debates and whatever else might happen streaming live on the web thanks to Justin.tv.

As tech investor Chris Dixon said on Twitter this morning, the Twitter drama that's unfolding is fascinating because it's a struggle between a product that wants to be an open protocol and a company that wants a return on more than $100 million in venture financing. You might find that drama interesting, or you might just be excited to see cool stuff get announced. Either way, it's great news that the rest of the world will get to watch live online.

Sponsor

Bookmark the Chirp Live page on Twitter or on Justin.tv (for chat). The event begins at 9 am PST tomorrow.

Discuss

Exclusive: Green Lantern’s Suit Will Be Almost Entirely CG —

Everyone is curious to see what Ryan Reynolds will look like in costume in the big screen adaptation of DC Comics’ Green Lantern. Production started earlier this month in New Orleans, and while the first set photos have begun to hit the web — don’t expect to see Reynolds in the green suit. Not today, not next week, not next month, not ever. So don’t expect to see any leaked shots of Reynolds in the actual suit until Warner Bros makes the official full reveal.

Why not?

Well, because there isn’t a suit.

No suit?

That’s right. No suit. When I was first told this info, I didn’t believe it. I actually didn’t even consider it as a real possibility. But the information I’m about to reveal has since been backed up by two other independent sources. I stand by this information 150% — this is legit. I risk my reputation on it. Ready for it? Okay…

The suit that Ryan wears on set is a grey tracking motion/performance capture suit with led lights. I’ve heard that Ryan Reynolds has been joking on set that Warner Bros is going to make him into a Na’vi when the final cut is released. His joke, not mine. The Green Lantern suit you will see in the final film will be almost entirely created using computers.

That’s right — Green Lantern’s suit will be mostly CG!

Wait, stop…

I said STOP. Comic book fanatics should not freak out just yet…

Read the rest of this post on SlashFilm.com…

Here are some possibly related posts:

• Will Green Lantern’s Costume Look Like This?
• Cool Stuff: Fan Made Green Lantern Movie Poster
• Jackie Earle Haley Still Said to be a Contender for Green Lantern’s Sinestro
• Green Lantern Casting Call Reveals Supporting Characters
• Justin Timberlake Screen Testing For Green Lantern
• Green Lantern Set Photo: Abin Sir’s Spaceship?

Shared by Jesse Stay
My first e-mail to the group was 12/30/2007 - I'm curious how he got admin access to the group to see membership details though and know when his membership started.

This is going to make two blog posts in a row that are “off the cuff” for me. This one particularly so, because it involves a lot of emotion, and not a lot of certainty. There are some arguments to be made, but most of it is about how I feel. That’s something that’s hard to justify logically; it just is.

I’ve been frustrated with Twitter regarding how it relates to its developer community for several months now. My perspective might be different from some folks, I think, because I’ve been a part of that community for a long time. The Twitter Dev Talk Google Group shows me as joining on March 15, 2007. I remember being proud that I was asked to be a moderator for the group; it felt good to be both friends with some folks at Twitter, and a “Friend of Twitter” as someone from the company referred to me and a few others once.

It felt good because Twitter really seemed to make an effort to be open and transparent with their development community. We were part of what helped them get off the ground — not the biggest part by any means, but a part. At the time, the vibe I got from Twitter was that they were a group of people trying to build Cool Stuff. I liked that because I like building Cool Stuff too, for the sake of building it. It felt like it was being built by guys who had the same passion for making things that I do. I would hear that they really liked what I was doing in creating an open source, multi-platform client for Twitter; that it was important to have options like that.

Over the years I often found myself defending Twitter’s API team when folks would air their own frustrations. Some of those frustrations were valid, and some of them were based on really unrealistic expectations. I often said that it was foolish to build a business on top of Twitter, because (except in very rare circumstances) there was no guarantee of any service level of API feature permanence. Things were often pretty spotty back then in terms of uptime and performance; that frustrated a lot of people. But I had their back, ya know? I was a Friend.

Things grew, and things changed. That’s not really surprising at all. I’m happily naive of most things related to VC investment, but I suppose to keep up with all the traffic Twitter got as it became more popular, they needed money to pay for services and hire people. If you aren’t making any money, you need to ask people to give it to you. And now you have to worry about what they want, too.

In the past year or so, it felt like I was seeing a shift in how Twitter related to its developers. People move around in a big company, and that was surely part of it – I didn’t know all the New Dudes. And I had really withdrawn from the dev mailing list, because I was tired of dealing with spam and talking about uptime and downtime and social graphs and pagination limits.

