You get used to certain things: the route you take to get to work or what you do on a Monday night, which you’ve somehow ear-marked for laundry or pasta but never a movie or roast chicken.
Now, it’s not that you don’t mix things up a little – one Saturday you head into a gallery maybe or decide to check out some new restaurant at the other end of town, and sometimes by heading off the beaten path you find yourself taking pottery classes one summer, although by the time winter sets in again the pottery wheel is off in the corner and you’re folding laundry on a Monday night again.
Our lives online can be similar – wake up, water the Farmville crops, poke some people, check out the BBC News site, and then follow a bunch of random links people sent you in e-mail. Mobile computers changed the dynamic a little, but in a lot of cases all it did was let us check out those funny links from our Blackberry or play a bunch of mini games on our iPhone.
I mean…take a poll at my office, which is a fairly representative sample of ages and interests, and there aren’t many people with Twitter feeds and most of them forget that I forced them to set up RSS readers so they could keep on top of client-specific topics.
The Web is a super highway, it’s a city, it’s a mall, it’s a, well, Web, but our path through it tends to be reasonably well worn, the difference is that when we need something SPECIFIC it’s a lot easier to find than running to the library, and we don’t need to spend Saturday afternoons catching up with old friends by phone, we can check out their photos on Facebook or Flickr and have a pretty good idea that the birthday party we missed last weekend was the drunken spectacle we expected.
Web Widgets
First there was information. And then the Web took a detour into transactions, abiding by the conventional wisdom that if you track porn the future will follow: and what’s porn without someone paying for it, right? And what’s Amazon if it isn’t a system built on the, um, back of (or at least the lessons learned from) online transactional sales of porn? (On that note, run a Google search for “future of porn” and see what you find.)
But then the Web evolved past mere information to allow content to be dynamic and widgetized.
Instead of a static page which only the author could update, content became fluid and database-driven: you could easily add or edit a Web page (or let others have edit rights as well), write a blog post, comment, upload a video, or share your vacation photos. And in doing all of those things, you could also mark those additions with an identity – your name, say, or a link back to your MySpace page or other ‘identity marker’.
With the ability for participation in a more granular Web and the ability to append that participation with some kind of indication of who you are, the idea was that all of this sharing and appending (in forms as small as a status update) would allow us to more easily connect with each other, removing the barriers to geography and ostensibly allowing us to achieve great things together: an entire encyclopedia arising because we all chipped in, maybe we’d solve poverty or world peace next.
Legacy Systems
But as Jaron Lanier pointed out, somewhere along the line in the development of technology, decisions are made by someone, somewhere, and these decisions become immortalized in code. And then someone comes along and adds more code to that original piece of code. And before you know it, that original decision is encumbered with so many systems on top of it that it becomes nearly impossible to retrofit. (Lanier has an incredible story of how the display of fonts were handled during the early days of the Web that’s a must-read chapter demonstrating this principle).
Now, I’m not an expert on the history of technology, but it seems to me that the decisions that were made as the Web became more dynamic and ’social’ were errors of omission, perhaps, more than inclusion.
Those omissions were not agnostic – what gets decided by someone coding a new Web site somewhere is influenced by the tools she uses, and the language she codes in – and if you follow the trail back, there’s someone, somewhere who is influenced by the “common consensus” which, it turns out, is often driven by a very small group of technologists and venture capitalists who influence the culture in which innovation happens.
(And by the way, I’m not immune from bias – I have no idea, for example, what the innovation culture looks like in Japan or Eastern Europe or Singapore, so I tend to look at these issues through a fairly narrow lens, albeit one that seems to cover off much of what passes for the drivers of the very global Internet, which increasingly encompasses mobile, games, the Web, and pervasive computing).
And so, while the Web became more granular, widgetized and social, the cultural context in which that future evolved placed a certain set of values on development, based on one particular vision for the future in which granularity, reach and the ability to edit would lead to greater communal wisdom and value. This broad cultural context in which technology was developed, in which venture money was spent, influenced the people who actually wrote the code or set the standards.
The Cultural Context of Now
This cultural context was given voice in things like the Cluetrain Manifesto:
“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.”
Or, earlier still, the Whole Earth Catalog:
The Whole Earth Catalog functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting. An item is listed in the Catalog if it is deemed:
1. Useful as a tool,
2. Relevant to independent education
3. High quality or low cost
4. Easily available by mail.Catalog listings are continually revised according to the experience and suggestions of Catalog users and staff.
These cultural drivers helped to shape the ’social/widgetized’ Web. But it turned out that what was forgotten increasingly became as important as what was built in.
