Is the Demise of Second Life Nearing?

I just hope I'm logged in the day Linden Lab selects every single object in-world at once and checks, "Physical."

They need to create a standardized protocol, first.
That's pretty much the state of the art for webpages where you can have a presence... where you can leave messages, or interact with the content in any way. And I sure wouldn't want the alternative, where I had to have a single traceable trackable cross-referenceable account to access everyone's web forums.

You mean like Microsoft and Netscape tried to make happen?

They couldn't, because the protocol was simple, could be implemented easily, and din't require authentication to view content.

You have to have a protocol that allows you to visit a grid without being logged on to ANY grid, an unauthenticated protocol, that gets you the equivalent of "read only" access, with no non-volatile inventory.

I don't see that happening with any credible descendant of the current SL protocol. SL isn't like AOL in 1993, SL is like Plato in 1979. There's no way you could have built a "web" based on Plato, for all that Plato was more like the web today than anything from the '80s. I don't think it'll take 20 years to get from SL to a 3d web, but I don't think a 3d web is going to be like SL.

There are a boatload of "3d web" protocols, like VRML.

I can't find anything about their protocols on that site. You can do way better graphics than SL, but that doesn't tell us anything about whether it's got anything to do with a 3d web.

Yeah: what's set me off lately is what I'm hearing at office hours from folks who *are* opposed to SL platform changes that might complicate or limit the completeness of interoperability.

So much of the "interoperability" that I really care about is valid for many things other than 3D worlds--and not handled completely or at all by the current Open Grid work. For example, identity. That's not about naming--I get it that somebody else may already have "Qie Niangao" on some other service that demands unique names, and I may have to settle for "Philip Linden." But I'd like it to be reliably true that when Qie logs in to Grid X, he'll always be Philip, have the ability to disclose that irrefutably to the public (and perhaps more importantly--and much more difficult--prove that Scripter McGrief is *not* Qie), and be able to take Qie's Friends list with him, subject to their approval, with inter-service name-mapping intact.

But I really, really don't care if my "avatar" is recognizable across those services--to me, that's as important as each webpage using the same font and background color. And while it may someday be nice to use the same viewer for all grids, right now it would be more valuable to me if the jump between grid and web were more seamless for any viewer (or browser).

So there you have it. Qie doesn't care if his avatar's portable at all, and I don't care about anything that can't handle making my 40 inch ferret guy... currently implemented with sculpted prims and scripts... possible on all worlds. Even allowing for plenty of various goals in the space between these extremes, I don't think any kind of compromise that's limited to the bare SL system avatar is going to matter.