Is the Demise of Second Life Nearing?

The thing that gobsmacked me about this thread was the description of that Forbes blog piece as part of a "grapevine".

Because when it comes to the Internet, most of the "old" media is about as reliable as a tabloids, whether simply due to ignorance or purposeful marketing to luddites. This is especially true when you go at it from the pure business angle. The big new things on the Internet simply can't be crammed into an analysis of profits and potential IPO. There's always more involved that can often be as important, if not more important, a factor to success. This often being the passions of the creators/users who keep things afloat and expand simply because they like it, until it reaches the right circumstances and takes off on its own.

Basically they just don't "get it". And unfortunately that's not something you can really teach either, no matter how much you try to explain things.

Also, another RL example: Apple. Over two decades of experts (yes, REAL experts, which makes it even funnier) claiming 'days away from bankruptcy' and 'making huge mistakes'. And some are STILL at it.

Well to be fair the Apple Lisa was hardly a resounding success and they were losing ground badly, but that was over twenty years ago!

IBM have been written off countless times too.

As I think Niels Bohr said ..

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future"

It has to be said though, it becomes even more difficult when they have to be universally accurate so that they apply for Apple, IBM and erm.. SL.

Apples and oranges anyone..?

Second Life's demise occurred last Wednesday, at approximately 2:30 pm SLT.


I believe this period we're in now is called denial.

AOHell? AND Internet Exploder?

Wow, you're a spam attack just waiting to happen!

QFT

Now if there only were a magic formula to make LL understand that, instead of pursuing "we're Serious Business" shenanigans, and start treating residents as valued customers.

I actually used Internet Explorer 6 today. Voluntarily.

Just for a few minutes. For a test.

/me splashes holy water on herself, trying to ward off the demons

Firstly as my posting history will verify, I fall into the "who cares?" camp.

SL is a diversion for me and while I don't see its end in sight quite yet, I don't believe it's an IBM or Apple or even God forbid a Microsoft.

I'm no luddite either mind, and firmly believe that we're heading to a point when living at least part of our lives in immersive online environments is seen as no big thing.

I do hesitate however in using the old 3D moniker to describe where we may be going. I believe we're talking about new environments which fulfill all the needs of our senses (or as many as possible) rather than the simple facility to mimic movement within a 3D space.

So yes, ridiculous as it seems, potentially a See, touch, feel and sniff internet..

I'm saying all this to sort of highlight that I'm not a luddite by any means and actually as someone in the industry my financial security is a little invested in the success of online innovation.

What I would say however is that you're view of a web which does not have to pay attention to RL commercial pressures and let's face it opportunities is foolhardy and pays no attention to lessons learned in even very recent history.

I hear this idea all over these boards, SL is something different and we the soothsayers of the future metaverse "get something" which the horrible "money men" won't and never will.

While I don't like to rain on anyone's parade, this utopian "free web" is actually funded by those filthy money men and their ad buys. More horrible to contempate is that the great egalitarian heroes of the web actually spend most of their working days working out how to get more of "you" in so they can get more of "them" to spend money on advertising.

I love the idea of the creativity, the freedom and what has recently been called the wikinomics of the web (I'd recommend the book if you haven't already read it). I also abhor the business types almost as much as you.

For the most part however they are still funding our halcyon brave new world, so let's at least be polite enough not to call them names while they do so.

I'm confused as to why multiple businesses pulling out of SL would affect the viability of the product.

When a business (or anyone) purchases an island, they pay a setup fee to install their island on a server.

Their monthly tier covers power to their 1/4 of a server, plus manpower to maintain the service, technical troubleshooting &etc. (and a profit margin)

When the business quits SL, the server is taken offline. There's a corresponding drop in power and cooling bills, and no one has to do tech support on a powered down unit. (incidentally, on average a server farm requires 2 watts of cooling power for every 1 watt of processing power)

So unless every entity logs off permanently at the same time and all of the mainland and all the islands shut down, LL's business model should scale down a lot better than it scales up.

I think you're imagining things. There's a bunch of people in this forum who are as conservative as you might want, and they also don't see any reason to worry about whether big companies have a stake in SL or not. It's got nothing to do with utopianism, by any means.