Because what happened was that while yes, we did become smarter and we became able to compare airline quotes, quickly check Wikipedia for a reference or definition, start to crowd source drug development, set up micro-loans to the developing world, and were able to Tweet (or follow the Twitter feeds) from Iran….what also happened was that for the most part people weren’t all that interested in sharing relevant knowledge, they didn’t care about independent education, and they didn’t necessarily become smarter than most companies (they simply became more opinionated, faster).
What most people spent their time doing was watching funny cat videos on youTube and sharing gossip with their friends.
What We Forgot
Now, I’m playing arm chair pundit here for the history of the Web, and while I ramble on, I’m going to miss stuff and have trouble explaining how subtle these points are. I’m very big on ambiguity and I try to avoid big proclamations – there’s always more than one side to a story, and that’s just as true of something as complex and chaotic as the Internet.
But it seems to me that you could make a few simplistic and, sure, debatable claims for where we ended up.
The Web is a Tool for Connection not Creation
The Internet was a tool. As a tool, its purpose was to connect people to content. But as a tool, it was left to others to figure out the content part of the equation.
The Web wasn’t developed to facilitate the development of content itself, it was developed to facilitate its sharing. As the Internet grew in importance, the development of content itself became increasingly subservient to the fact that one of the major means for the dissemination of content was the Web. This creates an uneasy alliance: the Web needs content and yet its legacy is in the sharing of content rather than facilitation of its creation.
Over time, this uneasy alliance has led to work-arounds: I remember getting my first Homestead account, for example, which at least allowed me to prep text and graphics for display without needing to learn HTML coding. But content development itself isn’t the basis for the architecture of the Web.
Content is Not Semantic
The Web was built on ones and zeros. But bytes were aggregated into human-readable form. Human-readable form is, however, messy stuff.
When the Internet was small, that was OK. The Web wasn’t built to facilitate the development of content, simply its sharing. But there was a short-cut taken as a result: the Web, not being the “place” in which content was developed, did a poor job of understanding the meaning of what it was displaying. Meaning was instead embedded in the sharing and the connecting of that data to people. The meaning would be derived by the author or the viewer, not by the technology doing the displaying.
The Semantic Web is the attempt to retrofit the technology to the very messy reality of human-readable forms: you can’t change language, so what you need is an interpreter. Language isn’t binary: one word does not equate to one meaning, and so the Semantic Web is an attempt to place a construct around what a word means in a single context.
There is a Lack of Content Provenance
The principle seems to be this: get information out there, connect people to it, let them append it, and the truth will rise. The core principle is that the precursor to wisdom is availability. If information isn’t shared, it isn’t known, and if information isn’t known, we can’t evaluate its relevance or validity.
But missing from this equation is the fact that most information has some sort of provenance. Even pure data has provenance. Facts and figures can often only be evaluated based on who or how those facts were generated.
The Web was not built to transport data or information along with provenance. The relevance of information would be sorted out by the fact that its availability would be more wide-spread.
There is Only One Intent
The Web was built on the premise that it is a tool to facilitate connecting people to content. Content put on the Web would have, therefore, one intent: to be shared.
Anything that happened after was a work-around. Creative Commons is a work-around: you can express your intent using a widely-accepted system of licenses, but the only way in which you can express that intent is through tagging.
Your intent for a piece of content is not, in other words, embedded in or carried WITH that content. The legacy of the Web, and perhaps the reason the Web is even here to begin with, is that ubiquity and access was more important than provenance and intent.
This is Not a Commercial System
E-commerce was a hack, really: the Web wasn’t built to facilitate commerce, it was built to connect people to stuff, but monetary transactions about that stuff weren’t part of the original equation.
It took the better part of a decade to start to sort out how to attach transactions to that content, and yet it’s still a messy system. Fraud, trust, global systems, currency conversions and other challenges still exist because the Web didn’t tackle those challenges at the beginning.
Now, I’m not sure the Internet would even exist if it had – what’s more important is to recognize that there was a legacy, and as a result of that legacy things like micro-transactions (charging a half penny to read a news article, say) are nearly impossible, and your credit card is as close as you get to authenticating your value to someone selling something, and your trust in them is primarily transacted through ephemeral means and their ability to accept your credit card in the first place.
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory – as via government, big business, formal education, church – has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing – power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.
Cults, Tribes and Walled Gardens
We’re adaptable. The Web is what it is, and we find ways around its limitations. It probably wouldn’t exist if it had been set up as a big shopping mall, and the concept of ubiquity and access aren’t, on their own, untenable notions.
