On Friday evening and Saturday I experimented a bit with Tumblr, a blogging platform somewhere between the long form blogs of let’s say Wordpress and the microblogging of status updates, tweets etc (I know some will say Twitter is not microblogging, but anyway, for some it is).
Talking about all things Twitter, I also tried out 12seconds which enables people to easily record videos of 12 seconds short, so one could consider it as a kind of micro-vlogging service.
Both services enable you of course to post using mobile devices. It could actually be nice to integrate such services also in virtual environments – so that clicking on an avatar would give you the possibility to seamlessly see the video-, picture- en text-streams of those persons, eventually even their current whereabouts.
Dusan Writer has this nice post about bumpy roads and inflammatory speech, and somehow he seems to make a distinction between the enthusiasm for the new (augmented reality) and what happens next with the things we already have and which enter in a phase of becoming really useful.
I don’t see much of a tension between the two. First of all, virtual spaces and augmented reality are not that very new. Both already had their hypes and disappointments, both have their skeptics. Also I think (hope?) there will be a kind of convergence – one day having your Second Life in a good quality on your smartphone, having streams of events in the physical world and in the virtual world intermingling (some artist experimented with that already). There’ll be use cases for that, whether it’ll be entertainment, art, education or business.
What do you think about these issues? What are the compelling use cases for the integration of virtual worlds/mobile internet/augmented reality/streams of posts?
Roland Legrand