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.

Identity and the Web

The issue of identity verification has been around as long as there has been an Internet. Anonymity and global reach are two things that helped the net become the predominant medium of communication on this planet. Anonymity provides the freedom to fail and the freedom to say stupid stuff. Anonymity also gives license to all manner of nefarious activity and network abuse.

According to a Symantec study published last year, 90 percent of all email is now spam. And a 2009 Canadian study found that the cost of computer security intrusions nearly doubled from 2008 to 2009.

Anonymity is an anathema to the transactional web. In order for the internet to continue to be a viable communication medium and platform for business transactions, there must be a simple and sound method to verify identity across the web. This is not a new idea, but it’s been in the news a lot recently with Facebook’s recent retreat from using user data to create the social graph.

At issue are two aspects of identity: commercial identity and personal identity.  Commercial identity is a requirement of any transaction — proof that you are who you say you are. This verification of commercial identity is the core service that credit card companies have provided for the last 50 years. Personal identity is about who we think we are. Personal identity is a construct of self that is created from our network of friends and acquaintances,  our likes and dislikes and the way we spend our time.

In the last few years, the concept of personal identity has expanded into social media. As people share more of themselves online, and as the network becomes better at logging every mouse click, text message, purchase and comment generated by an individual, a broader construct of personal identity has emerged. That is the perceived value of social networks like Facebook: they own vast piles of behavioral information about each individual subscriber. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of an “open graph” at the F8 developers’ conference in San Francisco last month was a logical step forward to link Facebook data with members’ activity on the wider web.

What Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t count on was that users might want to control the construction of their own identities and that the web community as a whole might prefer that the central repository of personal identification data were non-proprietary. Zuckerberg clearly did not read Kim Cameron’s Seven Laws of Identity, or take into account Microsoft’s failed Hailstorm experiment.

Yet the need for verifiable identity persists.  Symantec’s recent acquisition of Verisign’s authentication business looks to do for business what Zuckerberg proposed to do for consumers. Google has also resurrected the old Unix finger command for Gmail users (see Webfinger).

A host of other groups are working on the same problem. The just concluded tenth annual Internet Identity Workshop brought together some of the usual suspects in Mountain View, California, without arriving at a solution.

Whatever system of identity verification is ultimately adopted for the web, it must — as Cameron’s 7 Laws  decree — put users firmly in control and operate as a metasystem, drawing from many different identity repositories and contexts.

Gadget Fetish

Couldn’t resist this fuzzy clip from 1981 where ur-techno musicians Kraftwerk demonstrate man-machine love.

IE Fades as Chrome Surges

The window through which people view the web is changing. Between March and April, usage of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer slipped below 60 percent, according to ArsTechnica. That’s a huge change from just a few years ago when the various versions of Internet Explorer accounted for over 90 percent of the browsers used on the net.

Mozilla’s Firefox holds just under 25 percent of the browser share and Google’s Chrome browser claims almost 7 percent of the viewing public. Google’s open-source net-viewing tool is faster than the competition and their latest release parses web pages faster still.

Although some analysts predict that the internet will be accessed primarily from mobile devices in just a few year’s time, actual mobile web usage accounts for  less than 2 percent of US web content consumption. According to a Pew Internet study, about one-third of Americans accessed the net with a mobile device in 2009. Counting mobile access is also tricky, since many mobile devices strip or otherwise obscure their user agent strings.

Browser preferences also vary greatly by venue. Sites about web tech can usually count on a majority of users viewing with Firefox; sites about the arts may see a marked preference for Safari. On this site 45 percent of users log in with Internet Explorer while 41 percent use Firefox and 14 percent prefer Safari.