But we’ve done work-arounds, we’ve hacked the system, and the unexpected ways in which we’ve used the tool which is the Internet has given rise to value in unexpected places.
The lack of provenance, semantic mapping, and the emphasis on transmission and ubiquity rather than context or meaning, gave rise to several larger trends which we often see as sort of separate things, when in fact they’re really not much more than hacks to fill a few gaps.
Many of these larger trends are based on the fact that the Web was built to transmit information but had no built-in sorting or evaluation technology.
Google was a hack, based on the simple idea that because the Web was built to connect information to people (but not to otherwise sort or value content, its provenance or intent), then if you could somehow monitor the connections that people made to information, you could start to sort out what people thought was important. The second hack, and the thing that made Google what it is today, was that it added a commercial transaction layer to granular content.
Tribes and cults of personality are another hack. Google gets us part of the way there by helping us to sort out the reams of information and get it to us faster. But it doesn’t solve the broader problem of context. Google can page-rank information, but it can’t give us much insight into WHY something is important. It can tell us that one particular article on global warming has been linked to by lots of people, and does a pretty good job as a result of returning results first which have very little slant to them.
But we need a ’slant’. We need someone to put a lens up to a piece of content and tell us what it means within a broader context, values system, or philosophy. We carry around our individual lenses, or models, and we want someone to compare and contrast information to our own model.
As a result, you see the emergence of tribes and cults. And I don’t use those terms in a particularly denigrating way: they can be very useful hacks.
A tribe allows us to aggregate a group of people around a common lens or worldview in order to sort through meaning more quickly. A cult allows us to aggregate around an external articulation of a particular meaning. Tribes allow us to sort through meaning, cults deliver that meaning for us.
Apple is a cult, and Steve Jobs its messiah. We don’t need to sort through meaning, Apple will do it for us. If you subscribe to the Apple cult, you’re subscribing to a certain world view on the meaning of technology, its place in our lives, the way in which content is sold and delivered, and the elegance of the experience.
Facebook facilitates tribes. (I half suspect that Mark Zuckerberg wishes it was also a cult, but I’m not seeing it.)
I mean, it might be nice to move from an invention to that invention sort of being just there, but the reality is there’s nothing wrong with that phase of cults, tribes, evangelists and broken dreams – that’s how an invention sort of gets its legs, how it finds its place in our culture and, eventually, to just exist and be used without the encumbrances of pundits and trade secrets and messiahs on the mount.
And while the digital age has sped up the time frames, while we can move more quickly past the cult of the new or of the personality, we’re not usually talking years here, we’re still talking periods that run for decades.
None of which denies that we need to remember the cults that came before, or be suspicious of the tribe – there are false idols and promises being made with no merit (or, for that matter, with no business model), so we’re right to regard them with at least a heavy dose of cynicism, and to watch out at the edges where the hacks are being done – the work-arounds and added layers.
The rise of walled gardens are all hacks, really. Ways of building systems, communities and sites for sharing that accommodate for, in one way or another, decisions that were once made and the technology legacy of those decisions.
Amazon is a walled garden in order to accommodate the lack of an embedded transaction model. Facebook is a walled garden originally meant to accommodate the lack of clear identity systems that connected to community-relevant content.
A Model Future
In the world before the Web, information and knowledge tended to be compartmentalized and hidden. In the world after, information was more readily available and the benefits of this far outweighed the fact that the information wasn’t semantic, or didn’t have clear provenance, or couldn’t be connected to author’s intent.
But I can’t help seeing a logical fallacy in much of the discourse on what the Web, say, or technology more generally, means.
The logic often seems to go like this:
- The Web (which is, after all, simply an agnostic tool) has shown that information can be and will be freely transmitted.
- Information which is freely transmitted, brings people together with that information in order to make sense of it, to sort it, and to extract wisdom.
- Wisdom is a common good. Therefore, the lessons we can take from this particular tool are de facto values which we should accept as a broader cultural good.
The fallacy lies in believing, first, that the tool itself is agnostic. And second, in presuming that the tool itself is the source of how to form our common ethic, rather than simply one input from which we can derive insight for arriving at those decisions.
Tools allow us to create models. Models are smaller working versions of reality that allow us to make decisions about what kind of future we want to have or what kind of beliefs we are willing to hold.
There are all kinds of ways to create models. But just because we create a model, doesn’t mean that we’ve replicated reality – merely that we’ve created one version of it, a test case if you will for how we decide as individuals (or collectively) what our history tells us or how our future will unfold.
