7 Billion Friends

Catching Up With Loved Ones, Players Of The Game, Oh The Places You’ll Go

I’m in San Francisco until the 10th catching up with friends and collaborators on the project. First let me say that Larry Sheradon is *killing it* on the map and website updates. We met up right when I got in to go over plans, and he whipped out pages of drawings and pulled up prototypes on his computer that had me drumming the table in joy. Dude’s good. Real good. Hello World indeed (placing isometric inches):

I also met up with Mark Wallace, and got down with Pierce P and Christian Westbrook. Here’s an old photo of us at the end of 2007 on the first day we set up desks at our office in Brooklyn for our too-sekret realtime social web startup called Wello Horld (left to right: Pierce, Christian, and Mark).

Some of you know the backstory on that. We ran into irreconcilable cultural conflict with our investors about how new things are supposed to be made and released (and, I’ve come to realize, owned), and we were eventually replaced after a long and painful ordeal that saw none of our work released to the world.

Afterwards we all split up to do our own things. Christian went to Co-Tweet (which was just bought the other day — drinks on Christian!) to write code that makes their realtime system scale, Pierce went to a social gaming company called The Broth where he writes code and makes art for popular Facebook games like Barn Buddy, and Mark returned to his virtual worlds origins to help manage community for Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life. I, of course, threw myself into starting the hybrid beast that is LOVELAND. rawr. That’s an interesting split!

In true Mark Wallace style, that conversation will have to remain secret for a while, but it was good. ;) Christian and Pierce and I are getting down deep, sharing problems we’re working on, and things we could do together. That’s pushing me even harder to get a proper (radical) Credit system going where people can work together without Working Together(TM) at a company with an overly constrictive ownership structure.

Topics of interest include easier payment systems, virtual currencies, augmented reality and graphics on top of video streams, better investment visualizations (seeing investment come into something in ways radically different from a progress bar), and the finer points of Chat Roulette. More on that to come.

All this brings to mind an old song (cuss word warning):

Playersofthegame by  LemonBattery

And an old book:

Back to it.