I’m no good at predictions. A while ago I predicted that this new game I found, Second Life, would be an interesting diversion for a few weeks, or at least until I leveled up, and either I haven’t figured out where to find what level I’m at or its been an awfully long couple of weeks.
So, I’ll leave it to others to predict.
The State of the Virtual World
Prokofy is predicting that Philip will write a book, and he may be right, although it would probably only be released for reading on a Kindle or something similarly cool. On the other hand Philip thinks electricity is cool, so maybe what’s old and classic is new and uber-trendy among the sushi eating beach boys of Silicon Valley, it’s so hard to keep up. Maybe paper’s in again.
Philip gets bookish. Via Vint.
Prok also weighs in on tier rates and concurrency and some other stuff, and I’ll take his word for it, I never would have predicted that the Lindens would back-track on something, or suddenly change their pricing, which places me in the “what are you daft” camp I suppose.
RightAsRain is predicting. Well, he’s not really predicting anything. His disgust, I suppose. What a sham the Lab is. I love RaR. I love all that stuff they did over there on the Rezzable sims, and the Greenies, and the Carnival of Doom. But from what I figure, they weren’t making any money, because they started charging admission. Their business model, I guess, had something to do with the number of new users continuing to grow at the pace it did a year or so ago…a kind of massive network effect (or Ponzi scheme, depending how you look at it). But if that was the model, then it sort of made the Rezzable sims a tourist destination – I mean, I’ve been to Paris, it’s lovely, but I return for the food and the people and the culture, not to see the Eiffel Tower a second time.
Greenies go OpenSim via Vint
I guess I never quite understood what was going on. I remember visiting the Surfline sims and thinking “yeah, I’d buy a place here” and then being completely stymied when I couldn’t find a house to rent or land to buy. There was barely even anything to BUY. And I was willing. I LIKE buying stuff, even if it’s stuff I don’t NEED. I buy it because it actually only costs a few cents, and maybe it’s cool, but mostly I buy it because I love the way someone built their store or branded it or the way they thought through a particular style or space.
I mean, I bought what I COULD, but Black Swan didn’t even have a gift shop, and I must have visited it 10 times, but why would I visit again when they started charging admission? Used to be I brought newbies there, to amaze them with what was POSSIBLE.
I look around and see places like Loco Pocos, or Midian City, or Golgothica, or even that incredibly irritating vampire game and I see people who look like they have workable business models, selling stuff, and making money at it. Maybe I’m missing something?
It’s OK. RaR is predicting OpenSim is the place to be. Make it so I don’t have to fill out another registration and remember another password (and please don’t go on about OpenID) and I’m game. (The name verification thing is a cool idea, by the way).
The Bigger, Better, Cleaner World
“The Throng” per Ugotrade
Tish at Ugotrade is predicting that the great minds of the world will band together under the banner of a nobler cause, specifically “sustainable living” and I suppose with Obama sloshing money around for energy efficiency, eco-friendly, green world projects and independence from foreigners and whatnot it’s probably a good crowd to be hanging around with. Nothing like a good eco-colonic to get over the past eight years I suppose, and lots of consulting gigs to boot.
The Wikipedia/O’Reilly set and their followers either don’t have jobs or can’t find anything to invest in that someone can’t start up in their basement without VC money. They need something to do, so it’s off to save the world, and eliminate our carbon emissions. Which reminds me: I should probably turn my computer off now and then, it’s poking a hole in the ozone layer, it’s just that I hate having to boot up in the morning, the Twitter stream waits for no Windows, after all. (Yeah, yeah – I have a Mac at work, so don’t bug me about it).
OK, I’m a bit snarky. This sudden energy around, um, energy reminds me of a teacher I had in grade 11. He was ex-hippy, wore sandals, smiled serenely, seemed to enjoy his job, knew all the cool songs, understood my angst, encouraged me to write – and I hated him. I mean, who did he think he was? He was a TEACHER. Teachers aren’t ALLOWED to be cool.
