I’m not much for making predictions and in making them I’m not really PREDICTING anything, just adding meat to the bones of what’s already known – predicting that the MediaAPI will launch in 2010 seems like a bit of a no-brainer, predicting that it WON’T be launched on the other hand would be a sign that I’m feeling snarky about the Lab’s ability to deliver, and the reality is it’s already available in Snowglobe so why quibble.
Gwyn has a list of predictions and it’s pretty much what I’d put down, if I was given to these things, so go over and have a read, although I’d make a few amendments:
Second Life 2.0: Yes, the new viewer will be launched. (One of those no-brainers). But I’m not sure what Gwyn means by ’slight interface changes’ – hasn’t she seen the screen shots? Or actually used it? Surely she’s on the super secret test team or whatever. But no one will call it a slight change, I don’t think, in fact I expect people to be screaming to high heaven about it and rallying around Emerald for a while (which is why, by the way, the Lab may seem so eager to, um, accommodate the Emerald folks – have a “builder viewer” you can turn to when everyone bitches about the new one).
Gwyn does have a point however in its roll-out with html-on-a-prim, but I disagree on the date. I’m guessing we’ll see a “Second Life 2.0″ launch in February or March – maybe not a full roll-out but pretty close, and it will include: the new viewer, html-on-a-prim and the MediaAPI, linked somehow to bring Second Life Home out of beta (free in-world browsers for all Home owners or premiums with TREET.TV streams playing in everyone’s living rooms?), another enhancement to premiums, and the first announcement of how mesh will be handled.
XStreet will be Rebranded: Yes, probably, although not necessarily in name, but as part of the ongoing ‘channel management’ they seem to be doing what with Work portals and landing hubs, a coming Education entry path, all those community partners, and the SLE Marketplace.
Interoperability will Become a Reality: Um, no, don’t think so.
OpenSim Stuff: I have no idea. Why would VastPark bother?
New Avatars in SL: Pleeeeeeeze. Something with facial expressions. Look at Aion – if you want to see incredible avatar creation it’s a dream.
Facebook-y Dashboards: Another easy one. Yes.
European Grids: I frankly can’t see them compartmentalizing the Grid based on RL geography. Kind of counter-intuitive for a virtual world.
My Grab Bag of Items for 2010
OK, now, having said I don’t like making predictions, I’ll add my own grab bag of things. These aren’t predictions so much as things that occur to me every now and then, kind of “I wonder if…” thoughts which, if they come true, will make me look really smart but which are really nothing more than vague guesses:
- In conjunction with the launch of Second Life 2.0, the MediaAPI, etc. will be the launch of the “Develop” portal and associated ‘channel management’. You’ve all seen that “Develop” button on the home page right? Well, it’s there to do more than just link to the old Grid site. The Lab recognizes that if it can’t attract top-level content, it will never scale to the million concurrent users of which M and gang dream. There’s nothing wrong with the in-world content developers (they’ll say) when in reality they figure that what they need are the agencies, indie game shops and Farmville types to take another look at SL.
- So, the ‘Develop’ channel will include outreach to game developers, social networking studios, enterprise software companies and anyone else who they can rope into bringing fresh blood to the larger challenge of creating ’scalable/viral’ experiences in SL. Which will mean, inevitably, that they’re out pitching the big brands and agencies again – it’s the world M comes from after all, and I’m sure he’s kicking himself that the Smithsonian isn’t in SL instead of Blue Mars. Look for major media-type deals as the Lab tries to grab some of the share of development time from folks making Facebook widgets, pitching SL as ‘ready for prime time’ now that it’s more stable, mesh imports are available and….
- ….and there’s a new class of servers. This is something that’s already quietly used on the Grid for special events and we’ll see a new class of servers that support significantly higher numbers of avatars and don’t share bandwidth with other islands. It will hardly tip SL into the 5,000 avatars/sim category, but expect to see a whole new ‘professional class’ of sims sometime soon. But….
- One of the biggest constraints will be LSL. Expect a move this year to see a second option for scripting in Second Life, possibly based on Lua or, um C++ or something (ignore this prediction, I have no idea what scripting language would make the most sense). This shift won’t kill LSL but will be a sort of new API that links SL to ’standard’ programming and will also, incidentally, allow more robust media/Web/social media plug-ins.
