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metaplace - Now That Didn't Last Long
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Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Well, anyone who signed up for metaplace and wondered what exactly it had to offer anyone that made it worth the effort will not be surprised to hear that:
Proof that virtual worlds, just like the real one, will, sooner or later, come to an end. It's just that in the case of Metaplace it was very much sooner.
For the few that did think it was a good idea, commiserations. With Forterra on its way out too, you'll just have to move back to that other complete waste of time, Second LIfe. Which assumes you had a life of your own in the first place ;)
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metaplace.com is closing on january 1, 2010
Today we have unfortunate news to share with the Metaplace community. We will be closing down our service on January 1, 2010 at 11:59pm Pacific. The official announcement is here and copied below, and you can read a FAQ guide here. We will be having a goodbye celebration party on January 1st at 12:00noon Pacific Time.
Over the last several years, we here at Metaplace Inc. have been working very hard to create an open platform allowing anyone to come to a website and create a virtual world of their own.
Unfortunately, over the last few months it has become apparent that Metaplace as a consumer UGC service is not gaining enough traction to be a viable product, requiring a strategic shift for our company.
We’re sorry to announce today that Metaplace.com will be closing to the public at 11:59pm on January 1st, 2010.
This is a bittersweet moment for us. Metaplace Inc the company will be continuing on – in fact, we have big plans – but what you the users have known as Metaplace will be going away. We are also losing some friends and colleagues here as part of this strategic shift.
We’d rather dwell on the good than the sad. You, the users, have done amazing work here, and we want to celebrate it. We may not have managed to reach our goals with Metaplace.com and Metaplace Central, but we still had a lot of fun, watched creativity flower, visited amazing places, and made a lot of friends. We’ve had amazing guest speakers, more parties than we can count, live concerts, movie premieres and art shows; we’ve seen you make adventures and schools and churches and games and countless other sorts of worlds that would otherwise never have been created.
In that spirit, we want to treat these next two weeks more as a celebration of the good times. We invite you all to come back to see all of the amazing worlds that you have made. Registration will remain open, so you can show off to your friends. Remote embeds will remain active until the last day as well.
We’ll be turning off billing immediately, and refunding everyone for all purchases in the month of December as well as subscription payments that apply to December and future months. This month is on us. We are suspending regular customer service, but the support site will remain open for now in case there are any critical billing issues.
We know many of you have done work here that you would like to preserve. Please do use this time to capture screenshots, data, scripts, movies, and assets. We have a FAQ that explains how to retrieve assets from the service.
When other worlds have reached a sunset point, people have lost touch with each other. We’ve made a lot of friends here and we’re sure that you have too, so we don’t want that to happen. We have created a forum site athttp://www.metaplaceveterans.com that will be operational soon, so that you can all keep in touch with one another.
Finally: we want to treat the 1st of January as a celebration, rather than a sad moment. Please join us on that day for a party, starting at noon Pacific time. If Metaplace.com has to go, we want to go out with style, with joy, and with the same sense of fun that we have always had. Let’s celebrate the journey, not the ending. There will be meeps – count on it.
We’re sure you have many questions about all of this – and there’s a detailed FAQ that we hope answers them. Click here to read it.
In the meantime, we want to thank you all for your support, your effort, your creativity, and your loyalty. We know that many of you will be disappointed by this outcome. We are too. We are embarking on a new and exciting direction, and it feels strange not to have you all along for the ride.
It has been a privilege to have had you here with us on this great adventure, and we hope that this community – this wonderful, engaged, passionate, friendly community – lives on and on.
We’ll miss you -- and we hope to see you again.
Metaplace Team
Proof that virtual worlds, just like the real one, will, sooner or later, come to an end. It's just that in the case of Metaplace it was very much sooner.
For the few that did think it was a good idea, commiserations. With Forterra on its way out too, you'll just have to move back to that other complete waste of time, Second LIfe. Which assumes you had a life of your own in the first place ;)
Message to UPC: You Suck!
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Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Never in the whole of human history has a cable television / phone / broadband provider sucked quite as much as UPC do at the moment.
I would have thought they'd have been content with getting our bills wrong, cutting us off by mistake, disrupting our service, fobbing off and downright ignoring our legitimate complaints, boring the crap out of us while rolling out a firmware upgrade, providing us with less than 10% of advertised broadband speeds during peak periods and even leaving us without the broadband we paid for for up to three days at a time.
Obviously, I was wrong.
Not remotely interested in providing a better quality service, and this counts for both technical and customer service, UPC has instead spent all their money on protecting their "service" by switching to Nagra 3 encryption.
