New York magazine, 2005:

Now that people are breaking up with each other through text messaging, it's only natural that the hottest social-networking program to emerge in recent months is Dodgeball, a free texting service that lets users tell their friends and crushes what bar they're in at any moment so they can meet up. Two recent NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program grads, Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, both 28, launched Dodgeball last spring as an alternative to loud cell-phone calls from bars. When Dodgeball users "check in" at a given locale by sending out a text message, it goes to all their preselected friends, as well as any friends of friends within a ten-block radius. A photo is sent along with the alert-which helps with identifying near strangers. Introductions are made, beer is poured, and then hookups can occur-casually, and in a low-pressure environment, all under the guise of knowing someone in common. It's Friendster, except in real time and in the real world.

(The Friendster comparison proved eerily prescient.)

New York magazine, 2009:

Foursquare is a better Dodgeball, for those who remember the now-defunct social-networking, texting, friend-locating mobile-phone app. The new iteration, rapidly being installed on iPhones across the city, is a fast route to a good night out. Download the app free at playfoursquare.com to track your friends' locations (meaning no more rounds of "Where are you?" texts). It's also a game, with goofy badges awarded to users who check in frequently. And most helpful, members share their ample nightlife experience; according to one enthusiast, the saffron Sazerac at Apotheke is the drink to get.

(Photo by dpstyles)

How fitting, since Second Life, a piece of software which allows users to move "avatars" representing themselves around in a three-dimensional space and decorate themselves and their virtual land, resembles nothing so much as a failed academic experiment.

Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, has raised $19 million in venture capital from a star-studded list of backers, including Benchmark Capital, the backers of eBay; eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus; and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos. But the last infusion came nearly three years ago. The company charges fees on people and companies who own virtual land in Second Life, and also issues a currency, Linden dollars, used to trade goods in-world. Kapor, the company's chairman, told the Financial Times last year that it was "absolutely in the ballpark of profitability."

Second Life may well be on the verge of profitability. But it is firmly headed into irrelevance. It is impossible to imagine another BusinessWeek cover story like the one it garnered in 2006. Reuters closed its Second Life bureau last year. The former bureau chief, Adam Pasick, told PBS's Mark Glaser that there was no longer a there there:

We were primarily interested in Second Life as a business/commerce/finance phenomenon, covering it like we would any small but fast-growing economy in the real world. The bureau is now closed. Essentially the story we were there to cover has moved on.

His reporter, Eric Krangel, who now writes for Silicon Alley Insider, was more trenchant:

The very things that most appeal to Second Life's hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let's not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life). As part of walking my 'beat,' I'd get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I'd right-click the dancefloor to send my avatar gyrating as I sat at home at my computer. It was about as fun as watching paint dry.

What's left for Second Life? Community meetings, underattended cultural events, and education. CNN uses its Second Life "island" to hold meetings with volunteer reporters. WGBH threw a virtual concert with a grand total of 70 attendees. And the Modern Language Association, that bastion of English-department wonkery, is pursuing the idea of using it to hold meetings.

Imagine a dry academic conference enlivened with a few space-alien avatars. Deans with mohawks and tight leather pants! Only compared to the life of a university professor might Second Life actually seem exciting. We look forward to the news that Linden Lab has sold itself to an academic consortium. It's where the virtual world belongs.

Well, eight months after it first started making headlines we finally managed to score an invite to the Zivity beta site, and now we can tell you: not very much.

After all the hype it's received, we expected ... well, something we hadn't seen before, or at least something pretty special. You know, something slightly more than just an opportunity to set up a profile page and look at some pictures of naked chicks female beauty.

Granted, Zivity has entered the market at more than a bit of disadvantage. With megaporn site (excuse us, modern pinup showcase) SuicideGirls setting a certain standard for adult communities online, it can be pretty hard for any new kid on the block to compete. Still, given that Zivity is clearly aware of SG (Missy Suicide is one of their photographers), you'd think they'd at least try to have a site that's more impressive.

No such luck, though: aside from the photos and their totally original voting system, there's not much there there Does anyone really need yet another website where they can set up yet another profile? Sure, the pictures are pretty hot (if a bit tame) ... but why do you have to have one more profile to keep track of just to look at them?

Sample model page

Sample Photo Set

Photo Upload Page (note: no nudity for nonmodels!)

To be fair, Zivity is in beta, so maybe they have some other features in the works that will be in place before their public launch. If not ... well, we sure hope at least a chunk of that $7 million is winding up in their models' pockets. We hate to see good money going to waste.