Walled Gardens as Alternative Models
Second Life is a walled garden. So is Blue Mars, the XBox, the now defunct Metaplace, and a hundred other systems. The fact that OpenSim is open source doesn’t make it any less of a walled garden, either: at this point in the history of the Web, there are no open systems when it comes to virtuality.
The Internet was built to connect people to information, and then connected them to each other. Any system which layers different modalities on top of that is, in some way, a hack, a walled garden, because it imposes a specific interpretive stance on the questions of identity, content, provenance, context and form in either the absence of those things being determined by the larger infrastructure of the Web, or in response: if you don’t like the way the Web handles identity (which it doesn’t really, except maybe at the IP address level) then build your own. If the Web doesn’t ‘recognize’ 3D content, then build a system that does, like Papervision or an Unreal plug-in.
Now, these things change over time, and they’ll change on the Web too: 3D content will soon be built into the infrastructure of what the Web is, and the display of that content will no longer be a hack.
The Web connects people to content using a particular stance, which is embedded in its infrastructure, and it will soon take a stance as well on 3D content, just as it will take a stance on how video should be honored and standardized as human-readable media embedded in what the Web does as compared to the hacks which it facilitates.
Now, sometimes these walled gardens seem, well, particularly walled. Sometimes they run on the bandwidth of the Web, its connectivity, but use very little else. Sometimes they use the conventions of Web pages and HTML but build little mini walls inside, like a user registration system or a database for managing video and its tagging and sorting.
Each of these walled gardens represents an alternate model, or at least an appending of that larger model which the Web represents.
A Second Vision for What the Online World Provides
So aside from being a walled garden, something not uncommon and more ubiquitous than most people imagine, Second Life also represents a model because it has taken a stance on which things about the Web it will adopt and which ones it will discard in favor of its own: the fact that this particular version of being connected is in three dimensions being the most obvious of those decisions.
But against the backdrop of what the Internet is and what it isn’t, I can’t help thinking that there are certain things about Second Life which remind me that how the Internet turned out isn’t necessarily the only way it needed to be. And I can’t help imagining a life online in which some of the things we take as ‘givens’ aren’t the only way it needed to be:
- Content creation can be the basis for a digital domain. The tools for developing content do not need to be separate from the domain in which that content is displayed.
- Content provenance, at least in some limited form, can be embedded into the system. Content and its creator do not need to be separated – you can build a system in which you can connect the creative product with the person who made it.
- Similarly, you can also display intent. Copy/modify/transfer, a way of signaling intent, demonstrates that you don’t need to stop at tagging, like Creative Commons does, with that tagging somewhat disconnected (or, let’s say, connected only within the starting context in which it resides) from the actual object being tagged.
- You can embed commercial and transactional value into the above as well. This value can include micro-payments, and economic systems can arise from this embedding of commercial and transactional value which, in some ways, improve upon our real-world economic systems: overcoming to some degree the barriers of geographic trade and currency and a preference for larger transactions in preference for something more granular, global and partially decoupled from the State.
Similarly, Second Life represents certain decisions about identity, governance, and how to commercialize things like hosting and services, and more broadly about how we can use these interlinked systems to derive personal value (including monetary value), create communities, connect to content, and share our experiences.
Unfinished Business
Now, I’m going to run a little counter to what feels like a larger meme: that with Mark Kingdon gone from Linden Lab and Philip Rosedale returning, that there’s a chance that Second Life (and perhaps, by extension, virtual worlds) can have some sort of renaissance, can return to its glory days, and somehow make its way out of being a small little walled garden and be what it set out to be: an alternative ‘place’ so compelling and useful that, well, even your mother will want to join in.
And I say that first because I actually think that Mark did a lot of good. And it will be interesting to see over the coming months whether Philip can get the wind in the sails again and how he does it: because in large measure, if he accomplishes that then what he’ll really be doing is properly finishing stuff that started under M’s watch.
I’m partly of the belief that the list was right, but the order was wrong: that in coming in to manage Linden Lab’s transition from, well, a Lab to something more akin to a service provider or software company, Kingdon set some priorities and then the sequence of those priorities.
The error of sequencing wasn’t entirely the result of things under his control: larger trends in technology, the global economic meltdown and deciding how to respond, and a misread of the competitive landscape (Google’s Lively comes to mind), amongst other factors were some of the things he needed to juggle as he sorted out what to do next.
But the net result was that the dependencies built into his sequencing put an incredible burden on one thing: a new Viewer. Get that wrong, and none of the rest of it would matter.