- Linden Lab will hold its own developer conference while making nice noises about how the Second Life Community Convention isn’t being ignored. It will focus on developers, education, entertainment and enterprise and they’ll make a concerted effort to attract talent and attendees from outside SL itself. Picture a Microsoft Sharepoint VP pitching SL/Sharepoint integration, or Michael Eisner talking about on-line stories, and you’ve got the idea.
- Second Life Enterprise will only take off as the Lab strikes deals with outside consultancies. While the Gold Service Provider program started by ‘accrediting’ in-world agencies, their major focus in 2010 will be to sign deals with large service providers in specific verticals. This will lead to a shake-up on the current GSP list as we start to see them working with larger external entities: picture a global training company striking a deal with the Lab which hooks them up with a GSP, the GSP essentially merges into the training company, and the Lab continues to skim off the top through the Marketplace and license fees for SLE.
- The Lab will, finally, do something about music. It won’t work particularly well but headed into 2011 maybe they’ll get it right.
- Their focus on getting SL into social media will continue. Look for some kind of Facebook widget that, um, live streams video of your Second Life Home living room or something. Your guess is as good as mine, and I’m a bit anxious about them paying any attention on this stuff at all, quite frankly. (Stick to advertising, leave the widgets to Metaplace 2).
- They will publish a road map. Except that it won’t really be one. It will be like it’s always been: a series of blog posts that give a vague sense of where things are headed and which leave the blogs to fill in the gaps, thus continuing to allow the Lab to get out its message and test the waters through its dedicated team of flaks (like myself LOL) while being able to disclaim any responsibility and say “where did you get THAT idea from?” without giving you any ideas of their own.
OK, so, for someone who doesn’t make predictions, I guess that’s a start.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
And to all of you, and I mean this with all my heart: may you have a happy and prosperous 2010.
I think the first language is likely to be C#. That may be what you meant?
Yeah C# is likely for a new scripting language. An obvious addition ontop of the Mono engine implementation I’d say.
As for the rest, I agree with the predictions for the most part.
I believe this upcoming year will be a big one for API exposure as well…I really don’t think Linden Labs can afford going another year offering up the bare minimum in APIs.
I’d like to hope that the Second Life site redo was a glimpse, and test bed of the type of exposure of in-world data the Lindens are working on. So that developers, be it Facebook or iPhone can build better apps.
Given the API already exposed that allows diving into the Amazon based map exposure, there’s huge opportunity to be had.
Ashur – can you explain the map exposure thing? How does that work, how can it be used, and what are the implications?
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Map_API
If you scroll down that page a bit to the Amazon S3 mentioning, and accessing maps directly, you’ll see some information about how to assemble URLs to get the exact single map view that you want, rather than wading through the old javascript provided implementation taking up most of that page.
Any implications tied to its use this way or another way, I’m not sure. I thought about using it in a Flash or Silverlight app before…but there’s nothing to do with it really ‘cept load maps. Thus more API exposure would be great…like locational data of agents so that an app can be created that tracks them from the browser. Maybe a query of an agent’s profile for picks exposed to the web, classifieds a person has placed and locations its tied to..etc.
Lots of data in Second Life for it to just remain closed to the grid alone.
Thanks Ashur – I’ve been wondering about using SL for overlays of geo-specific data on a small scale, tied to data visualization somehow. I’ll need to spend some time giving an example, but there’s a lot of power in the MediaAPI, HTML-IN etc. and I’m starting to wonder whether there isn’t a sort of tagging that can cross-over from SL to the Web to real locations.
Maybe not geo-specific, it was your map reference that got me thinking about it.
MIT did some work like this – mirrored a real world location in SL, and the objects in the real world had sensors, fed that info to SL, and SL fed info back to the real world.
I’ve often thought that the ultimate concert, for example, would include a real world concert hall with a replica in a virtual world and audience/performance sensors feeding things back to each other reflected in lights, information spaces, augmented reality, etc.
OK…now I’m going off on tangent lol. But there’s something in there somewhere.
LSL looks the way it does because of the interaction model, essentially, the API of the events-based model that SL uses (which is why LSL looks so much like other languages based on similar models).
If you change languages, you’ll have to modify or extend the language to fit the events model – essentially finding ways to make C# or whatever look (or function) more like LSL, which itself might actually be *more* cumbersome and confusing.
