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Facebook are upgrading their website, this message was shown today when the site was accessed at 6:46 PM (GMT).

After seeing this message I refreshed the page and the site would not connect (page cannot be displayed). I wonder what they are doing…

Scientists study real life through online games

World of Warcraft and Second Life are proving a boon to social scientists who are using them as virtual laboratories.

Researchers are getting insights into real life by studying what people do in virtual worlds, reveals a review in the journal Science.

It suggests virtual worlds could help scientists studying ideas of government and even concepts of self.

Others are looking at behaviours peculiar to online worlds and how they differ from real life.

Mirror worlds
Online worlds offer great potential to social scientists because they overcome some of the problems these researchers encounter when gathering subjects in the real world, Dr William Bainbridge, head of Human-Centred Computing at the US National Science Foundation, wrote in the journal.

For instance, he wrote, social scientists often face problems finding subjects fast enough or securing funds to carry out the research.

The popularity of online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft meant there was a ready pool of subjects that could be recruited over long periods of time for little cost, he said.

The game worlds also gather huge amounts of data about what players do that could easily be analysed by social scientists, wrote Dr Bainbridge.

The validity of this approach was shown by the fact that early work in online worlds revealed that players exhibit many of the behaviours and social conventions they adhere to in real life.

Many game commentators have noticed that characters and avatars in game worlds keep about the same distance apart as people stand in the real world, suggesting that players act the same way in both.

The differences between online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft were also revealing, said Dr Bainbridge.

In Second Life, participants often only create one alter-ego or avatar and identify closely with it. By contrast most Warcraft players maintain several “alts” and regard them as possessions.

Both could throw light on how people create identities and how they seek to project themselves to others, wrote Dr Bainbridge.

Second Life was proving most popular with social scientists as it let them build their own objects to test the reactions and responses of gamers, he wrote.

The games could let scientists carry out large-scale studies of alternative governmental regimes that would be “next to impossible in society at large,” he wrote.

For instance, Dr Bainbridge wrote, the ongoing conflict in World of Warcraft between players of different factions for valuable minerals could be seen as a field experiment in “how individuals can be induced to cooperate in producing public goods”.

Papers losing real estate ads to online

It’s bad enough that a cratering housing market is leading to a slump in real estate advertising at newspapers, as a dreary series of earnings reports showed last week.

What’s worse is that a lot of that advertising may never come back to newspapers even if the real estate sector recovers. That’s because a significant chunk of those advertising dollars are moving — you guessed, online.

Exactly how much of a shift is occurring is difficult to measure in terms of dollars or market share, but several real estate executives say they are making a conscious decision to move money out of newspapers and onto the Internet as that medium grows in importance as a tool for researching home-buying decisions.

Granted, a significant amount of the declines in real estate advertising in newspapers can be attributed to the general weakness in real estate markets, particularly in hard-hit markets such as California and Florida, which were booming a year ago — leading to big gains in advertising back then.

Last week Tribune Co., the No. 2 publisher by circulation, posted a 24 percent drop in the second quarter, while industry leader Gannett Co. has reported a 9.9 percent decline and McClatchy Co. reported a 19 percent decline, citing big losses in California and Florida.

Like the housing market itself, much of the up-and-down movement in newspaper real estate advertising can be viewed as cyclical, meaning it will be weak in down markets and bounce back in the upward part of the cycle, whenever that comes up.

But what’s worrying analysts this time around is that real estate could become the next category of classified advertising — after help-wanted ads — to mark a significant and permanent shift away onto the Internet. The stakes are big for newspapers since classifieds are highly lucrative and make up more than 35 percent of their revenues.

Mike Simonton, the top media industry analyst at the Fitch Ratings credit analysis service, says that currently a good 30 percent of help-wanted classified advertising is now online, while the Internet’s share of real estate and auto classified advertising is lower, at about 15 to 20 percent, but poised to move higher.

“The threats from the Internet are real,” Simonton said. “Newspaper advertising should remain under pressure until newspapers are better able to address the threat of online advertising.”

Representatives of several major real estate franchisors said in interviews that many home sellers still see newspaper advertising as an essential component of selling a home, but that younger brokers, home sellers and buyers are clearly more focused on using the Internet.

“For our agents, newspapers are an old standby,” said Abby Lee, director of regional advertising in Denver for RE/MAX, a major real estate franchisor. “With younger agents, there’s a trend of going online. There’s a realization that’s where they need to be.”

Suzy Antal, director of marketing, communications and public relations for Prudential Real Estate Affiliates, a unit of Prudential Financial Inc., said many Prudential agents have been pulling back on advertising during the current downturn, but as they return, they’re shifting ad budgets to their own Web sites, creating blogs, and taking different approaches beyond newspapers.

“Is newspaper a high priority? No,” Antal said. “I don’t believe my buyers and sellers are going to be in that market.”

Newspaper publishers understand they need to move more aggressively to hold on to real estate advertising. “We can’t sit on our hands,” says Charlie Diederich, the director of marketing and advertising at the Newspaper Association of America, an industry group.

Diederich said newspapers are still a key part of most people’s real estate searches and an important tool for realtors to make people aware of their brands. But he also acknowledged that newspapers need to do more to make their own Web sites essential to home buying decisions.

“We’ve got to improve both our print but especially our online products … so consumers will continue to come to us first so we can deliver that audience to the professional realtor,” Diederich said.

A group of five major newspaper publishers also owns Classified Ventures, a Chicago-based business that powers the real estate sections of the Web sites of its 125 member newspapers.

Tim Fagan, president of that group’s real estate division, said Classified Ventures would “significantly increase” its investment in Homescape, a real estate-related Web site that provides home listings, but he declined to provide specific numbers.

Whether those efforts will be enough to stanch the flow of real estate ad dollars to online alternatives remains to be seen.

