Is Second Life really just the internet?

Ever consider that perhaps SL is just a graphical version of the internet? I mean each little property is like a little 3D website. Some places sell you stuff, some places are just for displaying or blogging, and a few are just gathering houses (like forums). Places change fast, a site you go to today may not be there tomorrow....

*grin* then you have the mature areas, which we all know what they're similar to.

But seriously, when you consider it, Second Life IS the internet in so many ways. hell, Rathe even created a search engine (similar to google) for second life searching.

Yes.. One word.. Metaverse.. thats one word right?

yup, but repeated very often

Well, a big part of the internet would be open standards and open source.

I suspect the big reason why the internet took off was much in part because it was so open and free.

I would say . . . it tries to be, and some people think it actually is.

coco

As I have been preaching for some time now, SL isn't the Metaverse. But I and many others believe it is the precursor to the Metaverse.

Once the open standards factor enters the scene, THEN we'll have a true Metaverse.

P2

*checks watch*

Good lord, last time I saw you online, I lived in Chartreuse.

of course it is thats all it was ever planned to be.

SL is a pretty crude representation of the metaverse that is the internet. However, there have one, if not a few discrepencies, which I am very thankful for.

Griefer problems: People with nothing better to do than to cause problems for others, in SL theres more control over that. Granted a few slip through the cracks, but SL at least has the Lindens to manage and 'prune the branches' if you will of those that seek to cause trouble.

Hopefully in the near future the Lindens will be able to organize a more efficient way of patrolling and maintaining peace and order within the SL grid.

Not the promised one, but the prophet...

Second Life is... sort of the metaverse, in the same way that BBS systems could be said to be sort of the internet. Second Life is very small and centralized compared to the enormity that the "metaverse" concept implies. But it's a step in the right direction, using the same basic inspirations.

As for Second Life *being* the internet, well, yes and no. SL is a platform extension of the internet, as ebay is an auction platform or Instant Messenger is a realtime communication platform. Second Life is just another sort of platform -- a 3D collaboration platform with a built-in micropayment mechanism (the Linden Dollar).

At this point, it's a pretty closed garden -- mainly as a matter of financial necessity for Linden Lab. They control the system so that they can make money from it and continue development. The ideal objective, though, for the long term, is to create an open system which can be deployed and maintained on a completely decentralized basis. At that point, Second Life will come much, much closer to "being" the internet, and not just a platform on its periphery.

We'll have a true metaverse, it has been said, when Second Life connects seamlessly with other rich media services. Which would be damn cool.

Does that make sense? (The company sent me to this conference today and I'm having a hard time keeping awake )

You guys make a good point, plus you've given me some really intersting reading material, which I appreciate. I'd say that SL is getting pretty darn close to that metaverse form, but right now it'd still be in more of a larval stage.

(haha, good to see you too, lordfly. Stop by my place sometime, I just bought some land and made a quiet little garden to rest in)

So then, what do you think the next step for SL will be towards it's ultimate metaverse form? I'm thinking finding a way to get people who don't actually play the game to still communicate with people in the game would be it. Maybe somehow linking chat clients from external sources to inside the game.

Larval is a perfect way of putting it.



Improved channels of communication are essential. Ability to access the web from within SL, and from within scripts, is one of the Next Big Things we've been pining for. Outbound XML-RPC is another of these. As for communicating with people? More needs to be done with that, too. Ideally I should be able to IM anyone who is logged into Second Life from within my (multiprotocol) IM client. I can't now, because the system is closed to that. Maybe they could adopt some sort of open protocol (Jabber?) for communications between residents, to enable access to the grid's people from outside.

Second Life is very limited compared to the internet. There are much better looking methods of displaying interactive three dee content on the internet than are possible in Second Life; the internet can be be viewed with a number of competing browsers, the data displayed on the internet is stored in a dispersed manner on machines owned by millions of different owners, while the data that is Second Life is stored in one or two buildings; the internet makes use of open protocols while Second Life uses proprietary protocols for data representation; the internet is extremely popular, with a broad appeal to people from all walks of life, the Second Life user population is small and appeals to people with a vision that helps them overlook the many technical problems Second Life displays on a continual basis.

