Regarding this O’Reilly post. There was a place called eHatchery here in Atlanta that was basically a big building full of offices, supplies, and connectivity. It’s goal was to help dot-com startups get on their way. On the way out, I hear you could get Aeron chairs for a steal.
When her majesty’s laptop was working, she played Second Life every so often; it was more like a large virtual chatroom where she could play dressup, and socialize en-masse.
Her friend would make models that did stuff; the most notable being Final Fantasy 7 ‘esque “big gun” that this girl would carry around, and it lobbed kittens out of it; because of the physics of the game, they’d bounce around; pretty decent range too taking into account wind resistance.
Anyway, I’ve brainstormed with friends many times in the past on how can we integrate some of Flashcom‘s features into a Flash panel to allow us to collaboratively code; like pair programming, only done remotely.
I apparently have been approaching it from the wrong angle, as Second Life appears to be an eHatchery 2.0; taking the approach that focuses on the most important thing; digital communication. Once you get that down pat, and provide a digital medium that most matches the real-world, you can actually get some real work done, and collab with friends on creating things. You pay rent by uploading your creations vs. paying for office space. (See comments here)
One of the nice things about Director was, the .dir was not only the source file, but the runtime file; you can have to do stuff via the Message Window; much like Flash’s Output Window, but you could run actual Lingo (Director’s ActionScript) in the Message Window and get results. Second Life helps foster that immediate results to your efforts as well as allowing you to easily share with friends abroad.