Because the new Viewer was the spring board for a whole bunch of other things:
- The integration of Web-based content into the world, through Grid-wide access to Second Life Shared Media
- The integration of Second Life with more open systems for things like groups and identity. The side panel on the new viewer would allow both context-specific help and search and the pulling in of Web-based content and was clearly a precursor to ways in which they might handle social connections, groups and, ugh, search.
- A widgetized viewer: M often talked about how eventually the viewer could open up something like an iPhone marketplace. Imagine being able to choose what widgets you want to have in your viewer. No more HUDs, with the ability to “run” things in-world with plug-and-play tools embedded directly into the viewer, downloaded from an extended Second Life Marketplace.
- Increased numbers of users attracted to Second Life because of an improved usability experience.
- With the above in place, a new content ecosystem and the launch of mesh imports. With content creators now able to import mesh, create widgets for the viewer, and maximize use of Shared Media, there would be a whole new range of content that could be created and sold.
- And finally, with the new ecosystem, and the ‘pushing’ of some of the content to the Web (the Marketplace, group and event notice systems, etc.) you’d be able to push THAT content out to the wider Web.
In preparation for all of that, M took steps to improve stability, localize content, plug the best he could problems with content theft, and to set up new tools for community and enterprise.
But it was all dependent on the Viewer being the spring board to phase two, and it was all based on the assumption that it was the interface that was the problem.
Even something like Second Life Enterprise was highly dependent on getting the viewer right. I frankly think they launched SLE in a sort of half-hearted way, but that they went into it with the belief that maybe it wasn’t their top priority, but that once business saw what came out of Shared Media and new forms of widgets and applications, they could just port all of that stuff over and it would sort of sell itself.
SLE is what it is. The price point is fine, but it’s missing the rest of the value proposition: integration with new approaches to managing the flow of content, ideas and technology, much of it dependent on where the Viewer was going to take us.
Strategy First
If all eyes shift to this idea of getting Second Life in the browser (including at the expense of tying up loose ends first), then my personal belief is that they’ll be betting on the wrong thing – that they’ve bought into the larger conceptual model that drives the Web (or, at least, drove it), namely that ubiquity and access trumps content and context, and will have forgotten that Second Life is a model for an alternative future, one which might not be widely shared, but which will always have a home for some people, for some tribes, no matter how small or walled-in that world might be.
Now, this isn’t to say that under M they were on the right track either. I’ve written at length about what I felt was missing over the past few years:
- An over-arching vision. And in the context of everything above, that vision would probably need to include: the recognition that Second Life represents a distinct and separate model for the creation and sharing of content than the wider Web; an articulation of how Second Life will take its place within the broader ecosystem of digital/social/Web-based/broadcast and other media; and a sense of how these beliefs can lead to a better future, whether for an enterprise, a community, an individual or society.
- A lack of effective design thinking. Following from the vision, design thinking looks to project a future which doesn’t exist yet, and which probably can’t be extrapolated from past data, and to give the results of that thinking a tangible form.
- The tangible forms of design thinking can include a marketing and communications strategy and visuals, a technical road map, and visible tools, projects or programs which intuitively let users (and potential users) understand what something means and where it’s headed.
If Philip does nothing else, his main goals should be to articulate strategy and vision and to tie up some immediate loose ends.
And then, he should live up to the “interim” in his interim-CEO title and bring in someone who can lead a team that understands true design thinking, which may or may not include bringing Second Life to the browser.
Philip’s role, unlike what he did when M came on board (which seemed to consist of hanging out in hotel lobbies and setting up his own JIRA), needs to be to maintain the Cult of Philip, to articulate and repeat and repeat again the vision.
And that vision, whether he stumbled upon it by accident or not (I often feel as though Philip has a very uneasy relationship to the idea of commerce, IP protection and ‘closed systems’, perhaps because he’s so close to the Cult which is Mitch Kapor or the Tribe which is Silicon Valley) is of an alternative set of systems and beliefs for how digital spaces could turn out.
He started that work, but there’s an opportunity to finish it.
Invisible Affordances
For the last few years, the main focus of the Lab has been partly technical (some improved stability) but mostly focused on “affordances”, which is a fancy term for “what does the system do and how do people access it”.
The theory of affordances is one of the underpinning philosophies of much of interface design. In one definition of affordances, objects and environments have latent and objectively measured “action possibilities”. An affordance is therefore your relationship to a thing and its possibilities.
If there’s a thing that has no ‘action possibility’ you can’t act on it. Therefore it’s not an affordance. An affordance needs both a possibility for action and someone to act ON it.
The Lab has been ruthlessly focused on “affordances”, which ends up being described to you and I as “improving the user interface”.
