Twitter does beat Second Life for the ap …

Twitter does beat Second Life for the application they are talking about. Who needs a bloated 3D viewer and immerse experience to build community, network, marketing and friendships–especially with those whom you would like to meet. Such business use was never the primary intent of Second Life (and OpenSim for that matter) and thankfully people are coming to that realization. Still, many do find these business uses happening organically in the Second Life and OpenSim communities where Twitter and OpenSim are working together for such business collaboration. The ThinkBalm community is one that I am aware of that is emerging here.

It has been said a thousand times but no harm saying it again. Use tech that fits a need, not tech for tech’s sake. In the case of economizing on travel, not to mention a dozen other business applications, virtual worlds make business sense.

I am sick of reading “this tech beats that tech.” Hype really is damaging. Comparative hype is an even more potent subspecies. It makes people jump on things for no reason other than hype and others abandon good tech for the proper application.

One of the greatest things to come from the slow decline of sponsored journalism is reality replacing hype. I would rather read the novice opinions of a dozen bloggers and tweeters over a few highly visible, highly sponsored news channels, magazines, commentators, book authors, and self-proclaimed industry leaders and innovators. Vive the meritocracy.

Learned an obvious lesson in productivit …

Learned an obvious lesson in productivity recently. Don’t even look at any email or IMs or Twitter or Facebook until lunch or even the end of the day. I always review before going to bed anyway which makes me enjoy it more and not waste good brain time in the morning on fragmented interests and curiosities pulling at it.

If you want to communicate with me today you will have to have written something to me yesterday. Either that or IM me directly. I imagine this is the why Twitter is so popular. It is when-i-can-get-to-it instant messaging instead of in-your-face instant messaging.

If you can’t make it work for you. Fine …

If you can’t make it work for you. Fine. Don’t use it and go away. That is my reaction to Sean Carton’s recent Is Twitter the Next Second Life? flame bait. People dismissed the web, email, and instant messaging as time-wasting, over-hyped technology and now what. Business efficiency would not exist today without them.

Frankly I grow tired of the insinuation that leveraging new technology is proof that you have too much time on your hands. People tend to measure efficiency by their own abilities. This speaks volumes about their own efficiency, but is irrelevant and unfair when applied to others’ use of that same technology. Following twitter feeds, Facebook, blogs, and even using the archaic ‘VI’ text editor are actually all time savers if you know what you are doing. This simple blog has helped me prioritize work and organize thoughts that would otherwise be lost. Video and other tutorials are as much to capture information I will need again later and have difficulty recalling as they are about sharing that information.

Oh, and here’s a thought. Maybe some of us are so efficient at our day jobs that we can quite easily accomplish all the is required of that job and more in less than your less-efficient expectation.

Efficiency aside, these technologies enable things impossible before now. Meeting someone in a virtual world is the next best thing to being there and often being there just isn’t realistic. Besides, where in the real world would I even have had the opportunity to meet such great friends like professional New York musicians?

I don’t know why I waste time even responding to that blog, but then again, I suppose responding perfectly supports your point. I would not have even read about it were it not for a tweet about it.