Internet Culture

I have been meaning to post something for the last several days. Everyone is away, and I really didn't think I would have had any trouble posting about some of the tools that I have been trying to use at home and work to try to keep better track of where I am spending my time, and potentially wasting it.
This isn't that post.
This is about a few of the things where I know I have been wasting my time.
I tried watching TV again this week. For the most part, I did not find anything worth watching. I understand that we are into the summer rerun season, but being I really didn't watch any of it the first time around, there should have been something compelling or at least interesting. Nada.
I did watch a couple of movies via Netflix. I tend to intentionally weirder titles when Natalie's not here. Mostly this is done to not have to deal with only having 4 movies at a time from Netflix and there being things that she wants to watch in queue behind oddball things that I just happen to pull out of thin air using some really obscure movies selection process that I do not think even I understand completely enough to understand how it works.
The two movies that made it through that selection were "Sex and Death 101" and "Chaos Theory".
Neither were what I expected them to be. Both were actually better as the quirky character stories they were. But I'm not really in the mood to write reviews, so lets move along.
I also spent some time dealing with the question of if I want to spend any more time in any of the available Massively Multiplayer Online Games. I really have not gotten into anything since Myst Online was canceled. And I still do not really know how I feel about the recent announcement that Myst Online may be coming back in another form via Cyanworlds's MORE project--Myst Online: Restoration Experiment. I don't know yet. I'm still thinking about what this means.
When MORE starts, it is going to be a very different game from what was hosted by GameTap. At this point, we know that there will not be any new content from Cyan, initially or possibly ever. I understand this. The question is how quickly can the community develop content for the game? How much of that content will be compelling? How much of that will tell its stories?
I have done some thinking about why MOUL did not meet my expectations. I have also been looking at a few other games trying to see if they do things any better.
MOUL did not meet my expectations because it couldn't. It just flat out couldn't. It was a combination of the state of the community, the state of Cyan and the methodology of presentation. And there is more. Some of these issues I did not realize until I did start into other games.
A while back I tried Matrix Online. The experiment was a failure. While I knew people who were playing, I unfortunately picked a time when they were either not able or willing to get into MxO and introduce me to the community. And this is a community where one either needs to decide to play alone or get an introduction. That may not be true, but it is my experience.
There were some things I did like about MxO. The very flexible skill system was something I think more games should have. That skill system allowed anyone who felt like investing the time to build a single character down any and all of the available paths. And that made it impossible to build an unplayable character, or completely dead ended a character due to a bad choice on build out. And I liked the setting of the Matrix movies. It is just a shame that the community seemed to have reached a point where it setteled. And the game itself has not seemed to evolve. As a new character, I should have entered the game and quickly found myself involved in the current state of the game, not where it was 2 years ago. With the community seemingly stagnated, I had no interest in continuing past the demo.
I did pickup GuildWars, but that just doesn't feel compelling. All of the missions just feel way too cookiecutter. And I have some issues with how the community feels distracted. I guess this has to do with the fact that most of the game occurs away from the noob areas. I also am a little bothered that at level 20 a player either stops or moves into the dedicated PVP environment.
I also recently tried EverQuest II (EQ2). People at work play it. People at work seem a little addicted to it. I really just don't feel like I'm getting into it.
The noob area is fine, but the missions are obviously cookie cutter. I haven't had much experience with the community, as the people I know cannot get their existing characters into the noob area. I also find that character creation a bit too complicated. I think there may be too many races and classes and they are put together in difficult to understand ways. And having started 4 different characters, there just doesn't seem to be much along the lines of trying to get players into the history or story of the setting. Considering there really isn't an external frame of reference, this is an issue for me.
The question I still need to answer is what AM I looking for?
I really want a compelling story. I also want to know that the story is potentially going to be different for each character, or at least have more than just a succeed and failed outcomes. It would be nice if the various missions had decision points in them that allow characters to experience one of several potential outcomes, some successful, so not so much.
I would also to see that extend into the main branch of the game. And in a PvP environment, should one be appropriate to the setting, have dynamically generated missions that put players against one another. Let me explain that one a bit.
Let's assume that we are in a game with groups or factions that are enemies. And that there are places in the game where these groups have to interact with one another. As players from one side take missions or quests in this area, have players from the other side be offered missions and quests to counter, interfere or just plain be the spanner thrown into the gearbox of the mission for the opposing players.
I would also like to see sets or arcs of missions and quests where there is real staged conflict between members of opposing factions. I would see this as better than a bunch of cookie cutter missions that absolutely everyone playing the game gets to play later.
As you can see, I am having a hard time finding a game that matches how I want to play.
I guess I'll stop here, for now.

