Trevor F. Smith: Exterior

links for 2008-01-29

• The S stands for Simple
  Pete Lacey's socratic dialog on the changing face of SOAP.
  (tags: itsfunnylaugh)
• The REST Dialogues
  Duncan Cragg's socratic dialog about REST versus SOAP.
  (tags: itsfunnylaugh)

links for 2008-01-27

• SkillBit
  Seattle's Startup Weekend web app for small business skill mining.
  (tags: startup seattle)

links for 2008-01-26

• Central Grid
  Resellers of the open Second Life clone, OpenSim, and peripheral services.
  (tags: itbegins)
• Ceteri: fire sale
  There's a very talented team with a good technology on sale, if you're in the market.
  (tags: kickbutt vcDeathKnell)
• David Geller's PR Mojo
  This link is to a blog post by Eric Rice (aka Spin) but the reason I'm linking to it is for David Geller's awe inspiring PR kung-fu in the comments.
  (tags: colormeimpressed)

links for 2008-01-23

• gapingvoid: social objects for beginners
  The main goal of virtual worlds in 2008 must be to stop making virtual worlds the default social object.
  (tags: gapingvoid)

Inevitable?

I wonder about how I ended up working on distributed, web scale spaces and in retrospect it seems like I was custom designed for this work. I worked on a browser at Be, a large web app at i-drive, a massive ubicomp project at PARC, and my first indie product work was a photo geocoding tool.

Web + Ubicomp + GIS + Startup => Transmutable

Though the experience seemed like a random walk through interesting projects with good people, this morning it seems like there is a reason that I've landed right here, right now.

Lemonade

After browsing a few pages of the Second Life event listings it occurred to me that what I'm looking at is thousands of adults doing the equivalent of sitting on the side of the road selling lemonade at a loss.

I understand that there are individuals in Second Life who do rather well (thank you very much). For example, the business run under the avatar name Ordinal Malaprop has enough revenue to enable the owner to quit a day job to focus her full creative energies on fascinating steampunk accessories. But based on the event listings it seems that most individual business owners in SL take a few formulas (Tringo, Yard Sales, Camping, Tutorial/Sales Pitch, Nightclub, Casino) and completely saturate the market to the point where goods sell for pennies each.

The games researchers I know will probably claim that this is identical to playing the auction houses of MMOs like World of Warcraft, and there are certainly similarities. However, I don't know that there are many gamers in first world countries who seriously hope to quit their day job by selling their gold pieces. The joyless, base tone of most Second Life event listings read like the business owner is working hard to achieve escape velocity and join Anche Chung in her $1M skybox.

If you understand this new, seemingly anti-fun hobby, let me know.

links for 2008-01-18

• Kevin Kelly: Believing the Impossible
  The ingrained understanding that a wikipedia is possible will change the generation which knew no other world, says Kelley.
  (tags: technium changedminds)

Annie Ok's vLES

links for 2008-01-15

• Andrew Chen: 10 signs you're a product fanatic
  Andrew nails me on all ten signs and then goes on to make me cry about the amount of whitespace I now see on Tomorrow Space. Someone mail me to Kansas.
  (tags: ouchbabyouch)

New Production

As Tomorrow Space begins to poke its head above the waterline I'm moving away from site development and toward customer outreach and business development. It's with a little pain that I watch my coding to-do list shrink as my calendar swells but there comes a time in every project when it's time to delegate and pop up the management stack.

You can expect to see me back in the blogging saddle both here and on the transmutable blog. I've also picked up a twitter habit for those of you who want blow-by-blows of what it means to be a startup CEO.