Why a world?

Maybe so, or maybe they would have been steamrolled by cheap knockoffs who piggybacked off their R&D to provide lower cost services because of their lower overhead.

There have been plenty of efforts to become the 3D version of the open www, dating back to VRML. As far as I can tell, none of them have been the ticket to riches.

Edited to add: there's nothing wrong with LL branching out to do all sorts of things. But I think they should focus on doing what they do incredibly well before expanding to take on additional challenges. Does anyone think that the SL software already works as well as anyone could ever want it to?

then the smart thing is to piggyback one's own r&d.

but none of those were as accessible as sl is now.

the perfect should never be the enemy of the good.

Also, if AOL had opened up their content development tools and let them become a standard instead of HTML, why wouldn't their tools have been steamrolled by Microsoft, just like Netscape was?

True, but small companies nevertheless have to pick their battles, and it's important to win the ones you're already in before charging into new ones.

Indeed. I often ask this question. I'm thinking some day soon SL-type thingies will be the banal norm on websites like amazon.com or Taco Bell and some avatar will come out and say "May I Help You?" and push your "favorites" list at you and menus and whatnot.

I don't under stand why they've injected all this breathless emotion and earnestness into it as if they were really indeed discovering some new world. I used to be more romantic about these worlds too but really, a lot of it is tripe. Quite a bit of it is grand illusion. It's the latest snakeoil and sleight-of-hand, at no time do the fingers leave the wrist.

I wish they would just concentrate on making it work, on making it so that the ordinary player doesn't have to log in a zillion times a time to shed lag and freezes, so that people can fly around without going into voids or freezing, so that the pictures wouldn't look like a sex education slide show from the 1960s, i.e. slow-mo. And when people say it's going to just turn into streaming porn, well, they're right.

All this earnestness about beneficial applications that help society is missing the point now. That's only a tiny fraction of the population to make use of such virtual world technology and let the government pay for it and practice with it like they used to pay for LSD experiments.

Meanwhile, you have to face the fact that if you scrape away all this tekkie bullshit aside, it is just an entertainment machine. It's not even so much a chat machine as it is an entertainment machine, a live drama. Remember Linda in the movie based on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 452? Remember those wide-screen 3-D televised plays in her living room, the 3-D people she was absorbed with all day long while her fireman husband burned books? The ones that turned to her and said "What do you think, Linda?" in interactive soap operas? Remember the soma sessions in Brave New World? That's all SL is. Not much more.

But what I don't understand is this idea that all these tekkis getting together across the seas and making a 3-D cube together is such an important thing. So they made a cube together. But what's it for? And who cares? That's what the problem is. They get so breathless about making a cube together that they forget that human beings have been making cubes together for millions of years, and they often use them to kill each other or extract money and favors out of each other or block each others' views LOL.'

It's just a medium, a channel, a space. On the one hand, you have to do something in it of some relevant to make it worth while. On the other hand, because Philip and co. made it a "world" and made it very compelling and immersive, you figure you'll play world games in it like "let's play land baron" or "let's play journalist" or "let's play technogeek". But sometimes you stand on the windswept strangely colored sands of the oddly named Cecropia and say to yourself how hollow it is, how really hollow.

And many of the people who came here, in the early days, came in answer to that very attribute of Second Life. So much of it was brand new. What would happen when no one had to kill monsters, or make pizza, to succeed? Isn't there more than hoverboards and endless stupid chat balloons? What if everyone's success, or survival, was dependent on everyone else? What happens if need is removed from the formula? Would there be a need for replicas of RL institutions and social constructions? Or would completely new versions evolve simply because no one will ever starve? Or, someday, will greed force this experimental society to build even more rules, walls, restrictions, and gallows than in real life?

Whatever happens, it will mean something to those who pay attention. And the numerous commercial virtual landscapes you think likely will nonetheless owe much to the experiments we build and run here. I, for one, feel very strongly that I want to have my say in the results of these experiments. I would dearly love to have an impact on how the rest of the world uses what we're testing here.

In fact, you sound a bit like YOU might want to have some effect on that evolution. Well, you may. Your dour estimations and predictions certainly must have some effect. I just wish you'd put as much motive pressure into it as you do ballast.

So, yeah, I get a bit "breathless and earnest." I really DO feel like I'm "discovering some new world" sometimes. Whether it's "illusion" or "snakeoil", it's still a bit magical to me. I do things I can't really do, and see things that don't exist, and can dream - and create - what I cannot risk in my real life. And this, alone, makes this place worth every penny and bead of sweat, to me.

Whereas "blog" was 2004's Word of the Year, I believe Eggy's just named 2005's.

But what I don't understand is this idea that all these tekkis getting together across the seas and making a 3-D cube together is such an important thing. So they made a cube together. But what's it for? And who cares?

first of all, a startup has to choose what it is going to be? A multi-tiered, multi-user PLM system? Or an attempt at a virtual world? It can't be both. The virtual world is clearly the idea that got them most excited and energized, they decided there was a business model there, and so they did it. And I'm glad.

one day, when it's no longer fun, they'll pack it in and be able to work for one of the new virtual environment firms that rent sims and license software to professional firms, schools, and governments because their resumes will be chocked full of this experience.

My guess is SL will have an honored place in history as the first, and best 3D immersive virtual world in the near future; but it will be replaced by something we haven't seen/experienced yet as it's still being conceived. And we will embrace that in hordes.

I think LL wants to build a technology useful to and accessible by the general public (or at least the computer-using public), rather than a tool for specialists and professionals. They see SL as equivalent to AOL (without the stupidity) rather than something like Lexis/Nexis. They thus need to make the technology, if not dumbed down, at least approachable. SL-as-world is attractive, engaging, to people coming in "off the street". The same people, faced with a *completely* blank canvas, would simply walk away.

Actually, that's an excellent point.

I have been on LambdaMOO for many, many years. It is a text-based virtual world that was started in 1990 and it's still going strong. (For those of you who know Eos Zander, that was where I originally met her.) It's even more flexible than SL, because the language is much more broad and visualizations are limited only by the imagination, not by prims! When first started, MOOs and MUDs were almost revolutionary. Wow, people can all log into the same box and talk to each other and write programs! SL is really just the same thing, upgraded to match the currently available technology. There's no reason to think there won't be something even more impressive in the future.

It's called a world because there are; cities Grigiano for example. There are houses, there are ppl, there are neighborhoods, there are apartments, there are condos, there are themed communities, there are parks, there are islands, there are continents. Yes sounds like a world to me.

And there was moving water. Well till the Lindens Killed it! SL mother Nature Her name Was Ms. Ripple Hmmm think the world get little well done or undone.

Why a world?