I took a few minutes pause at writing this post because i hold fond memories of Second Life and because in reality it’s still there.

But the news that Philip Rosedale is leaving Second Life role as a CEO can only mean the final demise of the once booming online virtual world. According to his blog post at SL’s official blog he’ll stay with Second Life as chairman.

I’ve played with SL full time for almost an year. I experienced all the joys and sadness of a decadent online world aimed solely at profit.

Some of you who aren’t familiar with SL must understand that the game credits could be exchanged to real US dollars and this turned the aim of the whole community to make money out of SL.

I must confess that my hands aren’t entirely clean. Being a developer it was easy for me to start creating virtual stuff to sell to the dumb masses that once inhabited SL. I mostly dwelled with casino games. Back then, gambling was the major activity in SL and i supplied a couple of casinos with all kinds of games, from slots to roulettes. Most of them were truly random and luck was indeed a factor. But there were some "special" games that where a bit tilted in favor of the house. Oddly this wasn’t generating any real inflow of cash and i turned to another source of income, i became an exchange trader.

Back then the Exchange between SL’s in game credits and dollars happened outside of Linden Labs control at a website called GOM. As one would expect you could buy and sell credits for dollars. There’s always a gap between the price at which a currency is being sold and at which it’s being bought and that’s the profit traders make.

As SL’s exchange market was quite small it fluctuated according to news of stuff happening inside the game and to SL itself, like for instance the introduction of video would boost the construction of in game theaters which meant players would require a lot of credits which in turn meant that the demand for credits would rise at the exchange thus raising the value of the currency.

I noticed that besides me there were only a hand full of others trading consistently at GOM. It didn’t take long for some traders to start organizing and collaborate in an organized way to raise our profits, driving the exchange rate up and down according to our needs.

All in all it was fun and I’ve made a couple of thousand dollars that really helped back then.

But during all that time I saw no interest by Linden Labs in creating a better SL, they held a money making factory and it was working at full steam, why bother investing when thing were going so well?

I’ve discussed this many times in the past with fellow players and most of them where true believers in Linden Labs propaganda that SL was going to be the next best thing since sliced bread. But that never happened. I hate to do this but i told you so.

A week ago I’ve reported the end of ReadBurner. But as Alexander Marktl the founder of ReadBurner stated in the final post at ReadBurner’s blog, ReadBurner was for sale.

I honestly expected that some domain trader would buy it and load it with ads and popup’s but to my surprise Marktl sold to a group headed by Mashable’s Editor in Chief Adam Ostrow.

Marktl has made the official announcement just a few minutes ago and clarifies his choice in selling to this particular group:

After some email discussions and phone calls, I decided to go with Drew, Adam and Eric because they understand and like the concept of sharing items through Google Reader as much as I do. Moreover they obviously have the skills and the resources to build compelling web products.

Marktl also comments on the number of emails he received asking him to continue with this project, and that’s is why he’ll stay on board with ReadBurner holding an advisor status.

Adam Ostrow defines the next moves for ReadBurner on his post at Mashable announcing the acquisition.

The first step is to get ReadBurner back online, and we hope to do that within the next couple weeks. Alex – who is staying involved with the project in his free time - has some concerns about the scalability, so we’ll be addressing that before we re-launch. After that, the plan is to keep reaching out to all of the evangelists (see here, here, and here for a sampling) that ReadBurner was lucky enough to find in its first go-round and continue to improve the site based on their comments.

I’m happy with this move mainly because i liked ReadBurner clean and efficient style, RSSMeme wasn’t quite the same, maybe it’s just a design thing but what I’d really would like to see is the same kind of aggregation found in ReadBurner in FriendFeed.

According to The Wall Street Journal Yahoo’s board will reject the bid made by Microsoft earlier this week in an attempt to buy some time and get a better deal out of the whole process.

Most analysts like this stalling move, but I think it will just make Microsoft more committed to the acquisition. The ball is now on Microsoft’s court.

We should expect some kind of formal statement from Yahoo tomorrow and I don’t see MS waiting too long to strike back.

The biggest thing since Youtube’s acquisition by Google last year has just hit the intertubes like a storm. The hostile move by Microsoft to acquire Yahoo.

