I was raised on the internet and spent so much time playing MUDs which then got me to want to create my own and learn to code. I played Abandoned Reality http://abandoned.org/ and it was such an amazing experience learning to write and play pretend. My wife and I met playing Abandoned Reality and turned out only lived 45 minutes away from each other.
I hope a few people try it out and get hooked because of your post.
I got my hands on the source code of a MUD. It was incredibly flat. Most of the code was if/else and output text. The data was in flat text files as well (1 line = one unit of data, an integer, range or an element of a list, similar to a .env file). The game dumps all the data at every save. It surprised me because I tried to be clever while making my own MUD engine but the result was exactly that, an engine, not a MUD.
Very interesting. Do you remember which source you got your hands on? I dabbled in CircleMud as someone else posted, but mostly Envy 2.0 or 2.2. I can't find those codebases quickly these days, but this is a link to a mud based on Envy 2.2 https://github.com/DikuMUDOmnibus/Ultra-Envy
It's from 10 years ago, a French MUD called Multimud. It's closed source because the code contains too much information about the game. It's surprisingly simple, a Perl socket-select single-thread process with no dependencies.
Some indie games that got open sourced after sales dropped off are the same way. Everyone who looked at Terraria's or VVVVVV's code knows it's terrible, and yet, those games exist and are fun, while clearly coded games are less common.
Digg failed; he threw his employees under the bus.
He went to form milk, that failed and he took money from people. Oink failed.
He got acquired to work on G+, very quickly after got booted to Google Ventures - and apparently didn't do too well there.
A lot of people have put him out there in good faith, figuring he was not a one-trick-pony - and that he had more in him, yet, now, we are talking about how he failed at investing in a runaway success.
So, really, why? This guy is like the valley's version of Kim Kardashian where Digg was his sex tape.
Look - I appreciate that he has done well for himself. But he has not created anything amazing, nor done amazingly well for others.
After all this, his best accomplishment is interviewing Musk, perhaps.
Its a waste of energy. let me know when Kevin really innovates.
Yes, it did. It had been starting to fail for some time though, and they tried to reinvent it. It didn't work. It was mismanaged, but you see this thing all the time. Hell, Microsoft is doing it with Windows 8 right now. It's hard to know how something will go until you try it.
He went to form milk, that failed and he took money from people.
Milk was acquired my Google, how is that "failing"?
Oink failed.
Oink did well but not well enough. The initial plan was to "fail quickly", and they did.
He got acquired to work on G+, very quickly after got booted to Google Ventures - and apparently didn't do too well there.
I don't know anything about this, so I will not comment. But as far as I know Kevin is still doing just fine at Google Ventures. Why do you use the term "got booted"?
I mostly take issue with your post because of the overtly negative tone, and not providing a single source for your claims. I used to see Kevin as a bit of a schmuck, but I think he's turned into somebody to watch now rather than somebody who just got lucky. He picks companies well, and I think he's in the perfect spot right now.
Digg created social news. The company ultimately failed because of some missteps, but the concept is still thriving on the Web today and can be seen with Likes, Retweets, Upvotes, and others. Digg Labs was cool, they had a great API, and while I'm not going to claim it was the first website to feature this, it was at least the first time I'd ever seen a website with an RSS feed of search result pages. Getting an RSS feed (when feed readers were cool) for any search query you wanted to amazing as it allowed you to follow any topic you wanted to.
Overall, the early execution of Digg was brilliant. They just thought too big.
Maybe fail is too harsh a term. But my poin being that the idea that Kevin is some sort of visionary worthy of the level of hype he gets is clearly a delusion.
Digg was great early on, and very quickly became muddled and ruined. To the point where it died completely and was sold for practically nothing.
Overall, it's all pointless to keep saying "hey! Look what Kevin's doing now!"
The product is discounted compared to other devices in it's range and they did that by showing ads on the lock screen that is often unused by users. In the past Amazon's kindle ads have been quite tasteful and non-intrusive.
I came to say the same thing because things like "Click here for all the detials or to order" completely turned me off and made me think their mailing list got hacked and some new spam magnetic balance bracelet was being announced.
Though I have no idea how much has truly been donated to Rick Santorum, but I would bet that growing thermometer did help contribute to that. Perception is an incredibly strong tool that can be used to elicit reactions like donating "because everyone else seems to be". Sad that they're using such a tacky tactic.
