Cartoon of The Day: Easter Tablet

 

 Taken at Bellisseria Fairgrounds. Tablets can be handy, if you know how to use them, If you don't, they can be tricky.

 

By Bixyl Shuftan

 

Trying To Figure Out New Tech

 

If I haven't been writing much lately, there's a reason. Yours truly has been making a tech upgrade. 

 

For years, I had just the old flip phones that came about in the 90s. Then when the company phased them out about a couple years ago, I finally got a smartphone, a simple one. But friends kept telling me I needed to upgrade. So I finally did. I went ahead and got a much better smartphone: a Samsung.

 

Trouble is, the joke about new tech being scary to people over forty, well, there's something to it. It's been something of a struggle trying to get the thing working right, which takes time. Time that cannot be used for writing, or covering events like the last days of the SLB.

But I'll get this figured out. In the meantime, in-depth stories, other than from other reporters and reader submissions, will have to wait.

 

Image credit: PC Mag 

Bixyl Shuftan

Facebook/Meta Quietly Leaving Virtual Worlds Behind

 

Last year, Facebook/Meta was really harping itself as the future of virtual worlds. It was touting it's Horizons as the up and coming brand new virtual landscape that the masses would want to join and experience. This year, they've been quiet about it. CEO and owner Mark Zuckerburg has gone from repeatedly promoting Horizons as the must be-in place online, to having stopped.

 

So what happened? Well, Horizons turned out to be a big money loser. Zuckerburg invested billions in his company's virtual world, only to get very little return for it in comparison. 

 

The number of people signing up was far short than the half million expected, and most didn't stay after their first month. It seems the "lack of realism" on the avatars, notably having no legs, was one of the big reasons. Of it's virtual worlds, only a handful were visited by more than 50, most not visited by anyone but it's creator. And unlike Second Life, which continued to do very well, Facebook/Meta workers didn't enjoy using the place on their free time "because it's riddled with bugs and other quality issues."

For all the money invested, Horizon's returns are small in comparison. It brought in 727 million USD in 2022, 17% less than in 2021. The result has been huge loses, losing nearly 24 BILLION dollars in 2021 and 2022, 13.7 billion in 2022 alone. Considering their overall income was 32.1 billion, the company had been continuing to spend and invest heavily after initial small returns, and was getting even less. So no wonder Facebook/Meta is cutting its losses.

Fortunately for Zuckerberg, technology tends have allowed him to quietly leave virtual reality behind: AI, which in recent months has gotten more attention thanks to programs like Chat GPT. An article on "The Street" stated in an announcement, he announced, "We're creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area. We're starting by pulling together a lot of the teams working on generative AI across the company into one group focused on building delightful experiences around this technology. ... In the short term, we'll focus on building creative and expressive tools. Over the longer term, we'll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways."

So it seems Horizon is being left behind, joining the ranks of the virtual worlds such as There and Blue Mars that had gotten plenty of talk but ended up falling short, while Second Life and to a smaller extent VRChat, continue to flourish.

 

Sources: The Street, Kotaku, PC Gamer

Bixyl Shuftan

Former Xiola Linden Joins Mixed Reality Startup

It's been about two weeks since Xiola Linden departed Linden Lab. According to New World Notes, already she's been hired. She's now at Ubiquity6, a startup tech company focusing on mixed reality.

Xiola told Hamlet Au she saw similarities between Linden Lab and the new startup,  "'Fun, energized, whip-smart, kind, thoughtful, and very diverse. That is something that was so important to me in my previous role, and I did not expect to find that kind of culture anywhere else -- I got lucky to have lightning strike twice in that regard. It's exciting to make new friends who are so enthusiastic about the incredible possibilities and potential of really compelling projects."

Uniquity6 has one product available: display.land , which it calls "a new digital canvas for creativity and shared experiences." How much we'll be hearing from them  in the future, hard to say. But Xiola's presence can only help them.