So now anyone with an box of dreams, or viewer of stars, or whatever, can no longer even watch the channels they've rightly paid for on anything except that god-awful excuse for a box by Pace. The interface. The size. The responsiveness. The remote (see right) It all sucks.
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I would have thought they'd have been content with getting our bills wrong, cutting us off by mistake, disrupting our service, fobbing off and downright ignoring our legitimate complaints, boring the crap out of us while rolling out a firmware upgrade, providing us with less than 10% of advertised broadband speeds during peak periods and even leaving us without the broadband we paid for for up to three days at a time.
Obviously, I was wrong.
Not remotely interested in providing a better quality service, and this counts for both technical and customer service, UPC has instead spent all their money on protecting their "service" by switching to Nagra 3 encryption.
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Assisted Brainstorming
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Monday, December 14, 2009
ASSIST Machine Sketch Interpretation - It's not new (dates back to 2001), though I wonder when we'll have these kinds of tools firmly in our everyday grasp.
It's certainly impressive, but the more I look at this presentation, the more I think I've seen it somewhere before...
Hmm... Did I see it here perhaps?
It's certainly impressive, but the more I look at this presentation, the more I think I've seen it somewhere before...
Hmm... Did I see it here perhaps?
Is Oracle's Acquisition of Sun a Formality?
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Not if the European Commision, the EU's competition authority (who Microsoft know only too well) have anything to do with it. At least, according to newsfactor.
When I first heard about Oracle's move on Sun and, therefore Sun's own fairly recent acquisition, MySQL, I thought it would all be a done deal by the end of the summer. Little did I know it would still be dragging on now.
That's not to say I'm not glad someone is stepping in and contesting the deal on anti-competitive grounds.
As I've mentioned once or twice in the past, I love MySQL and would hate to see it suppressed or, even worse, blown out of the market completely. I agree with Oracle's claim that they are not in competition with MySQL because they are aimed at completely different market sectors, but I still don't believe Oracle have the intention to allow MySQL to develop any further.
Hopefully, if there is any justice, the EU Commission will find some way to protect MySQL without denying Sun the investment they undoubtedly need. Every day lost in this challenge costs Sun a whopping $3.4M.
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When I first heard about Oracle's move on Sun and, therefore Sun's own fairly recent acquisition, MySQL, I thought it would all be a done deal by the end of the summer. Little did I know it would still be dragging on now.
That's not to say I'm not glad someone is stepping in and contesting the deal on anti-competitive grounds.
As I've mentioned once or twice in the past, I love MySQL and would hate to see it suppressed or, even worse, blown out of the market completely. I agree with Oracle's claim that they are not in competition with MySQL because they are aimed at completely different market sectors, but I still don't believe Oracle have the intention to allow MySQL to develop any further.
Hopefully, if there is any justice, the EU Commission will find some way to protect MySQL without denying Sun the investment they undoubtedly need. Every day lost in this challenge costs Sun a whopping $3.4M.
Lotus Notes is 20!
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Monday, December 07, 2009
Ed Brill reminded me today that Lotus Notes just turned 20. Didn't it grow up fast? I first started using is back in 1996, but since 1999 I can say I've used it every single working day, so I've known it for half its life. How nice.
In that time, I've sent mails, used application databases on it, chatted in it, replicated mailfiles and other DBs on it, collaborated through it, designed applications and LotusScript doodahs for it, installed it, upgraded it, customized it, loved it, hated it, swore I'd never work with it again, and then did the very next day.
No matter how much I've criticised Notes (and found myself nodding along with this guy), I probably wouldn't use Outlook over it. Obviously, there's integration to consider in some cases, and if you're in a Microsoft shop with Office, Sharepoint and the rest, you might have other needs, but in a mixed shop, or an IBM one, it's probably the best choice. The majority of Fortune 500 companies seem to think so.
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In that time, I've sent mails, used application databases on it, chatted in it, replicated mailfiles and other DBs on it, collaborated through it, designed applications and LotusScript doodahs for it, installed it, upgraded it, customized it, loved it, hated it, swore I'd never work with it again, and then did the very next day.
No matter how much I've criticised Notes (and found myself nodding along with this guy), I probably wouldn't use Outlook over it. Obviously, there's integration to consider in some cases, and if you're in a Microsoft shop with Office, Sharepoint and the rest, you might have other needs, but in a mixed shop, or an IBM one, it's probably the best choice. The majority of Fortune 500 companies seem to think so.
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