Human-factors designers use the term “gorilla arm†to refer to the vast gulf between cool design ideas and how they work in actual use-cases. At the beginning of the 1980s, touch-screens were just getting going, but gorilla-arm more or less killed off large-scale touch-screen research-and-development for many years to come. Only now, with portable devices and short-interaction kiosks are we seeing the resurgence.
But touch-screens aren’t the only technology that suffers from “gorilla arm.†Devices like Microsoft’s Kinect do as well.
Earlier this month, Lex Linden announced that Linden Lab had replaced Linden Lab’s existing infrastructure management system for Second Life with open-source product, 
I’ll tell you one thing about new technologies, new models, new economies, new paradigms and new methodologies.