Meet BlaineBot, AKA Me.

Today is the first day of my Second Life, oh, and Thanksgiving. So, what am I thankful for this year? I'm not so sure it's my Second Life.

With more than a million active denizens, and exponentially growing by the day, the possibilities for Second Life are intriguing...but do we have the next Google or MySpace growth story? I don’t think so - I just don’t see this application ever going mainstream. Creating my avatar and exploring the world, was just more tedious and time-consuming than rewarding. I expect that the learning curve for Second Life is much shorter than many MMORPG, but nevertheless, it requires a time commitment and technological know-how that many people just don’t have. Moreover, the game resides on your desktop and well, it doesn’t take a genius to see the imminent shift to the cloud. Good luck finding an employer that allows you to install a native application like Second Life on your desktop; and even if you could, how long do you think you’ll keep that job if you give as much attention as needed to get the most out of Second Life’s virtual environment? Probably not long enough to even get through Second Life’s “Orientation Island.” So sure, there are tremendous opportunities within this niche market but there are undeniable barriers that I believe will ultimately prevent Second Life from ever really reaching significant numbers or types of people.

My personal recommendation: concentrate on the real word, http://www.getafirstlife.com.

FreeCause Beta Launch

After 9 months of 20 hour days, headaches, chicken nuggets and floaty floats among other things, we celebrated the "official" launch of FreeCause. Of course, because the three of us haven't seen the light of day, much less our friends, for those 9 months, it was pretty exciting that many of them came to support us last night.

I hate you, Woot.

For the low price of 89.99, Woot delivered a Roomba - and while the loft desperately needs to get cleaned, for the last 3 hours this is what has gotten done in the office:

(sigh) NOTHING. Oh but the Roomba did eat my iPhone cord.

Web 2.0 Logo Inspiration

Trying to come up with some good ideas or at least inspiration for a new logo. Going for a Web 2.0 look (I know, I know, least descriptive and most over used buzz word). I guess we never noticed that our current logo looks a little too much like bathroom stall people...only blue. In hopes of re-branding, we've hit all the contests boards from colleges to oDesk and Rent-a-Coder but haven't been able to come up with anything we like. Talented, creative logo designers - where are you hiding?

Wait, that's not a balcony?

With only another month of summer left, we thought we'd take advantage of the grill. Here's how that went over with our landlord:

Landlord: You can't block the fire escape with your grill.
Justin: OH, that's a fire escape? I thought it was balcony.