Not sure why but my last post seems to have locked out the ability to comment. Maybe it’s me. I did want to respond to Prok so bear with me on shifting this to another post. Prok commented:

“Dusan, this sort of thing is tripe: “bring us a social networking system that works, that embeds in the Web, that lets us keep our groups organized and lets us tag our friend lists.”

Connectivity is not meaning.”

I’m very often vague, and very often change my opinions on things, I find a perverse thrill I guess in not being stuck in one world view and never varying from it. So maybe I’m less than clear with what I mean by stuff, so I thought I’d throw out today’s thinking on things (right to change my mind later):

- By social networks and embedding on the Web, I don’t mean that SL should be embedded in Facebook or mySpace or wherever. What I mean is I’d like to see some Web-based tools. I said give us social networking tools that work, and embed them in the Web. I didn’t say embed them in Facebook. I don’t LIKE Facebook, I don’t belong to Plurk, I don’t Twitter, I don’t HAVE any friends. BUT, I would like to be able to communicate with people more easily, and I would like to be able to do that in other ways than endless notecards written and saved and then copied and dragged over while trying to scan my fairly scant friends list to highlight the right people to send the notecard to. Let’s say I’m organizing an event, or trying to take care of customers…I’d like to be able to e-mail them from Outlook maybe, or G-mail or wherever - a social/contact tool that’s Web based and is easy and lets me take care of customers and keep in touch with people and save these communications other than sorting notecards.

- Tagging friends - why is this so awful? I have some people on my list that like to know about events, others who are customers, and others who like to go dancing. Why is it some sort of geek-infested idea to say that I’d like to be able to sort my contact list? I’d like to be able to look at the friends list and quickly filter customers, send out a notice, whatever, and I shouldn’t have to pay Hippo or whatever to do that.

These things may be tripe? I don’t know. They seem simple to me. I would like it to be easier to talk to people, keep in touch, send out a group e-mail to say “gonna be late for the event” or whatever it is.

As for interop - well, that’s another post. What I know is there are really very few worlds right now. And maybe there will always be very few worlds. Second Life is a world, and I don’t really want to be running around Warcraft with my avatar, or Lively for that matter. I’d like some simple stuff if it turns out to be true that say, some companies want to privately host their servers for security reasons, and some schools want to hold classes on THEIR own servers that have been tweaked or had additional code built for whatever reason, and then the community in SL is still ticking along - I just think it would be nice if I didn’t have to log out, sign up, sign in, log out, whatever. I don’t need my inventory to go with me, and I could even live with my avatar looking different. But if I could TP without too much friction from the Grid to other 3D environments, great.

However, I’m not entirely convinced that this wish is worth it. Because in having that wish, it opens up all kinds of other issues. I’m not convinced it SHOULD be easy to move from grid to grid like we surf the Web. Having said that, the idea of interoperability seems to have merit so long as it doesn’t dilute the individual worlds, but instead makes the management of our identities and movement easier and give ME control rather than the registration whims of a collision of different log-ins and approaches.

Which brings me to walled gardens I guess. Which I confuse with magic circles. And that, plus wanting to know why I’m geeky might be posts for another day.

M Linden has capped his first two months at Linden Lab with a stunning overview of his thoughts, observations, a bit of rah rah, and a lot of stats and support for his view that perception and reality are perhaps at odds.

By perception, I suppose he means the resident community of Second Life, which after months, er, years of being burned - bank closures, age verification, grid instability, concurrency limits, and poor communication. The media, on the other hand, which abandoned SL after the failure of the ‘big brands’ to make a go of opening poorly designed stores with poorly designed clothes, have been piling on again, so while the spin has been positive for Second Life in the wider media universe, this has fallen of deaf ears in the SL community who has been long frustrated and needs more than a few lag-free nights to revive the faith.

But all signs are that at least M is paying attention.

I recently argued that Google’s Lively was a play on trying to monetize social media, something that the Facebooks and youTubes and mySpace crowd has had a hard time doing, serving up banners that people ignore and trying to embed themselves in conversations where they don’t belong. M has a similar take on the inability of social media to ‘monetize’ itself, and points out that, well, Second Life actually makes money, and that can’t be a bad thing:

“Second Life is the only social media/social computing property where, at its core, user-generated content and the economy is the experience. As a result, our estimates place our monetization levels at 3-30x that of major media and social computing properties.”
Read more…

When lag has got you down, when your hair just won’t attach, when no matter how hard you try the prims won’t align, or when some random blogger bugs you with enticing titles and no follow-through, then fire up your shadow boxing screen, call up a friend, and whack away.

For all the talk of small worlds and Flash-based clients, there’s something deeply appealing about something with low-rez but that really lets you get your back into it. Part of the games for health movement, researchers have built a remote system that lets you shadow box with a friend.

What I particularly like about it, as quoted on the site:

“The game encourages extreme physical exertion and, unlike the Nintendo Wii and other console games, it recognizes and registers

intense brute force.”

Small worlds or brute force.

I know which side I come down on, as spiritual and peaceful as I can sometimes be.

Ariella Furman is a young filmmaker who works exclusively in Second Life. Earning upwards of $2,000 US dollars per month, her story was recently featured on the TechNewsWorld Web site.

It is nice to see positive coverage of the use of machinima in Second Life. The article describes in detail how Furman, a recent college graduate, goes about creating a film in SL - in this case, her client is IBM - using a virtual producer and how she directs the avatars.  She has worked for Electric Sheep and Popcha working for IBM, Nestle, and other clients.

Furman’s final cut can be played in SL, but just as significant is its playability in a Web page or in the real world. IBM recently played her video at a conference in Florida. The article describes Furman at work with actors in these virtual settings, a far cry from typical film shoots.