I’ve got what I guess I’d call specific “predictions” perhaps… but it’s the sort of thing I act upon, rather than talk about.
But you can still gauge the overall accuracy.
If I’m doing visibly better on 1 Jan 2011 than I’m doing today, I was largely right. If not, I was largely wrong
Happy New Year, all!
[...] Kind of counter-intuitive for a virtual world. My Grab Bag of Items for 2010. OK, now, having said I… [...]
First of all, happy new year, happy new decade!
No, I haven’t previewed SL 2.0, so I really have no clue what it in it. The few images and snapshots that I got from Tateru’s sites and a short, low-quality video I managed to see somewhere never conveyed to me the full range of possibilities that the “new viewer” has. I was just extrapolating from LL’s usual sluggish pace of development and not expecting huge miracles.
I wonder why you don’t think that interoperability won’t be a possibility. After all, IBM is already sponsoring co-location facility operators specifically for OpenSim hosting. They have a vast investment in that area, and so does Intel (Sun, since being bought by Oracle, might probably lessen their own efforts on virtual worlds for a while, until Oracle decides what will be worth exploring
). So it won’t be even the 50,000 or so OpenSim users pushing for interop … but the handful of corporate software/hardware giants eager to get into LL’s land market. I think they can be very… persuasive, specially because they’re actually contributing some of the vital code that will allow interop!
Vastpark is already working on OpenSim integration for nine months.
The idea of an European grid is not really to create a grid for European users and “compartimentalise” it more; it’s to give more options in terms of freedom and privacy! As laws change across borders, and no country is “perfect”, having multiple choices would allow different ToS and allow people to gravitate to whatever grid would offer a set of rules more aligned with their own needs and wishes. Thus, a grid on Tennessee would appeal to the puritans who want a PG virtual world; while one on Amsterdam would be great for adult content and gambling; and one on the Cayman Islands would allow banking
(I’m taking extreme examples, of course, just to make a point: more grids hosted on different countries allow for a more diversity of content for different styles of users — not higher “compartimentalisation”).
As for your own predictions, I think I pretty much agree with all of them. I like the idea of the “Developers”, and I really, really hope that your prediction of the Big Huge Media Agencies stepping into the VW market truly becomes a reality! My company has been contacted in 2007/8 by almost all of them, we went together to customers to try to sell solutions, but none managed to get a client. The total amount of Big Huge Media Agencies contacting us in 2009 was, thus… zero. Let’s hope your prediction comes right and 2010 completely changes that!!
A new class of “Enterprise Server” that allows 400 avatars would be… interesting, to say the least. Technologically I don’t know how that might be implemented on the SL Grid, since the largest problem will be client-side, and, to the best of my knowledge, a LL sim can only use a single CPU. So, of course, faster CPUs will bring a slight increase in performance but… unless LL rewrites their code to allow a single region simulator to be multi-threaded among several CPUs, I don’t see how a super-server would help much. CPU speed has not increased much since, well, 2007 — all hardware suppliers are focusing on multi-core architecture instead (and faster graphics cards!). But who knows what the ‘Lab is brewing in their research department… maybe they are creating a multi-threaded simulator software that actually can spread the load of a single sim among several CPUs. With the new 16-core-servers to be introduced this year, this could definitely mean 1,600 avatars in a single region, with 240,000 prims to play with, for US$4720/month — expensive, but a bliss for people wishing to give huge concerts or conferences. So, yes, if that’s on the roadmap for 2010, I think it would be amazing…
Speaking of roadmaps, I love the way you put LL’s thinking into words hehe.