In any case, I wish I could say I was entirely buying the virtual world angle to all of this eco-talk. I mean, sure, save costs on meetings – it’s a down economy after all, who needs to fly the staff around for off-sites and retreats and trade shows, meet virtually instead. You can even salve your conscience a bit about driving around in a Ford instead of a little electric scooter, but I’m not seeing the part where virtual worlds save the ozone layer. As a social space for meeting other cool, intelligent people, sure. As a more impressive conference call, definitely. The rest of it I’m waiting on.
So What’s the Big Idea?
I do think that 2009 will be a remarkable year.
Write that down. You can hold me to it a year from now.
Other than that, I can’t predict. A Google virtual world was about as much as I could anticipate over the last 12 months, and look where that got us….although recently there have been avatars wandering around Google Earth but they look more like Macy’s Day floats than anything else, but it’s still something to keep an eye on.
Image: Future Lab
I was reading about product design and business strategy and they proposed that you should always plan design to last for 15-20 years. And they argued that it actually isn’t that difficult to do, because most technology that will be prevalent 15 years from now is already here today. So with that in mind, it’s safe to say that we’re probably already living in our tomorrow, which will look different from today only because more people will have the really cool toys.
So I don’t know. Maybe that means more of the same. Although really, if the past is any indication it won’t be the gadgets or the latest Web apps that count, it will be the people we meet along the way, whether curmudgeons or naifs, grinning like M as he wanders blithely towards his rez date at the Lab, still smitten, or still a noob, or more devilish than we’d like, depending how you look at it, but still logging on.
I think it’s funny how noone comments here when I am allowed
and how – even though they would – noone is allowed to post on the official SL blog. I also wonder how many views I get this way, much more I would get with an own blog tee-hee.
2k8 looking back was not a financially bad year for us in SL. All our logging mechanisms measured a steady rate of visitors/customers with an expected Halloween and Christmas spike.
However what counts much more is SL itself. (I don’t really like the term virtual world industry, because up until now all other contenders (let’s say it: wannabees) lack real innovation.)
—
SL has changed a lot. It is mainly due to ‘the Lab’ functioning no more like a lab, much more like a ’service provider’. (I hate this expression by the way.)
They are desperately trying to get a grip on ’something’, trying to act as an environment for education, virtual meetings, a game platform, a place for ultimate creativity and many more.
These directions might be good or bad, but it is out of scope for now to analyze these existing possibilites, I would rather ask a question or two from ‘the Lab’ itself (and I hope that ’spiritually’ it is still led by Philip Rosedale – who, according to Wikipedia, is an American _Businessman_, but I have better feelings thinking of him as an inventor).
** Why does SL exist? What is the purpose of SL? **
edit: I cut like 3 paragraphs that were hard to read, let’s just summarize them and let’s try to behave like we are still a Lab but also want to get some cash at the counter.
– Answer it with quick questions and answers –
* What would the world lose with SL going offline at this moment – Nothing.
* Can we do anything to change this and if we can, how? – Yes and see below.
Below
* How can we change this? Do we have a direction (a tactic… a strategy.. a vision…) or just a lot of officers (executive this, executive that, manager of this and manager of that) without private soldiers?
- We must have clear directions. With ugly buzzwords. We have thin pencil lines now. How can we convert them to nice inklines? Provide the functionality. Broaden the userbase. Outsource it to great minds like Anonymus Not. (Oops, that last comment was not intentional and must came from a frustrated ego, _strikethrough_ that. I hate outsourcing too. Ansd consultants too. The idea of them. The ideology behind them. I hate the self-proclaimed ’solution providers’ too. Gaaa.)
Buzzwords: Create, Meet, Learn (Educate!!) and Play, _COMMUNICATE_ (with the residents), PROTECT CONTENT. Strikethrough the rest of the buzzwords. (Keep it simple.)
Now what is really needed, to use a nice strong ink for these. Did we use it in 2k8? No, we didn’t. Umm. THAT is not good.
So… what? Erm… people did that instead of us! No they didn’t. They are stupid. People are just a stupid bunch of pixels until you zoom on them. They come in and they leave. Because there is NO CONTENT. REZZABLE sims are NOT CONTENT. AM RADIO sims are NOT CONTENT. TEMPLUM EX SUMTHIN are NOT CONTENT. These are sims for photoshopping freaking snapshots (and how bad people are in that… it’s like everybody ‘knows’ photoshop, no they don’t), but we need sims where you can actually DO SOMETHING….