But it got weirder when they announced Chirp, their “official developer conference.” Doing this event made sense, but I felt like some of their choices about who was speaking didn’t. I didn’t see guys like Cameron Kaiser, Abraham Williams, Marco Kaiser, JazzyChad, or Damon Cortesi listed as speakers. Instead, I saw execs, pundits, and VC investors.

Now I’ve been to a lot of developer conferences, both as an attendee and a speaker. And I’ve never seen a speaker lineup so devoid of actual developers. Anyone who knows me, knows that I generally believe pundits and VC investors (and execs to some extent) to be moronic at best, and pure evil at worst — corrupting the purity and passion for Making Cool Stuff.

Then there was how some stuff was handled. When Chirp was first announced in late January, before the speaker lineup was finalized, I inquired about speaking there myself. A friend suggested I talk about my experiences as an open source dev, and this seemed like a pretty darn good idea – I wanted to talk about what I’d learned, what motivates us as developers, and how we define success. So I made an official inquiry, and was told by a Twitter employee that they’d look into it and get back to me soon. I didn’t hear anything for a couple weeks, so I sent a follow-up, and was told that things were filling up on the main day (well, that’s why I asked early!) but that there might be an unconference opportunity. There’d be a public announcement about it in March.

Well, the conference is on April 15th. Not knowing until March what might happen is just not enough time to plan. And to buy a $450 ticket, and then hotel in SF, and then airfare; I just couldn’t afford that. Of course, it turns out that cheaper, hackday-only tickets would be made available, but these weren’t released until March 30, 15 days before the conference¹. Far too short notice, and by this time the speaker lineup described above was set, which indicated to me that this wasn’t a conference for developers like me.

So in this, I saw a pretty big chasm between where I was, and where Twitter was. Before then I hadn’t quite realized what it was like, but this kinda dumped on me like a ton of bricks. Getting a bit of the runaround hurt my ego, for sure, and that’s part of it. I don’t really think that’s a good reason to get upset, but I did feel like I had a longstanding relationship with Twitter, and through this, and the way Chirp was being presented, I didn’t feel like this was the same organization I’d interacted with for the past three years.

And, well, it wasn’t. They used to have 6 employees, and now they’re over 140. Duh.

So with all that, then we have Twitter dropping an enormous bombshell yesterday on their dev community, by creating official clients for both BlackBerry and iPhone. Twitter had done a few things before to add services that had previously been handled by third parties, but in general they’d had a very hands-off approach with the dev community, sticking with their core features and letting developers handle stuff like url shortening, photo uploading, and — most significantly — all non-web clients. Twitter has enjoyed a very diverse, very organic community of applications and services. Client apps that serve as primary user tools for interacting with Twitter are a very large part of that community. Twitter’s moves in that space have suddenly and dramatically changed the playing field for all of them.²

There was no warning, and there were no apologies. No statements made to developers that Twitter knew this was going to impact a lot of them; no attempt to unruffle feathers or explain how this was what Twitter needed to do as a company. We did get a couple notes on the dev list, but they could be summed up as follows: “it happened, now find other things to do.” That’s what angered me more than anything last night.

This really isn’t about my own client, Spaz. Spaz is not popular, and I doubt even having a directly-competing Official Client on desktop or webOS would impact its numbers – folks choose Spaz because they like it, and if they don’t that’s fine with me. Spaz exists as an alternative to closed source, commercial apps, and it’s even MORE important now that it exists, I think.

I guess it’s about respect. It’s about a relationship I had, and I think many of us had, with Twitter, that doesn’t seem to be there anymore. And that’s frustrating, and disappointing. But mostly I guess it’s just sad.

At the recent SXSW conference, we handed out free Google Reader T-shirts to people based on how many Reader items they'd ever read... in their whole life. We knew that free shirts would be a hit, but we learned something much more important: a lot of people have read a lot of items. (At an average of thirty seconds per item, the most prolific readers had spent more than 180 full days of their lives perusing stuff on Reader — what Blogger gives, Reader takes away)

After the conference, several of us felt like shirts didn't seem like enough of a reward for all the valuable hours people have spent trolling through so many feeds. One thing led to another, we did a few calculations, drank a few too many cups of coffee, and today we're happy to announce Google Reader's first rewards program: ReaderAdvantage™.

The ReaderAdvantage™ program is simple. You get one point for each item you read. The more you read, the more you get. Then you can trade in your points for cool stuff. And because we believe in a little friendly competition, there are four levels of ReaderAdvantage™ status:

• Novice: 999 points
• Gold: 25,000 points
• Platinum: 133,700 points
• Totally Sweet: 314,159 points

We considered inventing a secret ReaderAdvantage™ handshake, but instead we created embroidered badges to ensure that members can easily identify their compatriots.

