Tips for Corporate Builds in Second Life

Chris from One-to-One Interactive writes in with a new report that compares corporate professionally-done (and often committee-approved) builds in Second Life with player-made stuff. Even if you think Second Life is sooo 2007 but are interested in interaction design in general, take a look. Among other findings, there's this gem about how the biggest sim is not always the most popular, and for the reasons that are familiar to architects and urban planners but not necessarily to software designers [emphasis mine]:

"Corporate builds are sprawling virtual landscapes that distribute users throughout multiple locations of activity. Visitors to corporate builds were likely to interact with the content alone or with one or two friends. In contrast, user builds focus visitor activity into a few key areas. As a percent of overall land, user-created builds devote 40% less space to dedicated social areas, such as clubs and dance floors, than corporate builds. The limited social space in user-created builds encourages residents to collect into more densely populated and socially active areas, discouraging resident sprawl. Visitors to user-generated builds were more likely to be in groups of 10, 20, or even more. Second Life is ultimately a social world; social interaction is the primary activity among its users, so spreading users apart amongst well-produced buildings, spaces, and activities is self-defeating."

Rotary Phone Dial Interface for iPhone

- objectgraph via idealist

Make Spoof Pages With A Line of Code

Web spoofs made easy! Open up any page, then copy the line of code below in the browser's address field. This makes the page "editable" locally so you can modify its content like you would in a text editor.

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Besides its obvious entertainment value, this little experiment shows how easy web editing and publishing should really be.

-- around the web, but specifically from BlogStorm

Last-Frame Interaction in Online Video from Involver

I once wrote about how one possible way to make money off YouTube was to add some call-to-action interaction to the last frame of the clip; this space is currently occupied by the promos for related videos. A new start-up called Involver has brought this model to life:

"Involver’s unique vision is to provide more than just “video with a buy button”, creating a tool for marketers that does more than deliver millions of impressions with no way to capture the audience. The platform uses a rich set of video plug-ins to allow the campaign owner to capture email, offer quizes or surveys, even take orders or donations - all within the framework of the video, never forcing the viewer to browse to a new Web page." (-- StageTwo).

You can post Involver-powered videos to a whole bunch of social networking sites, although not to YouTube.
-- thanks, Jim

Can Social Networks Make Money?

The cover story in this month's MIT Tech Review: "It's a model that stirs memories of the first Internet bubble: build the user base and hope the money comes--from an IPO, a buyout, or ads. At this point, KickApps does not reveal revenue figures, or even what kind of a cut it is taking from the ads. That, too, brings back memories: staying mum about revenue was always a sign that there wasn't much to talk about."

"The problems with social-network advertising revolve around three main issues: attention, privacy, and content."

Ads in Google Docs?

There's this article (blog post?) in Time about how iPhone apps won't be free and it starts with:

"It's probably been a while since you bought new software. That's because so many tech firms — buoyed by ads placed in Web-based applications like the Google Docs word processor and the thousands of apps on Facebook — can now afford to give their programs away for free."

Are there really ads in Google Docs?

Earlier:
Contextual Advertising in PDF
Contextual Advertising in Word Documents
Advertising on CV
ATM Advertising

Create Email Newsletters with Mad Mimi

Cool tool alert: Mad Mimi, a rare example of the Web 2.0 techno-goodness put to productive use, is a recently launched tool for creating nicely looking email newsletters by dragging and dropping different design elements around the page. Subscription boxes for your site and usage stats are included. Sending to the first 100 subscribers is free. Not sure yet how well it handles multipart (HTML and text-only) messages, but I'll report back after giving it a more thorough test drive. For similarly easy-made custom landing pages, I recommend Marketo.

Bookmarkable Banners with Reminders from Spongecell

Bookmarkable advertising is a pet topic of mine and I'm glad to point to the most recent of the very few examples of banners ads whose shelf life is extended beyond a single impression.

Spongecell, a company that makes online calendars with social features, is launching Spongecell Ads. These are online display ads with widget-like functionality that allow users to share the contents of the ad with their friends and also, importantly, set a reminder for yourself.

The example above is an ad for what looks like a music event, but you can see how this format can work with any date-based information: promotions, coupons with expiration date, sales and so on. To quote from an email from Spongecell, "We’re adding our Add to Life technology to a standard IAB advertisement to make it easy for a consumer to easily move relevant content from an advertisement into the tools they use every day - Calendar, Social Network, Mobile device or home page - think of it as a bookmark for an online campaign."

Semantic Match Ties Ads To Page Meaning

Keyword matching is so last decade: "Through Peer39's proprietary SemanticMatch technology the most relevant ads are displayed in the most appropriate and productive content, assuring higher ROI. Based on natural language processing and machine learning, Peer39's patented algorithms understand page meaning and sentiment, and deliver the most relevant and effective brand safe online advertising." (site, press release)

Blogbite of the Week

"Anyone can solve a user-related problem with a few lines of code, but that doesn’t automatically make you the better company in this world of rent, bills, overheads and shareholders; especially when you’re not actually generating revenue."

A reader comment under Techcrunch post about Anyvite making a better product than eVite.