Oh, you laughed at MS Bob. Come on, you know you did. Laugh at this, too.
UI designers fall for these pie-in-the-sky abstract concepts because the companies they work for tell them the same things and make the same frustrating requests as do all tech companies. Bob was serious, this was serious, SpaceTime is serious, Apple claims to be serious... The metaphor culture is catching, and people are becoming more and more aware of how queer it sounds when radio ads tell them to "log on to" a website, and more and more people are becoming savvy enough to be clear in their protestation of, say, a new OS stripping away their locus of control. The relentless street-preaching Web 2.0 crowd won't die and people are dying to do (by industry prognosticators, clueless a-holes to a man) really weird stuff with their like SL and Kaneva and turning weblog sites on their heads hacking out more than mere identities... It's no wonder the people whose charge it is to design the visual infrastructure resort to crap like this, I bet it even passed internal UA and QC schemes. There's a paper mockup of this beast somewhere in a rubbish bin where it belongs, and people are still downloading screensavers. For their cellular telephones. What, me worry?
