Friday 14 January 2011

Once upon a Blue Mars..

About 0.00001%of this blog has covered Blue Mars, and the reasons are fairly obvious... 40% of my readers are Mac owners while 0% of Blue Mars users are Mac owners (well...maybe not quite accurate as Parallels etc could be used....) ..so my feeling has been that any grid who can disregard the Mac OS, can be disregarded as a serious contender in VWs.

I have been fairly harsh and outspoken re. Blue Mars (since June 09), especially when they had to employ someone to blog for them as no-one else was interested. It seemed like a stepford wives type of grid, no mess and dirt, and I am a firm believer in mistakes and amateurs....as I said back in October "The best content is supplied by the amateur, the worst by Committee."

It seems they are now gonna chase the mobile users, like the Boys, without realising that even a 15 inch screen makes virtual life hell. I know, I spent 3 years on a 15 inch screen. Ask me if I want to use a 4 inch screen.... I'd welcome that like a tax demand. (Why does filling out your tax form seem like passing a degree exam? I'm convinced my degree course was easier.)

Now, I do, in spite of all my negative words, believe that the more grids the better, the more niche groups that get catered for the better... but the demise of Blue Mars simply proves that an elitist attitude to content creation is not gonna attract masses of content creators ...you don't have to be a research scientist to work that out.

Now...chasing the Myth of a Million Users ... I have spoken about this before....
...... You know when you are in the supermarket and the other queue seems to be moving faster than yours...and so you switch queues only to find that was a mistake...?? Well, I think SL and Blue Mars chasing mobile/Facebook/BlueStupidVille is the same mistake... by the time they get there it will be a Myspace/Friends Reunited/Avatars United fiasco.

We will see.

I found Grace's recent post about FaceBook and Twitter very interesting ...well worth a read...here. and there is no doubt in my mind that increased communication is a positive thing ...42 groups with chat that doesn't work is not much of an improvement on 20... still... that might get fixed.

So, I wish all Blue Mars workers/users good luck, but you should have got us Mac people onboard. It wouldn't have helped much, but I might have been a bit more sympathetic.

:))

4 comments:

  1. As I have said before, I learned a deep and fundamental truth about the net many years ago: You Lag, You Lose.

    Facebook wasn't trying to imitate anyone (although they did borrow a lot of ideas from MySpace). Amazon wasn't imitating; iTunes didn't.

    The old entertainment business model of "If X has a hit song, let's write one like it and ride that train" doesn't work on the net because of the open channels of distribution and creation. Guerilla/street art will always move faster than Committee/Org art.

    By the time some Committee approves a truncated and butchered version of a concept originally presented to them, it has already lost in the marketplace. Welcome to the new media/information revolution :D

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  2. yes - that was my first impression and it's true today. BM is sterile. The first time I was there I was in a gorgeous sim - great graphics - but there was never anyone there. And then the populated the rezz plaza with Bots!!

    Nur Kitty

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  3. Blue Mars is dead. Lesson learned? Don't build a world with a business model that is dependent on making your content creators pay. Don't build in a laggy experience. Right now I'm worried that SL's 2.X viewers are going to lock out the peeps in "the cheap seats." that is to say, those of us with low-end lap tops. there's a lot of us out here. 2.6 failed for me. froze to the point of uselessness.

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  4. @ Wizzy, yes, I find I'm getting a better fps in Iwz, and hopefully they will be a bit careful with the cheaper seats. The web based browser will put a lot of strain on the ISP and broadband capacity, so I think its no real solution.
    Phones and notebooks surely wont cope....I really can't see it happening...so much data on out-dated crap networks, it seems impossible.

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