I just had to share this – Cube linked it from the comments here and elsewhere and if there was a vision for a future I am NOT interested in, well, this is pretty much it. Although the help on how to make a cup of tea could be useful.

Hotel rooms and airports dehydrate me. Throw in a few times zones and eventually everything starts becoming a little blurry looking, and if you throw California into the mix it’s a lethal combination – a grande frappe machiatto or whatever it’s called starts to look like a little thimble and I start craving ever larger cups of coffee. Starbucks will start selling a bucket-sized thing one day and in California, at least, no one will notice, they’ll all think they’re drinking MODEST amounts of caffeine, no one will have the heart to tell them that Colossi isn’t an appropriate size except for circuses and James Cameron.

The past few weeks have been this sort of floating caffeine-kick. I went back to my room one night, opened the door, but that lock/clasp thing was on and I couldn’t get in.

Turns out I was trying to get into the room number from the LAST hotel – although lesson learned, those coded hotel key things aren’t a one-to-one relationship to your room and will actually work on more than one door.

Getting Down to Business
So I’m out meeting with people and talking about virtual worlds, or how geography is being extended in space and time, or what a set of protocols looks like for peer-to-peer support in a virtual world – and the strangest thing happens, which is that, well, no one kicks me out. No one gently prods me off stage. And no one seems to have their arms crossed (well, except for that one guy with the toothpicks and the pocket protector but we’ll forget about him).

As I said some time ago, virtual worlds crossed a tipping point and they forgot to tell me. They’re either mainstream because you’re going to count Facebook, or they haven’t reached mainstream ADOPTION but the acceptance is there, the question isn’t whether, anymore, the question is how, and if you have anything that sounds like a reasonable answer to that question then pull your chair up, your one hour meeting is going to turn into four. It’s time to get down to brass tacks, rubber hits the road, sounds cool how do we get going and, oh, can you give me a PRACTICAL solution.
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January 27, 2010.

Following was my response to Wallace Linden and his post about how nifty neat and cool it would be if Second Life could take advantage of all those super-awesome social networks out there. If my voice seems like it’s dripping with sarcasm, um, it is. Read on:

First, let me start by applauding the following (and the more general attempt at a conversation):

And as Web and mobile services continue to work their way into all corners of our lives, these aspects will continue to proliferate — and as they do, we’ll start facing important questions about how we handle these collections of selves. Their answers will do much to determine who we become as the next generation of connected human beings. How we as technology providers handle such questions largely determines what choices we as individuals have open to us. And the choices we make as individuals in these contexts can have a surprising impact on who we are — in “real life” — and who we can become.
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Code is not agnostic. Code is the accretion of a thousand small decisions and a few large ones.

Code, because it is not agnostic, produces effects comparable to speaking another language.

I ‘lived in French’ for a while – listening to it, speaking it, reading signs in French, menus, newspapers. At first, I thought it was me: certain sentiments, feelings or explanations seemed incredibly hard to articulate.

I thought it was because I wasn’t fluent enough. When I went home to my all-English town, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t my proficiency that was the problem, but rather that the language had certain values embedded in it. French might be more romantic but it’s actually inadequate to expressing certain gradations of love. Languages with feminine and masculine nouns and objects also embed other subtle values.

Like language, code gathers values-systems around it over time. Even when code is written in a closed-off room by a single person, it embeds a way of looking at logic and the subtle shadings of that person’s values, which were themselves informed by both other code and other people. But most code isn’t written in a closed-off room – one person starts it, another modifies it, another appends, debugs, changes, upgrades.
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So during our intermission (which means me being on the road again) a bit of promotion. Well, not promotion but useful links to things of deep interest to you, dear reader.

We have a report out today highlighting the past season on Metanomics. It acts as a bit of a “State of the Union” on virtual worlds. The report extrapolates from the guests on the “fall season” and highlights the following:

Virtual worlds are achieving much wider adoption
“Virtual worlds to date, in particular for enterprise, have been a testing ground, with significant prototyping and exploration. Consumer adoption of virtual worlds, once restricted to game environments like World of Warcraft, has increasingly been reaching a mass scale, particularly among younger audiences and as components of social media (e.g., Facebook).

In recent times we have seen a major shift in adoption rates and a widening variety of uses. Large-scale growth has occurred in the virtual goods industry, with one estimate by Virtual Worlds Market predicting a value of $15 billion by 2015. There is a wider field of application providers and hardware platforms than ever before and in the business models that link these activities to the real-world metric of profitability.”
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What’s WRONG with love in a virtual world? Why does the press insist on obsessing with sex and divorce? Well, pretty much for the same reason I’m writing this post – as a shameless traffic generator.

Not really.

But hyperventilating commentary about the forlorn and the jilted, the lovestruck and cheaters – well, it makes good press, although it reminds me of the early days of the Web when the media, which didn’t understand what was going on, focused on what they termed a seedy underbelly and what everyone else termed a natural reaction: if you have a new vehicle for making whoopee, why the heck not? Besides, Second Life won’t cook dinner for you so you might as well get some of your basic needs met.
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There’s a cultural revolution going on in Second Life facilitated by a shift in approach by Linden Lab. Whether you think this revolution will scare away its core community or build its appeal to a wider audience depends on how you parse the future. What’s certain is that Linden Lab is in the middle of a multi-year process which may end up being a textbook case of how to manage massive change in online communities.

