6 months from now, SL will be........

Actually Big Brotherism was about being told what to think more than anything. If this was big brotherism LL would be telling people that adult activities are bad, etc. They are doing the opposite. They are saying if you do volunteer to have your identity verified this one time, you can do what you want in terms of enjoying adult content. The age verification is a way to allow people to continue doing what they are doing in SL, not eliminating it. Verifying identity is going to be more and more necessary online in the future, not less. Its a small hedge against scam artists.

As well, to be honest, most of us are not important enough to spy on. I'm reminded of the East Berlin secret police (the Stasi (sp)), who had so much information on people that it was useless; data is not who you are.

And if you buy a Monopoly Game with a credit card, it is recorded too but really who is going to care.

If you are running for US President you might want to stop pretending to be a mildmaid and playing games with Stef the stable boy but otherwise I don't think anyone is going to consider any one of us important enough to spy on even if we are boinking pixels.

Could I interest you in a second-hand sim? Hardly used, Only one previous careful owner...

even bigger? fading/history? an addiction? so tired/boring ? owned by google? have 10 continents? graphics will be more life like? a competitor is now #1 ?
........................???

(please NO MORE of the Age verification thing, that topic is extremely TIRED)

thanks.

Dwindling into a huge grid ghosttown of yellow land still charging $20 per month for land that will sell for 50c as people leave in droves for the opposition offering new ground breaking innovations like cars that work and customer service

Sorry Alan if I hijacked your thread.

Although I sort of thought that the "TIRED" subject of identity on the internet might impact the future of SL in a very, very small way.

Anyway, lets get back on topic!

6 months time - lots more sims..lots more people..lots more breasts and cars and houses and ways to have sex and a much more "life like" second life.

Woot!! Woot!! Woot!!.

Cheers.

In 6 months SL will still be here and going from <cough> strength <cough> to <cough> strength <cough>.

1. The grid will be larger.
   
2. On paper the growth may look slower as dead accounts and the like are culled and replaced with sign-ups that are actually real people.
   
3. Lag will be the same as ever, but the causes will different.
   
4. A new group of griefers will be around to take the place of W-Hat, /b/, 4-Chan, PN, etc., and will in turn grow old and be replaced.
   
5. People will still be predicting the end of SL and the forums will have much the same good old 'end-of-SL-as-we-know-it' threads.
   
6. Maybe, just maybe, a viable competitor will appear on the horizon.
   
7. Another major scandal will erupt. It will also pass and we'll see the formation of an SL 'scandal-of-the-month' group.
   
8. 3rd-party colo facilities will come on line as a precursor to open-sourcing the server software. Expect to see AC, Dana, D'alliez, Des and a host of other players in the Private Island estate scene jump on that bandwagon. AC will most likely be heavily involved in European and/or Asian colo facilities. Both markets are huge and the Chinese market is experiencing explosive growth.
   
9. Theme-specific colo facilities will emerge: a furry grid, gorean grid, an FPS shooter grid, a hard-core s3cks'n'pr0n grid (oh hang on, they got one already called Sociolotron), a 'disney' grid, etc...
   

Beyond that, not alot.... no mention of me winning the lottery in my cystal ball ... yet.

"Orwellian" is the correct term, and it's used to describe many things relating to propaganda, misinformation, and totalitarianism -- in fact any number of aspects relating to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four; not just mind control. I've just opened my copy and am reminded that the most disturbing thing about the first couple of chapters is just how much the Ingsoc movement knows about Winston - because Big Brother is always watching him of course - and that Winston's eventual brainwashing at the Ministry of Love is more the endgame of the novel.the difference here is that LL is suggesting age verification is only required if you want to access explicity adult content and violence. quite different to buying an innocent game of monopoly when you consider that - wherever you live in the world - this knowledge about your 'desires' could easily fall into the hands of a foreign governement who may or may not interrogate you about it if you ever visit. sound far fetched? i always point people to Catherine Omega's Homeland Security nightmare when they doubt it.