You remind me of the people on the chamber of commerce of small towns all over the US, worried about whether their plans to get a new plant or warehouse or other "corporate presence" into their sleepy little bedroom community will fall through. All the while missing the fact that their sleepy little community is perfectly functional and viable without any industry in town... and the people who live there and pay their property taxes don't want to drive past industrial parks between their houses and schools and churches.

The majority of the income to Linden Labs isn't from a few hundred corporate sims, it's from the thousands of recreational sims, and the in-world stores... most of which are strictly hobbies, and the hundreds of thousands of people who are here for recreation. SL isn't here for them to work, it's here for them to play.

This. It's what I've been preaching to LL at every opportunity...and it's why I agree that an improved avatar mesh should be high on their agenda.

An improved avatar would not only draw more residents into SL (many now leave because of the "awful graphics"... but it would stimulate the SL economy, because we'd all have to buy new clothes. Most of that money winds up in LL's grubby little hands, which in this case is a Good Thing.

The main focus on avatar redesign right now is making it compatible with other grids. the ability to move from one grid to another is a big deal. Im sure that an updated mesh will arrive as well, but they arrive in steps, not gradual.

The "awful graphics" are usually related to one's own computer system, and lack of shadows. Shadow code is there already, and if you know how to develop you can include it. There's also a couple builds of the client that allow shadows. However, unless youre running 4 cores and a big video card, dont expect high performance.

Many people who think SL's graphics are "bad" don't understand the differences in design between SL and their favorite shooter. Personally, some things are a lost cause and you can't please everyone.

Thanks to moore's law, this stuff should be implemented sooner than it would be in the past. I expect to see an improved gaming engine too, but all these things take time. Engineering isn't easy.

If I can't look like this (or like the hundreds of other avatars I have in SL) when I get to the next grid, why on earth should I care whether the base avatar is compatible or not:

Why? I actually used to think grid interoperability mattered, but I don't anymore. And even if I did, the very last thing I'd care about is whether there's a compatible avatar on each grid.

I'd be very much more interested in SL interoperability with OpenSocial than with Magical Mystery Opengrid X. At least in the case of OpenSocial, there's a there there.
What's a "gaming engine"?

If you get SL running at it's full potential is interoperability a concern at all. If SL works, why is there a reason to go to another grid?

..I don't want SL to die.


I also think they are wishful dreaming. (Of course, with the economy and everything that is happening recently..)

I was waiting for an answer from somebody who considers interoperability to be a priority. In lieu of that, and because it's not entirely off-topic of this thread, I'll try to explain some reasons why this might be important, or at least why I once thought so--and why I don't think so anymore.

First, there's the "corporate" or "educational" semi-autonomous grid application. Similar to what IBM demonstrated early-on. There are legit reasons for some institutions to need to have an isolated sub-grid--perhaps to protect proprietary information, to permit mixed age group attendance, or whatever. But "interoperability" here is quite limited, because it's just another instance of an SL grid, perhaps hosted behind a firewall, with limited access and data flow. In a way, this application calls more for a *restriction* of interoperability than for its extension.

Second, there's the "anybody but Linden" grid, as represented by the OpenSim gridlets. Back when SL usage was expanding at a rate that LL seemed incapable of managing, this seemed important, and there's a case to be made that LL needs some kind of competition to keep them honest about pricing. But to me this argument is forever tainted by the ravenous glee of OpenSim outfits at the misfortune of SL Estate residents during the OpenSpace debacle. Well, that and the accompanying trash-talk of anybody who would ever set foot on the Mainland.

Third, there's the Grand Unified 3D Web vision: that to be viable and realize its full potential, SL must interoperate with other Massively Multiplayer 3D environments, and together form the Next Big Thing. The problem here is that currently there's no there there (certainly not There) worth the trouble, and without an existence proof, all this work is just on-spec.

Personally, at this point I wish to teleport to other 3D grids exactly as much as I wish to do pivot tables on my snowblower.

LL has been devoting at least two developers to this effort, with blessed little if any discernible benefit to their actual customers, presumably motivated by that old 3D Web notion. And now, in the spirit of "no good deed goes unpunished," the interoperability militants are staking out office hours to lobby against any improvements to SL that might be inconvenient to that effort.