Back in Septemeber, I posted how I was getting rid of MySpace and LiveJournal. Getting rid of MySpace was more a defensive move. MySpace just does not feel like the kind of site that I really want to spend my precious time associated with. I even went as far as to load the AmIOnMySpace plugin for Firefox 2. There is not yet a version for Firefox 3, but I am sure that will come. Of course, there are other ways of preventing MySpace from coming up in the browser.
LiveJournal just didn't match up with me anymore. I host my own blog. I didn't need them. And I like what Six Apart has done. I didn't mind LiveJournal. It just didn't fit anymore. I didn't want to keep accounts with services I was no longer using.
I hope all this indicates that I am at least thinking about the quality of the services I use. It really doesn't matter if it's an Web 2.0 social network or just a 'regular' site that doesn't try to be anything more than what it is. There is a point where the site is causing me more issues than I think it should.
Today Friendster crossed that limit.
For the last several months, the only contact I have had with the Friendster site have been fairly obvious SPAM for adult sites. You know what I'm talking about. You get a message from Friendster saying someone's left you a note. You don't recognize the name, but you go into the inbox and there it is, an innocent message, asking you to follow a link to see what is presumably some hottie's webcam or special photo gallery. Please. All I ever do is flag the messages as spam, delete, and move on.
Now, I could maintain the Friendster account, and just ask it to not e-mail me when someone messages me. But then I would never go to the account. If I never go to the account, then I don't need it. If I don't need the account, I don't want it. If I don't want it, why have it?
There were not a lot of people I knew that were using Friendster. And all of them I talk to in other ways.
So, thankfully, all Friendster had me do was fill out a quick form as an exit interview and that was it. The account, I was told, was gone.
I'm sure they will have my data somewhere in their backup media, but when I tried to access the profile, it was unavailable.
So, one less social network site in my portfolio.
Good bye, Friendster.

Since the last post, I have noticed that the Twitter feed has appeared to load a bit faster. Initally, I had turned off the "What am I doing?" block. I did not leave it off for long, just a couple of hours. I missed having it. I did turn it back on, but Twitter is leaving me something to think about. Actually, it is a couple of things.
The performance of Twitter is an issue. I know they are making changes, and trying to setup rate limits and what not for their account. I have to assume they are getting slammed pretty much round the clock by people updating and people using things other than SMS messages to either update or receive the feed. I know it took me about 5 mintues to figure out how to post to Twitter using a command line. And then I saw Dave Taylor's script at Linux Journal for doing the same thing. So I used that. It was better. I made some changes to match how I normally do scripts, but the guts are his.
How many other people are doing that? Writting scripts to abuse the Twitter (or any other services) api, and pushed the usage model in a completely different direction from where it was designed for. (I love doing stuff like that!)
So, here I am, sending tweets from my phone using PIE or SMS (mostly PIE), sending tweets from about 3 different windows apps, sending tweets from a shell script. And then there are all the ways I'm receiving them. I'm not receiving a single SMS message. I found them to be too distracting. The phone sending me an alert means I either have a meeting, a phone call, or something really needs my attention. I prefer to get tweets via a desktop app, a Firefox extention, and my Chumby. I am also using Twitter to feed into at least two other sites that update themselves from the Twitter feeds of their users.
Since the last post, I noticed that Twitter was doing something different. They used to limit clients to 60 or 70 calls an hour. With the number of clients I had going, I would hit that once or twice a day. This weekend I started to notice that I was hitting it way more often. They now have a maximum rate of 30 calls an hour. And honestly, I don't see my web site loading any faster.
I do think I want to do something different with the Twitter feed. I think I would rather the nanoposts that I send to Twitter show up in the main feed, with the day's tweets grouped together as a single post. I think I saw something like that one someone elses site, but I can't remember which one. Probably a WordPress thing. But being I'm not a fan of WordPress, I'll have to figure something else out. Or just keep going how I'm going.
Of course, this all assumes that I'm going to continue on with Twitter.
That's another thing I've been thinking about, what the is going on with Twitter? First there is this collective idea that Twitter is having major performance issues. And then I see this in Tweek's feed: Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service. And then Ars Technica runs with it.
One has to wonder about companies that don't feel the need to honor their posted terms of service. And I have to assume that these same companies would have no problem at all going after end users that annoy them one way or another.
Where's the accountability?
Too many times, I've sen these awful click-thru terms of service and licensing agreements that are impossible to read, and is many ways seem to prohibit the exact activity that the product, wesite or service was pitched to perform or provide. And I get that a company or service, in the interest of protecting itself, must occassionally make changes to their terms. But Twitter is on the record as saying they went with their original TOS intentionally, presumably because of Flickr's repuation, a part of which is their enforcement of their TOS.
Twitter's now telling people that's not what they meant to do now? They just slammed a package together and, well, mea culpa, there will be changes to make it harder to pin things on them. I like the Ars article's analysis. What is Twitter, a service or a community?
Maybe it is time to evaluate either doing something myself, just for me, or looking at services that target the same space as Twitter. I am not using Twitter as anything than a platform for message passing. Honestly, of the now 29 entities following me on Twitter, only 2 are people I actually know. I think even my skills as a programmer would be enough to put something together to accomplish most of how I'm doing with Twitter, even updating at least one of the other sites. And with only two other people who would really be affected (and I'm fairly certain that either of them would really care if I stopped using Twitter) it may be worth going my own way here.

