Google thinking of Building it's Own Second Life

I think that what a company like Google would want to do strategically is probably similar
to what SL is trying to position itself as, that is the provider of the tools that allow others
to create their own various virtual worlds.

I suspect that what each company will want to do is own the standard with which people
will be able to if they choose to, link their world with others.

Imagine a future of being in world say the current SL grid, but it is no longer the whole world but more of a gated community that is loaded with various major super tools with a choice of search engines and audio video options as well as the ability to TP to other approved worlds outside of the SL community. "Approved" in the sense that currency and data handling are up to a similar quality and safety level as SL.
Possibly in this way we could TP to a completely different world without having to log out.

What if when you pressed 'pay' you got a choice of currency handlers? Where you could
then choose PayPal for example as your default money exchange method inworld.

Same for Search you could then choose Google or whoever you wanted as a default search engine. Same for Audio and Video it would be great if these external expert services were able to provide their services in an inworld manner from the outside.


I agree that their will be thousands of worlds in a similar way that their are thousands of
websites.

It is the tools and standards that will allow these worlds to communicate and interact that will be one of the greatest prizes.

I think that a joint venture between SL and Google would be a pretty exciting thing.

Food for thought.....Google knows how to run a buisness and how to maintain a vast technical networking system.

LL has the base core, and the users at this point.

Let Google and LL work together (yeah I'm dreaming, but it COULD happen).

*goes back into her dream*
~Jessy

I favour the chaos theory. Look at the various groups services. Yahoo groups were the pioneers and beat off a whole load of competition during the portal wars, acquiring various services in the process such as egroups. Then MSN lumbered into play. In the last year Google started their own service. And bloody hell was it a mess. It is impossible for any new user to tell where the old dejanews/USENET system ended and the new Google groups begins, the two services have been merged together like chocolate and creosote. Try using it and you'll see what I mean.

So, I don't neccessarily think Google will be onto a winner here. They are capable of gross incompetence, even though they've got a lot of things right.

yes, this is the technology that will really make this 3D internet thing live. Standards work already starting ...

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/19/126250&from=rss

I'm not sure "joint venture" is an appropriate way of putting it........more in line of a completely separate platform. A choice, yeah.......read that competition. I doubt Google with it's user base being in the hundreds of millions (perhaps in the billions) would take a platform that has an extremely difficult time handling 50,000 concurrent users. Whatever Google has in mind, I'm sure it's at a level of 10's of millions concurrents. Google isn't going to settle for a b-b when they want a canon ball.

Agreed.
If Google really wanted SL, they would have bought it by now, IMO. I think they have grander plans, and will be able to put out a superior product by starting clean. They already have purchased a 3D engine - they can give us inworld sculpty/importing tools based on what they already own. They've got the cash to buy as many servers LL has and more.

And I bet they will make it so that everyone has a bit of land to build on at first, but can buy more - a smarter system that delivers on the promise of creativity for all and still provides for capitalistic growth.

Why buy SL when they've got a superior product waiting in the developmental wings?

This news about Google has me dancing. I hope it has LL quaking in their boots. Competition is a good thing. If it's not Google, there's someone else on the horizon LL. You better go do what needs to get done.....and fast.

As for what Google would offer, I wont even venture to guess. I am fairly certain that with the Google name it will be stable. Also, it will attract virtually everyone from all other VR to come check them out. What happens after that, I have no idea. I do know if I don't see much different but do see a stable environment, I'm outa here.

Just to clarify, my comment on a joint venture is a speculative suggestion that I think would
be exciting.

Not trying to say that is what I think is happening.

This might be naive of me, but I have tended to think that LL must have some plan of a future grid that brings it up to speed in terms of physics and stability either of a completely different design that is still under wraps or major improvements that can be made to transform our experience of the current grid.

Clearly LL and Google have very different skills and technologies that are none the less
very complimentary.

For either one to recreate what the other has would be a much more expensive and time
consuming proposition in terms of producing a much improved product.

Google ultimately may not be interested in constructing a complete 3d world on their own
we do know for sure that they Are interested in leveraging and maximizing their current
products and services. The advantage of joint ventures of this type that are on the verge
of defining new standards is Time. Put two large recognizable companies and brands together each contributing and pushing their own expertise and you will not only reap
a gain in time to market but will also increase the probability of realizing the ownership
of those respective standards.

So the joint venture idea is an alternative to complete one on one competition.

If Google does what LL is trying to do, create a platform that could be licensed freely to allow others to deploy their own worlds, they could actually set the Virtual 3D World standard.

LL could help by not improving the robustness of their platform quickly enough... Google could make it relatively painless to port over sims from sl to their grid and I can see sims moving wholesale.

However, the philosophy that LL has about the 'openness' of the grid is still a major edge... most other companies are paranoid or greedy and this 'openness' does not come easily to them.

I'm content with the rumor. Gives a sliver of hope.

I read the Google wants to focus more on Virtual Tourism of the real world rather than being better than Second Life.

That would make sense. But the Sketchup angle is intriguing and certainly lends credence to the idea that it's not just about virtual tourism - why, when you could create fantastic things through Sketchup?

Shhh, Dzonatas, you're such a buzzkill.

Just don't make me wear an Adsense HUD.

Although if it means never losing anything from my inventory, I may give it a shot.

Yes. Google want to bring in advertising relevant to what the user is looking for/at.
Their wish is that every local business in the world would tie in to a location display in Google Earth.

