A few weeks ago, Om Malik did a highly unscientific graphic comparison of second life and real life. Well, real life sucks, and it is in the after life where harems of virgins await us. (...await the virtuous men. Who knows what women want?) So for round two, we do a highly scientific graphic comparison between second life and the after life.

Calibration - after life vs. afterlife

This calibration comparison shows that though after life is more popular than afterlife globally, both are highly correlated, so we can choose either one. We pick the stronger term for final combat.

Calibration - second life vs. secondlife

secondlife emerges as a search trend at the end of Q1 2005. At the same time, second life starts trending up from its previously stable baseline. The MMO game is finally garnering attention eighteen months after its October 2003 debut. second life is the far stronger and more dynamic signal so we choose that for final combat.

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As casual planning startup Renkoo revs up in closed Beeta (pronounced Bee-tah), UK based Renzoo launched this week a beta of its unified messaging platform. Apparently Ren-ness was in the air the latter half of 2004: both domains were registered a month apart, Renzoo.com on Aug 27, 2004 and Renkoo.com on Oct 28, 2004. Luckily for both firms that each targets a different part of the globe. Renzoo’s audience is the UK and renzoo.com forwards to renzoo.co.uk.

Oh yeah, about Renzoo’s service. The ways in which it multiplexes email, voice, voip, sms, wap, and voicemail as a centralized messaging service for individuals is pretty mindnumbing. You can read all about the feature set at renkoo.com, I mean renzoo.co.uk.

Technorati Tags: unified_messaging, renkoo, renzo

Trillian, if you don’t know, is an instant messaging client that works with the AOL AIM, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, and IRC chat systems, any or all at the same time, channeling your chat activity through one interface. Spokeo, founded by three Stanford guys, applies the same concept of tributary merging to the proliferation of social networking, blog, photo and video systems as well as RSS feeds. Just launched, Spokeo currently supports social networks Bebo, Facebox, Friendster, MySpace, Wretch, Xanga; blog, photo, and miscellaneous sites Blogger, DeviantArt, Digg, Flickr, Fotolog, ImageStation, LiveJournal, PhotoBucket, PictureTrail, Piczo, WebShots, Windows Live Spaces, Yahoo Video, YouTube.

I’ve never found the idea of Trillian attractive. I’m a software junkie and prefer to use each chat system through their respective clients. Each client is a unique creation and Trillian is a common denominator that often fumbles features such as file transfer or voice chat. But I have friends who swear by it. To them the utility of chatting – sending and receiving text – and managing their buddy lists across several systems through one interface outweighs the aesthetic drawbacks and the deficiencies in seldom used features.

Spokeo seems even more useful for its targeted space than Trillian is for chat; most if not all of these community systems place your friends’ pictures, blogs, and videos on individual profile pages. Except for possibly a list of blog subscriptions, you’d have to surf each account to keep up to date. Spokeo distills that content, from their often noisy profiles, and aggregates them all by each friend onto one scrollable page, and allows you an array of different views and slices. So Spokeo is useful for monitoring friends on say MySpace alone; Spokeo can do that for your all friends across the supported systems. In this way, Spokeo is like the RSS reader but evolved for the multimedia content of social systems.

And of course, Spokeo as a meta-social network is a social network itself.

The Ajaxy interface--built on top of Ruby on Rails--is kludgy in a few places. But it’s not bad and on par for an early stage service. They have medium term funding and are hiring programmers and engineers to ramp up.

Technorati Tags: trillian, social, bebo, trillian, aol_aim, youtube, rss_reader, digg, flickr, webshots, deviantart, livejournal, social_networking, piczo, xanga, icq, imagestation, spokeo, blogger

There’s an amusing public spat over at TechCrunch in a comment thread between Trent Kang, founder of CreamAid, and Michael Arrington that highlights the hypocrisy of the blogosphere elite when they worry out loud about the pernicious effects of the emerging pay for blogging models. Arrington likens such pay to payola in the music biz that the FCC investigated and censured a while back.

As Arrington criticizes the payola for the masses, the meta-story of his TC posts conveniently illustrates the corrosive influence of money at the top of the blogosphere. While he takes great pains to disclose his sponsor relationships and even makes a show of criticizing their products and services, it is his behavior not disclosure that deserves scrutiny.

Three new purveyors of blogging payola emerged at roughly the same time and Trent Kang takes issue with the sequence of their coverage at TechCrunch. Kang claims CreamAid was first on the scene, and despite their efforts couldn’t get attention at TC, while PayPerPost came later and took pole position. Adding injury to insult, CreamAid was covered finally but as second act to ReviewMe, a subsidiary of one of TC’s sponsors, Text-Link-Ads.

Arrington’s reply to Kang’s complaint was the brush off “Trent - My suggestion is to work on your website messaging.”

Perhaps Arrington meant "massaging." Whatever the flaws in Kang's messaging, lots of other blogs clearly understood CreamAid's mission. Postbubble wrote a comprehensive story on CreamAid's business and model on August 1, 2006, and so did Mashable the next day. Following CreamAid’s September 28th public launch, sites not receiving sponsorship from Text-Link-Ads wrote full stories. Again, TC didn't cover CreamAid until ReviewMe's later launch. Would TC have put a little more oomph into “understanding” CreamAid had Kang shelled out for sponsorship?

We don’t totally blame Arrington. Merit ranks below politics and money. Look at the mismanagement during Katrina. To use Arrington's own payola example, who runs the FCC? Political appointees. Their appointers and their legislative overseers are all mostly beneficiaries of relationships and influence money. How did Michael Powell, injured tank commander serving in Germany, get from the recovery ward to FCC chairmanship? Powell is a smart guy, but don’t tell us he did it purely on merit alone. Likewise, we understand that getting attention on TC is achieved by factors of which merit is only one of many. All the levers of influence in politics are at work there too. Michael, editorial discretion is your perogative, but don’t be sanctimonious about payola and worrisome about its undermining of credibility when money clearly influences your own blogging.