Well then.. .for 2k9…
2009
//hire a group of people to start to create a new architecture
* CREATE Provide a place for creativity – organize building contests and BE the jury, don’t hire residents for it. Residents are the plebs. Ask AM Radio if he has ever heard of ambient occlusion, caustics or global illumination, no he hasn’t. These people, the residents are average Joes, most of them create in SL, because they are not good enough to create elsewhere where there _is_ actual competition.
* EDUCATE Educate people. ARC was one of the best thing to introduce. Let sim owners have a clear statistics page for their sim, where they can see HOW inefficient they built or how those so-called solution providers built a bad, bad sim for him. COLOR-CODE sims based on these stats on the map. So everyone would see, NO, DON’T ENTER TEMPLUM EX SUMTHIN or TEMPURA, because they wil KILL your PC.
//build your own linux distro that starts with SL and every application is accessible from it
* LEARN Provide learning sims and contact educators who are _professional_ in their field. No, these are not residents, save for a few. Lure them into SL. It is equally important to educate your content creators. You must have BOTH a clear webpage AND an inworld site for EVERY level of creators. No, the Ivory tower of Prim is out of date. Where is the professional help for someone starting out with _real_ 3D modelling tools
* PLAY Provide the means for gaming. Make Official Linden races. I have tons and tons of ideas. My head is exploding, I think it has already exploded, but I reverted to a saved version.
* PROTECT At the same time, protect the content. Gaa! I know… it can be copied. Yes it can!! But who is the one who makes the copies? The bots! Do we want to save the bots? No. I love them, but… gaa… let’s make that damn captcha for the login screen! Let’s make a captcha for teleport!
Hah! You would say: people would turn away! Oh yes, but WHAT IF THE SIM OWNERS’ CAN SET options like they can set the allow only payment info used residents? Like x – Allow only people who used CAPTCHA for logon; x – Force people to use captcha upon teleporting into the sim; x – Allow only people who use the official SL client for logon.
Or what’s even better: let PEOPLE HAVE THEIR OWN MECHANISM BEFORE LETTING PEOPLE IN THEIR SIM. Like a simple question?
PLUS! Gaa, I’m shouting. So. *Takes a deep breath.* At least let sim owners have a statistic of their visitors WITH IP address and the ability to ban certain IP adresses or subnets.
I know you fear the losing of bots would cause a decrease in statistics. Yes. But in the long term it will be a HUGE benefit.
You say these are just slowing down attacks or making things harder for thieves? Yes, exactly. But now they cut thru IP rights like knife thru hot butter.
I’m stopping now before it’s too late.
Anyway, HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone, I love SL.
PS I never drink/consume (alcohol) nor any kind of meds. I should write everything into a 100 page pdf, but noone would read it.
I questioned the Rezzable thing back when Metanomics was fairly new. I got quite a bit of blow-back for suggesting that there was no discernible revenue streams in place.
Having started up several companies over the years with varying results, my failures have one thing in common: a lack of income streams — the whole “we will make it up in volume” mindset while giving away the store is too easy to fall into.
Goedeke – I don’t disagree. My own theory on this stuff is really vague, but it goes something like this: if you’re going to be in the content business, you need to develop a business model that engages users at increasingly complex levels. Start with objects, build a second tier of community, sell service packages, offer subscriptions, create communities of interest within the one community of interest.
Having said that, I do agree with RaR that the tools within SL are ineffective in many ways. Groups suck, metrics are hard to come by, estate tools are spotty, all the stuff he’s blogged about. So it’s not that I disagree that there are limits to the ability to extend the basic business model of, say, Greenies into community building, subscriptions, whatever. Although, having said THAT you then take a look at Immersive Workspaces and you see deep integration with Web-side services using existing tools so, well, I’m not sure – seems to me a lot IS possible.
I suppose I’m rather ungenerously taking RaR to task a bit here. Greenies and the Rezzable sims have been a great contribution to the Grid – the fact that they didn’t contribute to his plans for his business is probably a lot more complex than I’m making out and I suppose we can debate it all day.
