greenpoint design

Second Life Succumbs to Real Life

A short piece in Read Write Web yesterday noted that Second Life, the multi-player virtual world created by Linden Labs, is cutting staff and moving to a web-based platform.

How could a global multi-player environment not be based on standard web languages? That non-compatibility with the largest network on this planet doomed Second Life as a marketing venue from the start. All those businesses that set up shop in the virtual world in 2007 found their expensive digital venues virtually abandoned and would-be visitors from the WWW barred by the platform gap.

The real news here is that Linden Labs has finally figured out Metcalfe’s Law.

Data and the City

New York has been called ungovernable. No one would dispute that the city is difficult to manage,  but it is not ungovernable.

Take the issue of transportation, for example. New York’s metropolitan region of 20 million people is served by 20 rail lines moving about 150 million riders each year. The regional rail network converges on two stations in Manhattan — Penn and Grand Central. Add to that daily subway, car, bus and bike trips into Manhattan and you’ve got a situation that has spawned a lot of neologisms, the politest of which is probably “gridlock”. Moving millions of people in and out of Manhattan each day is a big problem to be sure, but not impossible. The problem has to be broken up into smaller pieces first and then quantified.

Charlie Komanoff  is trying to do just that. Komanoff is a transportation and energy consultant who is adding up the costs of travel into and out of New York City. He has come close to achieving that goal with the Balanced Transportation Analyzer, a massive 4.5 MB spreadsheet that will allow city planners to model the cost-time impacts of various transportation policies. The most telling finding of this three-year study is the high cost of motor vehicle traffic in New York. Komanoff figures that each car admitted to Manhattan’s central business district (the area from 60th st. to the Battery) during the morning rush generates 3.66 hours of associated delays, or about $145 worth of our time.

Komanoff is the subject of a fascinating article in the June issue of Wired, by Felix Salmon. He is also the organizing force behind Transportation Alternatives, an influential bicycle and pedestrian advocacy group based in New York.