Gosh, I don’t know what to say, I have this strange feeling that you’re soooo right about that, and that no matter what we say or write, LL will not change the way they communicate with us… one thing, as a developer, always worries me, which is planning. Of course all business is about risk. Of course all business has to quickly adapt to changes. If someone is not willing to risk or to adapt to changes, they shouldn’t be in the business. But often it feels unfair, if LL knows perfectly in advance what they’re going to do and when (yes, some of their projects actually have plans, milestones, and delivery dates!), that they don’t release that information publicly. It’s more productive to adapt to changing circumstances you know very well in advance than to quickly try to adapt on the moment they’re announced. Let’s see two typical examples, good and bad. Good: the SL Work Marketplace was announced 3-4 months in advance of implementation. We can discuss if 3-4 months is enough for developers to plan ahead their product lines to keep in sync with the ‘Lab or not, but that’s a different discussion: the point is, yes, we can plan, and yes, we have an idea of what’s going to happen. When things get actually deployed, we cannot whimper and cry that we didn’t know!… the responsibility is all ours. Let’s see a “bad” example: meshes and clickable-Flash-on-a-prim. We know these are in development. In June LL had an internal prototype demonstrating both working quite well. We have absolutely no clue when this is going to be deployed. We don’t know the format these meshes will be, and what their limits are. We don’t know what tools will be required to work with them. We don’t know, for clickable-Flash-on-a-prim, what special libraries/features will be required. Both will have a huge impact on the way content — buildings and programming — will be created in SL from now on. But we don’t know when that will happen, we only know it will be “soon”… but that’s not enough, because we cannot prepare for that. Let’s take a typical, stupid example: let’s assume that I have a team of five 3ds Max developers, who have been happily producing sculpties for the past year. LL launches their in-world-mesh thingy, but, due to completely unexpected implementation issues, they will only work with Maya meshes. This means that I would have to pay for the costs of 5 new Maya licenses and a retraining course for five developers, which would take, say, 6 months, until they are proficient enough to use Maya as well as they use 3ds Max today. If LL would have said in June that their viewer only supports Maya meshes, and that these would be officially launched in March 2010, and they had provided us with a prototype, I could have taken one of two routes: reconvert the developers to Maya and hope that they would be ready in 9 months, or develop a 3ds Max plugin in 9 months that would tweak a mesh so that it’s properly compatible. I would still have to spend the money, of course, but at least I’d be ready for the change when it comes.
That’s really why it is so important that any disrupting technology is not only planned in advance, but also announced in advance, so that developers can adapt to it and remain competitive in the market. Because we all know that the day both these technologies are introduced, nobody will ever buy a prim-based HUD or a prim-based skirt any longer
It is likely that LL will tap into Mono as a second option for software development. Note: software development, not scripting. LSL is a scripting language, C# and all the languages integrated into .NET (Mono is a porting of .NET) are pure object-oriented languages, not scripting languages.
The advantage of relying on Mono is that development will be available to most of the programming languages integrated into .NET. However, this means that LL needs to release an API to hook Mono to its system. Very doable with the Mono/.NET set because of its flexibility as an open development platform. It would be a very powerful combination.
Gwen, while I agree 100% on what you say about roadmaps, for the sake of conversation I’d like to add that there are rumors that LL is looking at COLLADA as the file format to be used in SL. Which would be the smartest choice, since collada is supported by a wide number of 3D software applications. Check this comment here: http://bit.ly/882ikU
nice list – sl will continue to try to increase n00b base as growth seems very flat for the last 5 months
i am not sure how ignoring people in my size demo plays into this – nut i have felt no support at all for people in my space ($3000/month subscription) but also realize my subscription is tiny (albeit, that’s half a month of pay for a Linden – so???)
looked at Linden home thing, wow on 82 prim Japanese houses on a 117 prim lot – Linden needs to use megas or something . . . and wondering what, if any, effect this will have on SL as a whole
would be nice to see C# like in OpenSim
I’m going to gently disagree with some predictions.
1) Nearly 11 months ago, Runitai released a picture on Flikr of a plastic duck in an SL~like environment. It was named duck.dae. Knowing that, we knew what programs could make SL mesh, and how to make it with at least 11 month’s lead time (so far). Yes, some of us are *quite* prepared for the arrival of SL mesh.
It’s elementary, Ms Llewellyn.
2) Opensim is Second Life’s practical, hardworking sister with the good personality. Good stuff? Oh yes. Wanting her dear sister’s attributes and attention? Oooh yes! Sexy in her own right, drawing onlookers that her sister didn’t attract first? Not so much.
Expect opensim to remain firmly within Second Life’s shadow, for years if not permanently.
3) Anonymity won’t be overtaken. Why? Because Anonymity is Privacy 2.0. It’s mostly just all of us verified types we simply don’t want to be bothered. Thus more akin to closing the bedroom door, than being paranoid or escapist.