But what sort of bugs me is that RaR has taken what should be a fun, community, product-oriented Web site (Rezzable.com) and turned it into a soap box for being cranky and slamming LL. That’s what personal blogs are for. It’s not that he doesn’t have a right to do it, but it sounds a little like an oil or car company Web site slamming government because they didn’t get enough tax breaks or whatever to encourage innovation.
Constructive criticism is great, constant crankiness on a corporate/product Web site is a business decision. I’ll gladly argue the constructive criticism, much of it valid, and like Anonymous-Not, leave my comments open if someone needs a place to vent.
And on that point – A-N, I think you actually have a fair number of valid points and ideas in all that. The one that strikes me the most is the idea of providing training, support and community for different content creator types. I’ve blogged about this before – I’d like to see LL operate more like a game platform – an X-Box say, whatever…with their primary tasks being to a) develop the underlying technologies b) educate its development community on those technologies through deep training and development and c) create proper marketing and promotion channels in which their content partners (meaning, well, everyone) can participate through well-articulated means.
OK…well….time to get ready to ring in the New Year. Hmmm. If someone wants to invite me somewhere I’m on my way.
I remember visiting the Surfline sims and thinking “yeah, I’d buy a place here” and then being completely stymied when I couldn’t find a house to rent or land to buy. There was barely even anything to BUY. And I was willing. I LIKE buying stuff, even if it’s stuff I don’t NEED.
Bingo. RaR hates land. He hates land as a commodity. He also actually loathes commerce. He’s one of the technocommunists with a neo-geo brand of business that he thinks will involve pulling a rabbit out of the open-source hat, but by using old-media methods of “few-to-many,” making high-end professional content like on the Rezzable sims, and then merely flushing the great unwashed public over them to gawk at the stuff, and then pushing ads at them, like ads for perfumes.
He actually has no respect for avatars as beings, for the virtual world as one they’d like to inhabit and buy things for, and doesn’t make them comfortable. He consistently, again and again, laughs, ridicules, abuses, and despises the notion of buying or renting land — and the people who engage in this business. It’s really an ideological frenzy, and it comes out of that latent collectivism that rapidly leads to the New Class, as you can see, as he pulls together a stable of expensive builders and designers, but doesn’t let them even put out a stall with their vendors, instead, he puts an admission price on their builds, and then puts out very carefully culled and feted stuff like Black Swan lingerie, not even making it easy to click and buy it. It is not for commerce. It is not for people. It is for RaR, the commissar, to control and soak for what ever he can get out of it.
I just find this model utterly loathsome and will go on exposing it. It’s like Disney, only without the niceness, and without the lunchboxes and sneakers you can buy in the store with the Disney logo. I remember the first time I went to Greenies I felt *mugged* — mugged by having to gawk and be discomforted by the big-ass build, mugged by having to endure the little in-jokes with old TV, mugged by the idea that I couldn’t right click and interact and become part of the scene, mugged by the idea that I couldn’t even buy anything without looking all over hell’s half-acre for it.
And this stuff isn’t incompetence or neglect — it’s conscious. It’s a conscious rejection of commerce as it has always been practiced freely among people. His constant ragging on LL and their alleged failure to keep pumping newbies to flush over his sims to gawk at them and become passive eyeballs for his push-perfume-ads is just contemptible. They’ve given him every benefit with mention on their slgrid.net page and multiple featuring on their Showcase. Good lord, you should be able to coin money on the rentals and sales of stuff if you just put it out and stop being so frigging arrogant and insolent about commerce and *people*.
I’m curious about what goes through the minds of you and Vint and other Creative Commons nutters who flog CC all the time and yet don’t practice what you preach.
I saw that same photo on Vint Falken’s site, and wanted to use it, so I clicked to see where it went — it’s not her photo, but merely Via Vint as you point out. That click led me to some other guy’s Flickr page…at the end of the chain was a professional photographer who had been at Burning Life who had a business page with these photos. Nothing on the photos or his site said they were available under CC to just grab and post with a link to him. I figured Vint and the other guy were just friends with him or figured they were all Burners together and it would be fine. So often CC works that way! I figured if *I* posted it with a link to his page, I might get a nasty note — and I also couldn’t immediately find out how to write to ask his permission…so I didn’t use his photo.
SUCH a typical example of the CC shill, and I just wonder how your all’s thinking processes go with this.