And without the competition of other Opensim based grids, there never will be, and Second Life will remain a walled garden.

If you want to stay in the pretty walled garden, there is nothing stopping you. Luckily, there were enough people in 2003 who felt the need to step outside the gardens that were functioning and available to them at that time to begin creating the Second Life walled garden you experience today.

If it weren't for those early pioneers and inovators, you'd still be playing TSO and There and the dream of an intergrated 3D web would be pointless to speculate about. Second Life specifically brought that dream one step closer to morning. If SL ever realizes that dream or not, I still see it as necessary, the same way it was necessary to have other ISPs then AOL.

For a reference point, I have lived on the SL mainland for all but 10 months of my SL exsistence (I'd moved to a private estate but went back to the mainland because I like quirky). I had no glee in my heart when LL screwed Opensapce sim owners. I do not think SL needs competition specifically to insure pricing.

I think SL needs competition because competition sparks improvement and lack of competition results in atrophy and apathy.

Ahhh, the Meataverse......Thanks.

I both agree and disagree. I agree that competition would be healthy, I just don't see OpenSim offering any competition except as a cut-rate version of the same thing.

When Google first announced Lively--before I tried it--I thought for a bit that this "3D Web" thing might take off, and that there might be some interesting competition, and something might emerge with which it could worth the effort to be interoperable. Maybe someday, but if it's just a kind of SL clone, well... not very interesting. And with the apparent waning of interest in 3D social environments, I'm just not looking in that direction for now.

So, what I think *would* be interesting (to which I alluded before, referencing OpenSocial) is increased interoperability and integration with the real current competition: social networking and interaction services such as Twitter.

I suppose it comes down to how much faith one has in the 3D Web vision that determines where one sees both the competition and the valuable opportunities for interoperability. Because I've come to see 3D as remaining a niche for the foreseeable future, I'm pretty skeptical about things like a changed avatar mesh being make-or-break for any interoperability that's apt to matter.

Qie, among the many things I like about you is your way of geek speaking without using geek speak. Also you seem to be able to see the whole picture without the falling to your knees and genuflecting at the "3D Web". On behalf of luddites everywhere, thank you.

When OpenSim develops to the point that it's viable competition for SL, that might become relevant, but that's not going to happen soon... and even then, I don't really see what you're getting at.

SL vs OpenSim is like Compuserve vs AOL. AOL and Compuserve didn't become the web, they connected to it in the early '90s. There is no "3d web" for SL to connect to, and SL can't *become* the 3d web without things like custom meshes and skeletons, client-side scripting, and all kinds of things that allow you to create an avatar that's independent of the server.

The idea I'm trying to get across is not that Opensim grids compete with Second Life as a platform but as a service provider of a standardized platform protocol. This in no way means I think LL should hold back in improving the SL platform.

But imagine if you had to register an account with every single webpage to access it's content. And that every webpage required a different browser to access. That's what it seems like to me when I try to go from one grid to another, that all look really really similar to each other for all their differences, and why interoperation is essential to anything like a 3D web ever happening. And I, for one, would love to see it happen.

Why people would ever need another grid is exactly why people would want a different ISP. They don't want a different internet, they don't want to have to download a different browser, they just want someone else to provide the service to access the same internet as everyone else.

If there are never standardized virtual platform protcols there never will be a 3D world-wide web. There will only be little walled gardens of virtual worlds all disconnected. That seems incredibly limiting to me. I want to world surf the way I webpage surf... freely moving from a webpage hosted on Network Solutions to one hosted on Yahoo using either my home computer with Embarq as its ISP or the office computer with Comcast broadband.

Without interoperability Second Life will never have the sort competition it could sorely use to push it towards providing better service for its users. There will be other virtual world platforms anyway and people will be left with comparing apples to oranges the way some try to compare SL to a game or argue why Blizzard can provide better customer service to its users then LL.



I agree completely. I just still have a little more hope left for it then you.

These guys seem to be on a slightly different track then LL and seem much more in tune with what I am hoping for in how a 3D web would work

http://www.mycosm.com/blog/mycosm-screenshots