· Zivity

* * * * *

Previously: Zivity's Big Score: Good Money After Bad?, Porn 2.0: Haven't We Been Here Before?, The New Porn.com: When Bad Things Happen To Good Domains

• Disney acquires Club Penguin for $700 million. Actually, it was half that. The other $350 million is dependent on meeting earnings goals by 2009.
• Intel acquires Havok for $110 million. Second Life may use the Havok physics engine, but its engines are most commonly used in videogames, not virtual worlds.
• Double Fusion raises $26 million; Double Fusion Japan secures undisclosed capital investment. Double Fusion is an in-game advertising firm. It no doubt is inherently interested in product placement and ad sales in virtual worlds, but its in-game ad engine is widely marketed to console and PC videogame publishers. Again, counted properly, this is a videogame investment.
• Emergent Game Technologies snags $12 million in funding. Emergent creates game engines that are used in massively multiplayer online games and casual titles, but its biggest clients are, yes, traditional videogames.
• Greystripe gets $8.9 million from Steamboat Ventures. Greystripe distributes ad-supported mobile games. It's like Double Fusion for cellphones.
• Weblo cons manages to obtain $3.2 million in venture capital from VantagePoint Venture Partners. Really? Have you seen Weblo? It might bill itself as a virtual recreation of the world, but it's little more than glorified MySpace pages.
• GarageGames acquired by IAC for an undisclosed amount. GarageGames is a jack-of-all trades developer, publisher and Torque engine creator for independent games.
Setting the bar extremely low for what qualifies as a virtual world investment — businesses that apparently derive most of their incomes from running or providing support to virtual worlds, and thereby including content creation tools, virtual-world-specific in-game advertising firms, and, grudgingly, Weblo — the grand total investment for the year is shy of $500 million, half of Virtual Worlds Management's claims.

You know what this reeks of? Someone throwing together a little hocus-pocus to stir up some virtual hysteria for an investment conference that you can conveniently learn all about for $1,000 a head. Now that sounds like where the real money in virutal worlds is. (Photo by Christian Kadluba)

Here's what I think happened. I think UPS's network was overwhelmed by Amazon's Potter-volume in some parts of the country and they had no way to deliver all those packages. (The forums for the book at Amazon and Google Blog Search are full of similar complaints from others...warning, spoilers! UPS even offloaded some of the volume to the USPS for "last-mile" delivery.) So, UPS just marked all of those packages they had no intention of delivering as "oops, we missed you, you must have been out".

Let's go back to Amazon's guarantee, which states that the refund "does not apply if delivery is attempted, but no one is available to accept the package". Amazon would be pretty angry with UPS if they cost them a bunch of money due to refunds and, more importantly, the loss of a bunch of customer goodwill...maybe Amazon would switch a larger portion of their formidable package output to another carrier, for instance. So UPS intentionally misclassifying those deliveries covers their ass with Amazon and covers Amazon's ass with regard to the refund.

Harry Potter and the Phantom Delivery [Kottke.org]
(AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)

The article suggests growth in IBM's software business will boost services deals, but then states: "the unanswered question about I.B.M. is, Can the new, higher-margin business grow fast enough to offset the maturing of its traditional services business and rising competition from the Indian outsourcers?" The article does little to answer that question while still proclaiming IBM "has made impressive progress." Even CEO Sam Palmisano is less bullish on IBM's prospects than the Times: He merely says that "there's still a lot to be done." (Chart by NYT)

University College London (UCL) is looking at conducting—in a virtual world—psychological experiments that no longer take place in the real world.

The UCL-led study repeated, in a virtual environment, a classic experiment from the 1960s by social psychologist Stanley Milgram—which found people would administer apparently lethal electric shocks to a stranger at the command of an authority figure—and discovered that participants reacted as though the situation were real.

Virtual world may revive outlawed experiments [News.com]

At least, that's what the "shiny e-brochure" received via email for a "Mr. Nick Edwards," who is apparently the editor here at Valleywag, said. The not-so-critically-acclaimed Web 2.0 Wave in the US and POLAND conference took place at Stanford University just a few short weeks ago.

Did you know that Poland has the largest Skype user base? Or the leading contribution to Wikipedia, per capita? But what does that have to do with Web 2.0? And why did Poland fall victim to the Web 2.0 hype machine, promising that "many companies are breaking new innovative ground in astounding ways." Yawn.

For any who may care, the full propaganda after the jump.

————— Forwarded message —————
From: Clay Bullwinkel <[redacted]>
Date: Nov 12, 2006 6:34 PM
Subject: "Web 2.0 Wave in the U.S. and Poland" - brochure
To: tips@valleywag.com

Mr. Nick Edwards
Editor
ValleyWag

Dear Mr. Edwards,

Below is the shiny e-brochure announcing our event. Press can be admitted free of charge. We hope one or more of you can attend. Please also forward this to fellow journalists, friends, and Web 2.0 business people who may be interested.

Poland is coming on strong with world class Web 2.0. Many companies are breaking new innovative ground in astounding ways. It's about time that they get to know their U.S. counterparts and explore partnerships. Poland has the largest Skype user base, leading per capita contribution to Wikipedia, rampant proliferation of all kinds of media aggregation sites, leading interactive mobile TV technology, and other stunning infrastructure and user interface innovations.

If you or any of your press colleagues will be attending, please let me know with a quick email. I can then make proper arrangements at our registration desk. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Clay

Event Details [U.S.-Polish Trade Council]
The Sweet Very 1.0 Slides [Stanford.edu]
US and Polish Web 2.0 companies swap notes at Stanford [SiliconValleyWatcher]