The Week's Readings and Julian Lombardi's Lecture

I really enjoyed Julian Lombardi's lecture because he discussed the history and the future of GUIs, something that I was not at all familiar with. I thought it was interesting that for hte past 20 years, the interface of personal computers has remained relatively unchanged. The desktop as it is now, is virtually the same thing as it was back in the late 80's, with documents, folders, etc. Though I thought that Lombardi and his Duke team's project was interesting (I even tried to download the pre-alpha version -- without success), I don't think that companies or people will adapt to the new interface in the long run. For one, it gets rid of anonymity, which has always been a major asset during the current era. In any case, I hope the project succeeds so that we won't be constrained to a single interface anymore, which according to Lombardi, prohibits many new innovative technologies.
The "Who's on Third in Second Life" article describes, with great depth, the idea of libraries (storage and access to information) in second life. As I was reading the article (that is...before I played SL), it seemed very interesting and promising. However, after actually playing SL and visiting a "library," I found that it was difficult to access any type of information or communicate intelligently with any other avatar (but, this might be becuase I have only played SL once and am still not use to it).
In the "Opinion: Second Life and the next wave in customer experience" article, Steven Walden portrays virtual worlds, including SL, where companies actively and successfully engage in advertising. However, after playing SL, even though you can find a few company ads in various places, it seems to me that this type of advertising isn't promising in terms of revolutionizing a customer's experience. For one, it seems virtual worlds aren't technologically advanced enough yet that a customer can have an actual virtual experience with a product or a company. The examples Walden states don't seem to be viable.