There.com being bought by Yahoo?

There are many rumors floating around that There.com is being purchased by Yahoo. Yahoo recently (within the past week) did a survey about virtual worlds and avatars, and almost all of it was asking about There.com. Also, There Inc fired almost 75% of its staff, including VPs, managers, and all in-world greeters and most in-world event hosts yesterday.

Many people are frantically bailing from There. To those people, I say Welcome to Second Life! Others are hanging on till the very end. We shall see what happens!

w00t, death to the capitalists! Welcome all of you 13yr old leet speaking there users! Err, wait, maybe getting all of there here wont be such a great idea

Almost makes me glad I did not take a look at it.

the demo movie looked kinda lame, and from what other people were saying about it, I decided not to try it.

Besides, Between my two jobs in RL and SL, I barely have time to go There.

:: ducks from the awful pun ::

Its really kinda tragic. If There bites the dust, we will only have TSO to pick on, and that's too easy.

It's not gonna die, no way. If SL can survive how could There NOT survive? They'd have to be wasting so much money it's not even funny.

People spend real money on virtual crap that costs nothing to actually produce (unless you count putting power into the memory chips), basically for the purpose of being associated a "brand name".

From what I hear.

I R FROM TEH THERE I R COOL AND I WILL H4XX0R U CUZ I HAVE TEH SMALL WEE WEE W00T

You misunderstood the rumors, James. They didn't say Yahoo was buying There. They said 'some yahoo' is buying There. They couldn't find anybody competent to take it off their hands.

Lmao darwin, if I were eating kornflakes they would surely be all over my keyboard by now.

There will most likely not dissapear, however you never know what or who will buy out other companies in time of their dispair. Anything is possible in the land of virtual enviornments, well... except for going underwater in There, BECAUSE ITS ALL SOLID! Zing!

Ugh, if Yahoo (not some yahoo) did buy There, I'd have to look at advertisements for it constantly. (Heh, they'd probably get a HUGE influx of users if it had a big ad on Yahoo!) I'm just glad I won't have to see it.

There is a State Of There Address tonight in There. 8-10pm EST
It will also will be broadcast on Pulse Radio

So... what happened?

If Yahoo buys There, I can't help thinking its usage will take off enormously. Yahoo provides a *lot* of exposure. Like, just imagine, on your My Yahoo page, there's actually a window where you are logged onto There!

> Ugh, if Yahoo (not some yahoo) did buy There, I'd have to look at advertisements for it constantly.

It depends. In their mail service, you have a choice. YOu can either pay nothing and get not very many adverts occasoinally or pay about 3USD a month and not get any at all.

Azelda

Danggit, darwin! Ya nearly made me choke on my Ramen noodles!!!

I hope Yahoo doesn't buy There. The horrible brain sucking curse on There might be transfered over to Yahoo, and bring about the END OF THE WORLD.


Well hopefully whatever sinister force is imposing the brain sucking curse on There doesn't have the power to apply it to Yahoo.

Last I heard, There Inc was getting into the military simulation business .... (/.)

Theres a very funny post on one of the There forums about all the things the military must have to put up with using There software.

Personaly I think its very odd the military would use There software. Sure they have interisting physics and avatar animations, but other than that... theres nothing. And I sure hope they don't need it for any aquatic planning since the water is all solid. And using stars or the sky to help you any is out since clouds don't move either.

Oh please, Linden Lab and CRS (WWIIOL company) would be better choices to design a "training world" like that. Especially CRS...

Although the best would probably be...umm.. one of the companies that normally produce military simulations?

So I guess the military is gonna have to pay $1 US for every bullet fired. Which basically means we're all paying for a game. lol

Remember, this is the US government we are talking about.

the bullets would be the same price as in real life, $5 a shot.

So they should contract CRS or LL to do the project.

If we're going to throw taxpayer money away, let's at least throw it at good companies with real innovative ideas.

We will never win a war again.

The military isn't using their adaptation of There as a straight-up combat simulator. Instead, they're using it for situations that the standard simulations aren't good at, like occupation duty or convoy escort -- stuff that's more likely to involve talking than combat. There is much better at handling crowds than SecondLife.

Ever been to a party in There? Everyone not directly infront of you turns instantly into a "block head" (a person which looks like they're made of a bunch of boxes without any features). Unless they fixed that somehow for the military There is not really better at handling crowds than SL, we may get lag in large crowds but atleast you can see whos around you.

As for interaction, i.e. facial expressions and emotions, There is better at that, the animations seem more smooth and life like. But this may change in SL at some point.

I would say thats the only thing which would make There chosen over other games out there.

Well, you are all aware of the government paying $10,000 for hammers and such. You should all be aware about the There $4000 shirts. I think this is a match made in heaven.. Maybe I'll join There and create the $1,000,000.99 hammer.

I can't imagine Yahoo buying There.com. Doesn't sound like a very good fit to me. Yahoo is busy updating their search engine to compete with Google. Why? Because Google is moving into the portal business, which will make them direct competitors. Doesn't look good to depend on your competitor for key functionality.

Sounds like There had a layoff though:

http://www.livejournal.com/community/therecentral/18011.html

As far as the deal with the military, one of two things will happen: There will lose money trying to satisfy the ever changing requirements of the government, or the deal will get called off after everyone figures out it's not a good match.

Someone with good contacts (http://www.there.com/about_team_member.html#6) probably made that deal and I bet nobody in the government did a whole lot of research into what the capabilities of There were. The military already has their own 3D-VR code that lets you get in a room with projectors all over the place, with full combat gear and interact with the virtual enemy. My guess is that they are looking to save money, scrap their own system and use an "off the Shelf product" instead. According to this article:

http://www.mt2-kmi.com/articles.cfm?DocID=358

"The government noted the popularity of the company's virtual world approach and its similarity to ongoing military training simulation and synthetic environments. Gehorsam had been an independent member of a DARPA study directed at the same area and knew of the DoD interest. "The government saw the probability of modifying the current technology to meet specific training needs," he said.

"I felt There Inc. had a more advanced platform than the government had," he continued, "because we had done four years research on the basic technology. I also believed this would allow the Army to focus on the actual training benefits rather than the technology."

Sounds like a bit of a conflict of interest to me. At some point some auditor will probably think so too. Few people in government pay any attention to conflict of interest issues until, um, they get caught at it. After all, its YOUR money they are spending.

There were never 10,000 dollar hammers. Even the pentagon is not THAT stupid. There were however 600 dollar toilet seats. For aircraft. Many parts had to be built to meet tolerances required for high speed aircraft, etc. This raised the prices higher then would be expected for civilian items. Then the contracters inflated those prices to even higher levels to rip off the government...because they could get away with it.