4) I obviously don’t think that Blue Mars is going away in 2011. It’s a compact company with a clear business model, the right executive team and proven venture capitalists behind it.
Its market niche is terribly underserved by weak competition with 90’s tech, and that same market niche is badly handled by SL. Of all the things I kept tabs on, Blue Mars was the easiest call of 2009.
1) @Desmond, I’m sure you have time to search for all Flickr pictures in the world out there, but that’s certainly not my case
Also, just because that “duck.dae” was a COLLADA file, that doesn’t say much. It’s like claiming that animations use the BVH format and thus *all* BVH files will flawlessly work with SL, which is not the case — not by far! You can use the same argument for sound files, too. So knowing what LL is actually using without the possibility to test it is of little interest, except in the academical sense, or perhaps to send out a press release or two… or make snarky comments.
2) It’s possible, but not exactly because of the technology: but because OpenSim-based grids simply fail to attract residents to a virtual world lacking content, events, an economy, etc. at the scale of SL Grid. That’s not surprising, of course. You can’t hardly expect that the 50,000 or so regular (?) OpenSim users are able to create 3 billion items and generate half a billion US$ in user-to-user transactions from scratch. It takes years… at least. So, yes, in that regard — community, content, economy — OpenSim will always lag behind.
The only way for OpenSim not to lag behind is to allow interop
But that’s no surprise…
3) I sincerely hope you’re right on that!
4) I would also hope (for your own sake!) that you’re right on that. After all, Multiverse has a similar business model to Blue Mars (although it’s harder to develop there) and they aren’t gone yet, they are just… irrelevant.
Oh, there are a few flavours of collada file. But that’s rather irrelevant. You can generally output to whatever flavour you need. It’s as easy as adding a PhotoShop plugin, more or less. What we learned from duck.dae is that Linden Research was going with a known open standard, not fancier sculpties. They could swap to half a dozen other formats now, and it wouldn’t matter ~ it’s all just an export plugin away.
I certainly don’t keep tabs on all the flikr pictures in the world, but knowing *who* to watch, and for *what* is rather worth doing. Here’s another hint: keep your eye on Babbage Linden. grin
* * * * *
Bottom line, the mesh import is part of a larger narrative, one that also encompasses opensim and so forth. Economics has a powerful hand, and we are seeing pragmatic, sometimes cynical, and yes, sometimes money~motivated content creators eager to do a number of things:
a) keep their source files to themselves,
b) have an ability to sell the same item platform~independently,
c) take control of licencing issues and the associated market fees that come with people trying to do it for them.
Gwyneth, you’ve flushed a prediction out of me
Here it is.
Expect to be able to buy something in just one place, but then have it on *at least* Blue Mars, SL, and certain opensim grids, and possibly Unreal based grids as well. Content creators will solve for themselves what noncooperating, competing platforms won’t. And they will make money doing this *for themselves*, rather than paying high fees to special markets designed to do this sort of distribution for them.
Pretty soon, an avatar jacket or livingroom sofa will come not in just half a dozen colors, but half a dozen platforms as well.
Bingo Desmond.
And frankly, I think one of the broader opportunities here is that all those folks using Google Sketch-Up or Blender will actually have decent places to PUT their stuff.
My take on the ‘amateur’ 3D modeling community is that they create a lot of stuff and a lot of scenes, and then those scenes become nothing more than photos posted to DeviantArt.
Imagine if those folks realized they could not only create a scene, but fairly easily import it, tweak it, and walk around it with their friends?
So while the SL/OpenSim/Blue Mars developer community, and the pros, are one thing to look at – I think the broader opportunity is to give all those folks fiddling around in 3D modeling programs a place to actually PUT the stuff other than the Google Warehouse or 3Daz.
At which point, yes, we start seeing ‘uber-markets’, which is why I predicted 6-8 months ago that the Lab would make a move to partner with a third-party modeling site, much like a Turbosquid/Adobe partnership, for example (and having Tom Hale on board doesn’t hurt the chances of that prediction coming true).
BTW – I’m already starting to see items in-world where you buy a copy and you get a duplicate on an openSim Grid – one order, delivered to two avatars in two separate places.
Bingo, nothing. I actually this won’t happen in this fashion at all. I don’t think you realize just how much buying and selling and content are integrated into social circles and world locations and how much people buy because someone is in a friendship network or because it fits their home in a place.