I hope that some of the tech will be sold, opened or some how fall into other peoples hands. They did a lot of neat things with their prototypes and I think there is a chance that it can still help.
I think BOFA and other major banks are hand feeding people to credit unions in droves. I went today and set up my account at RBFCU and I can't wait to get far away from BOFA. Both my parents and I were with them for 20+ years.
I don't really understand how it's creepy as hell. You volunteer information to it and it posts its. If you don't want people knowing when you are sick, broke a bone, or lost a loved one then I would think you don't post it to Facebook. This generation and even more surprisingly some out of generations of the past really want to share everything and this gives them that ability.
The issue that I have with it is that it so easily exposes posts from the beginning of time to people I only recently became friends with. When I first signed up for Facebook, it was still in 'college only' mode, and what I posted was with that restriction in mind.
Over the past few years, this has dramatically changed; now I'm friends with coworkers, parents, etc. As my list of friends/target audience changed, the posts I made shifted in nature to stay appropriate to my current list of friends at the time that I posted any piece of content. When Facebook enabled post-specific privacy controls, I made lists and used them religiously for restricting access to content I provided.
However, short of clicking through each and every one of my old posts and changing the access control list or removing the content/untagging myself, how do I prevent the next boss or coworker that I friend on Facebook next week/month/year from easily seeing the dumb shit that I was posting back in 07 when my target audience was other college kids?
What I really wish existed was a privacy setting that allows me to restrict people from viewing content that existed before our Facebook friendship began. If I posted something before I knew you, and before I could account for you being a part of my social stream, it's none of your damn business.
These conversations are inherently difficult to articulate. "Creepy" is an adjective one uses to describe how something makes them feel. There's probably a more specific term for words like this. That is, the adjective isn't an entirely objective measure.
Think about this conversation for a moment::
Dick: I sure do hate strawberries. They're gross!
Jane: OMG, you are so crazy. Strawberries are delicious!
Dick & Jane: LOL (literally, they have a laugh)
In this conversation, neither Dick nor Jane are upset or confused by the other's feelings about strawberries. There is little ambiguity to the fact that the adjective "gross" applies only to Dick's feelings about strawberries. Neither feels threatened by the other's feelings about strawberries, because neither of them have any significant emotional investment in the fruit, and their relationship won't suffer as a result.
Step back and look at the Facebook Timeline situation. The author finds it creepy. "It", is the act of inviting others in to your life experiences on such an intimate level. "Creepy" is how the author feels when considering doing so on his own Facebook account.
Some people, when they read the conversation about strawberries above will have a visceral reaction about Dick's dislike of strawberries. "How can anyone dislike strawberries," they'll exclaim!? The same thing is happening here with the Facebook Timeline conversation. For some people, the Facbook Timeline is like inviting a complete stranger in to the bathroom with you, and not a bathroom with stalls and dividers. I'm talking one toilet here. Then again, maybe you're in to that kind of thing. I'm not here to judge.
The point is that in any sizable population, you're going to have divergent viewpoints on what is "creepy" and what is not. Creepy is not an objective measurement. It's how you feel about something. What I don't understand is the author's framing of the issue:
"Nobody’s forced to use Facebook, of course, although for many it’s pretty much a mandatory part of the social experience. What worries me is the trend of radical transparency and social context throughout the web software industry, where it’s expected that everyone will share their lives unless they’ve got something to hide. On the surface, for white males like me living in California, there’s a lot to be said for this on an individual level; don’t lie, be up-front, wear your intentions and motivations on your sleeve. But ultimately the decision about what to share has to be the individual’s – if you don’t feel like sharing something, don’t. Radically transparent interfaces are designed in a way that leads to a kind of peer pressure for disclosure: everyone else is sharing information about A, B and C, so why are you being so evasive?"
To paraphrase, "I recognize that I'm not forced to use Facebook, but I'm worried about the impending pressure to share." Taken further, one could say that the author is concerned about the "implications" of this. Implications is code for something else though. It's a rhetorical device used to represent a growing dissonance between the author's feelings on a subject and the perceived consensus.
But I think a central assumption about a lot of this sharing, especially on social networks is that it's ephemeral, soon forgotten, lost to the passage of time. Just like the conversations we have offline. That's part of what's creepy.
The other part is the autosharing, which I've discussed in another comment.
Taken separately, I think either part is notably creepy, but put together, they cross waaaaaay over my personal creepiness line.
I hope a few people try it out and get hooked because of your post.