Source: New World Notes

Bixyl Shuftan

Press Release: Labor Tech Discussion at Virtual Ability

Labor Tech discussion
Hosted by Tom Boellstorff and Winifred Poster
FRIDAY March 16, 8-10am SLT
Sojourner Auditorium, Virtual Ability

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Virtual%20Ability/54/170/23

Join us on Friday, March 16, 8AM SLT for an informal discussion about labor and technology. Some members of an informal group of researchers studying labor and digital technology (for instance: call centers, “sharing economy” things like Uber and AirBnB, uses of social network sites like Facebook and Instagram for earning money) are going to make brief presentations about their research, and we’ll have a couple of brief presentations about some research about labor and disability in Second Life too. There will be plenty of time for open discussion. Please join us!

Hosts:
Tom Boellstorff is an anthropology professor from the University of California at Irvine. He is the author of the book "Coming of Age in Second Life."

With support from the National Science Foundation, Tom and Donna Davis (University of Oregon) are engaged in an SL research project “Virtual Worlds, Disability, and New Cultures of the Embodied Self.” How is the internet changing how people think of themselves as individuals and interact as members of communities? For this project, they focus on the disability experience in virtual worlds  where disabled persons can appear any way they choose and do things they may not be able to do in the physical world.

Since some early human first picked up a stick to use as a cane, people with disabilities have been at the forefront of technology innovation. What can their creative uses of and adaptions to online social interaction teach us? Tom and Donna explore this question by collaborating with disabled persons as they create and interact socially in virtual worlds, and discover how they use different kinds of devices in their homes to experience these online environments.

This research will have implications for improving health care and social support. But it also will use the insights of disabled persons to better understand now new online technologies influence how we think about our bodies, how we think about social interaction, and how we think about the role of the internet in everyday life.

Winifred Poster is a professor in the International & Area Studies / International Affairs Program at Washington University, St. Louis. She is the author of "Invisible Labor: Hidden work in the contemporary world" and "Borders in Service: Enactments of nationhood in transnational call centres."

Her areas of interest are feminist labor theory, digital globalization, and Indian outsourcing.  For the past two decades, she has been following high-tech firms from the US to India, both in earlier waves of computer manufacturing and software, and more recent waves of back-office work and call centers.  Her focus is on the intersection of post-colonial computing with the political economy of service labor.  She's curious how information communication technologies are changing the meaning of work, dispersing it transnationally, incorporating new types of workers, and reshaping identities.

Presented in voice with text transcription.

AOL Instant Messenger To Shut Down

Those of you whom have been around the days of browsing the Internet and the World Wide Web since the beginning will remember America On-Line's AOL Instant Messenger. Also known simply as AIM, it helped pioneer the days of social media, people using the Internet and being online to get in touch and chat with one another instead of simply looking up information and checking email. But like many other pioneers in technology, it became outclassed by later products. It was announced earlier this month by the VP of Communications of Oath, the company created by the merger of AOL and Yahoo, that AOL IM would be shutting down in December 2017 after 20 years of operation.

If you were a 90’s kid, chances are there was a point in time when AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was a huge part of your life. You likely remember the CD, your first screenname, your carefully curated away messages, and how you organized your buddy lists. Right now you might be reminiscing about how you had to compete for time on the home computer in order to chat with friends outside of school. You might also remember how characters throughout pop culture from “You’ve Got Mail” to “Sex and the City” used AIM to help navigate their relationships. In the late 1990’s, the world had never seen anything like it. And it captivated all of us.

AIM tapped into new digital technologies and ignited a cultural shift, but the way in which we communicate with each other has profoundly changed. As a result we’ve made the decision that we will be discontinuing AIM effective December 15, 2017. ... Thank you to all of our AIM users.

The announcement was made on Twitter and Tumbler, two newer messengers that helped displace AIM into irrelevance, and ended by promising to "continue building the next generation of iconic brands" and "provide more products and experiences."

And so, a peice of life on the early Internet is fading away into the history books.

Source: CNN

Bixyl Shuftan