If you use Google Reader, there's no reason not to join. Visit the ReaderAdvantage™ site to read all the details and enroll today. As always, please send us your thoughts and feedback in our forum or on Twitter.

Gravatar Has Just Become an 22 Million+ Strong Social Network —

Until now Gravatar has just been a way for you to use one avatar across the web. It’s worked well and allowed millions of sites to grab avatars to use in comments, forums etc. without forcing the user to upload a photo every time.

Today Automattic (the company behind Wordpress) has announced an upgrade that turns your gravatar account into a profile page complete with links to your various other profiles. Not unlike many an online business card.

“What if you could attach more of yourself to it to better represent your style, flair, and personality not just with more photos but with links to all the cool stuff you’re doing around the web. That’s what Gravatar profiles are.” writes Beau Lebens on the wordpress.com blog.

So what do you get? Currently, it’s a pretty standard profile page. You get a gorgeously minimalist design (with vanity URL to accompany it), a gallery of photos, contact details, connections with your other (verified) profile pages as well as a number of personal links. Connecting your account to youR various other profiles (Digg, twitter, Facebook) works better than any other social profile I’ve come across including Google Buzz which tries to do the same, but fails miserably.

The real story here though is whether Automattic is seriously considering turning Gravatar into the next Social Networking behemoth or whether this is merely a small move to make Gravatar profiles more useful. The answer very much depends on whether you consider public profile pages as significant an element of a modern day social network as I do.

“All profiles will become public for everyone” the announcement post points out. This is not optional.

This means that there will be at least 18 million 22 million new public profile pages on the web for every WordPress.com publisher (as of November 2009) plus 9.7 million active installations of the WordPress.org software, many of which are also likely to have a gravatar.com account (to put this in perspective, twitter reportedly has 75m users, but only 17% of those accounts are actively used.)

This reminds me of when Google initially announced steps to develop its profile pages and I wrote a post describing how Google were in fact building a “Social Network under our very noses.” I was criticized back then, but one look at Google Buzz should prove that for once, I was right. But where Google has apps, what has Gravatar got? Blogs.

Gravatar has the backing of millions of blogs, plus an activity stream that could potentially be filled with comments left on millions of websites, favorited sites, favorited stories, recently read stories and more. Of course then there’s the potential to import activity from other sites, Flickr, Twitter etc. too.

This isn’t entirely a new idea either. In many respects what you see before you is Automattic’s counter move to Disqus who have gradually replaced Wordpress comments on many popular blogs and have also been slowly building a social network under our very noses.

So what say you? How significant is this?

To get started, either edit your profile on WordPress.com or log straight into Gravatar.com and get your account set up.

Original title and link for this post: Gravatar Has Just Become an 22 Million+ Strong Social Network

I’ve been hinting about a new conference that we’ve been working on with Eric Norlin that complements Defrag and Glue.  Eric is about to launch it and the splash page for the Blur Conference is up. 

If you are familiar with Defrag and Glue, you know they are built around two of Foundry Group’s themes (Protocol and Glue respectively).  Blur is being built around our Human Computer Interaction theme, but with a twist.  Instead of simply being able to “see cool stuff up close”, our goal with Blur will be to create an environment where you can actually use and work with this stuff.  We’ll have user-oriented demos, hackathons, and tons of crazy shit no one has ever seen before. 

Plus, we’ll give away a lot of cool toys, have a ton of smart people who are working on the next generation of HCI in one place, and have some fun surprises.  And we are doing it in an environment that is especially tuned for a conference like Blur.

I’m incredibly excited about what Eric has put together for this year’s Glue Conference (as I wrote about the other day).  He’s setting a high bar for Blue, where the goal will now be to have a few brains explode!  Get ready – it’s never dull around here.

Related posts:

1. The Glue That Binds Things
2. Pitch Me At The Glue Conference
3. The Glue Agenda Is Getting Awesome

Honestly, we've been holding off on actually posting this in hopes some more details might actually trickle out. Since that hasn't happened as of yet, here it goes. Yesterday, Research In Motion made a rather ominous post on their Facebook page regarding some cool stuff coming soon for BlackBerry Messenger. While details were slim, they wanted to make sure everyone was fully aware of how to get onto the latest version. The message as posted on Facebook:

There are some exciting things coming for BlackBerry Messenger in the days (and weeks!) ahead. Make sure you have the latest version of BBM so that you can be a part of it!

If you already have the latest BBM version, 5.0.0.57, then no update is
required.