"So you like to pass go and collect $200 without paying your taxes eh Sir?" is a bit different to, "so you like to blow people's brains out and get f***** up the *** in a video game do you Sir?"

history is clear that publicly available information about payment info causes class divisions and blanket bannings in-world and we all know that age verification extends beyond an interest in sex and violence. it's just very unfortunate that LL puts the emphasis on those two words because anybody intending to fly to the States or who needs security clearance for their RL job would have to be seriously deluded to go through with it*.

Edit: *if this data must be exported to the States, obviously.

Enough are that losing a big chunk of them will be pretty damaging to the economy.

'Damaging to the economy'

So you mean the rest of us who make under $50US a month still won't give a damn because we aren't here to 'get rich'? Economical arguments are in my opinion unfounded - we still can't predict how many new people will sign up after the 'droves' leave (which in my mind will be a total of less than 10% of the active user base).

and to Alazarin Mondrian - you're one of the few people who actually seem to have their heads screwed on right I agree with your thoughts almost completely. Remember Copy-bot? oh wait, what was that again? the end of SL? That was less than 6 months ago!

Second Life will continue to grow and will continue to inflate its actual numbers. But it will grow - in the last month I have seen people's fifty year old parents starting to get interested in this in a big way...I've helped 7 people over the age of 45 set up an account and log on. What you might see is that the userbase becomes more age-diverse and thus brings in more varied interests...just a thought. Second Life is about to go mainstream in a very real way - I'm much more worried about whether they can handle the numbers of people trying to log in!

I'm worried that by going mainstream, SL becomes too much a copy of RL, and therefore not worth visiting anymore.

I didnt say the economy wouldnt survive - but a sizable portion of people who are interested in sex leaving would Damage the economy, All of the economy is inter-related theres not some wall up where people who are into sex dont mix with those who dont.

The Economy is what funds Content Creation - thats how SL works, If there is a SL Recession it will effect everyone - even those not interested in getting rich.

New Players can only replace leaving players provided they can see a value in spending their USD on content. If the world's economy is shaky this will be less likely.



"going Mainstream" has its negatives as well.

Well, I would say it is already there - and yet it is still worth visiting because it enables people to live out their RL fantasies. Not just sexual ones. People here can build museums, art galleries, anything they would love to do in real life but can't because they can't get the job/money to do so.

Also, what about people who are unable to leave their house? Shouldn't they have real-life type places that they can visit and interact with people...accessibility is a major factor of Second Life's appeal to the cultural heritage and museum sector. Trust me, I'm a part of that sector.

It seems that a lot of people don't want Second Life to go mainstream - fair enough, but there will always be niche virtual platforms that follow so you can hang out with the 'old-school' crew who remember the good old days before SL 'sold-out'. Me personally, I'll be here trying to help put together the Metaverse envisioned in Snow Crash...where as many people as possible have access and revel in all the good and bad things such a pervasive virtual world has to offer.

Barring unforeseen developments, I think SL will be more or less as now in 6 months' time. A few more residents, possibly a lot more land. Everywhere people will be ripping out their rock gardens made from textured spheres and replacing them with sculpted rock-shaped ones.

You completely miss the downside of "Mainstream".

Mainstream isnt going to make the Metaverse like "Snow Crash".

Mainstream will make SL the 3d Interactive version of Network TV.

And now a word from our sponsors ...

I really can't see the folk interested in pixel sex leaving in droves. As already pointed out, a lot of these people aren't exclusively here for the sex. They also buy houses, buy clothes, visit museums, tip dance clubs ...

I also don't share the stigma that a lot are portraying here .. verified? yes, wanna make something of it? come to a damage-enabled sim with me for a moment!

but one thing for sure in 6 months time?

there'll be a thread here saying 'the end is nigh .. what will SL be in 6 months time?!'

That passage was aimed at the poster who was talking about wanting to know my identity before trading with me and not aimed at LL.

...At least twice as big.

