Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds are a growing reality that some people are oblivious about. I have mentioned before the rapid growth of the gaming industry and the colossal investments that corporations are making in the gaming industry in order to come at the top with the best technology. For some people gaming is limited to the nintendo, xbox and playstation, but there is a huge market for the computer gaming. Games in the computer can be a lot more immersive and addictive. Some games like second life, take the player to a completely new world where they can be whoever they want and say and do anything that pleases them. Games like this are not limited to gamers alone. Some people use them to have a meeting with people from all around the world and to try to model constructing ideas in order to be able to see how it will look when it is finished. One example of these uses is in the article "Going to the Virtual Office in Second Life" by Mark Tutton. In this article, Tutton illustrates how some companies use second life as a tool to have meetings in a virtual office that resembles a real life place and situation. This way they cut on travel cost and having the characters that look like the actual people who are using it, it makes it a little more personal than a conference call in Skype.

To be up to date with the latest virtual world breakthrough, one has to be reading about it every day. The technology developed over the past few years has improved dramatically. For example, in the article "after second life, can virtual worlds get a reboot?" by Diane Mehta. They talk about second life and even minecraft as the latest breakthrough in virtual worlds. This article was written in 2013; only 3 years ago. But the technology that can be involved with virtual worlds has changed drastically. The person being interviewed talks about 3D modeling as a new feature that she expects to be developed in the next few months. Only a few months, not years, not decades; this is how fast things can change. Today we not only have all of the virtual worlds in our Ipads and Smartphones. A virtual worlds are now being developed in a way that no one could have imagined 10 years ago. A way that the user can almost feel the environment around them in a virtual reality. Virtual reality is a game changer in the gamer world, as we drop the joystick and keyboard to control the game and we start using the actual movement of our body. In my opinion, virtual reality will take over the gaming world in the ear future. Right now you can go to the store and get an "oculus rift" and get immersed in a virtual reality world. 

Blog About Twitter

Twitter is in my opinion superior when it comes to discussions compared with blackboard and in class discussions. Compared to blackboard, twitter's comments have to be short and concise; as opposed to the long paragraphs and essays that you can find on blackboard. This makes it easier to read everyone's opinion and also forces the students to find a way to cut their thoughts to 140 characters. Compared to the classroom it has the advantage that the students can take as long as they want to craft their thoughts before putting them online. In a class discussion, students have very limited time to think before adding their opinion to a discussion. On top of that, it is not easy for everyone to talk in front of crowd. Twitter gives the comfort of not being watched and takes that pressure off from the students. However, students should not rely only on this to speak their minds, since social skills are required in order to succeed in almost every career. Twitter could be used as a "warm up" of the topic to be discussed in class. This way students can prepare before coming inside the classroom. Out of the 3, I find blackboard the hardest to keep up with. It is messy, confusing, not user friendly and often clusters a lot of information.

Social Networking Sites

For this post I have selected two of my favorite sites in addition to Facebook and Twitter. These sites are Youtube and Twitch. Most of you probably are not familiar with Twitch.tv as it targets a specific group of people: Gamers. One thing about all these social network sites is that if they are similar they try to "copy" what the other one is doing in an attempt to replace it. We have seen it in Facebook's status messages and tagging people, imitating Twitter. Youtube is no stranger to copying a potential competitor. Youtube added "Youtube Gaming" in order to offer similar services that have been in Twitch.tv for a while.

One thing that all 4 sites have in common is that they all let people communicate with one another and share original content and all sorts of files. Facebook concentrates more in the social life aspect of people. As in the main purpose of Facebook is to share any life event trough pictures and videos. Like pictures of the bar you visited Saturday night, or your cousin's birthday party. I feel that most of the time, these posts are an attempt from the person posting it to seem interesting, cool or to be accepted to certain social group that he wants to belong.

