So in the news today, Second Life - the MMORPG (if you actually want to call it a role playing game) - got $11 million in funding from Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay) and Mitch Kapor (Lotus, OSAF, Mozilla). Now, some people call that great news, others are more sceptical about it. I must admit I’m on sceptical side for a few reasons.

I tried Second Life for a while and I’m sorry to say I didn’t like it that much. Not that it’s not well executed, because it is - particularly the avatar creation tools are amazing. It’s just that something seems weird when people spend their time in front of the computer, controlling an animated avatar that talks to other avatars (themselves controlled by other people) and builds stuff for others to spend (real money) on.

Now, there’s obviously a good side to this: second life does have an amazing scripting tool that’s getting people into developing things (even if for use in the Second Life environment) by themselves - and admitedly anything that stimulates development and creativity is a great thing. Is that worth the $11 million dollars? Maybe not. Is the community worth it? Maybe it is. I guess it was the novelty and the world of possibilities when people are building a whole Second Economy. Lets see how they play the game.

Further reading: Scoble considers Second Life an OS, Dave Winer asks if Microsoft will port windows to run inside it. Fun ensues.

Every so often someone says something so terribly right I can’t step away from talking about it. Caterina (of Flickr fame) on the creation of companies in the valley:

There’s too much going on. Every night there’s a Mashup get together, or a TechCrunch party, or it’s Tag Tuesday, or SuperHappyDevHouse or SXSW or this conference or that conference. And this stuff is fun. It’s a real community. But all of these things are great by themselves, but terrible in combination. I see some entrepreneurs in photos from *every single event*. Who’s talking to the users, writing the code, tweaking and retweaking the UI? It ain’t the Chief Party Officer.

I think this is going to be the first time I’m swearing in a blog post, but shit yes. You are so awefully right. Maybe I don’t agree completely with it being a bad time to start a company - because it’s always time for the next great idea -, but I’m buying you the drinks on my next visit to the valley (you know, for the next hip party).

Fred Wilson over at A VC wrote some thoughts about how online content publishing is converging into a unified display based on single-column layouts because it is simply more efficient (he compares it to the simple search field at Google). He goes on to say people who’ve been designing magazines and newspapers must feel this is ugly and boring.

On online content readability:

For someone with a background that only loosely touches formal design, I don’t consider text-only displaying of articles boring or ugly. I do, however, have great concerns about how only a few developers (of RSS readers) seem to care about text readability in their (online and/or offline) applications. If we are, in fact, consuming more and more online published content, we need our tools to raise the bar in helping us doing so effectively.

Print design has a science behind it, and so does online typography. Page readability is a function of discrete parameters which can be thought out and planned in advance. Lack of plan means a poor experience - and this is the case with pretty much all online news-readers (some particularly excel at sucking - pun intended).

What we need are better tools.

Bloggers who care about their readership also care about how to better deliver their content and act accordingly by designing and writing their weblogs in such a way that readability is assured. Well, some do. But this effort doesn’t need to reside only on the publisher side - if we’re seeing a unification in the medium (and are shifting from browser to newsreader to save us time in keeping up with the information we care about) we need the tools to evolve with us as well.

Better content publishing will depend on better ways to publish and better ways for the audience to consume the generated data. Not to mention ways to interact with that data - particularly in the case of blogs, by commenting and trackbacking -, but that’s a whole new blog post in itself.

Game designers are faced with a challenge - they need to get rid of HUDs in their games for several reasons: it goes against immersive gameplay, damages some HDTV screens through burn-in, and casual players need a simplified interface to feel at ease with playing a game. So if the HUD must go, what can be done?

Is there really enough information that needs to be 100% of the time in front of the player? And shifting planes to web applications, is there information in your app that needs to be visible at all times? How long do you think people will be looking at it instead of the rest of the functionality? In fact, do you even need a dashboard at all?

These are the questions you need to be asking yourself to stand out from the croud and help your user actually use your application. If you’re providing a service through your app, will persistant information be helpful or will it just clutter up the screen? Frequently, web applications tell us things we already know, or that are just not relevant to the task we’re trying to accomplish. If we can trim those situations down and decrease the complexity of the user interface, you’ll be game. Literally.

Article notes: If you want to read more about the HUD dillema, read the Gamasutra feature “Off with their HUDs“. In the picture, Katamari Damacy, © Namco - arguably the most innovative game out in the last few years and admitedly a recent addiction.