will SL succeed?

There is NO room for personal attacks here, and absolutely no need to insult the self-worth and intelligence of other Resis. From the Guidelines:
Please encourage positive discussion and learning from one another, so that we will all be better.

And the ones with rabid kids or dogs find it even harder.

coco

Um, the whole point to SL is that it's a virtual world. You don't have to be there to be there, you're already there no matter where you are.

I'd much rather go to a convention in SL than to a SL convention. In fact going to a convention in SL sounds like a really hoopy idea. You could set up a room with a big-screen TV or three running a feed from "bot" avatars, and on the SL side set up a big media texture streaming the feed from a webcam on top of a screen.

Park the bot behind the media texture, and set up a handful of listeners in front of the texture using llEmail or something to send what people say to a voice synth feeding speakers positioned in the corresponding spot in the room.

Viola... you've got a room that's an extension of a spot in SL.

I have yet to see Eggy "act stupid."

You have not been around the Eggy long enough.

Briana Dawson

His experiments with cocoa was not his brightest moment.

Ruined coffee machines may be the price for scientific progress.

It depends on the definition of "success" for SL.

It'll probably make money for LL, since land and tier seem to be selling well.

I doubt the userbase will grow as high as the big MMO games, because most of the "fun/bonus" factors of SL don't scale well with a growing userbase. More people means the minimum VFM bar rising higher making it harder to make money, more lag, gambling games getting harder to win, and so on.

consider the normal llifespan of an MMO. at the age SL is at, we should be significantly around our half-life.. is this the case? not in my view.. it seems to me we're still building the grass-roots of this world.

it's been said before that SL is still in a Beta type stage.. i believe we're still firmly in that stage.

by the end of the year, we'll probably have somewhere around 300,000 - 500,000 active accounts if the sign-up trend continues. by the end of next year, that could easily become upwards of 1.5 million. i'm not saying that's a definite, but from what i've been seeing, it sure sounds right.. even conservative possibly.

this all boils down to, yes.. i think SL will succeed.

to add more on top of that, decentralizing SL is somewhere among the future horizons.. if i remember correctly, that is. does someone remember where i heard that and exactly what it was?

as i once put it.. we're establishing the Betaverse, from which the Metaverse will be birthed. whether it's an evolution of SL or a competing virtual world, this is where it's really getting started.

Or your apartment smaller, perhaps.

I think it's an even chance that within a few years, we will see a decentralized virtual world and LL's part will largely be that of one particularly popular service provider; more Yahoo/Geocities than the current AOL-ness.

Not a certainty by any means, but I don't rule it out.

I'm reserving my judgement until we see some competition to SL. As long as SL has a monopoly it'll succeed. I think there are so many things a competitor could possibly do better, that SL can't do without a major shift in direction, I lean toward thinking SL will not succeed in the long term, by that I mean years from now.

SL has a place in history I believe, the same way Mosaic and Netscape do.

And you'll note that Netscape, reborn as the Mozilla project, are fast-gaining on the browser market.

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lol yea, fair enough, but as an open source project, if SL goes open source that's a different thing altogether. Can't see that happening with SL now though

It's hard to see how SL can lose the Linden Dollar, become decentralised and open source, it just would not be the same product. ( it would be way better! )

I wasn't quoting the article. I was quoting Coco.

P2

In addition, it took near-complete loss market share, changing ownership at least twice, and a complete bottom-up rewrite to do it. Oh. Not to mention it had to become (somewhat) open source.




- Newfie

Oh, totally true and I agree, so far as that goes - it would look quite different from now, even if much of the content was able to remain.

On the other hand, I once would have scoffed at the very idea of a Macintosh with an Intel chip. At one time, the idea that the Soviet Union would collapse by, essentially, going bankrupt was absurd.

I don't bet on improbable events, but I tend to expect them.

You optimist you !

I think Newfie hit the nail, "a total rewrite". I think you have to see it as a new product even if it started off as SL.

Interesting though not sure how relevant my ramble is:

The Mac has had 3 different processors during my career. It remains Mac regardless of what drives it and it's more successful and growing faster than ever. If this was an SL analogy then SL could change and get stronger and continue to innovate.

The soviet union was brought down by competition, effectively starved to death from the outside aided by corruption on the inside. This is sort of how I see what could happen to SL, competition will starve it, the Linden dollar will eventually corrupt it.

only if:
- sl becomes more first life business friendly
- sl is more interoperable with the internet (mail, chat, java, flash, www, html, etc)
- ll markets better (wells fargo chose not-sl for their 3d presence)
- ll allows other grids on the sl platform to form. which also means multi-grid clients.

otherwise sl will go the way of other closed systems... aol, netscape, compuserve, etc. (the ms path to dominance doesn't likely)

Wrong! There are only at most 8192 particles in the universe, depending on your graphics settings

(Sorry... I couldn't resist)

Will SL succeed? Perhaps, but it seems like development has become stagnant (HTML, Mono, Havok 2, etc.). That might just be me, though.

I don't think SL is viable as THE metaverse, but it's already successful as a unique social space and a platform for myriad not-so-massive RPGs. SL is quite successful as a communal fantasy space, where a hip-hop club might quarrel over the back fence with a pack of space marines, or you might wear your mech suit to drop in on the talking animals two doors down. I don't expect it to displace the Wolrd Wide Web or put scripted MMOs out of business, but it is becoming to some extent The Street, where denizens and refugees of other worlds come to meet, and party. Nothing lasts forever, but SL and LL are doing fine just now.

I think SL will last a long time unless they do something drastically wrong. I think its great that everything in SL has been created by its users, which has taken years to build up. I just wish it was faster. It would take years for any competition to come close to SLs user built up content.

Yeah, with the gazillions of casinos, camping chairs and laggy clubs SL has noone will ever go anywhere else. Not having 10 million camping chairs would be even worse than not having any lag.

Casinos and camping chairs? There's always Cordova and Gougen. Much more interesting.