I think the notion that there will be people creating one set of files to be downloadable into any world is a geek affectation, and of course, accompanied by a lot of zealous greed at the idea that it will make money. But it will remain very much a boutique niche. Most people don’t want to trek to all kinds of worlds. They get rooted in one or two. These other worlds appearing are so free of comfort levels and normalcy still that the idea of paying more for a table just so it can download into two worlds at much is a long shot.
Dusan, geeks always rave and rhapsodize about Google Sketch-up and the 3D warehouse. But…have you actually ever sat in a world with its categories and tried to upload stuff into your world? I did with Metaplace, and as I can’t say enough: it looked like ass. Not because MP was 2.D, but because stuff that is just randomly taken from wherever just never fits. It’s not integrated. It isn’t designed in a context.
Try to realize that the pretty scenes on Deviant art then have to be lived in, put with other furniture and prefabs, etc. and it just doesn’t mesh.
Even if you are seeing some duplicate item going to OpenSim somehow, it’s a niche.
And mind you, I’m not saying this due to FUD, curmudgeon status or ignorance. I’m an avid supporter of capitalism, which doesn’t do well with protectionism and which likes the free flow of goods, people, ideas, money across frontiers with as little friction as possible — globalization, remember?
BUT, those things work when there is INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND PRIVATE PROPERTY PROTECTION. Nobody is going to invest time and money in development in the current ripping climate. Economies and property law have to be wired down first.
This topic of the open metaverse market is going to animate the geeks and some creators endlessly, but the reality is, until you can get better world integrity, and an interoperability that respects economies and property rights, you will not have these freedoms that the technocommunisms dream of by expropriating from the expropriators.
Prok – agree on IP rights. You know how militant I’ve become about it. But that’s the PROBLEM with Google’s warehouse – there is no IP protection, unless I missed something.
SL will give the option to import mesh (for a fee of course, as a sort of counter-balance to the in-world economy), and once in the SL domain I’d hope that their content protection road map will keep getting further along in reinforcing C/M/T and killing copybots. If a content creator wants to then bring that same content into other IP regimes, on OpenSim say or Blue Mars, then they can, and that’s great for them, and we can stop hearing whines about lack of interoperability or back-up facilities which people use to justify copybot as if it’s some kind of GIFT to content creation.
I’m not arguing for interoperability here – maybe Desmond is, but I’m not. But I do see the possibility that NEW content creators will want to give SL a try because they can pull in stuff they made as a fun project in Blender, only to realize that once they’re in SL there’s a community here, and a different way of thinking about how stuff gets created in a collaborative space.
Oh, I think it’s quite true ~ platforms with a painfully obvious lack of IP protection are going to lose out, and possibly not make it to the party. No doubt about that.
And this isn’t interopability ~ far from it.
This is exclusivity, recognised and dealt with in a manner that suits both content creators and consumers.
It’s also a huge shot in the arm for anyone else wanting to design a platform. Stick to standards, respect IP, have modern graphics, don’t compete with your customers ~ do the things a platform *should* do ~ and customers will flock to your shores, bringing their favourite stuff in with them.
To be strictly fair, platform independent markets for assets have existed for years already. Only now, however, are online virtual worlds really beginning to take significant advantage of it.
Example:
http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/c4d-victorian-house/332685
Now, that won’t be an ideal drop~in to most worlds, but it’s not far off the mark, either.
This general market, and the virtual worlds market, are going to collide hard and fast in 2010.
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » Sputters and Sparks: Second Life in 2010 – Virtual worlds and creativity, business, collaboration, and identity. [...]
I agree the larger content market will ultimately drive at least content distribution points. In fact, ventured a prediction about that back in April 2008:
“…more and more of the economy of 3D content that is bought and sold in-world in SecondLife will ultimately move to the real-world economy…”
Still all this IP concern is really going to slow that down. People really care about 3D content IP, more than they ever did about web stuff. Perhaps this is because the 3D internet is emerging from Second Life where paying for content was promoted from the start, unlike the dawn of the web.