In user interface design (which, I believe, the Lab mistook for “design thinking”) the idea is that while objects and environments may have action possibilities, “bad” design is when those possibilities aren’t seen, are unclear, or are cumbersome. Affordances need to be visible, clear, and should properly signal their latent possibilities.
But here’s the problem: if Second Life is, in part, both different from and in response to the wider affordances of the Web, then does it also contain the possibility that it contains invisible affordances?
What if you’re a Web designer, for example, and the affordances you know were grounded in the culture, decisions, environments and values noted above? Can you translate those affordances to a different type of space?
What if it turned out that you’re actually creating a whole new set of affordances? What if you’re not just trying to better design those affordances but to also create an entirely new grammar?
Because I can’t help thinking that as Linden Lab struggles to make sense of how to reconcile where its headed and to articulate its place in our broader lives both online and off, that the deeper value is in creating a grammar, in making visible, things which haven’t been easily accommodated by technology to date.
The Visible Imagination
So we take a well-worn path through the Web just as we take the same bus or road to work, and just as we do laundry on a Monday night instead of renting a movie.
We take it as a given that the Web is the way it is and that everything you’ve ever read or believed is just, well, true. We’ve always gone to work this way, why would we think there’s another route?
But Google and all the other hacks and walled gardens have shown us that nothing is a given: that if we look for the weak spots in larger ecosystems there’s an opportunity to create value (and there’s an accompanying opportunity to destroy, but that’s another topic). Where we’re at is that while the Web has shown us one model for the future, it’s not the only one, and it has a few weak spots.
And one of those weak spots is that because of the way in which it handles content, its creation, its provenance and the mechanisms for its sharing (and selling) it has not been particularly adept at certain forms and affordances, and one of the major weak spots is capturing and embodying that which is often invisible: inspiration, stories, imagination, and personal exploration.
Sure, it connects us to all sorts of different forms of content and information, and it even connects us to each other. But the Web does a lousy job, on its own, of making our imagination visible.
We can share ideas, but the forms in which we can share those ideas are limited.
We can assume different identities and wander around forums or post comments to blogs under those personas, but the tools with which we express identity are limited.
We can shape our own context around content – adding a comment to a youTube video or embedding it in our blog, but the texture and range within which we can create context is limited.
A user-generated virtual world will NOT be the last step in how we articulate, through technology, that which has been previously invisible to the Google algorithm or the Facebook wall post: the deep context, emotion, serendpity and ideas that we generate not because we FOUND content or connected, but because of what we experienced once we did.
As we tag physical geography with a vacation photo or video, as we add emotional back story to a real world event by Tweeting our experience – all of those things we do as we hack and extend the tools we’ve got all pushes us in the direction of trying to make the tools fit our needs, and our very human needs include exploring ambiguity, exploring ourselves, and telling stories of our journeys in as rich a way as we can.
Second Life has shown that there are alternate ways in which technology can support our understanding of ourselves and the world, not because its affordances are easy, not because the information can be captured in an algorithm, and not because there’s even particularly many people there at one time: but rather because through the almost accidental combination of our ability to create content within the same domain in which it’s presented, and to do so in a space shared with others, we’ve discovered that we can rez our imagination, which in a world that seems to relish making it difficult to do, is still the most amazing affordance of all.
Nice article, I particularly liked the depth of the background you built up before making your points, even though I don’t agree with all of them.
A lot more verbose than most people would accept, but that is their loss.
A bit long but very interesting reading
Thank you for setting the records straight about M’s work. You are one of the few who commented his departure with an objective view of what he had done.
* Indigo
Dusan,
You have some good insights at first, but then you kill it by falling for the fads yourself.
You’re absolutely right that this connector called the Internet isn’t more than the connection and that everything from Google to Twitter (which you don’t mention) are hacks on top of that fact. All well said.
But what you aren’t willing to concede (because you, too, believe too much in the analog hole argumentation about how you “can’t” preserve content rights and integrity) that the walled garden is in fact revolutionary and in fact the way out of the sterility of the connecting web that only offers a backbone for endless hacking — and sterile hacking nihilist culture.
First, you follow Zha Ewry and the big IT concept of DRM as merely “a signal of intent”. It’s not that. When you use the semantics that way, and make it sound like property is neutral, and it only depends on the will of the creator to decide some batch of rights and “signal” them, you’re doing the two things that technocommunists want you to do:
o denying that copyright is inherent
o decoupling commerce from copyrighted content
o browbeating people into “sharing” because of the “inevitability” of copying (criminality) and invoking the magical thinking of “other business models”.
