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

i dont know what will be in store 6 months from now.
but im sure that eventually ll will run sl into the ground.

In 6 months Second Life will be owned by The Electric Sheep Company which itself will be a wholly owned subsidiary of CBS/Viacom. Upon logging on you will see 3 minutes of previews, 9 minutes of commercials, and an offer to order food from your local mass produced garbage pizza chain. Then you will be told your login failed, please try later. Then you will see 5 more minutes of commercials.

Avatars will become less and less important in SL the more it continues to edge over to a virtual representation of ourselves in RL. Voice conversations already tend to involve real life more than they do SL, and you'll care about whether the actual person you're talking to is interesting or not, not whether their little cartoon version is or isn't.

In 6 months we'll also hit LL's deadline for grandfathering in old sims at the $195/month and it seems likely that the rates will be hiked up. Old tier sim owners will scream because despite the advance warning they still won't have planned for it, and new tier sim owners will use it as an excuse to reprice upward.

now signup levels appear to peaking i was hoping that demand would wane and island pricing would remain static or even drop a little.

yeah, i dream a lot.

I don't really see how you're meant to just "plan for it" - as if somehow "planning" could make more money appear by magic

My solution? Linden Lab admits that this whole "age verification" plan will not actually prevent underage people from taking their parents or someone else's info and getting an account, or getting an alt on someone else's account. That someone who will steal a credit card number in order to login to a game will happily steal the other information required. That some over 18 people will sign up accounts for their friends under their info and some parents will even sign their kids up under their names & information (yes, there is even an example of that on the forum here somewhere). That age verification is, in essence, impossible unless you are coming to my house and doing it in person.

Thus, ANY age verification plan is flawed and will not actually accomplish what it is meant to do - keep underagers off the grid and out of adult areas. And meanwhile, they want me to fork over my personal information to a third-party, Republican data mining company.

Age verfication should work exactly as it does right now. You sign up, you say "yes I am over 18". Making you have a credit card on file and pay a nominal fee even for a basic account at least gives Linden Lab a verified account with a name and address on file that matches the credit card that they can track down when there is fraud or illegal activities - which is really the best you can ask for. People steal credit cards, true. Some people under 18 have credit cards, true. But people steal social security numbers, driver's licenses and more just as easily. The legal responsibility should fall on the person signing up to not be lying - not on Linden Lab or on ME for them lying.

I am damn sick of Parents looking to the government or the corporation to "nanny" their kids. It's about time they took the legal responsibility over their childrens' actions.

This is a great point about age verification and the internet.

It wont matter one bit as far as what Linden Lab does though.

6 months from now?

EITHER:

LL goes ahead with their current verification plans. After some rough false starts they manage to come up with appropriate legal methods of verifying age and identity in every country on the planet, though in many cases this requires an in-person visit to a Notary Public and a notorized letter sent to LL's certification authority, attesting that you are of legal age. Some kids will steal their parents ID, and get caught. Those kids get ARRESTED, and/or their parents do, because unlike lying on a website about being 18, it is actually a CRIME to present someone else's ID. They get charged with Identity Theft, in a very public way, which scares off most of the kiddies, who find it easier to surf the Internet for their porno.

Yet it is soon determined that all Mature sims must get flagged Adult, because even one prim penis walking through the sim is a violation and gets reported. Likewise, any PG Sims in camera range of a Mature/Adult sime get reclassified as Mature/Adult. A PG-only continent is created for those who refuse to verify. And it remains as barren as the Australian Outback. Because so many of the content providers are age verified, so they can sell anywhere, and they don't need to mess with a "niche market" for G-rated-only wares.

At the same time, though many long-term residents may (and some certainly will) leave in protest, many more will flood in to fill their places. LL doesn't even notice the departure of those who refuse verification.

In the end, SL becomes dominated by porn and violence, and those seeking G-rated entertainment go to some new venture run by Disney Corp. - Or LL opens a G-rated-Only grid, and opens that grid to all age ranges. And it tanks, because LL won't police it well enough.

OR :

LL bails on the proposed age verification, after several expensive lawsuits for identity theft with them as named accomplices takes its toll.

They decide it's cheaper to ban all adult activity. The grid becomes G-rated.

Most of the current population leaves. Millions more flock in. They sell out to Disney.

===============

In all probability, it wil be somewhere between those extremes. I think that the age verification and "adult parcel tagging" in general will fail miserably, and if SL is to continue in anything resembling its current form, LL will have to take steps to actually allow areas to be marked PRIVATE, and to be impossible to render if you aren't verified in some way acceptable to the land owner. That may mean age verification for a porno palace. It may mean "Payment info on file" for other merchants. That may mean "Only accessible for my invited guests" for a lot of us. Give us the "Privacy in a pocket" that LL themselves agreed was a possible solution, so we can restrict access to skyboxes, without having to ban all access to a parcel. Problem solved.

Just a thought on the Notary idea. For US residents, anyway, why can't LL send each of us a letter,Certified Mail/Signature required that we sign saying we are 18 years or older etc, and we return it via certified mail? Cheaper than a Notary.

I'm actually feeling fairly optomistic about 6 months down the road. LL is obviously having to do a major rethink on their sign ups & verifications.

The current state of affairs will be traded off for new, but hopefully less dramatic ones.

I'm looking forward to a bit of sanity returning to the grid after all this dang dust settles!