Everybody is talking about the consequences that this 44.6 billion dollar deal will have on the web. The obvious concerned party by this bid is Google who already made a very aggressive statement about the monopolistic nature of Microsoft and how they would potentially use Yahoo web assets to threaten Google’s in several business niches that Google leads undisputed, like the web advertising market.

But Google went beyond issuing a public statement, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo Inc. CEO Jerry Yang to offer his company’s help in any effort to thwart Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, say people familiar with the matter.

Google can’t contemplate the idea of fighting a bidding war for Yahoo against Microsoft, not only because Microsoft would probably outbid them in the end, but also because anti-monopoly laws would make Google’s bid a legal mess.

But a corporation as large as Google has a few cards in the sleeves, and according to the New York Times:

Google’s lobbyists in Washington have also begun plotting how it might present a case against the transaction to lawmakers, people briefed on the company’s plans said. Google could benefit by simply prolonging a regulatory review until after the next president takes office.

In addition, several Google executives made “back-channel” calls over the weekend to allies at companies like Time Warner, which owns AOL, to inquire whether they planned to pursue a rival offer and how they could assist, these people said. Google owns 5 percent of AOL.

It seems that this will be a long and hard war to be No. 2 on the web. Yahoo employees seem to be worried about losing their corporate identity and be engulfed by Redmond’s money making machine.

The timing for the bid seems to be perfect, just when everyone had their eyes set on the Super Bowl and Super Tuesday election for the President of the United States.

As a user of web services from both companies (Hotmail and Flickr) I find all this quite amusing and concerning at the same time. Anyway this seems to be a Borg takeover where resistance is indeed futile.

I need to start by saying that I’m a Dreamhost client. This blog is hosted with them. And to be perfectly honest I really like them.

They are are renowned for their sense of humor which I do enjoy, specially the monthly newsletter. Now and again there’s a bit of downtime, but that’s to be expected. Their support works great and folks are very helpful even when I accidentally borked one of my websites by accident.

But this Monday they’ve fumbled the ball big time, by triple charging almost all of their thousands of clients. Apparently I wasn’t affected, at least no money went missing from my credit card. I’ve only received an e-mail stating that I was all paid up until 2009 which left me scratching my head but I didn’t bother to check what was happening.

But hundreds of others clients weren’t so fortunate as me and flocked to the support phone lines and e-mail. Not a very good day to work at support I’m sure.

After some time, Josh Jones offered an explanation to what had happened on Dreamhost’s official blog. Which only made matters worse, because the tone of the post was light and jovial, using The Simpsons pictures to illustrate their mistake.

I surely understand the frustration of some clients who sites were down, and some whose bills/rent/mortgage bounced. I would be pissed too. I would be more pissed to find that the explanation of the error apparently makes fun of the whole situation.

Despite their immediate action to return all the money and even cover the charges that some clients have incurred due to this error it’s obviously a mess, and the end result is lots and lots of cancellations, threats of legal action and probably some guys showing up at the Dreamhost offices with baseball bats.

Now that’s a nice name for a website. Subvert and Profit shows the ugly face of the internet underground.

There are many online communities dedicated to exchange services for money, and there’s nothing wrong about that.
But it’s quite usual to find “job opportunities” to vote for certain items on digg.com or stumbleupon.com. There are also link exchanges, del.icio.us tagging and several other ways to bring traffic to websites.

Some are sleazier than others and most explore the inequities of social news algorithms. The idea is quite simple. Get a group of 100 people to vote for your story on digg and you’re on the front page, getting the much wanted traffic to your website.

Apparently Subvert and Profit is expanding to youtube, according to this Techcrunch post:

While they have not yet revealed how they plan on subverting and profiting from YouTube, we can take some guesses based on Dan Ackerman’s infamous guest post on the subject. Dan’s viral suggestions included email lists, comments, views, blog embeds, and ratings. I imagine S&P’s strategy will center around paying their users to boost each of these.

However, getting big on YouTube is significantly harder than Digg or StumbleUpon. Front page featured videos are chosen by YouTube itself and pushing a video up the ranks in terms of views requires tens of thousands, not hundreds of user actions. I can only imagine their plans include outright view fraud to make the video “go viral”.

Maybe Youtube is quite difficult to monetize, but I’d bet that quite soon we’ll start seeing twitter spam, if not from these guys from some other folks.