You get very, very fuzzy and weird on your recipe for what comes next, not saying what you really mean, being jargonistic, and not following up on the implications of what you are saying — so I’m going to call you on it:
- The integration of Web-based content into the world, through Grid-wide access to Second Life Shared Media
The Internet gets sucked into SL a bit by people making lots of purloined copies of various Internet-based images that as you explain are easily decoupled from provenance and they make new content. I still estimate that a lot of content in SL is original, but a good chunk isn’t. So what are you saying with this, really?
And what is “grid-wide access to shared media”? The viewer 2 gives you shared media — if you want to bother with it. But…did anybody outside a small coterie of high-end designers? I don’t see that they did. I didn’t see a lot of uptake of viewer 2 among my customers. They’re still deeding old TVs and watching preloaded content, not rezzing prims and fussing to get URLs in place to “share media”. Newbies are completely skipping over all the “shared media” jazz because it requires rezzing and fiddling prims. So where are we REALLY with that, Dusan?
- The integration of Second Life with more open systems for things like groups and identity. The side panel on the new viewer would allow both context-specific help and search and the pulling in of Web-based content and was clearly a precursor to ways in which they might handle social connections, groups and, ugh, search.
Again, what are you REALLY saying with this, Dusan? Who needs their Facebook group in SL? Where is that burning need for RL identity in SL that you claim exists? (I think it is probably there for some small constituents, but you can’t tell me that a company that just revised their webpage — and you can’t just blame M Linden for this! — to say “ESCAPE TO THE INTERNET”S LARGEST USER-CREATED 3-D COMMUNITY” is REALLY planning an influx of real-lifers.
The sliding panel. Sigh. What a bunch of problems. Suffice it to say, your notion that this is the widget to pull in web content (whatever you REALLY mean by that), a viewing of my Facebook page? Why?) isn’t coherent. You are looking at only your constituency again. What to normal people really want? They want a second life. They want a world! Why can’t they have a world?! why can’t it grow more slowly, with less technical convulsions, and with less feting of minority constituencies like geeks and designers?
- A widgetized viewer: M often talked about how eventually the viewer could open up something like an iPhone marketplace. Imagine being able to choose what widgets you want to have in your viewer. No more HUDs, with the ability to “run” things in-world with plug-and-play tools embedded directly into the viewer, downloaded from an extended Second Life Marketplace.
Again — geeky goobledegook. Widgets? Doing *what* Dusan? For what? Um, watching the weather in my RL community? A weather bug? A stock ticker? A twitter tweetdecK? *widgets for what*. Stop getting gidding about the idea of plug and play widgets and ask…for what? WHy? *in this world*?
- Increased numbers of users attracted to Second Life because of an improved usability experience.
Except in the last three things, you spoke nonsense, spouted geeky gobbledegook untethered to reality, and insisted on siphoning in webness to this world, welding in widgets that don’t have a purpose, and invoking specious groups. People need the groups of *Second Life* to work, not to see Facebook groups or make groups work “out there somewhere” intermingled with RL identity. What what the users do and what they want, not what you want to have cool widgets that are fun to program and impress certain commercial clients with.
- With the above in place, a new content ecosystem and the launch of mesh imports. With content creators now able to import mesh, create widgets for the viewer, and maximize use of Shared Media, there would be a whole new range of content that could be created and sold.
So, oh, ok, I get what you are doing here. You’re invading the viewer, the panel, the world, the space with all kinds of contraptions to support the invasion of a high-end elite merchant class that will disrupt the prim-based economy (and even the newer sculpty economy) and privilege only those who use third-party programs like Maya. OHHH now I see what that stuff is “from the Web” that you need to get — Google sketch-up, 3d rendering from various sites, blah blah. So again, you pretend that *your class interests* necessitate *borking the entire world again* and *serving yourselves*. I don’t mind if you say that or do that Dusan — who could stop you or the Lindens? Just be honest about what you are doing. Be honest that your plan is to disrupt the world, the view, the functions to help support a new elitist mesh-based merchant class and allow all the game designers out of work out there from EA.com or Metaplace or whatever to come in the doors here to make content. Don’t sugarcoat it.
Prok – Well, believe it not, but I actually felt like I was running out of space. This post was meant to paint some broad brush strokes of where we’re at and some guiding principles for where next. I’ll leave the laundry list until later.
While I think M got a few things on his list right, I don’t know how many times I have to say that I think they were ineffective because they lacked the broader context: vision, design thinking, and tangible forms for both.