Twitter seems to be more professionally and academically accepted as a social network tool. Not that it is bigger than Facebook, but it seems more appropriate at a business and academic level. Having a limit of the amount of words per tweet makes people more creative about what they post. I see twitter used as a tool that supports the content of a specific project. For example, many people who make videos in Youtube, often use Twitter to let their followers know what they are working on and when their next project will be ready, as well as updates that have to do with delays.

Youtube has been around for a while and its main purpose is the making of videos that range from cats being cats; to classes of economics. Youtube users often concentrate their content in one specific audience. For example, there are channels that will only post videos about basketball and others will only post videos that have to do with video games. Youtube seems like the most profitable social network if the user can get a constant amount of viewers. There is an interesting trend in youtube, and this leads to my discussion of Twitch. The most viewed videos are music videos, having at the top "gangnam style" with 2.6 BILLION views. However the channel has 9 million users subscribed which is more important that a video view since it remarks how many people are going to see all of the content that you post. On the other hand we have "PewDiePie" gaming channel. It is the most popular channel with 48 million subscribers. Even tough his most viewed video accounts for only 78 million views, it counts with the persistence and support of 5 times more people than the "gangnam style" channel. Making it more profitable.

Twitch.tv is concentrated only in gamers. In this website people can stream in real life when they play at home. Anyone can watch them, talk to them and give donations. There are a lot of people who stream video games for a living and make a decent paychek (all from donations). Twitch.tv has been becoming bigger with the growth of video games popularity. Even Amazon.com just signed a contract with them and having an amazon prime account gives you benefits in twitch.tv as well. Its busiest time is when the League of Legends world championship runs every year; at this time they get up to 500000 people watching live. Streaming has been adopted by youtube and even facebook. Streaming games is growing rapidly and twitch is definitely a social network to keep your eyes on.

Social Networking

We all are familiar with social media and social networking. Most of us even feel that we know most of the uses that these social media platforms offer and the advantages that they bring to a business or a person. Most of us have heard about a case when through social networking a business has increased their revenues at little to no cost. Like the case that was discussed in my marketing class last semester about a restaurant that opened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The owners decided to bring the restaurant to twitter, foursquare and yelp. But not only that, they listened to what people were writing and they were actually acting upon those comments. Even sometimes the customers will give a recipe for a burger and the restaurant will actually use it and sell it. As you can imagine this boosted the revenues of the restaurant tremendously. 

Other organizations that are benefiting from social networking are involved in politics. Political campaigns are now publishing heavily on social media in order to attract support from all the social media users. This has been proved to be very effective, mostly because the people seeing the post by a politician can actually comment and give their opinions in real time. One of the first examples of this change is the Obama's campaign. When the president used social media in order to strengthen his campaign. In the article "How Obama Tapped Into Social Network's Power" by David Carr. We get a description of how the president was one of the first politicians to take use of the "unconventional" and non traditional social media for his political campaign. The use of Facebook and twitter to run a campaign ended up giving more power to the people and to the president himself; the ones loosing here were the bankers and lobbyists, as Mr. Carr said: 

   

           "The juxtaposition of a networked, open-source campaign and a historically imperial office will have profound implications and raise significant questions. Special-interest groups and lobbyists will now contend with an environment of transparency and a president who owes them nothing. The news media will now contend with an administration that can take its case directly to its base without even booking time on the networks."

Just as these social media platforms become more popular and powerful; they become more competitive with each other. Social media platforms are in a constant fight in order to grab more users and it seems that they all want to take over the other. Some social media platforms have not survived the competition from Facebook and Twitter (like Myspace). But even when we think that these two giants are very different from each other, they are actually very competitive. This is better illustrated in the article "Facebook Goes for Some Twitter Sensibility" by Claire Cain Miller. On this article, Miller explains how after failing to acquire Twitter; Facebook decided that it was time to imitate some of the features that seemed very useful by the Twitter users. One of these features that Facebook took from Twitter is the option to tag a friend in a status update. Before, the option to tag friends was limited only to pictures. Another thing they took was pretty much the whole Twitter layout in what is called "Facebook Lite". Search, and see for yourself; I hope you are okay with copycats.