Is Second Life A Stepping Stone?

Hi everyone

Im hoping your all having a good day in sl or wherever you happen to be today and i wanted to open a debate on second life and how other users percieve the world.

I came to sl just over a year ago, ive marveled at it's complexity, ive growled at its instability and i still think it's the best mmo environment there is.........BUT.

Im starting to feel less of a desire to champion sl as the ultimate 3d space of expression and socialization that i used too. I spent years hoping something of this scope would come along, and hell had i been in the position id have loved to have developed something like this.

Nobody can deny that as software it is one of the buggiest programs ever released to the public, but the overwhelming power and sense of freedom keeps us all plodding along regardless of the myriad of problems we face with it.......thats something both sides of the stability struggles should be proud of.......us and LL....the core userbase is more than loyal to the company and the world.

What i wanted to hear about from people is how you percieve second life, amongst the problems why do you stay?, would people leave in mass droves if a more stable alternative platform emerged, would you stay for second lifes community regardless of its stability problems?.

Please feel free to add to those questions or comment as you like, all i ask it can we please keep the thread on target and have a nice discussion on the topic.

i reckon sl is a stepping stone. ll will piss-fart around too much and some imitation product will come along and make much needed adjustments and steal the limelight.
i have no doubt about this.

Agree The client has possiblies to be a fine one. But quility workers along with good and relyable hardwood would improve conditions. sooner of later well get things right but until then it will be a long long way to stabilty.........below a little humor

I had no prior experience in any online worlds before coming to SL, and really am not in any rush over the 3d internet/metaverse thing. Is SL the future. I doubt it . Perhaps in the sense that the Wright Brothers first plane is related to a modern jet, the future of the web will be descended from this but there is a long way to go, in my opinion. LL could be there, but based upon a lot of their business practices, they will probably be only a footnote. my highly uneducated opinion, for what it is worth.

Well, LL themselves have already said that Second Life is just a "stepping stone" since they plan to open source the server code and then allow people to link their servers into the "SL economy". At which point, the SL we presently know will be radically changed forever.

Whether good or bad, I will not speculate. There are many in the OS community who are very good at what they do so there may well be some servers running very stable code. But there are a lot of others who are not so good so finding a stable server vs. unstable one could be something of a crap shoot. At least to start with.

Once the server code is released to the public, anyone can then use it to develop their own SL like world. So, who knows what the future will bring?

If there was an SL like system that was as robust in all respects but more stable, I'm certain many would jump to that platform. I know I would.

Until that happens though, I will continue to be a SL resident because, bugs not withstanding, it is the best of its kind.

Hum? so like a living creator that is unique to a world? Unless its some how figures out how to reproduce or maintaines itsself as in its present state or body. So you mean we are in "Inertia" time of SL history.

1. )Physics. The tendency of a body to resist acceleration; the tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest or of a body in straight line motion to stay in motion in a straight line unless acted on by an outside force.

2.)Resistance or disinclination to motion, action, or change: the inertia of an entrenched bureaucracy.

Lets hope SL withstands this time of "Inertia"

Agreed

All do repect i mean this. we been hearing this same bla bla "for me 3 years" Bleeding edge, bla bla bla. But as long as the company "LLABS" repects its users ( which at times does not" BUT you know that stepping stone is SLICK with a surface of water. Which is named or called "BAD CODERS"...

I'm not really up on the history of MMOs but didn't Ultima Online presage the EQs and WoWs by years?

SL is the first feeble steps into a user created MMO, but it likely will be leapfrogged by another product rather than evolving into the next generation.

I think SL users will defect in droves if another virtual universe opens with even half-way decent meshes for its avatars. Or maybe SL will get them first and won't go the way of Prodigy.
But it does seem likely that the future on-line environments will be 3d.

SL is by far not the first. and surely not the future.
a real bad model of how it should be done
we need freeland we can run on our own servers and inventorys we control and backup,
the whole L$ is the worst of all it is the reason second life sucks so much.
compare SL "the 3D internet" to a webpage, i can create, backup, and run my own
webpage from my own computer if i wanted. or i could pay some one to make me one and run it and even get support!. with SL you you already know what you get...

I haven't found one world that wasn't buggy in my 10 years exploring 3d worlds and similar.
I hope there are better verison out there some day.

There's a lot of speculation about a competitor that does everything right.

Some people talk about Mr Right, too.

And unicorns. Don't forget unicorns. They come with rainbows, and are friendly, and infinitely loyal to the pure of heart.

Second Life is a niche market. What I think is going to happen is something will come along with better funding and backing from the start. It will be a neutered version of Second Life, "sanitized for your protection", and more mainstream-friendly.

Which also means it'll be more corporate friendly. How'd you like to get paid not in Lindens you can trade out for cash, but in music downloads, ring tones, coupon codes, cellphone minutes and airline miles? Or having your home location perma-set to a "village green" with copious product placement and advertising?

*sigh* I think some of us will be looking back on this as the "good old days"...


Incidentally, if I could hijack this thread for a moment, in a very real way it is also a "stepping stone" for content creators. Clothes lead to photoshop & business skills. Building leads to 3D modelling (sculpties), and scripting leads to PHP, XML, and back-end databases. Club management leads to ... well, management, and so on. I've got more than a feeling that she-who-will-not-be-named-to-avoid-thread-histeronics-and-thread-locking has a goal which merely starts at selling content items for 10L and ends up with her running a successful service bureau in China.

I feel like I'm still using Netscape.

You know, that is one of the best points I have ever read on the forums. Aren't we all still waiting for a bug free OS? A bug free web browser? A bug free <insert software name>? Honestly, is there anything out there that works completely bug free? I can't think of a single thing.

i feel like im stuck on ie

Someone made reference to the Wright brothers earlier on. The Wright name hasn't survived as a modern aircraft maker. However Karl Benz built the first internal combustion powered motor car and Mercedes-Benz is still very much with us. So who can say where SL will go?

The grid is stored on a warehouse full of servers. With coming nanotechnology who's to say that a whole grid might not be able to be stored on a future generation home PC? And will LL's human brainpower stay or move on to other projects?

nanotechnology ? they been talking about this for what 9 years now?

I can't believe you've just said this. Are you a Linux user?

My OS and web browser works just fine. Nearly all my software works great.

SL is the best program I've ever used. But it's also the buggiest. But to be fair to LL, Second Life isn't just a program. It's a service.

Albeit a service that's been struggling to deliver for the past four years.

The point was not the existance of Wright Aircraft as a compamy per se, or Linden Labs. The analagy was meant to say that Modern Aircraft are the distant relatives of the first flying machines, but bear such little resemblance, and I think the future Web/Internet will be something totally unrecognizable to what is Second life today.

I think any rival would encounter exactly the same problems or, to sidestep them, limit our abilities greatly.

Something else will come along, but SL will always be remembered for laying the foundation for main stream 3-D social sites in which the resident controls the content. They don't have what it takes to keep being the innovators, however SL brought this platform to the main stream and that counts for something(considering that in the future the 3-D platform will be the norm for computer users).

Google-Second Life?