Japanese electronics giant Sony has confirmed rumors previously published at Kotaku (that as we reported resulted in a blacklisting for the site) that it intends on launching “PlayStation Home”, an online world that will allow Playstation3 users to interact in a virtual setting.

Reuters reports that the new world will include text, audio or video chat; users will be able to watch movie trailers or feature films and play casual games, and the service will be available to users in the US and Europe in the northern Autumn.

Pictures of the service, available at Joystiq, will seem familiar to users of Second Life. Aside from the slightly glossier graphics, “Home” looks and feels like a Second Life clone. No word yet as to whether Sony will allow the creation of objects in world along the same lines as users can in Second Life, but given the similarities don’t be surprised if similar features are also being planned.

The real question in terms of marketshare is does Sony really think that a Second Life clone can help boost faltering PS3 sales? Certainly they are coming from behind in terms of social interaction, with the Wii becoming a sensation based upon its strength in multi-person gaming, but Second Life style virtual worlds are relatively not that popular (despite the SL hype, there been only 2 million signups, with a whole lot less regularly logging in). Rather than “Home” I’d suggest they’d be much better off if they spent money bringing World of Warcraft to the PS3: that alone would result in a big boost in console sales.

Picture Credit: Joystiq

 

Tags: Sony, PlayStation3

Originally posted on March 7, 2007 @ 8:34 pm

In a sign that reality is starting to come back into Web 2.0 valuations, Valleywag reports that social networking grandfather Tribe.com was purchased by Cisco for only $3 million.

Having said that though, are any 901am readers users of Tribe? I’ve heard the name many times in the past, but for the life of me I couldn’t actually tell you what it did until I revisited the site for this post. It’s fair to say whatever the site does, revenue would be lacking. The main page consists of 1 Adsense ad unit in the footer, which gave me a totally unrelated ad:

With an Alexa ranking on 2,677 though $3 million makes it a reasonable buy, after all, imagine how much spam content you could pump into those pages :-)

 

Tags: Tribe, Cisco

Originally posted on March 5, 2007 @ 10:56 pm

The Chinese Government has added the SixApart owned blogging service LiveJournal to the nations firewall, blocking access to all LiveJournal blogs from a nation of 1.3 billion people (and 120 million+ internet users).

Wired reports that the site GreatFirewallofChina.org, which tests connectivity from China, first spotted the block Friday.

LiveJournal, whilst extremely popular North of the Chinese border in Russia, is reported to only have 8,692 users based in China.

Originally posted on March 5, 2007 @ 10:40 pm

This is bizarre. Industry Analyst Michael Gartenberg, having accepted the job of enthusiast evangelist at Microsoft Feb 15 (essentially Robert Scobles old job), has today announced he’s leaving the job and returning to his old position at Jupiter Research.

Back on Feb 15, Gartenberg wrote:

The difference lies in what I have done in the past and what I will be doing. That is the difference between being a baby sitter and a parent. They both take of children. The difference is the sitter plays with child, gets paid for it and then at the end of the day, they hand the child back and go on to the next one. Parenting is a little different. An observer might think that being the sitter is the better job. As a parent, I know better.

So did being a parent suck, or is Microsoft a bad company to work for?…and what causes someone to wax lyrically about the wonders a new position delivers to only quit that position 21 days later? Interesting, and yet bizarre at the same time.

 

Tags: Michael Gartenberg, Microsoft, Jupiter Research

Originally posted on March 7, 2007 @ 7:29 pm