Cool. But what is it? If no upgrade is required and those already on 5.0.0.57 are fine, how is Research In Motion going to get us excited? As much as I'm hoping for something awesome to happen here, I can't see what exactly it could be if no updates are required. No updates means no new features unless they are server side. Any thoughts on what it might be? Drop your ideas in the comments folks.

[ Facebook ]

CrackBerry.com's feed sponsored by ShopCrackBerry.com. What Is RIM Planning For BlackBerry Messenger?

When Blippy launched a few months ago, the idea was to get the site up there as bare-bones as possible so it was simple to people. That makes sense since the idea of sharing your credit card transaction data was (and remains) highly controversial. But despite the controversy, users have embraced Blippy. So now it’s time to give it a fresh coat of paint — and a new privacy feature.

Today, Blippy has undergone a massive redesign. Previously, Blippy was a stream of your friends’ transactions and little else. Now, it’s much more robust. In fact, it looks very similar to the most recent redesign of Facebook. You’ll notice the new update indicators next to the logo that get badged with a number when there is an update. You’ll also notice a search box front and center (for now, this is only to search for businesses or users).

More important than the redesign is the new feature Blippy is launching. Starting today, you can manually review each purchase before it’s displayed on Blippy. This is an important step in the direction of better privacy controls. Previously, you could pick and choose which sources you imported your transaction data from, but it was an all-or-nothing proposition. You could remove items after they appeared in your stream, but not before. Now you can do that by approving each one. A bit of a pain? Sure, but for some who are really concerned about privacy, this is a welcome addition (of course, you may wonder why they’d be using Blippy in the first place, but hey, people are weird).

This new setting will be displayed when users hook up their credit card or e-commerce account for the first time to Blippy.

Blippy has already streamed about $15 million in purchases, co-founder Philip Kaplan notes. “Today, thousands of people are automatically sharing purchases on Blippy. I think of it as ‘a stream of cool stuff my friends are buying.’ The additional level of control we’re introducing will make it even easier for people to share just want they want to share — whether a new iPhone app, movie from Netflix, favorite bar or restaurant, or grocery store run,” Kaplan says.

In January, Blippy raised a $1.6 million round of funding. The company is also getting some traction with retailers — though not all of them.

FlowingData have converted some of the most famous movie quotes in this history of cinema into an infographic. Check it out, embedded after the jump.

• Cool Stuff: Tom Whalen’s Poster Art
• Cool Stuff: Film Geek Graffiti
• VOTD: How JJ Abrams’ Star Trek Should Have Ended
• VOTD: Darth Vader’s Original Voice
• Cool Stuff: Brandon Schaefer’s Movie Posters
• Cool Stuff: Boba Fett Life-Size Bust

Would 2010 Steve Jobs Sue 1996 (Or 1984) Steve Jobs Over Patents? — One of the things you discover in studying the history of patent use among many companies is that when they're young, they innovate. When they're old, they litigate. That is when they're growing and building cool stuff, they don't worry much about patents, but focus on building the coolest products they can to best serve the market. But when they get older, and entrenched, they don't innovate quite as much, but focus instead on trying to keep competitors out of the market. We highlighted this by showing Microsoft's changing views on patents, from Bill Gates' claim in 1991 that "the industry would be at a complete standstill" if companies had used patents in the PC software space early on, to Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith saying in 1997 that "software patents and other intellectual property is essential to maintaining the incentives that encourage and underwrite technological breakthroughs."

Similarly, a year ago, we highlighted how Apple appeared to be going through a similar shift, quoting Steve Wozniak's claim about how the Apple II was "one of the most successful products of all time," in part because they didn't think about patents or copyright, and shared their ideas freely with everyone -- to Apple's Tim Cook's claims that "We will not stand for having our IP ripped off, and we will use every weapon at our disposal."

With Apple now going on the offensive against HTC (and, by proxy, Google's Android), it seems others are noticing not just an overall corporate shift, but the change in viewpoints of Steve Jobs. william points us to a Gizmodo post highlighting how Steve Jobs noted how Apple was "shameless about stealing great ideas." But in the announcement about the HTC lawsuit, he has a different perspective: "competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."

Strong words coming from the guy who admits he blatantly copied the graphical user interface he saw at Xerox PARC many years ago. Now, no one's going to claim that Apple and Jobs haven't been incredibly innovative over the past decade (or more). In fact, they've been amazingly innovative. But during that time, the company has mostly focused on continually innovating, rather than going on the offensive over patents. It seems like this new offensive move might be an early warning sign that the company no longer believes it can keep up its innovative pace.

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We’ve posted a few videos from the guys at How It Should Have Ended in past editions of VOTD (Video of the Day). Their latest episode takes an animated look at how JJ Abrams‘ Star Trek should have ended. Watch it now, after the jump.

