The Meshverse Journal – Node 3

So many links, so little time! My man Lee keeps hooking me up with good links – thanks!

“AOL is dipping its toes in the nascent virtual-worlds environment for research reasons, but we clearly don’t consider this a significant project for the company,”

CNET

Something just isn’t right here. I mean I’m all for small experiments, but given that AOL is pretty deeply invested in the social networking space(Hometown, AIMPages) in order to compete with MySpace, I’m wondering what is really going on with with their toe-dipping:

• Diversion
• They want to keep competitors guessing while they sew up a partnership with a virtual world platform developer.
• Blindness
• They just don’t get it and really think the world will wake up and realize AOL is the only online service anyone needs. That hasn’t worked very well in the past with the web or social networking.
• Desperation
• Like Rupert, they know they have to be in this space. However, since they haven’t figured out yet what to do and watching Second Life about to tick off another million(2.8 million signups as of this writing – up from 1 million three months ago), they’ve decided they better start learning by doing.