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September 3rd, 2008 at 3:36 pm

New versus old. That’s the divide currently being managed by Facebook across its membership. From the vantage of Compete.com, the new option offered by the network has its fair share of adopters. But many are reverting to the original, too.

It is said that in mid-August, Facebook saw 60% of its users venturing to try the new site. Sounds good, right? Sure. Of course, the company has made it a point to perform a gradual rollout of the update, so the general trend to click for the refresh does steal some of the wow from the above mentioned figure. Furthermore, 40% of users who have trialed the update are choosing to go back.

There are two lessons to take from this. First, if users are given the option to make an impermanent move, many will play, but some won’t stay. Second, Facebook is smart to have made this choice available. It’s completely sensible. The update is a big change. Particularly for developers. And Facebook has already incurred its fair share of negative press from the user-powered Beacon marketing adventure. So something of this scale is better to lay softly on the membership. Something along the lines of, “Hey, check out this new candy we got. No contracts or long-term agreements. Honest. If you like, you like. If you don’t, no problem.” Facebook touts more than 100 million users. It surely wouldn’t want to tick off anywhere close to half that pie.

It’ll inevitably have to force some holdouts, for the simple fact that it has to manage its Platform, and the cloud isn’t like your local OS. And more broadly speaking, it’ll be some time before Facebook clocks a near complete majority for its summertime launch. Several months more, perhaps. But a swift mandate wouldn’t have done kind things to its reputation among users. It would have only created a headache for those not ready to “buy in” to the release. In all, the adoption rate seems pretty good. Not great. But good.

Source:Mashable!

Have a digital camera on hand? More likely than not, I think. If you’re free to experiment, and feel up to demo, take three photos of your mug and send them the way of Big Stage. There your profile will be displayed in three-dimensional form as part of a custom, automated design called “@ctor.” The reason for this is to create an avatar to use “through a diverse array of online media, networks and communities.”

The way Big Stage is being presented today is understandably very simple and straightforward. It helps create the “digital you.” But the technology behind the curtain isn’t so elementary. 3D imagery, albeit not photo realistic imagery, constructed from a series of digital photographs requires some work. There are names like Rocketon and Meez that inhabit the avatar creation market, but Big Stage is intensely personalized. Some might say exceedingly so. If a flat, two-dimensions view of your face isn’t quite enough, and is too limiting for the purpose of, say, creating a video clip with you as the character, Big Stage goes far in assembling the adaptation you might otherwise prefer.

Want details on what it is Big Stage derives its powers from? The company explains thusly:

Big Stage’s life-like avatar creation system stems from advanced stereo reconstruction technology funded by multiple government grants, including the CIA, as part of a nine-year cumulative research project at USC.

Quite a lot of effort for avatars, you might say. Is it wasted? Not quite, if you take into account the purpose behind the project. It is an effort to pursue the concept of a virtual world. By logical extension, a Web user’s virtual self is involved. And if characteristics of the virtual self are to be refined while at the same time maintaining at the end user side of production an intuitively designed and largely automated system, this beta delivery by Big Stage is really just a measure of progress. A pretty substantial one at that.

If Big Stage were in a more experimentalist position than it is now, its release to the public wouldn’t be so intriguing. But what it requests of the user makes it too small a hurdle not to want to leap over. At least not those interested in the virtual paradigm that is graphically rich.

One last technical point to make to curious testers about the release of Big Stage in its current form is that it is Windows XP- and Vista-compatible only. Mac users will have to operate on Intel-based machines running either of the two most modern Windows platforms. An IE 6.0+ or Firefox 2.0+ install is required as well.