I'm in the UK and I'd have no problems at all with them sending me a letter and asking me to confirm I'm over 18 and that my name and address details are correct and then having to return that to them by registered mail. Heck I'd pop down to their UK office with my official documents and show them to them.

Notaries are really cheap in Ohio

Course they will stamp any paper you sign without even reading it.

They only Notarize your signature. They arent responsible for what the paper says.

If I were under 18, I'd have no problems signing that letter too

In six months, Second Life will still be here.

Most of the anti-Verification zealots will still be here and will be verified, quietly turning their backs on their cause.

They will have moved onto the newest crisis-du-jour, proclaiming that the end is near, all while slowly scooping up large swaths of land to resell at great gain later.

Celebrating Hallowe'en

Depending on when sculpties get introduced to the main grid and how long builders will take to get used to using them I think you'll see a flood of bad ass freebies made from the old prims as they slowly turn to litter in our inventories. Eventually this will lead to better performance since fewer prims will go a longer way in building.

This will also spur a retro movement where people will go back to using an assload of prims to make watches and PDAs for avs.

Voice Chat will change the social dynamic throughout SL and there will be private island havens for the anti-chatters since a lot of sim owners won't want to pay extra for v-chat to be enabled on their land. I wouldn't be suprized if a new continent of private islands banding together for typing freedom pops up to rival the size of SL in 2005.

No one will notice because they're all quiet anyway.

And LL will take away the search function in favor of the new "Find it yourself you lazy bastards" method in an effort to fix the bugs everyone complained about in "Project Open Letter III: Yelling Harder".

Check local listings for the movie adaptation.

Now this, reading through the transcript there was something along these lines. The transcripts are hard to follow so I may have got the wrong end of the stick, but Robin said that there were no plans to merge the two grids but then said something about a new 13+ grid, which would of course be PG. I can't remember the exact quote.

In 6 months time...

The age verification thing will have blown over, simply because the controversy will have died a natural death. Those who were against it will not cave in, and the whole issue will be no big deal.

SL will have more concurrent users. Each of us will have at least one more alt.

We will still complain about lag.

We will be a year away from the 2008 elections in the US, and we will have to deal with candidate sims because some guys in suits decided that campaigning in SL is "the next big thing".

One of the aforementioned SL virtual candidates will be caught shagging a $L500 SL ho'.

Someone will create a very realistic sculpted penis, which will be the weapon of choice for the aforementioned SL virtual candidate.

We will still be looking forward to upgraded graphics and physics.

Anyone not using voice will be branded an alt, a minor, or "some dude using a female av". People will complain about all the rude folks who use profanity in voice.

SL will be reported to a consumer group because it won't run smoothly on a machine that has Voodoo graphics.

The forums will have over half a million threads with this title.

LOL More "can't access"'s than residents by then

In 6 months time SL will be one giant strip mall. We are almost there now.

In an experiment that begins today and runs through Thursday, companies such as eBay Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Microsoft Corp., Sodexho, T-Mobile and Verizon Communications Inc. will hold a nationwide job fair in the cyberspace community called Second Life.
Those who "pass" the Second Life interviews will be sought out by the companies in the real world.


http://www.baltimoresun.com/technology/bal-bz.virtualjob15may15002653,0,4899237.story?coll=bal-technology-headlines

In 6 months , our SL names will be on our resumes ?

and thats why many are unhappy with LL's idea of age verification. its too easy to get around and will not solve the problem of minors on the grid, or stop ageplay. i for one dont care. many forget that those "children" are adults. what needs to be done is a more stringent policing of mature, private grids.
i know im off topic and probably should post this inthe 1000s of AV threads, but think about this: i'd be more worried about that escort being a child than an actual child ava.

I think that 6 months is a very big field of things seen from a very high point in the sky. I have a lazy eye and bad shooting.

So for me SL will be exactly what i feel now about it because it's all about the reunion of all these little tiny persons with their little tiny points of view, all mixed up together in one single big and amazing social theory. it's like we're all living inside one single head you know? so hey.. if head is getting dizzy maybe it should stop drinking something. this is not the end of the world, it's just a bit of discipline.

bang!

In 6 months I hope more people are educated to explore rather than follow-the-arrow-arrow-arrow tune. yeah. SL is that, makes you activate the numbness.

and keep learning. so much to learn, so little time

Ah yes, one thing I left off my preductions: the number of <couch>residents<cough> reported on the Second Life home page will have crossed the 10 million mark. Of which 9 million will actually be alts, camping zombies or dead/lost accounts.

The Electric sheep company invents Sheepbot 5. This invisible bot lands in a sim and begins photographing everything on the sim. It then posts these photographs on its new Travel agency website for potential visitors to find interesting places to visit. A new uproar is created when this OPT OUT only service is discovered to be posting pictures of avatars in compromising situations. Respected residents are depicted in their bedrooms on all manner of sexballs. Colette Meiji is spotted dancing drunk wearing a lampshade for a hat, and Chip Midnight is photographed naked taking a shower while wearing a Munchflower Zaius drow skin. The ensuing blitz results in a 120 page thread with residents complaining of the privacy issue. Some claim there is no real privacy in SL, while the others bitch and moan loudly of the lack of privacy. Every third post is a disclaimer from the Electric sheep company which states: " RESISTANCE IS FUTILE".