Rosedale’s Love Machine Scrolls Right

Second Life creator Phillip Rosedale is starting a new company, The Love Machine.  It’s a set of collaborative tools for companies to help people work smarter, a typical goal of any workgroup solution.  But what’s different is his fundamental premise, which is summed up in a recent blog post of his: On the End of Offices.

I’ve been following Rosedale since I invited him to speak at an ad agency I use to work at.  We walked around Sixth Street in Austin the night before recording a podcast.  Not just a developer, he had great ideas on how businesses could get the most out of Second Life.  Today, he has great ideas on how to work.  Ideas that have nothing to do with the virutal world and everything to do with the real world.

He and his team don’t have an office.  Like many of us, they work out of coffee, bars, etc. Free wifi is everywhere and there are obvious and not so obvious advantages to not paying rent, especially in San Francisco.  Better use of capital.  Less meetings.  Fun & Inspiring.  Better ability to recall meetings because of how the brain stores information when  you meet in different places.

The Love Machine has made smart SEO choices as well.  As a startup, they need all the advantages they can get to drive traffic and get customers.  By using WordPress as their website’s content management system, they have chosen a free, open source solution that has a robust community of developers improving it every day…and that’s in addition to the core team.

But one of the interesting things they’ve done is how they’ve instituted scrolling in their journal featurewhich is a collaborative timeline visually inspired by Twitter. At first glance, it looked like it could have been created using the SEO killing frameset.  Or, only slightly better, in Flash. However, a quick peak under the hood reveals they’re using a jquery scrolling method.

jquery is an javascript library that ships with WordPress.  Many developers use it create sliders, scrollers, etc.

It works like this:  all the text is in the HTML page, nestled in <div> tags that are easily digestible by search engines.  The CSS and jquery libraries take care of scrolling behind the scenes from the search engine’s point of view.

The Love Machine’s Journal is proof that you can get SEO friendly scrolling with out having to use Flash or, horror, framesets.