All valid points. The more people that come into SL the more chance for creativity and diversity. The resident creations are what brings me in each day, I pick a Sim at random every day and just wander around it. However, I feel the Advent of RL corporations puts user creations in peril to a certain extent. As RL has shown, many of these enteties don't like to share the sandbox with the little guys. I go out of my way to avoid patronizing them in RL when possible, I hope their presence will be less intrusive here, although I highly doubt it.

The lights are already dimmng and the bling's not quite as sparkley. SL got too big for their britches and couldn't keep up. I never crashed before the last update, and noe it's like 5 times in a bit over an hour. I was pretty hooked, but now, when SL becomes a pain to be in, I leave and go out with RL friends. They're pretty fun too. Now that the addiction is waning, SL is an interest, but the poor performance and lack of regard that's shown in the decision making process is causing my interest to fade. It seems that the "community" I joined and thought I was beomming a part of is no longer supported on this platform.

quoted from http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2188649/web-users-online-second-life

"Although many commercial companies have established a virtual world presence, none has converted it into an effective and profitable sales channel"...

...Can it be done ? How ??? RL Marketing strategies do not work in a virtual world. Will some company/person have figured out how, in 6 months, how to use SL effectively and profitably ??

Sorry Ciaran, completely misinterpreted that section. Don't know what I was thinking. <slaps head>

I was going to say. the snow crash metaverse inspiration was there at the beginning. and if anything, SL has slowly drifted away from it with changes and growth.

it's a great theme for a cyberpunk private sim, but unrealistic for a platform...with its physics, simless architecture, metaphorical death, graveyard daemons, etc. the latecomers were looked down on in Neil Stephenson's envisioned metaverse more than they are here, early purveyors like Hiro and his friends benefitted from it the most, and sex, violence and a bizarre kind of drug were big components. sound familiar? =D

lol no problem, I misinterpret what plenty of others are saying too, so I'm with you in that boat

I believe I'll still be loving SL in 6 months' time.

I think there will probably be some big ugly spam problem, and we may even forget we were talking about the numbers of sex users back in the spring. Some Linden programmers will be unhappy at having to fight huge battles against armies of clever and determined fraudsters and spammers.

I think the sculpties will bring amazing sights, and I think there will be many excited and enthusiastic new users. We should keep pictures of the world as it looks now, to compare with how it looks after sculpties have been pulled in everywhere, and copied and adapted with a myriad of tricks and techniques.

-Fo

The tragedy is that it doesn't actually work this way. People will buy land, build something like this, and then in a fairly large number of cases just find that no-one pays them any attention - because that's still a scarce resource you have to compete for, and the price of competing goes up every day (how much has the top classified reached by now?). It's sad, but inevitable, and I've seen this cycle happen over and over again. And the fact that this same cycle might in fact be what is keeping the SL economy running, to be frank, terrifies me.



The Snow Crash metaverse can't be mainstream, though. The biggest problem SL, and the Snow Crash universe, have for going mainstream is I think avatars. I don't think the mainstream will ever enjoy a model where you have to pay for how you want to present yourself to the world, and even within that you have a limited number of choices dictated by artists, and those choices are hard to find. If you look at the mainstream networking sites like popular fora or MySpace or blogging sites, most "avatars" (which on those sites is normally taken to mean a small identifying picture) are either RL photographs of the person or pieces of art cut-and-pasted from other sources on the internet. So there's a huge choice to pick from (lots of art on the internet), it's all free, and you can always just be yourself if you want to - none of those apply to SL at the moment, and they might have to at some point.

Moreover, the communities around sites which do have paid-for avatars socially adjust for it. There's an online dancing game called Audition where you can subscribe to buy extra clothing for your avatar, but in practice almost nobody wears any of it, and in consequence nobody cares if you're "badly dressed" because everyone is dressed the same. In fact, if you do buy extra items, you're more likely to get strange comments along the lines of "why did you spend real money on that?" Which of course is bad because so much of SL's economy revolves around avatars at the moment.