I am not the only one to notice that Twitter is running a little slow today. There have been a number of Tweets I've seen over the last several days either stating the obvious or suggesting why this is happening.
The problem with Twitter being slow is that I am posting my Twitter feed directly to the site. This is done via a script that runs from the browser. This means that if Twitter is slow, then this site runs slow. I have noticed this before and I finally did something about it today. I moved the script to the end of the page so that I HOPE the page loads and then the Twitter data loads, and the page doesn't look awful and half rendered. Time will tell.
While I am talking about Twitter, I am surprised that I have 25 people "following" what I post there. Of course, I realize that Twitter is just another social network site. This means that there is more going on with the site than might be obvious.
One of the behaviors I have noticed in the Twitter population is the idea that if someone is following me, I should be following them. Or at the very least, there is a portion of the Twitter population that things most of the Twitter population thinks this way.
It works this way, a Twitter user can see who is following them. There is also an option to be notified when someone starts following you. Either way, you get to see who is following you. There seems to be this idea where if you follow a lot of people, at least some of those people will follow you to see if they can figure out why you are following them. At the very least, someone is going to click on your account to see who you are. I know I check the pages of the people I am notified about.
So am I interesting enough to have attracted 25 people? I'm not sure. One of my followers is my brother. Another is a member of the Myst Community. Two are for software projects I use or have used. One appears to be associated with the city. Some appear to be people I don't konw but who live in the region who may have just added other locals, unless I'm not really paying that much attention to the people I work with, as I'm usually on the phone all day. At least one entity is a project to follow as many people as possible. The rest just look like they are trying to sell me something, assuming I'd follow them just because they are following me.
One is following in the 10's of thousands. Tens of thousands of people being followed.
Considering that Twitter will happily forward you, via SMS or IM, every update from every person you are following, I'd hate to live or work with someone following that many people. When does the phone ever stop? When does the IM ever cease?
I'm following 5 accounts. Brian, two myst people, one software project and the local city update. I'm not really in a rush to add anymore. I sometimes think about adding more Myst people. I really wasn't going to add the first one, till they followed me first. Honestly, I wonder how people feel about the unexpected follow from someone they kind of know, but don't really konw. /shrug.
There were a few more poeople following, but when I cared a little more about it, I blocked them. I stopped blocking. If someone really wants their friends/follwed account timeline to look just a messy and meaningless as the public timeline, why should I stop them. There only going to follow 9,999 other people.
I will be checking to see how the page is loading after the changes I made to try to protect from slow tweet retrieval. But let me konw. Then again, it's not like there are a lot of you out there actually reading. I might try a different method of presenting my own feed over the long weekend.

Tonight, at 00:01, is the shutdown of Myst Online: Uru Live. My goal for the next few hours is to spend time in the game with the rest of the community that have stuck it out till now. It is hard to avoid the cliché from the Myst games. Within the games, and the community, everyone wants to say that the end has not yet been written. With the game shutting down, for the second time, with the second publisher, it is hard to see how MOUL will ever be anything more than a curious oddity in the history of online games.
For the last five weeks, there have been a number of forum posts, blog posts and articles by members of the Myst community and the gaming industry that have talked about the end of Myst. There have been passing remarks on yet another game being canceled or closing. There have people wish for, demanding and begging for a restart of UntilUru. There have been wild, impossible plans for continuing the game without GameTap and even without Cyan. Like I said: impossible.
There have been discussion about how the game could have been run. How the very essence of the game was changed by Ubi's insistence that at least part of the game (the Prime ages) be available as a standalone game. There were arguments and debates about how the Cleft, the hoods, even the city and ages should have been organized, instanced and delivered. The value of Yeesha, the DRC, various community organizations, role playing & playing Uru in character (cavern) and playing Myst out of character (cavern) all have been debated.
The community has talked about what happens next. What we can do. Where we will go after the sound of the last link fades in our ears and the stark reality that it was merely another game, and now it is over.
And through most of this, I have been somewhat quiet. Unless, of course, one was listening on CyanChat.
What is left of the community has started gathering together in the places we hold dear. The last in cavern meetings are being organized and everyone is saying their good-byes.
Not really good-bye.
This community has been together in one form or another since shortly after the release of the first Myst game in 1993. Here we are, fifteen years later, gathering together both in and out of the game, celebrating what we all hope is not really the end.