In a “A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community”, Howard Rheingold asks the following question about the future: “will there be an open market, in which newcomers like Apple or Microsoft can become industry leaders?”
I think there is an answer to that question right now in the present. With the emergence of Web 2.0 tools and social networks, the future is now and the future is open source. The leading social network in the U.S., Facebook, just recently produced a SDK (software development kit) package and opened up their software to developers around the world. Facebook has made it possible to create applications that can be used as part of their network. Small businesses can now become part of the social network market. Businesses can create applications for the Facebook platform and then sell them to Facebook. They can also retain rights for applications and run advertisements on their application pages. If you would like to learn more about this new facebook feature, watch Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, explain it in detail (Click here). Having a programming background myself, I am interested in trying my hand in developing a few Facebook applications. Who knows, I may even make some money. Which in turn begs the question… who will be the first millionaire in Facebook applications?
Another open source online community has already produced its first millionaire in Anshe Chung. What is truly amazing is that Chung started out in SecondLife with an initial investment of $9.95! For some more information about SecondLife, click on the Anshe Chung link above or watch the online office space that Rheingold set up at http://vlog.rheingold.com/
ELISEBETH CONNOLLY BOYER says
Well there goes an hour and a half of my life down the tubes! I had heard an NPR show on SecondLife this past summer but had forgotten the name of the app then while reading your post decided to check it out. ARGH! It drove me nuts! I really don’t understand how people get sucked into their SecondLife? The NPR show said that people can build houses, get married, have sex, have kids — what are the limits of real vs virtual life? People have actually gotten divorced in real-life to run away with their SecondLife spouces. That is nuts! I’m all for technology, virtual communities and distributed intelligence but when the lines between life life on- and off-line become blurred I begin to question the utility of “the machine”!
HEATHER BETTE HUGHES says
So… where do we think it all goes from here? I don’t think it’s going to stop. Why would I want it to? There is so much momentum built into the human-machine interface already. We don’t complain about grandpa’s pacemaker, the mammogram machine that detected aunt Betsy’s breast cancer, the sonograms that help us have healthy children and the life support machines that we demand for them if they aren’t. What about the aerospace equipment that enables us to explore “where no man has gone before”? It all goes back to fundamental philosophical questions: Who am I and why does it matter? We will talk about issues of identity and i hope about those of control. We have made such rapid technological progress in such a short amount of chronological time- for some it feels shocking, for others more “natural” (Pea, 1993). For those who feel distressed at the thought of breathing water- you are already in the fish bowl, but do you see your self as a fish? What are the implications of our awareness of the world? What is the world we live in and how are we defining our selves in relation to it? After all, according to Barbara Glenn, chief of animal biotechnology at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, in a recent article on the future of the food we eat: “Clones are just clones.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/16/AR2006101601337.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16372490/
BEN DONALDSON says
One of my best friends spent the last summer building a corporate island on SecondLife for government meetings, because they thought it would make meetings more fun. Although people get the chance to be the giant 3D dragons or robots they feel like inside, it just distracts people even more from the initial problem (the boring meeting).
And does the idea of moving formal events to a virtual world like SecondLife make progress even harder? I mean that suddenly you’re not face to face when communicating, which according to all Internet conversations leads to much more arguing and immaturity (which might be a good thing for some teams)… I feel like Rheingold just likes the idea of capitalism getting sucked even more into the anarchist laws of the Internet where people like him are the experts.