BACK TO THE FUTURE
I've been an on again, off again user of Second Life since it went live almost half a decade ago.
This open-ended virtual world, that is the closest thing we have to the world envisioned by Neal Stephenson's sci-fi 1992 bestseller Snowcrash, continues to fascinate both in terms of it's possibilities and challenges.
If you're not familiar with the service, check out their web-site, or their Wikipedia entry.
Better still, is this video titled "Glimpse Inside a Metaverse: The Virtual World of Second Life", where the Linden Labs/Second Life founder and CEO Philip "Linden" Rosedale and CTO Cory Ondrejka, do a great walk-through of the Second Life world. They go through the vision, the clever problem-solving large and small, and a candid discussion of the challenges, to a curious, and smart assemblage of Google employees (redundant I know, to use smart as an adjective for Googlers).
It's about an hour long, so a bit of a time investment, but well worth it. Even if you're familiar with Second Life, and a long-time user, you'll find information here that is pretty interesting.
As mentioned before (see earlier post), Linden Labs' Second Life was launched in 2002, only a decade after Snowcrash, published in 1992, inspired mainstream audiences with what a virtual world could really be like.
And it's been another half decade since then to get to a point where the service has grown to over 4.7 million registered users, of whom about 25-50,000 are online at any given time.
Despite the mainstream media attention it's received over the past few months, and it's growth to over 4.7 million registered users, it still remains a world where the learning curves to do really interesting, and rewarding things, remain fairly steep.
It's the ultimate "social network" when you think about it, yet most observers think of it as an online "game" rather than put it in the same bucket as a MySpace or Facebook. Shows you how labels really format our thinking.
In terms of open-ended, online virtual worlds, we're where early, consumer online services like Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online etc., were in the early 1990s.
Like those early online services, by necessity, today's virtual worlds like Second Life, There.com, Multiverse, Areae, and others have to be fairly vertically integrated in terms of the various technology layers, with relatively proprietary software, protocols, scripting languages and tools.
Having said that, Linden Labs/Second Life, is trying rapidly to move to as much open-source/web-connected an environment as possible. Over time, we may see the various technologies needed to create an open, fully-web based, horizontally layered, graphically rich, virtual online world, on top of the two-dimensional web we know and use today.
Certainly, that's what efforts like Google's Google Earth, Microsoft's Virtual Earth, are slowly moving towards as they create three-dimensional worlds on top of real-world maps, photos, videos, and 3-D modeling kits.
But in the meantime, the most fully developed, relatively robust online world in town, with the most critical mass user base, remains Second Life.
It continues to face infrastructure ramping issues as it's popularity increases, along with the requisite challenges for all participants old and new, to figure out how to make things work "in-world".
For a good, critical look at Second Life, take a look at Charlie O'Donnell's post on "10 reasons to go short on Second Life". Follow that up with "10 reasons to go long on Second Life", where the Daily Graze blog of The Electric Sheep Company, addresses Charlie's concerns.
Despite the cons, I'm determined to have another go at Second Life.
If you're a Second Lifer, either veteran or novice and would like to connect, contact me either , online at my Second Life persona "MParekh Oh" (aka "in-world"), or "out-world" via regular email.
I can also use any tips you may have in buying land, building an online presence, and generally doing useful stuff in Second Life. In particular, I'd appreciate any references to the best service providers you may have dealt with in Second Life, be they Second Life software programmers, real-estate brokers, virtual goods designers, architects and the like.
I'm also interested in start-ups, businesses focused on opportunities around Second Life, and worlds like it.
I know it's a long way to go before we get to Snowcrash, and improve upon it.
See you "in-world".
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