I recently wrote that Linden Lab was “at war” – but the war was with itself as the cultural mindset and organizational practices that made Second Life what it was (and still to a large degree is) were replaced by a different approach, one that focuses on channels and products and revenue streams and user experiences. I suggested that this war within the Lab is a reflection of a wider dialog, one that tries to reconcile a faith in code with the natural irrationality of the very human users that interact with that code.

But the Lab is juggling more than just shifting from a coder culture to a service-oriented one. There are changes coming which might give us insight into the wider challenges facing enterprise, communities and individual creators and consumers, challenges related to our identities, the tools with which we share and create, and what it means to be a great brand in a universe where dispersion is more common than aggregation and attention is ephemeral and often fickle.
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So the year started with a bang and in between airports, hotel rooms and forgetting where I put the coffee once I DID make it home, I was still trying to piece together some kind of uber-post wrapping up 2010. You see, with so few days left in this year, there’s still hope that my predictions for the year will all come true and I’ll score 100%, but for now I’m looking at a pretty good hit rate.

OK, so the truth is my predictions seem, in retrospect, unimaginative and lame. What with M Linden (Mark Kingdon) coming out with his first major post in, what, a year or something, he managed to pretty much turn my predictions into a tick list, which left me scrambling to think of something else to say about the year to come.

But M’s post provides the hint of an answer when he reminds us of how quickly technology changes, how fast companies come and go, and how monumental it can all seem in retrospect:

“Despite the historic challenges, this decade gave us RSS, WordPress, Wikipedia, QQ, Skype, Firefox, YouTube, Gmail, Yelp, LinkedIn, Flickr, Amazon’s EC2, the Wii, Zynga, Webkins, Club Penguin, Tuenti, Facebook, the iPod/iPhone and iTunes, Twitter and, of course, Second Life.”

But this was also the decade that saw the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas & Electric, Enron, World.com, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, and a bunch of car companies. It’s a decade that’s seeing, in its conclusion, the post mortems on the failed AOL/Time Warner merger and a lot of “what ever happened to’s” like Yahoo and eBay (sure, they’re still there, but they’re like slightly worn out pieces of furniture) and technologies that have come and gone, with that Fiona lady rumored to be considering a run for Congress or something.

Massive Change
But strangely, in spite the convulsions in the economy and being witness to companies being bulldozed to a shell of their former selves, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more optimistic about where the world is headed. While I’m the first to raise my hand with a cautionary footnote when the techno-optimists talk about saving the ozone layer with the Singularity or the benefits to the shopper of behavioral targeting (otherwise known as corporate surveillance and data scraping) I’m more interested perhaps in the edge cases and pockets of innovation, the little islands being carved out where some pretty cool thinking is going on.

What strikes me about what’s happening is that while there are always markets to please and shareholders to appease, there’s also a wider dialogue about the meaning of sociality, creativity, and values.
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Bryn Oh’s Immersiva – photo using only custom Windlight settings and no post

In the old days, the Lab would roll out new features and then, well, kind of leave them half-finished. In the new days, the Lab rolls out new features and then pretends it’s looking for community feedback…but what that means is they have their finger on the roll-back button and they can press it or not. (Roll-backs are a whole other topic of course).

Windlight is a good example: it brought the visually rich graphics to Second Life that are usually reserved for games, but with an even wider palette well-suited to the surreality that we can find in SL. I remember during the test period being awed by the new look, but as it plodded through the tweaking phase we ended up with – well, with sparkles on the water really. The default Windlight didn’t look much different than the old SL, and it took too many mouse clicks to change them all the time, and then if you flipped the time of day it would revert to default.

A few builders realized that Windlight settings could completely transform the look and feel of a sim. Take a trip to Immersiva to see what I mean. Under default settings it’s beautiful, but under the presets that Bryn Oh designed it’s, well, immersive.

But the challenge with builder pre-sets is they’re a hassle to install. There’s no script you can place that you click which loads a Windlight pre-set automatically, or at least not that I know. And there’s no estate-level controls.

One argument against estate-level Windlight is that it would radically change the experience of geographic continuity. You’d be wandering from sim to sim and it would go from a sunny day to a dark and stormy night. But this argument doesn’t hold water for me: as an artistic and immersive tool, the environment is part of the palette, but it’s basically useless if you can’t easily let others experience it. For a builder, this leaves little option but to build for default: and I can tell you that you’d texture and build very differently in a foggy sim than a sunny one – it’s a completely different look and feel. I could even see the texture artists getting a whole new revenue stream creating for specific Windlight pre-sets, or offering texture packs with a preset plug-in.

Over on OpenSim, meanwhile, we have what I believe is the first estate-level Windlight system, called LightShare(TM). (Full disclosure, though: while we have no commercial interest in LightShare(TM), the developer of LightShare has done significant work for my company Remedy). From the Meta7 Web site:
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