Still you just can’t easily secure 3D content for multiple-platform usage in a single format. To the chagrin and alarm of a lot of content developers, my bet is that 3D will go the way of web resource (HTML, XML, JPG, MP3, FLASH, MOV, PDF) files now. 3D files formats (like COLLADA) will get thrown around just like any other internet files. It is just a matter of time, network computing power, and overcoming (or bulldozing) IP concerns.
well.. ghosts from the machine… some “predicted” this way before 2008.:)
i suggest this read when it ships next week or so.
nothing SL offered was new… it was just new for you.;)
lessons learned for 2 decades…and this is the message FROM a content maker, not a “platform” services mouthpiece.:)
http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307269647/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261538182&sr=8-1
I guess I remain skeptic and have to side with Prokofy on this. As so many pointed out, digital content for sale has been online for *eons*. It’s by no means an inexisting market — just a small one, compared with, say, content sales in Second Life (not to mention IMVU, Frenzoo, and others). And, honestly, the major reason is indeed IP rights. I used to shop for content in Renderosity or DAZ… with all its caveats… I actually pity the poor designers, who sell that content rather cheap (for the quality they provide!), and just include a README.TXT saying “you can only use this content under this or that condition”, which gets discarded in nanoseconds while everything they’ve painfully created is just dumped on Google 3D Warehouse — or, well, Second Life.
So there is a certain inevitability in this: content creators will, at some point, have to stop selling their content online, since it’s pointless to ‘protect’ it. They might just offer some of it for free as a way to grab attention to the quality of their work and hope against hope to get hired to do some real work for people willing to pay them for their extraordinary services — just like, say, photographers do (and musicians slowly do the same, of course).
Or, well, they’ll stick to Second Life — where at least Linden Lab promises to guarantee that content creators will always have their rights protected, even though the actual enforcement is lagging behind their goodwill in doing so.
Mo, you might actually find it interesting that a lot of predictions around the 2D world (as opposed to 3D) were centred around “premium content on the Web”. The idea is that some people at least are willing to pay — very little, e.g. micropayments — for content that is guaranteed to be of high quality and delivered flawlessly to your computer. Apple’s iTunes and all the competing websites (including Magnatunes, eMusic, and their ilk) certainly pushed very strongly into that direction. The idea that quality content is worth a few US$ at the least, and that you can leverage on the Long Tail to make a living of it, is coming back.
And why shouldn’t it? Special talent is required to be a good content creator, as well as years of experience, most of them struggling to learn complex tools. If there is no way of actually make a living out of that knowledge, talent, and experience, and all you can hope for is having a lot of page views on the website where you put it for sale (eventually being allowed to place a few ads there — until someone just moves your content to an ad-free content archive, of course), why should people take up digital content creation as a career?
Even artists need to pay for their food
Unless, of course, we set up a different model, where artists are sponsored by patrons, like during the Renaissance… the question is just if there are enough patrons to support the sheer amount of very creative and talented artists out there 
Is there anyone interested in setting up a Foundation for Free Digital Content so that digital content artists could get a grant to be able to buy food and pay their bills while we enjoy their content for free?
We might ask Gates if he’s willing to sponsor that 
Well… perhaps Paul Allen would be easier to approach…
This decade will certainly be interesting to watch.
LOL.
A few years ago an article was written about the silicon valley. IT had the least amount of public museums or art exhibits per capita of any city/townships in the USA.
dont expect most tech geeks to pay for much art beyond a “pop” painting of Darth Vader. unlicensed of course.:)
Im speaking as the scifi con goes on in SL…. who pays? who sponsored? Linden’s a sponsor —- so we all sell our 2 dollar galactica costumes….make unlicensed pennies, and Linden cashes in 10 percent of it all….
this too shall pass… but google warehouse is NOT the answer…only a new overlord who will make blilions to Lindens Millions…
why?
ill be suprised if Creation inc. dosent make a move in a year…
anyhow.
Hi Dusan and happy new year to you to.
2 things I would add on the top of this :
The efforts of Linden Lab to review their newcomers policy + the new viewer + the new affiliation program should give fruits and we can hope to be passing the 100 000 accounts online simultaneously on a regular basis…. (is 25% increasing too optimistic or too pessimistic …)
Second point I would add is the improvement of the image of SL in Europe, – the new change of PR agency and the presence of Linden Lab in Amsterdam should start to operate as a positive effect here…
Predictions or wishes, depends on how you take it
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