Mitch Wagner's Blog

Adagio Tea: Steeped in social media, no unicorns and rainbows

Adagio Tea, a small online retailer of gourmet teas, makes innovative use of Twitter and other social media to drive sales and cement relationships with customers. They're a tiny company, but they do a couple of tricks that I haven't seen done anywhere else.

To induce customers to sign up for Adagio's Twitter account, @adagioteas, the company has set up a process to automatically send direct messages on the status of a shipment. To receive direct messages, a Twitter user has to be following the sender account. Adagio hopes that even after your tea shipment arrives, you'll continue to follow @adagioteas and receive occasional marketing messages.

Read the rest on the Computerworld Tool Talk blog: Adagio Tea: Steeped in social media, no unicorns and rainbows

Graffiti found in a Lake Murray Park Port-a-Potty

Illiterate? Guess whose fault.

Can Twitter offer ads without driving away customers?

Twitter could be getting ready to launch an ad platform in two to three weeks, according to reports. It will need to strike a delicate balance, delivering users' attention to advertisers without driving the users away.

Anamitra Banerji, head of product management and monetization at Twitter, told the blog MediaPost that "we are working on an ad platform, but it's only in the test phase," according to a report published earlier this week.("Twitter Ad Platform 'Imminent'")

"People are constantly talking and engaging with brands, sharing their feedback," Banerji said during a panel discussion at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, MediaPost reported. "What if brands start to participate?"

Seth Goldstein, CEO and co-founder of socialmedia.com, who led the panel, asked whether Twitter was "likely in the next month or so [to] offer Twitter owned and operated ads, perhaps?" Banerji said, "That's right."

Twitter may launch its ad platform at the South by Southwest conference which starts March 12, according to GigaOm. ("Twitter to Launch Ad Platform Soon")

Read the rest on the Computerworld Tool Talk Blog: Can Twitter offer ads without driving away customers?

Last night's episode of "Lost:" "Lighthouse"

There are fewer mysteries introduced this season. Oh, there's quite a lot of unexplained new business: The tower, the mirrors, the hippies in the temple. But there isn't the same sense that the writers are dropping clues which, if we just assembled them right, would tell us what's going on. They're just unexplained business.

With one big exception: What is the relationship between the alternate-2004 timeline in Los Angeles, and the 2007 timeline on the island? There seems to be a connection. The characters on the island bump into each other in L.A. There are weird things going on which seem connected to the island. The two I remember involve Jack: His below-the-collar shaving cut in the season opener, and his mysterious appendectomy scar last night. At first, he didn't remember getting an appendectomy. And I think he was lying when he pretended his mother had reminded him -- I think he still didn't remember it.

Also: Jack has a son in this timeline.

The character stories in 2004-LA seem to be about their exorcising their personal demons. Locke is still together with his girlfriend, they're on their way to getting married, and he seems to be reconciled to his father. Jack has a son, and he's reconciling with the boy.

I think island-Jack was right about being a bad father. He was whiny and needy. Children don't need whiny, needy, clingy parents. They need parents to be strong.

Claire has replaced Rousseau. She knew that fake-Locke wasn't really Locke, but she also referred to her father. Does that mean Christian Shepherd's ghost is the real thing? It does appear ghosts are real in Lost.

Hot Tub Time Machine

I just heard about an upcoming science fiction movie that looks like it could be a lot of fun. It’s the kind of movie you hear about and you have an immediate reaction. You either think, “That sounds awesome!” or “No, it sounds stupid. And only idiots say ‘awesome.’”

The title: Hot Tub Time Machine.

Read the rest on the Tor.com blog: Hot Tub Time Machine

Second-day thoughts on the new Second Life viewer

Second Life blogfather Wagner James Au weighs in on Viewer 2.0 He loves it -- or at least he loves parts of it -- but he says it won't drive Second Life mainstream adoption. He's right.

Read James's blog here: Second Life 2.0 Analysis: Epic Win for Userbase, Competition Killer... But Not Mass Market Game Changer (Yet)

Second Life has several barriers to mass adoption. Ease of use is only one of them, and it's not even the biggest one.

The first barrier is that you have to register. That's a barrier for all social media sites, but other social media sites have boiled the registration process down to e-mail address and password. In Second Life, registration is a lot more than that.

