Sad news we hear day by day from Sichuan.
We would like to extend our sincere condolences to all who lost friends or family and to all who still have to worry for their beloved ones.
Sincerely. Lutz Martin Stefan

I’m quite suffocated in work, just like usual, so blogging is quite light, as usual… Don’t forget to visit Coobico if you like to see the latest and greatest from our ongoing project. I’ve switched to Actionscript 3 in the meantime and like to share some nice resources for Adobe’s current installment:

Greensock’s TweenMax
I stumbled upon the AS2-version TweenLite when looking for a lightweight animation-framework for Flash-banners. The revamped, bigger brother written in AS3 for me even outbeats the ubiquitous Fuse.

Yahoo’s Astra Components
You probably heard this earlier than me, but Yahoo’s Dev Network offers some really helpful components for Flash 9, like charts and various menu-UIs.

Grant Skinner’s Memory Gauge
Memory management in Flash is a mess — the excellent gBlog offers a simple component which monitors framerate and memory-allocation through drag & drop. Nifty! I was looking for something similar for quite a while.

Now this really too cool — today Google finally offers an API to its language-tools – it was about time. A certain kind of translation to Coobico’s chat-interface was planned all along, and after pondering for quite a while on the actual realization, we decided to use some kind of automated approach, translating chat-bubbles among players with different language-settings on the fly. There were quite a few free, open-source, unofficial solutions available during the past years which could be queried against Google’s translation page or Yahoo’s Babelfish (and of course the occasional premium services). Now, such hackerish approaches tend to break too easy, so it’s a relief to see Google’s translation APIs finally going live, featuring all languages of Coobico’s prime markets: English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese. While it is not sure yet if such auto-translations will already be a part of the closed beta, they will definitely be added further down the road.
Enough development-chitchat, back to work!

Recently, the announcement of Linden Labs’ CEO Philip Rosedale that “the company he founded has begun a search for a new CEO with more operational and management expertise” was followed by quite some mixed comments ranging from “With Rosedale in a more ancillary visionary role, and a more experienced day-to-day, managerial CEO in place, that’s likely to change things, surely for the better.” (James Wagner Au, GigaOm) to “while Linden Lab insists that the decision wasn’t precipitated by a crisis, it’s hard to ignore the ongoing backlash against Second Life from the mainstream media.” (Prokofy Neva, Virtual Worlds News) to “Rosedale’s resignation from his executive position more firmly solidifies my own perception that it is only a matter of when, not if, the land of bizarre, free-form make-believe takes its final bow.” (Paul Glazowksi, Mashable)

Now, is writing off SL not a bit premature? After all, (according to Techcrunch) Linden Labs has a funding of around US$ 19 million under its belts (which, BTW, wouldn’t keep Gaia Online even running for more than 9 months, as we learned in the recent days). But Linden also faces peculiar problems both from its inside (namely the complexity of its product and its company-structure) and from the outside with growing competition like Hipihi, EA-Land and Multiverse.

SL has to confront a vital question which eventually every social network/massive world these days will have to answer: What is its purpose and unique benefit to its members, after the initial sensation has worn off?

I can’t help but put forward my 0.2 bucks on the current rants on Flash, iPhones and Apple’s latest iPhone SDK-campaign: a few days ago Apple announced that the iPhone is now essentially “Enterprise Ready” and “Developer Ready”, read an article about it at Techcrunch.
At the same time Steve Jobs weighed in on the iPhone’s web-capabilities, to be more specific, how Adobe Flash is not suited for iPhone:

“As Jobs put it Tuesday, Apple’s iPhone, with all its cutting-edge mobile Internet trickery, needs something much better than the current Flash player that Adobe makes for cellphones. The Flash Player option that fits the bill is made for devices like laptops that are larger than the iPhone; as a consequence, it performs too slowly on the iPhone, he said.
“There’s this missing product in the middle,” Jobs said.”

Personally, I don’t buy attempted explanations like battery-life and performance-issues, even though it’s granted that Macromedia never achieved the same performance of Flash-players on a Mac than on Win-PCs, at least not up until the recent years. To me, the iPhone equals an utterly walled, proprietary system and business-model. If Apple would have integrated Flash into the equation, it would have ultimately killed its cash-cow. With Flash it would have been a breeze for developers to deliver third-party apps to the iPhone and circumvent Apple’s revenue-model. Apple rather wants you to take part in its boarded-up developers’ programm, which comes at US$99, and what’s more, heavily restricts access to the device’s functions through Apple’s iPhone Human Interface Guidelines — which somewhat supports my argument. Check out the full specs of the Human Interface Guidelines at Techcrunch.