Google don't need the 50k concurrent users of SL. They won't want the SL code and architecture.
A 3D avatar world that Google might does not have to be directly comparable to SL.

a 3D avatar could be handled as a personal interactive website that is accessible via the (personal website's) avatar and is mobile within a virtual world.
Think of a walking/travelling MySpace account - where the account holder is (usually) online when you can see the avatar being active in the world.
Add presence handling to that and you basically have a form of SL without the kludgey slow sim-server and grid tech.

They can make/buy a 3D avatar interface to whatever type of world they want - and put "Google" on the front door. Most of the grillions of people who flock to use it will not be aware that SL or other 3D worlds ever existed.


That does not necessarily mean that SL and other 3D worlds will disappear.
I understand, for instance, that there are still people in RL who use Macintoshes

OK, I read the beginning and the latest so missed out on a lot .. I said I was trying to reduce my online time
I said a while back that if Google made Earth a virtual world I'd be very interested
Sling, have I missed something here? Woudn't say, I, 'see' other avies and if so, how could they not follow the uploading/downloading kludginess?

SL sim servers are bottlenecks. They serve up the bulk of the data to the client and to adjoining sims. The carve up the 'world' into arbitrary squares, with issues at and near the boundaries.
Change that to a process in which the client software searches for information that is virtually close to it. That information would include a feed from the 'websites/MySpace' of the avatars that are virtually close by. The data the client 'sees' would come from a distributed system and not from a single (shared) server dedicated to a location.

An avatar would just be one way for others to access the content behind the avatar. Most of the content *could* be accessed via a web browser. The 3D avatar is just an interesting way for people to extend 2D MySpace/Skype/web/collaborative.
Think of something like MySpace where one could take others on a virtual tour of a local neighbourhood or house - or go in a group to see some place - or just meet other people who are looking at the same place at the same time.

Imagine you were doing a 2D Google search today and could be aware of others doing the same search at the same time. Imagine if you could then start discussing the search topic with them and could look at their whole website/MySpace/profile.

A (Google) 3D world does not necessarily have to support the standard of collision physics that can track a speeding bullet in real-time. A sim server can be useful for tracking that sort of thing. A sim server gets in the way of most other things.
An avatar does not necessarily have to have a thousand prims of hair, clothing and active attachments.

Note: I use MySpace and Skype here simply as examples of a very popular and well-accepted concepts.


Google 3d - Apples
SL- Oranges

I should add to that:

Where there is a single server dishing up all of the content for a virtual location one has two big problems
- it has difficulty serving a few thousand or tens of thousands of avatars simultaneously
- a few thousand or tens of thousands of avatars would have difficulty fitting into the 'physical' space simultaneously

If the groups of avatars that can see each other at a virtual location are sets based on some filtered search/profile criteria, then an avatar and its company are existing in perhaps one of many simultaneous dynamically-created instances of a location.

In SL technology, there is only one instance of a location. This is an easy way of preventing more than one user from simultaneously and independently editing the content that is tied into a given location.
In a multi-instance world this can be handled by granting 'ownership' of editing powers as appropriate. After an edit, the data could be pushed out to any other instances that might be existing at the time, or just left until new dynamic instances are generated.


Perhaps Google want to enable people to explore the real world virtually, and interact while they do it.
That's completely different to enabling people to explore a virtual world.

There certainly would be massive difference in the amount of real world advertising that would be relevant to the context.
Google is (still) about capturing eyeballs and putting tailored advertising in the field of vision.

Thanks for this Sling .... and the edit - must have been one helluva coffee

My ex used to talk about him and I going to the next thing and ruling it.

/me waves ... and sits my backside back down at tha Hangout (when I get chance).

It certainly makes sense for a starting-point. But in order to achieve the virtual tourism aspect they would be solving all the problems required to make a platform from which they could easily create their own SL. Except that theirs would already have most of the world's major cities etc. within it. Just tag on a new imaginary continent somewhere for all the weird and wonderful content to appear and you've got SL.

I'm hoping that this makes LL get a serious move-on with improving SL, I don't want to have to try to re-create all the content I want on another platform.

In-ter-est-ing, Sling, this string of posts, thank you for them. There was a fair amount of buzz a few months ago about how powerful a blend of SL and Google Earth would be, and your vision is the logical extension of that fairly vague statement.

There is certainly room for both visions. In fact, ultimately one could see the galaxy of 3D grids, with their myriad virtual destinations, simply being part of Google's mesh of searchable websites. For example, Google's 3D avatar, having found a virtual showroom of sports cars in SL, could opt to "enter" the sim to interact and test drive.

If I were at LL I would be open to exploring not only this degree of interoperability, but also being the provider of some of the base technology Google uses in putting together their solution. Though Google - with its market cap in excess of the assets of many countries - can always opt to roll their own.

A funny thought hit me .. Google = Skynet?

Funnily, I did a Google search on it .. and guess what:

www.googleisskynet.com

I agree and think this is the real question about Google as a competitor for SL. Google seems more aimed at showing 3D images of a world, real or virtual and, I could easily imagine, allowing AV's to wander through it and talk to each other.

However, I'm concerned that everything and everyone would be phantom and nothing except the AV's could move and change.

Personally, while I'm certainly going to add a sketchup version of my house to Google Earth, a static phantom world is no substitute for SL.

My concern is that if Google doesn't end up buying SL outright and creates their own virtual world that they will simply buy up all the talent that LL currently has. There is no way LL could compete with the salary/bonuses that Google can offer.

Definately any virtual world built by Google will have the advertising dollar in mind.

Interesting times though--