We have seen the information overload phenomenon through blogs, myspace and Second Life, seemed as everyone had something to say: the word communication was the first matter in the web 2.0 era.

And now what? Have you noticed that the latest famous social web application are converging towards the less and less words communication?

Facebook ,from the beginning, preferred short status-messages instead of long blog posts such as Windows Live Spaces or MySpace, bringing people to an extraordinary amount of information other than textual one.

10 years ago was considered very dangerous to put a personal pic on the web, now there are such a lot of personal pics that we don’t even remeber why we were so scared.

Despite that, we seem to have always less and less time to write and to read: blogs are dying, Facebook is becoming a waste of time and so Twitter, the microblogging social-network becomes better, even quicker.

The web as we knew it “2.0″ is just changed and is something very different from what we remember, but the information exchange hasn’t stopped yet, news comes on Twitter before than on TV but it’s increasingly some kind of neutral report than a personal opinion’s space as we knew from blogs, some part of the information through the web is dying but hey.. no surprise: it’s just Internet.

Pubblico di seguito il documento che tratta l’analisi del sito www.legnano.org, scritto per il corso di Comunicazione Tecnica, presso l’Università Degli Studi di Milano.

Questo sito rappresenta un chiaro esempio di come alcune istituzioni tendono ad utilizzare tecnologie obsolete legate al web di passata generazione (web 1.0), trascurando di conseguenza alcuni importanti punti legati agli aspetti di accessibilità e usabilità.

analisi-di-accessibilita-e-spoglio-lessicale-www.legnano.org

In these days we are reading news about Gates goodbye to Microsoft and new hopes for  new CEO Steve Ballmer : to resist in competition with Google in the web 2.0 era ; But Microsoft seems it’is fighting against this new era, going on with the old-style business that allowed them to be the best of some years ago.

But now times are changed, the proprietary-software lives a pure devaluation era: Open Source done some work, Google done the rest; the point of balance in the free-service jungle restricts competitors in a battle to provide something that is really useful to the end-user, and nowadays it’s not easy.

New corporations and young students created a new market: Google, yahoo, Linden Labs, mySpace, YouTube and the the old’n'rich corporates now have to adapt. So some companies like Adobe launched Photoshop Express, other like Microsoft tried to resolve new problems with old methods: Windows Live Spaces .

It’s strange how Microsoft seems to keep high prices for Office package while OpenOffice.org is offering for free the same product with a similar quality, and it’s much stranger now that Google launched Docs: a word processing, spreadsheet and presentation platform, allowing real-time collaboration on the same document, so  the acquisition of Yahoo cannot be a solution.

Last week i spent an entire day in Trento (Italy): we had to set up two real-life lab for two schools* using Second Life for educational purposes. The bright, new idea is to connect these two schools together in a virtual environment to experiment new ways of doing e-learning, Second Life (teen grid) in fact may help with the use of 3d scripted-dynamical objects that may stimulate students creativity increasing their learning orientation, organizing them in groups with determined tasks and make interact them with other groups.

Now my impressions : Students seems really fascinated with computer graphics, colors and shapes, they already play video-games so they haven’t got too many troubles with the avatar command keys, despite that some technical aspects of Second Life must be well considered, first of all real-life/second-life converged organization: the virtual lab based on a grid SIM must be settled up with varius operative controls such as no flying permissions; the building/scripting realization is influent too, if you create a heavy virtual lab with thousand of primitives the server will slow down as your SL client, and the most important problem of a similar event is to avoid mess at all costs. In real-life if it’s a group of SL clients using the same internet connection, their maximum bandwidth should be limitated to avoid lag, and watch out on windows-based SL viewers cause the Voice System requires administrative permission, so keep the administrator in touch. These are my suggestions about some technical aspects of real-life/second-life event management based on my last experience, beyond this the experiment with two schools worked fine, students interacted with virtual reality and with their other school mates, i look forward to see new developments about this project promoted by two innovative teachers of these schools.

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*Liceo Russell di Cles

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Today at 9pm CET Lancia Automobiles will makes its appearance in Second Life with the Lancia Village, an isle based on 4 sims. There is a showroom with the well-replicated Lancia models, the Lancia cafè, a disco and a conference room. That event confirms the innovating marketing trend of Lancia about web advertisment.

slurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Lancia%20Village%203/130/131/37

“Build a virtual apartment and put it on your website. Work with friends to make a huge MMORPG. Share your puzzle game with friends. We have a vision: to let you build anything, and play everything, from anywhere. Eventually, anyway. We have to finish first.”

www.metaplace.com

Metaplace it’s an open platform that allows you to create your own virutal world on yourwebsite with no needs of other programs installation. The registration and the creation of the metaplace is kinda similar to the blogs one, choose a style, profiles characters etc.. It will be interesting to see how this tool will be used.. and if it allows interaction with varius web contents.

I would like to post a quote, i am glad to hear that thought from an italian teacher.

No new things for all the rest of the world but i appreciate that not all italians can’t understand virtual worlds potenialities

“Second Life non deve essere vista come una replica del mondo reale ma come uno stupendo laboratorio d’impresa, un brodo di coltura per le imprese più piccole. Con relativamente pochi dollari si possono infatti mettere in piedi dei prototpi di micro imprese . Non a caso Second Life è frequentato sopratutto da aziende e professionisti, non certo ragazzini. Second Life è stata inoltre studiata in numerose università in quante interessante modello virtuale di interazione umana: le possibilità di interazione tra i partecipanti offerte dal sistema sono infatti potenzialmente infinite”

Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffè – Docente All’Università Bocconi di Milano e coordinatore del Master in Strategia Aziendale

english translation:

“People don’t have to consider Second Life just as a real world replica, but as an amazing corporate’s lab, a broth culture for small enterprises. With a small amount of money it’s possible to create a micro-corporate’s prototype. Its for that reason that Second Life is mostly populated by Corporates and professionists, not kids at all. Second Life has been studied in several universities too, as an interesting virtual model for human interaction: these possibilities offered by the system, in fact are unlimited”

Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffè – Teacher at Bocconi University in Milan and  Business Strategy’s Master Coordinator

keep developing

The first websites that understood that the new bright idea was to offer free services to people in order to let them create communities (and to earn money with marketing2.0 ads etc..) now are rich and happy corporates like youtube, facebook and myspace: all of them offered a user-friendly interface and hosting space on their servers to interact with other people, or better to create a social side of the web.

From that discovery to nowadays everyone else tried to emulate the social network phenomenon working for free on websites and ideas that might have led to the new social network referent ;

Let’s focus on a case : SecondLife and virtual worlds communities

In SL, recently, we had the same phenomenon, in fact a lot of corporates and investors entered in the virtual world offering a large amount of free services over thousands of SIMS; so we have both real pleaces reproductions and both fantastic seasides and beaches.

But the aim remain the same : attract people to your land and let them create a community; The problem is that the population of Second Life is not so high to fill all these places and so the 90% of Secondlife SIMS are empty.

We are watching a mere free services devaluation, in which every land owner is running up to create a community around its land, thinking about all the money he could do with ads; and from the other side there is the SL population rejecting the corporate’s lucrative presence in their virtual world; that’s the reason why so much medias said SecondLife is a deserted place with a lot of advertise and no population.

So the real question is “What’s next?” what will come after the free services era, i mean in secondlife and generally in the web.

Now that we are so full of free web services that they fall in devaluation, maybe its the time to change our strategy.. whats the new bright idea?

see ya in 2008 !