Category: The Internet

Virtual marketers have second thoughts about Second Life – Los Angeles Times

At http://www.secondlife.com — where the cost is $6 a month for premium citizenship — shopping, at least for real-world products, isn’t a main activity. Four years after Second Life debuted, some marketers are second-guessing the money and time they’ve put into it.

“There’s not a compelling reason to stay,” said Brian McGuinness, vice president of Aloft, a brand of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. that is closing its Second Life shop and donating its virtual land to the nonprofit social-networking group TakingITGlobal.

For some advertisers, the problem is that Second Life is a fantasyland, and the representations of the people who play in it don’t have human needs. Food and drink aren’t necessary, teleporting is the easiest way to get around and clothing is optional. In fact, the human form itself is optional.

Their interests seem to tend toward the risque. Ian Schafer, chief executive of online marketing firm Deep Focus, which advises clients about entering virtual worlds, said he recently toured Second Life. He started at the Aloft hotel and found it empty. He moved on to casinos, brothels and strip clubs, and they were packed. Schafer said he found in his research that “one of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia.”

Another problem for some is that Second Life doesn’t have enough active residents.

On its website, Second Life says the number of total residents is more than 8 million. But that counts people who signed in once and never returned, as well as multiple avatars for individual residents. Even at peak times, only about 30,000 to 40,000 users are logged on, said Brian Haven, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Others just want to access a larger community than Second Life offers. Between May and June, the population of active avatars declined 2.5%, and the volume of U.S. money exchanged within the world fell from a high of $7.3 million in March to $6.8 million in June.

duh

John Battelles Searchblog: Just Asking…

Ive found myself more and more wary of doing things that Id like to do with Google applications simply out of some primal, lizard brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source. Its not that I dont trust Google, its not that I dont like the applications, its that Im worried they might fall to some ill use, out of the control of the current brand as Ive come to understand it today. Or perhaps its deeper than that – I simply cant let too much of my online life run through any one control point, regardless of who it is.

John Battelle wonders the same thing I wondered before, but of course, he writes it better and backs up his facts (damn journalists).

Andrew Keen thinks the user-created-internet is full of crap. A bunch of self-important blowhards talking to no one. I am one of them, and I think he is right. Will I give up this blog to let the “real” journalists restore order, doubtful. I have grown tired of the web 2.0 hype though and I’m glad to see someone skewering the insanity of this stuff. Even if you disagree with him, it is worth getting the other side of the story from time to time.

Andrew Keen’s blog at ZDNet

Yahoo Pipes is a cute and visual way to mix webservices and RSS feeds to produce something powerfully easily. Sort of a OS X Automator approach to webservices. Very fun.  I’d been wanting to make a composite feed of my various blogs, and I was looking at doing it in php. Possible, but not a ton of fun. I did it in Pipes in seconds.

Here is that feed and here is the pipe.

And here is a fawning article from O’Reilly about it.

After my post on Thursday about Interland (which was 24 hours after first contacting Interland support and more than 48 hours after Interland switched my mail server without warning and broke my e-mail), I received a message from Interland (web.com)’s SVP for corporate communications! So, supposedly, contacting web.com’s customer support gets you response times of a week, but posting on your blog that web.com sucks gets you a response from senior management within 24 hours. Wow, the power of the internet.

Here is what he said:
I noticed your blog post this morning and wanted to pass along my apologies for your troubles. I have spoken with customer service and looked into your account. It seems like there were a few email configuration changes that were updated and needed to be executed on your end as well. In any case, I am having our best rep call you to walk you through the process.

Again, I want to apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. Please feel free to contact me any time if you have any questions or comments. We treat these cases very seriously and I want to assure you I’m here to make things right again.

This is corporate marketing at it’s best, right? This is also what a loyal customer would want to hear, right?

There was a slight problem, and I had logged it in the original support item as well. Here was my response to his message:
Peter, I have been a customer of interland and now web.com for 6+ years. I remained a customer even though I am paying substantially more for your hosting than other hosting providers charge for significantly more capabilities. On SEVERAL occaisons over the years, you have made modifications or broken my site without prior warning. Each time I have complained and each time I have been promised that it would not happen again.

This most recent change is absolutely horrific. I have set up about 300 mail rules over the years to weed out spam on my main account. When you switched systems, you broke all of these rules so that the ones filtering mail INTO my box now essentially DELETE it. I have gone from getting around 50-75 valid e-mails a day to getting 6-10 (actually, it turned out to be around 2-3). I would go through and rewrite all my 300 rules, but your new ajax-ish web mail interface won’t let me bulk edit and it is so impossibly slow that it would take me HOURS TO FIX YOUR SCREWUPS. (I wasn’t exaggerating, I had tried. It was taking me over a minute to delete a single mail rule on a broadband connection on a fast machine. I had to delete 300)

All this and you recently raised my rates $10/month.

I switched to your service because I thought that it would be reliable and bulletproof. I am sorely dissapointed.

So, meanwhile, I never got that call that web.com promised from their “best rep”. This morning, I checked my support ticket and saw that it was closed. The tech who closed it noted that I had to change the addresses for my pop and smtp. Of course, if I hadn’t logged into their support system and checked that myself I wouldn’t have known. After following their instructions , they are still deleting 99% of my mail, and downloading my mail still doesn’t work.

So, I’m switching all my domains to dreamhost. I had planned on keeping my main unitcircle.com domain on interland, but this utter stupidity and lack of respect for one of their long-term customers is the last straw. I’ll have to figure out how to switch the catalog from asp to php, but that will be fun and I’d been meaning to get off windows hosting anyhow.

You cannot trust interland or web.com with anything remotely important, and they are more expensive than their competition if you are doing anything not-critical. Seriously, .Mac is cheaper than those losers.

And interland, if you want to respond to me again, I’d love to hear from you, but don’t try to send me an e-mail for a couple of days, because if it ends up on your servers, I’ll probably never see it.

Assume any e-mail sent to me over the last 3 days was not received unless it was sent to me at Adobe or at my gmail account.

Hopefully the situation should be resolved as the DNS propogates around the web, by monday, everything should be back to normal.

P.S. Interland (web.com) Sucks.

they just switched my mail server (without warning) and now I am no longer receiving any e-mail. They have the absolute worst customer service. AVOID AVOID AVOID