The Metaverse

Two sites I'd like to see for Second Life

In all the controversy over the changes that Linden Lab is making to the in-world search feature, it's often forgotten that for most things to do with Second Life, Google is a better place to search anyway. The Second Life online community is incredibly vibrant, and there are hundreds of blogs, news sources, and discussion groups around it. However, there are two areas where I think there's a gap. So, if there's any enterprising coders out there - here's two business ideas for you! Men's clothing While there are countless fashion-related sites for female avatars, I can find absolutely nothing reviewing male clothing. This is something I find really surprising: there are a lot of male avatars out there. Do none of them give a stuff for how they look? Events The in-world events listing is absolutely useless. What's needed is something like Upcoming.org for in-world. This will become even more important as corporates start to realise that simply building an island isn't enough, and they need to create events to make the most of Second Life.

Broader View: New Media Consortium and Sun Microsystems to launch the Open Virtual Worlds Project | KnowProSE.com

Broader View: New Media Consortium and Sun Microsystems to launch the Open Virtual Worlds Project | KnowProSE.com:

"One of the weaknesses of worlds such as Second Life is their inability to handle collaborative works with data. OpenSim, the community open source project that is beginning to rival Second Life, has HTML on a prim - but is HTML enough? We're really talking about a difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, as much as I hate those terms. I can haz AJAX?"

I never have really understood the obsession with HTML on a prim within virtual worlds, let alone AJAX. Until you have totally immersive VR, the virtual world experience is always going to be like any other application - in a window, on a screen with other windows along side it. And in those other windows, you can run other applications.

Of course, it's neat to be able to collaborate with other avatars in a virtual space. But does that offer a better user experience than simply using document collaboration tools like, say, Google Docs? Or shared workspaces? I think the answer is "no" - and until we have immersive VR, I think that's going to stay the case.

A ' Twitter' for your thoughts? Daden's new Twitter fountain comes to SL

A ' Twitter' for your thoughts? Daden's new Twitter fountain comes to SL:

"Twitter fountain displays thought bubbles of real thoughts floating up and away from the fountain in a cutting edge and original visualization within Second Life. The messages are answers to the question ‘What are you doing right now?’. The answers are then fed into the fountain creating an image of the ephemeral thoughts of people from around the world."

This is a lovely example of how you can use virtual worlds as places to experiment with different forms of media representation. A fountain of Twitters isn't at all efficient - but efficiency isn't always the best way to get things done in a human way (DOS is efficient: a GUI isn't).

In which Prokofy fails to understand dual licensing.

Second Thoughts: Sheep 'Dance on Eggshells':

"Now Satchmo delivered the real story: that in his/ESC's interpretation, if Linden Lab had a dual license under GPL with their OS code for the viewer, which they released both as an OP code and, as he claimed, still claimed the right to sell it as a proprietary item (and they must have gotten some payoff, too, when they licensed the Sheep to have a 'commercial use viewer), then by analogy or by precedent, the Sheep, too, could turn the open into the closed."

Hard as this paragraph is to parse ("word salad", indeed), it's pretty clear that Prokofy doesn't understand the concept of dual licensing.

Yankee Group's good work hidden under cloud of crap stats

It's not often that you find a company deciding to publicly berate an analyst firm. Yet that's just what Linden Lab has effectively done in a post on its official blog.

The spat is over a release by the Yankee Group which claims that average time spent per user for Second Life was a mere 12 minutes per month. Compared to TV, the web, or virtually anything else, that's tiny: I probably spend more time per month staring at the ads on the sides of coffee cups.

Linden Lab couldn't let this one go without a fight:

"We respect Yankee Group as an analyst firm in good standing in its field. But their press release this week cited a figure that we just can’t figure out: they claim that the average time spent per user of Second Life is just 12 minutes per month.

Just this past August, users of Second Life spent over 23 million hours in Second Life. During that month, there were just over 974,000 user logins to Second Life - that’s an average of 23.6 hours per user!

But hey, maybe Yankee Group was looking at a different user number. Were they counting the unique user registrations? That would be 6.2 million users - but that’s an average of 3.7 hours per user. Maybe they werecounting cumulative total registered accounts through August, 9.3 million users. Uh, but even that is still an average of 2.5 hours."