Furman describes what she does in this short video:

Charles Wankel and Shaun Malleck have put out a call for scholarly articles for a book they are editing on the topic of ethics in virtual worlds.

The topics they are interested in include: privacy, identity, values and ethics in design, standards of integrity, and ethics and values within online social groups. More information and a longer description of the topic areas can be found at the Internet: Marketing and Messages blog.

Proposals are due August 15, 2008.

Over on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, attorney and author Benjamin Duranske writes a quick summation and opinion piece on how the 3D Internet - virtual worlds (VWs) and 3D models - is quickly taking hold in day-to-day life, and will soon change the nature of human communications.

Duranske opens his piece describing the recent “Ponzi scheme” that occurred in Second Life, which was followed by Linden Lab’s banking ban, and how, despite the fact that people lost real money, there was no legal recourse for those who had been scammed.

This is a small tipping point for Duranske, as he then outlines how virtual worlds are seeping into mainstream consciousness, reviewing all of the big players who’ve gotten their feet wet in VWs. He cites the fact that, despite a slumping economy, $345 million was poured into VW startups in the first half of 2008 alone. Gartner Research predicts that 80% of all Internet users will have a virtual presence by 2011. Bandwidth speeds are increasing, DSL penetration is growing, and the allure of 3D models for advertisers and corporations is an easy fit, he writes.

Duranske’s facts lead, logically, to this conclusion:

If current trends hold, the Internet will evolve into a 3D space, and virtual worlds will become an integral part of human communication. Real life will never be the same.

Brian White takes us through the last two steps involved in getting your own standalone openSim server up and running in Windows Vista.

In step 4, he takes us through how to install the OpenSim on a harddrive and how to connect it to the MySQL databases, and how to recode the installation file so that you’ll be able to walk on any prim rather than just walking through them.

Step 5 directs us to open up the OpenSim for the first time and how to manage it as an administrator. Then you’re ready to go!

All of the steps can be found by starting with tutorial 1 here on White’s Virtual White blog.

Nice contribution to the OpenSim community - not quite Torley, but then again it doesn’t have that ghastly neon Web design either.

The brand agenda has siphoned talent from the metaverse to create the equivalent of commercial candy, throwing a sucker punch at the idea of virtual worlds without even knowing it’s doing it.

It’s OK, corporate collaboration and education can fill the gap, right? It’s the teachers who advance society not Coke, although it’s not for lack of trying - yesterday’s vending machine in the cafeteria is today’s Coke ad in Habbo Hotel or wherever, someday we’ll insist it’s packed with fruit drinks instead of sugared water, although by then our kid’s hands will be so chubby they can barely wrap their fists around a quarter.

OK. So. I’m irritated. But give me a break. I’m flooded with invitations and blinking banners, I’m enticed to “create my own avatar” and then discover that what they really mean is add hair to the little cartoon guy that I can call me. I’m told that a virtual winter is upon us, and what we gotta do is warm our hands over the crackling flames of small worlds:

“As we can see from the history of computing, it is often the case of “the small gobbling up the big, and everything else”. Trivially small, lightweight yet rapidly replicating platforms often grow up to become all-encompassing solutions. DOS grew up to become Windows and along the way the PC triumphed over the time-shared mainframe, minicomputer and workstation. ”

Sure, DOS was great, we all loved that blinking prompt thing. Windows was even better! Just look at Vista - or is that the big now that will get gobbled up by the small, by iPhone apps and widgets all of it living in the cloud, or running on that Google Gears thing, whatever that is, and all of it slickly linked together by semantic Webs.

Actually, I think it’s the word “trivially small” that’s the telling phrase.

Someone has been drinking some seriously spiked Kool-Aid out there somewhere. I mean, is this what we mean by a, um, meme? “The Future Was Here All Along - It Was Just SMALLER Than It Looked!”

Read more…

MIT has launched a seriously cool little application that converts all that gobbly gook code stuff that people spend so much time on (unlike prims, say, which serve a nobler purpose) and make it accessible to, well, to me anyways.

Scratch 4 Second Life allows you to construct programs using graphical boxes to “snap” coding blocks together.

Worth a try. If nothing else, it might help prep you for some serious openSim work - kind of like an object-oriented coding lesson of sorts. And for those of us used to prims, the idea of moving little boxes around is more intuitive than finding that pipe character on the keyboard.

I just had to point out a workshop in Second Life advertised under the provocative headline:

Fourth Annual Geoethical Nanotechnology Workshop to Explore: What Geoethical Management, If Any, is Appropriate for the Nanotechnology Necessary for Cryonic Revival and/or Downloaded Cyberconsciousness?

Actually - um, cyronic - isn’t that like freezing yourself? I suppose if the Singularity doesn’t arrive on schedule it might start looking like an option, but I’m continuing to hold out hope that while my mind might be numb that I don’t need to pack it in ice for the coming millenia.

Maybe I’ll head over for this discussion of cyronic revival and the “atom-by-atom assembly techniques that are subject to a consensual review, approval and audit process”.

Can’t help wondering, after all, how you consent, and who does the audit. The event is put on by the Terrasem Movement which “is a 501c3 not-for-profit charity endowed for the purpose of educating the public on the practicality and necessity of greatly extending human life, consistent with diversity and unity, via geoethical nanotechnology and personal cyberconsciousness; concentrating in particular on facilitating revivals from biostasis. Terasem focuses on preserving, evoking, reviving and downloading human consciousness.”

OK - the downloading human consciousness thing I get. After all, Philip thinks we’ll be able to do that in SL any time soon, according to comments he made to Hamlet Au.

Sign me up!