And while it might or might not be true that Flash was already seen running on iPhones in a lab according to Robert Scoble, this hardly matters to the average user. If the iPhone is really one of the spearheads of true mobile web and as a role-model for future devices, then I see internet on handsets jeopardized.

Instead of commenting on Hong Kong’s latest storm in a teacup, created by the still unresolved celebrity-porn-scandal, let me pick up some more important news:

The brand new Drupal version 6 has been released shortly — there is a screencast comprising its new features, namely a simplified installation, a more user-friendly drag-and-drop administration back-end and support for OpenID (which is the real killer-feature to me).
After building quite a few websites with Drupal, I am personally not shilling too much for it any more. Don’t get me wrong here, Drupal is great with all its networking features and homebrew-plugins; but I eventually grew annoyed of two of its characteristics:

First, I don’t like Drupal’s on-site administration. An admin-area is not supposed to be handled in the same space like the website it dishes out, in my opinion.
Second, and rather unnerving to me is the code Drupal produces, which is cluttered with unnecessary mark-up (like div’s) wrapping each and all of its contents. The bottom line is, I found myself writing preg_replace functions to strip undesirable pre-formatted contents from most designs.

After working with CMSs for about two years, my light-bulb moment was finding that each CMS has its own philosophy; Drupal’s approach then to me is, you only need a few clicks and you already got a (pre-formatted) site. While this is useful in some situations, it’s counter-productive in others. A CMS with a completely different attitude is ExpressionEngine, which I’m using quite a lot at the moment (I’m building Coobico with EE, for example). EE’s unique strength is that nothing is preset by default. You need to build every detail yourself, giving you unmatched control.

There is nothing else to it but to keep yourself familiar with two or three different CMSs for different specifications, I guess.

Around christmas-time articles about the popular Chinese MMORPG 征途 Zhengtu Online circulated on Chinese websites (they supposingly got a userbase of several million, and a net income of US $39 million in Q3, 2007). The issue didn’t seemed to be all that interesting at that moment, but it reached several large US-blogs like Kotaku around new year, and thus was getting more and more coverage in the past days. Before leaving comments scattered here and there, we can also discuss the issue here, right?
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What were your most favorite MMOs in 2007? According to GigaOm’s Blake Snow in “GigaOM Top 10 Most Popular MMOs”, World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel and Runescape are leading the pack, subscriber-wise. Runner-ups further down the list include Club Penguin, Webkinz and Guild Wars – you might object with the compilation of competitors here like some commenters who are missing virtual worlds like Maple Story, Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom, Final Fantasy XI and so on. But it’s already quite a smorgasbord of massive avatar chats and hardcore-mmorpgs. It’s pretty much a comparison of apples to oranges raising the question of a more detailed definition of the word MMO (massively multiplayer online world/game). Do Habbo Hotel and Webkinz fall into the definition of a multiplayer game? It’s a similar problem like the compilation of the top 10 social networks (where sites like Gaia Online had their place, too).
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A few recommended reads from the past days: China Economic Review has an insightful recap about Yahoo’s whistle-blowing incident about the fate of Chinese reporter and dissident Shi Tao. I find one assumption especially noteworthy:

“Yahoo itself is guilty of (…) a lack of foresight concerning the risks of locating user information in China (Google, for example, keeps its servers offshore, although this arrangement has yet to be properly tested)”

Locating the server which houses your business is really an important and delicate decision. We moved our digital home to Canada lately after a lot of considerations.

Two more interesting tidbits about Mainland China: China Web 2.0 Review blogs about a report called “Studying Malicious Websites and the Underground Economy on the Chinese Web”. According to this report, around 1.5 percent of China’s 145.000 most commonly visited websites are infected with malicious code which might introduce trojans and viruses to their users’ computers. Phew, I wonder about similar statistics for the US or Europe — anybody any ideas?

And finally, check out this article from Danwei about Milk. Milk is an acclaimed magazine about pop-culture, style and design published in Hong Kong, which is now available in Mainland, too. The Mainland Milk does not seem to be as delicious as the original…:

“the initial reaction seems to be disappointment, at least from the people who had been eagerly anticipating the magazine’s arrival. Members of the milk group on Douban, a social networking service oriented toward students and young white-collars, seem to agree that the mainland edition is a far cry from the HK original.”

…which keeps reminding me that Hong Kong and Mainland China are two very different playing-grounds.

Facebook, possibly the planet’s highest valued online-business, seems to soak up investments like a sponge currently. While the rumour about an upcoming hedge-fond investment might or might not be true, the $240 million they raise from Microsoft at the moment pushes the bar to a total funding of $338 million.
The newest investor to step into the ring is Hong Kong’s illustrious billionaire and Asia’s most powerful man 李嘉誠 Li Ka-Shing with an allotment of $60 million, with an option to invest another $60 million (according to AllThingsD).
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