Ouch. So much vitriol was poured on this obviously-fallacious reasoning that Yankee Group ended up withdrawing the report, which will be revised and re-released in the near future.

Ironically, although the numbers are decidedly dodgy, the core point of the report is quite valid:

"However, for virtual worlds and metaverses to achieve greater potential in the marketplace and grow beyond early adopters, the experience must be untethered to meet the needs of the Anywhere Consumer™. Companies that provide remote access—through mobile devices or other means—to their web experience will have a greater impact than pc-centric companies."

Ignoring the trademarked blather, what this means is that virtual worlds need to extend themselves beyond the desktop (or laptop) computer. This doesn't mean sticking some kind of horrible jerky version of Second Life hacked together in Java on a mobile, but providing links and bridges between SL and mobile applications. Just as Facebook Mobile doesn't deliver all the functionality you get on a full PC browser, so mobile SL doesn't have to have everything you get in the desktop client.

And, of course, this is already happening. Both Vodafone and BT have announced plans to integrate voice and text chat from phones into Second Life. It's easy to see how Second Life could form a multi-leveled virtual presence engine, with your avatar representing who and where you are in the virtual or physical world.

Unfortunately, this point got more than a little lost in the bad statistics of the Yankee report. Hopefully the next version will be a little bit more engaging.

Technorati Tags:
Linden Lab, Mobile phones, Second Life, Social software

Late Home

Gamasutra is reporting that Sony's "Home" virtual world for PS2 has been delayed:

"'The power of the PS3, as well as the networking, by putting [these] together we can offer the realistic 3D virtualization of society -- what we call PlayStation Home. I'm sure you're expecting a lot... this was originally scheduled to be launched by the end of this year... it is going to be taking place in the springtime of next year.' The reason for the delay? Hirai cited user feedback. A new service called Dress: Everybody's Fashion Entertainment will be added to Home, but there were no details. "

I'd love to know what the "user feedback" is that's delayed the much-vaunted Home. I suspect it might be something along the lines of "there's nothing to do and it sucks".

(Via Virtual World News.)

The Second Life Grid Grind » Blog Archive » The knock out blow? Hack allows user access to passwords.

The Second Life Grid Grind » Blog Archive » The knock out blow? Hack allows user access to passwords.:

"Now this current deal is a much bigger problem. A nice hacker type has published the how-to on sucking SecondLife passwords and user info right from the game. It requires a user to go to a webpage and have Internet Explorer as the default browser. With current SL system that can be achieved by a user looking at a users web profile, clicking on an object that has lsl script inside directing the user to the web page."

While I'm not quite sure that this is "the knockout blow" (to what? To whom?), this isn't good.

BT talks big on virtual worlds - silicon.com

Photos: BT talks big on virtual worlds - silicon.com:

"BT is developing services that could allow users of virtual worlds to call or text out to their colleagues and friends in the real world.

To test the technology it has built a private island (above) in Second Life which it has dubbed Area 21 - a play on the ultra-secret Area 51 and BT's 21CN network technology which is being used in the services.

Matthew Brotherton, project manager at the Applied Technology Centre in BT's chief technology office, told silicon.com: 'This is about how we integrate BT's communications services that are exposed as part of the Web21C platform, into virtual environments.'

He said Second Life is great a platform for this as it allows users to create the environment around them."

I'm always fascinated by tools which interface between provide interfaces between communications channels in virtual worlds. Now that Second Life has voice, the ultimate aim must be to create interfaces which connect to everything within Second Life: voice, text, and whatever comes next.

(Full disclosure: BT are one of my clients at Redwood.)

Technorati Tags:
Mobile phones, Second Life, BT

Second Life to Integrate Google Search (via Metaversed)

Second Life to Integrate Google Search | Metaversed:

"Jeska Linden, the community manager at Linden Lab, the company that publishes Second Life said in a discussion (link to recording removed as per InformationWeeks wishes) today at an InformationWeek meeting, that the development team were playing around with Google Search Appliance. Google's enteprise hardware/software search solution would allow residents to search the Metaverse far more effectively"