• VOTD: Star Wars Scrolling Text Invades Earth
• R2-D2’s Star Trek Cameo Revealed
• Cool Stuff: May The Best Prequel Win T-Shirt
• R2-D2 in Star Trek? Astronaut To Watch New Star Trek Movie in Space
• VOTD: My Favorite Movie (Star Trek vs. Star Wars)
• The Death Star Destroys The Starship Enterprise

25-year-old Massachusetts-based graphic artist Brandon Schaefer has created an impressive collection of retro-minimal movie posters. The Ghostbusters-inspired posters above have been making the internet rounds recently, but Schaefer has a huge portfolio of posters, some of which can even be purchased as prints on inPRNT.com. Check out some of his posters, after the jump.

Check out more of Brandon’s work on SeekAndSpeak.com.

Cool Stuff is a daily feature of slashfilm.com. Know of any geekarific creations or cool products which should be featured on Cool Stuff? E-Mail us at orfilms@gmail.com.

• Cool Stuff: Boba Fett Life-Size Bust
• Cool Stuff: The Coolest New Movie Toys/Collectibles to Premiere at Toy Fair 2010
• Cool Stuff: Jamie Bolton’s Minimalistic Movie Posters
• Hollywood vs. New York: Four Decades of Destruction
• Cool Stuff: Movie and Television Time Travel Timeline
• Cool Stuff: Seven More Awesome Pieces of Art From Crazy4Cult 3D

Is Second Life about to enter its “second life?” —

You probably have forgotten about Second Life (the virtual world from Linden Labs), right?

Remember, that’s that virtual world that got a TON of hype back in 2005/6. It was on the cover of magazines. On CNN and other TV shows. It looked like it was going to be THE new thing of the decade.

What happened?

Well, a few things.

1. Corporations figured out that they’d need to spend a lot of money to build an island in Second Life (Microsoft spent somewhere around $100,000 if I remember right back then) but soon they figured out that each island could only hold 100 people. Not a good ROI.

2. It had game dynamics. Games are fun for a while, but eventually people get bored of playing games. That’s what happened. People who were very excited and evangelistic about Second Life eventually moved on.

3. It lost its “new and shiny” patina. That’s most of why the press forgot about it. We only pay attention to new and cool stuff. Heck, just look at Techcrunch. Do you read about older technologies there? No.

Anyway, one thing happened that I find very interesting: it continued to grow in users, time spent on the site, and dollars spent in it.

On Friday I sat down with Mark to find out why.

First, the users remained very evangelistic. Second, corporations like IBM found other uses for its islands and kept investing (they now use these islands for training and replacements of expensive conferences). Third, the technology has been steadily improving. Fourth, the company has found new ways to bring new users in and make the experience easier to get into.

But he admitted that they had been pretty quiet and avoided doing more PR work until just recently.

Why is that changing this week? You’ll see why tomorrow morning at about 11 a.m. on building43.

But to tease a bit, I find that their new direction, the first part of which you’ll see tomorrow in the video I did with Mark, is interesting and represents a new life for Second Life and its host Linden Labs.

To wrap this up, have you used Second Life lately? Even if you haven’t, see you on building43 tomorrow morning for more.

Social media are a bunch of tools. They let us see things a bit differently. They empowered new ways of working together. But they’re just the tools. When this all gets cool is when we start really turning this stuff on our own passion projects, on our bigger goals, on what COULD happen.

What projects would I work on, if I were over how cool social media is?

• Start a public list of Twitter accounts from local businesses. Point everyone in your community to it.
• Start small mastermind groups on Google Wave (I have an incredible group going. Very small. Very useful.)
• Donate four hours a week to a charity, giving them more promotion and exposure for their causes, equipping them with more ways to find what they need.
• Connect to 10 people every day. Make it a blend of 5 people you’ve been in touch with, and 5 people you need to stay fresh with. Ask for nothing. Offer everything. ( Tim Sanders does this well.)
• Give your local school teachers or library a free class on how to use the tools for their projects.
• Turn your lens on your family. Tell family stories for future generations.

To me, the cool stuff has very much yet to happen. We can do SO much more.

You?

Tim O'Keefe, Michael McIntyre, and Brock Roland of San Francisco State University's School of Engineering created MARV, here. That's "MIDI Actuated Robotic Vibraphone," of course. Which is a nested acronym, really. Crank it all the way out and it's "Musical Instrument Digital Interface Actuated Robotic Vibraphone," or MIDIARV, which is not nearly so catchy. Each key has two solenoids--a striker and a damper. Cool stuff. I wonder if you couldn't make one solenoid do both striking and damping? [via Hack a Day]

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