Blanche Evans, the editor of Realty Times, an online real estate news service, says that realtors now have a number of alternatives besides newspapers for listing homes for sale, such as http://www.Realtor.com, a site run by the National Association of Realtors, in addition to major online destinations such as Yahoo Inc.

As home-buyers flock online, it’s also tough on realtors, Evans said, since home-buyers are becoming accustomed to seeing extensive color photos, descriptions of the neighborhood as well as video tours of the property — all of which costs money to produce.

With all the online tools available today, realtors “have the ability now to really expose the property in a significant way,” Evans said. “People have the ability to tour the house. That has changed everything.”

Mozilla gives Thunderbird e-mail the boot

Thunderbird, Mozilla’s open source desktop e-mail client, is being kicked out of its parent organization’s house, ostensibly for its own good.

In a blog post on Wednesday, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker explained, “We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.”

The rationale behind the decision is that Mozilla’s ongoing effort to promote the Firefox Web browser leaves Thunderbird out of the limelight.

Baker proposed several options for Thunderbird: creating a nonprofit foundation similar to the Mozilla Foundation; creating a Mozilla Foundation subsidiary for Thunderbird; and releasing Thunderbird as a community project along the lines of SeaMonkey, an open source application suite that includes a Web-browser, e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editor.

While Baker outlines potential difficulties with each of these approaches, she makes no mention of the fact that Web browsers like Firefox, in conjunction with the continued adoption of free Internet-based e-mail services, are obviating the need for a standalone e-mail client for many users.

Responding to Baker’s post, Rafael Ebron, founder and general manager of Browser Garage and a founding Mozilla Corp. employee, explained in a comment that despite being an avid user of Thunderbird, the e-mail application no longer meets his needs. “I honestly must say that I do not have much use for an offline client anymore,” he said. “For the last few years I have switched to entirely online options. Gmail, Hotmail, etc. solve all of my e-mail problems. Google Groups solves my Usenet problems. No more backups, importing, and synchronization. It really is an ideal system for me.”

Online e-mail services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Microsoft’s Hotmail also offer very good spam protection, unlike out-of-the-box Bayesian filters in desktop e-mail clients.

Then there are other differences between Firefox and Thunderbird, like the millions in revenue Mozilla earns for setting Google to be the default search engine in Firefox. Thunderbird doesn’t feed off the search cash cow, though with 5 million users around the globe there are probably untapped revenue opportunities.

Thunderbird has also suffered in comparison to Microsoft Outlook for its lack of calendar support. Though a calendar is under development in the form of Mozilla Sunbird, Thunderbird still faces a tougher sell than Firefox, without an obvious search ad dollar payoff. It also has to deal with competition from the likes of Zimbra in the corporate world.

Firefox rode resentment of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer monoculture to success. Microsoft Exchange and Outlook don’t seem to generate the same discontentment. Finding a new home for Thunderbird may prove to be far easier than sparking the uprising it needs to be king.

The internet in Kazakhstan

With DSL prices like these, it’s no wonder Borat left Kazakhstan behind. A new report from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe paints a grim picture of Internet access in Kazakhstan and shows how difficult life can be for those in poor and authoritarian countries who want to join the worldwide community of Internet users.

Consider the prices for Internet access, for one. Most users (and only four percent of the country even has access) hook up through state-owned Kazakhtelecom, a company not concerned with competitive pricing for its services. An unlimited dial-up plan costs about €82 ($111) in a country where the average monthly wage is €292 ($399). As for DSL, an unlimited 1.5Mbps connection costs €2,458 ($3,355) a month, and doesn’t even included the required ADSL modem. Want a 6Mbps cable connection? It’ll cost you, to the tune of €16,144 ($22,032) a month. As the OSCE report drily notes, this is more than a thousand times the price of such a connection in Western Europe.

This doesn’t just make Internet access expensive; prices like this actually change the way that people use the Internet, as we’ve seen in other countries.

Getting a connection is only the first step, though. Internet policy decisions—such as canceling domain name registrations—can seem a bit, well, arbitrary. Borat.kz, a domain registered by UK comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, was summarily shut down by the Association of a IT Companies in December 2005. The reason: “We’ve done this so he can’t badmouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name,” the head of the association told Reuters. “He can go and do whatever he wants at other domains.”

The government is also not real excited about websites that publish “dirt,” “lies,” and threaten national security, and the country’s Minister of Information last year announced that a comprehensive policy on dealing with these issues would soon be announced. Although it has yet to appear, Kazakhstan’s “Information Security Concept” was approved by President Nursultan Nazarbayev. That “Concept” makes clear that Kazakhstan is faced with serious threats from “destructive illegal political, religious, and economic organizations,” “certain foreign political, economic, military, and information structures,” and “unlawful activities of political and economic organizations in creating, disseminating, and using information.”

Bloggers who have published items critical of the government have been charged under statutes that prohibit any violations of the president’s “honor and dignity.” In 2003, a journalist complained that one of his favorite websites is being blocked. According to the report, “the prosecutor opened a criminal case against him for compromising the security system of Kazakhtelecom. He was beaten, sentenced and sent behind bars.”

As that last example indicates, content filtering is alive and well in the country. For several years, the preferred method of blocking was apparently by IP address, but that came to an end in 2005. The method of choice is now “increasing the connection latency” so that undesirable sites take so long to load that users give up.

Kazakhstan has recently been attempting to raise its worldwide profile, and it has been a member of the OSCE since 1992. For both of those reasons, it may pay some attention to the report, which concludes by suggesting that the country get rid of the state telecom monopoly, that the OSCE should monitor networks in the country to see if Kazakhstan is still filtering content, and that the government there should work to “support affordable and safe hosting a websites with the national ISPs.”