SL, and highly graphical platforms in general, will always be more limited than the internet in general because to be blunt they're too much work for not enough extra gain.

Looking at the social level, and as an example: Wanna use an anime character as your representation on a BBS? Pick a nearby-ish username, find a 64x64 picture of them and drop it in your icon. Wanna do that on SL? Get ready to spend hours making clothing and items, trying to skin your av, learning prims, buying L$ to get the bits that are already done well, etc.... and at the end of it, and assuming you don't sell the av, you don't actually gain any more than the guy with the 64x64 picture of them in their forum icon.

So what about the big business level? Well, suppose you're Coke and you want a website. You already have professional artists and a brand design, you can buy a domain block and host it yourself, and HTML's pretty easy, no problem. Suppose you want somewhere on SL. You now need a 3D modeller or modellers skilled at SL's unique prim system, you have to work out a brand design in a 3D interactive environment, you have to host on Linden's hardware and pay them for it, and you have to have some reason why you haven't just put up a VRML site and have done with it.

SL needs lots of work. People tend to be lazy, and big firms only work if they need to, which they don't if they're already big.

EW! I don't wanna be in a larvae! Come up with some other metaphor!

coco

Errm, yes, RisingShadow. Thats roughly what it was meant to become, right from the beginning.

Did no-one tell you ?

Haven't you noticed the arguments about whether it is a game or not ?

One big difference between the net and SL is location.

Even though the Internet has a series of numbers for every website, and someone of a "Tree" of links on each, two sites who's numbers are similar have no visible link, while SL places have location and proximity to each other.

if you website was at http://103.43.52.120 you'd not see the site at http://103.43.52.121

I have an image of me going online to check the market updates while seeing a fetish porn site, which sits just next door on the internet, peeking out the side of my monitor.

The proximity is a measure of the time and effort it takes to go from one place to another, this artificial device would be greatly reduced in importance if SL to point to point teleport, as it used to allow, and allowed for placeable parcels, as it ought to.

Location means you have to deal with lousy neighbors.

Not just the porno site peeking in next to your, say, educational software site, but the flashing alternating watermelon and pink rectangle that the owner of that website has displayed in hope it will make you buy him out.

Hmmm noone ever asks the question of do we really want a metaverse? to Disembody ourselves and push ourselves all over the electronic void, slowly, insufferably removing human interaction and stories from the process.

I think about how SWG was ruined by hundreds and hundreds griding through every occupation on thier waty to being a jedi. How rolepplaying went from being the raison d'etre for EQ, to some silly notion, when every one knows EQ is about camping the buff mobs and gettig the Phat loot, woot!

Soo we will have to teach a class in humanity to all players. One only needs to look as far as w-hat to see the gross failure in human virtue that the proto metaverse is becoming.

Sure SL wants to be the metaverse, but do people, other than and handful who seem to think snowcrash was the bible, really want the metaverse?

Or perhaps they missed, in snowcrash, that much of the novel is lampooning many of the post-modern foibles. And that Stephenson's "metaverse" is not really a positive place, inhabited by positve people.

Of course really, given the cetralized nautre of SL I think from a business stand point its model is much closer to AOL than it is to the internet. But then AOL provides content and has tens of millions of users.

Something preventing SL from becoming a real Metaverse is the fact that it's too good for its own good. It's way too ambitious and resource-hungry. It is not uncommon for people to run 5-10 browser windows at a time... the average consumer's hardware power needs to grow by an order of magnitude so we can have tabbed SL clients rendering 10 scenes at once, and so we can switch between them at sub-second speeds.
It is also way too resource hungry on the server side. Land needs to be 10 times cheaper / more plentiful.

I was thinking the same today, Eggy. SL doesn't allow for nearly sufficient multitasking at this point. It'll get better, though, as hardware improves.

Hell, look at Half-Life 2 and imagine trying to make that run on 1980's hardware. The impossible today is taken for granted tomorrow.

Currently for me, SL is like an extratasty hot pocket of Internet's big soup. It's like one of those Chef Boyardee beef pillows you bite into, and it's all warm and gooey inside. It's kind of intensified passion, actually, and as such, can be quite draining. Related... Flip amig0 has some things to say on the matter.

SECOND LIFE = I MEGAPHONE