Why are blogs and wikis a better metaverse than SL?

Lately I've been spending a lot of time with rss readers, blogs, and a little bit with wikis.

I find that a lot of the people I really respect and admire utilize blogs and to a lesser degree wikis as their form of 'virtual' interaction with one another and with the internet at large.

As a way of communicating and exchanging ideas, blogs and rss readers are very rapidly taking over the number one mechanism for doing so. And as an information, educational source wikis are very powerful.

While the social and immersive existence of SL is more appealing from a sci-fi point of view, I am beginning to wonder if the real direction for metaverse interaction is going to be more asyncrhonous in nature.

I'd be very interested in hearing from those who were attracted to SL because it looked like the metaverse promise land (and not just a weird video game), and how they think SL is worse/better than blogs and how (or even if its a good idea) the gap could be bridged.

Some thoughts

- the real time / synchronous aspect of SL is too consuming
- the 3d visualization has yet to provide any real value proposition
- the crowd it attracts is too game-oriented, so the culture is all wrong
- the lack of a strong textual interface to SL makes it less suited to concrete thinking

What blaze said.

Why?

-- SL has very tiny IM space (even if you stretch it). It tends to force you to type in very short half sentences. TSO is more social and gets more deep personal interactions sometimes precisely because longer sentences are able to show up in cartoon-like balloons over characters' heads and room chat is a huge transcript easy to cut and paste, without scrolling back endlessly in a tiny box like SL IMs (yes I know there are ways to get SL to do balloons, but let's just look at the out-of-the-box experience first.

-- Yes, they are notecards. When lagging, they are hard to pull from inventory. They save with the name "Notecard" and don't force you to name them as in word processing applications so you end up with a lot of New Notecard files in your inventory when you are struggling to get a lot of thoughts and plans on paper. You have to open them sometimes to rename them. They pile up. I notice people send you 10 short IMs in succession and fill up your IM box when you're gone rather than going to the trouble to create, write, name, save, and send a notecard. In TSO, you could do all this with one PM.

-- It's easier to put a prim down than it is to talk.

-- Build mode preoccupies the menu, the screen, the avatar and makes it hard to talk and many people are always in build mode or script mode or terraform/land edit mode.

-- Pictures go on to notecards as files with icons, not the full picture itself, as on a blog.

-- You can't chose fonts.

-- The Ims and the room chat and the whispering merchandise and object returns to inventory are all a stready streaming scroll and become confusing. It is all too easy to answer out loud in the room what you meant to say in an IM.

-- Multiple IMs get lost over on the right hand side of the sliding menu.

-- I came for the immersive metaverse, I had to exit almost five minutes later with my bmps and some im's awkwardly cut and pasted to go up to my blog to communicate. I can write paragraphs on my blog, but not in game. In TSO, you could write paragraphs.

-- The forums are much more overheated than other games not only because of Linden tolerance but because the game itself is too frustrating as a text-based communication tool.

-- Notecards are used as advertising spam indistinguishable from personal letters or project memos -- there isn't an icon to distinguish the modes of 1st, 2nd, 3rd class mail.

Well you get the idea.

I don't buy the basic premise here.

When I think of the concept of the Metaverse, it seems to me that synchronicity is the whole point. It is the creation of a shared universe. In his book Stephenson focused a great deal on the problem of facilitating non-verbal communication. One of the characters discussed was famous for creating an avatar gesture system that allowed people to closely approximate what they were feeling, without requiring the use of text entry.

How could such an achievement be compared to wikis and blogs?

A way I'd characterize the difference is mind vs. spirit. When you read a blog, it is much like being able to crawl around in another person's life. You get to peek into the corners of their mind, wander around in their house, or peruse their music collection. After a while, you get the sense that you know them. But all you are seeing is the mind. The space is vacated while you take a look. Nobody's really home for you to connect with.

Contrast this with IM's. On IM you often get a lot of inane chatter, but the other person is right there on the same line with you. You may not get to fill in the details about the other person, but you get a real sense of their spirit. You get in touch with a real being.

The Metaverse would ideally emcompass both methods of communication, but personally I think the holy grail is a fully immersive spirit-to-spirit connection, with nonverbal as well as verbal cues available at will. SL is headed in that direction, with baby steps. We can pull all kinds of fascinating objects out of our pockets to share. We can smile and gesture at each other, though admittedly this is still at a terribly awkward stage. We can interact with each other in a nearly infinitely variable shared space.

That said, I'd be all in favor of adding more functionality to the profiles. They could be expanded to include all the things people might want to share on a permanent basis. You could fill it with a blog, or have a shared commentary page, or a spot that allowed the sharing of inventory objects. That's a good idea.

Poking around in someone's mind is still no substitute for connecting with the being.

Metaverse.

The word MEANS immersive and 3-D.

You can argue that WIKIs and blogs are more valuable / better / whatever than a Metaverse, but you can't argue that they are a better Metaverse.

That would be like saying a carrot is a more healthy donut. A carrot is not a donut. While a carrot may or may not be healthier than a donut, a carrot will never be a donut.

Holy crap Ananda, that was hot. Like, the same way a rollin' beat is!

The metaverse as we know it from Snowcrash is a fictitious environment described in a narrative controlled by a single author. It did not evolve from the unpredictable and infinite combinations and possibilities of human interaction and technological innovation. Assuming it will take the form as described in that more or less advanced pulp work is probably a mistake. One may as well have assumed the future was accurately predicted by Orwell. Elements yes, but a few tomatoes will hit the mark if you look around long enough and make a collection of educated assumptions.

It may be futile to try and emulate it as opposed to letting it emerge in its own right and of its own accord. For example, Active Worlds has integration of the web, and thereby the async resources of it, right in the game world. IMHO they are onto something that LL should note for their own product.

If the question is why are edited sentences richer than SL/IM/IRC then I think the answer is easy. SL/IM reduces almost everything to "thoughtbites" as if all communication was handled via 80 column punch cards. Running prose that someone has pondered, edited, re-thunk, re-wrote has to be richer than a series of quips. Waiting for someone to type two sentences is slower than the 300 baud modems of yore. SL favors concise, quick, and witty. Real text favors authorship.

I think it is Jakob Nielsen's seminal green/purple book that reprints a 2 and then 3 person typical real chat session text as a multipanel comic strip. There is almost no continuity whatsoever.