Read the rest at the Computerworld Tool Talk Blog: Second-day thoughts on the new Second Life viewer

How to decide who to unfollow on Twitter

Every once in a while, you have to break off a relationship with someone on Twitter. They get annoying, or boring, and you realize you're just not getting value from being in touch with them.

Until recently, I had a really bad system for deciding who to unfollow. I regularly checked FriendOrFollow.com, a tool for organizing your Twitter followers. I would look over their list of people who I followed, but who did not follow me back. These were people whose tweets I read, but they didn't read mine.

Read the rest on the Computerworld Tool Talk blog: How to decide who to unfollow on Twitter

"Men of a Certain Age" comes of age

I really like this show, and so does Time Magazine's James Poniewozik: "The Morning After: Men Coming Of Age":

The obvious surprise was that Ray Romano has dramatic acting chops: with Joe, his gambling-addicted, newly single dad, he took the melancholy streak that was always present in Ray Barone, and simply turned the dial a few notches to show us Joe's pathos without making him pathetic.

I agree with all of it, and I love Poniewozik's description of Scott Bakula as looking "like he was carved out of an apple."

Last night was the season finale. I hope it gets renewed.

Julie watches it with me, not sure if she likes it or just tolerates it.

ArminasX Saiman reviews the new Second Life 2.0 viewer

New Viewer, New Thinking. One detail:

Instant messages, group notices, payments and inventory offers now use a different scheme. Gone is the familiar baby-blue box that appeared in the upper right corner of your screen. instead you see contemporary style notification boxes appearing at the bottom right of your screen with friendly “X”s to send them away. Clicking expands them to the right detail. I feel the new messaging scheme is mostly good, but because the system is not as prominent as the old blue box, important events don’t poke you in the eye as they once did. I find this change to be the most difficult to adjust to, as you’ll quickly see messages stacking up and icons flashing on the bottom bar. It’s taken me a couple of weeks, but I think I’m fine with it now.

It took me a while to adjust to the new notification system as well. The old one was annoying, but you could be sure you were seeing every single group notice and instant message that came your way. For my first couple of weeks trying out the new viewer, I was nervous I was missing things.

Then, Sunday evening, I was attending Virtually Speaking Sundays, and realized later that I was able to effortlessly follow the discussion on audio, text chat, three instant-message conversations, and the occasional group notice. No way I would have been able to handle that amount of distraction on the old viewer. In the old viewer, new messages demanded your attention right away; in the new viewer, you can minimize discussions and get to them when you're ready, while a discreet icon notifies you of new messages coming in.

Second Life seeks mainstream adoption

Linden Lab, which develops and operates Second Life introduced a new beta version of its desktop viewer software on Tuesday, the first big upgrade in many years. Will the new software help bring about a renaissance of the once-trendy service?

You remember Second Life. It's a virtual world, a three-dimensional environment like World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto. But it's not a game, it's a simulation of a world. You can build virtual buildings and vehicles, create virtual clothes, play live music, role-play as a vampire or cowboy, and buy and sell virtual goods for real-world money. It's the closest thing we have now to Star Trek's holodeck.

Second Life drove a huge amount of hype in 2006-2007, with many tech journalists predicting it was the future of the Internet and would be bigger than the World Wide Web. Then, like a lot of hyped things, the Second Life bubble collapsed. Now, Second Life has a reputation as a failure.

That reputation is, quite simply, wrong. Second Life continues to keep a loyal user base, which has been growing, albeit in fits and starts, since it was out of the limelight. The service is now running 680,000 active users, defined as users who spend more than an hour in-world any given month, said Tom Hale, chief product officer for Linden Lab, in an interview in Second Life on Monday. That's not competing with the Web, or even Facebook, but it's respectable.

Second Life is also profitable, Hale said. The service is free to use, Linden Lab gets revenue from people who want to lease space on the company's servers to host their own virtual islands and tracts of land.

Now, Linden Lab is looking to bring the service the mainstream appeal that eluded it. They want to make Second Life mainstream, starting by increasing active users by 40%, to 1 million, by the end of 2010. The dream over the long term: Linden Lab wants Second Life to be bigger than Facebook. Much bigger.

"We have a long way to go until we reach Facebook scale, but that's a reasonable goal," Hale said. "However, I'm not going to sign up for those numbers until we have ample evidence that the market is ready to see that kind of adoption."

Read the rest on the Computerworld Tool Talk blog: Second Life seeks mainstream adoption