What we got with the Viewer was an attempt at a tangible form but it was a failure. As a result, I can’t even talk about what I mean by “Web integration” without it being tarnished by the poorly managed efforts embodied in the viewer, and getting lumped in with the poorly managed communication by the Lab which equated that with creating a “3D Facebook”.
So, first, don’t equate MY broad concepts of how Second Life has a place in the larger online ecosystem with the execution of a similar idea by the Lab.
But in direct response:
- Yes, walled gardens are revolutionary. Some of them. The Web is also revolutionary. I don’t see the two things as being in opposition. And that’s my whole point about putting things in context: the binary notion that we need a revolution to OVERCOME the Web makes it seem like we need to fully replace the revolution that came before.
I don’t actually believe that. What I believe is that the Web was revolutionary and that other revolutions will follow, will build on it or build in opposition TO it, and that Second Life is a revolution because it created a walled garden in support of some of, and in counterpoint to other values embedded in the architecture of the Web itself.
- Your comment about signaling is interesting. It presumes that content doesn’t need additional signaling because it is already covered by law. In this view, an author has only one thing: ownership. If an author didn’t need to signal intent, you’re right, my argument would lead to the brow-beating.
But I’m sorry: I don’t see a contradiction between an author’s ownership of content and their right to indicate the uses of that content. By allowing a signaling of intent, I’m conferring a right on the author, not on the person doing the copying. In your view, giving an inch to the rights of the users of content is giving up the whole mile: allowing an author the right to signal intent means that they’ll be brow-beaten, and therefore we need to revoke the author’s right in the first place.
I can’t reconcile denying the author rights to indicate their intent for the use of content because of cultural or social pressures. Denying an author rights because it might lead to entitlement isn’t the solution to entitlement, but better signaling methods, laws and enforcement are.
Copyright is inherent. The right to express an intent for how that copyright is used is also inherent. You can’t deny the latter because it leads to a sense of erosion of the former, you need to look for other mechanisms to protect both. Which is what I think the Lab did with C/M/T, itself revolutionary, especially coupled with commerce.
As to your other points – again, I wish I had more head space to carry this through the next 6,000 words in one sitting. So bear with me a little.
But to clarify what I saw as the strategic value of some of the things on M’s list (while saying, again, that he still missed the big picture, and that his list was incomplete):
- I’m not entirely sure I know what the value is of Shared Media. I do feel, however, that it has a value and that because so few people can even see it, there aren’t many people innovating with it.
My broad belief is that the Web doesn’t allow us to be “around” content with other people. The Web doesn’t have much of a sense of place, or what it has is somewhat limited. Now, I’m not entirely sure what it looks like, but I always wondered what would happen if we could somehow bring content with little context, and with little presence, into an environment that HAD context and presence.
Shared Media goes beyond Web pages. It allows us to bring content into SL that didn’t exist before except in limited ways, to interact with that content, and to do so in a shared, collaborative place.
Whether that means, I dunno, editing a spread sheet or updating vendor notecards from some sort of shared in-world console I’m not sure.
It’s not so much surfing the Web that I was interested in, but being able to easily access different forms of editable content inside a 3D collaborative space. This might lead us to a new understanding of how the “flat/placeless” Web can be given context and a face…but I’m not sure, maybe in the end it would only lead to a lot of movies or Web-based games, in which case, I agree, skip it.
- The idea of the “widgetized” viewer isn’t really much more complicated than making HUDs, tools and panels which can be added, subtracted or removed from the viewer based on what a user wants to do. HUDs, as you probably know, are these really awful things to program and control. If HUDs could be created with greater ease by using standard approaches (like coding in HTML or Flash), we’d see a lot more utility in everything from estate management to event management, from shopping to group management.
I’d love to have a Metanomics widget, for example, with upcoming events, a little chat element for live shows, a “question” box to ping Beyers with questions during a show, a little polling device maybe which would display results near the stage, and maybe some sort of controller for our event staff.
I can imagine all kinds of things done for music events, shopping, rentals, RP sims, or interest groups. I’ve seen HUDs that help people find others with similar interests (a sort of 4square for dating in SL) and others used for building (most of the building tools I first used were HUD based).
But HUDs are separate things, very very hard to program, and have limited functionality. The “widgetized viewer” would allow wider functionality and would just help make so many things soooo much easier, because it would allow the Residents to create them, sell them on XStreet, with the user downloading the widget for display in the viewer.
- (By the way, widgets don’t impress my commercial clients. When it comes to virtual worlds, what I sell to commercial clients is fairly narrow and has very little to do with cool/nifty stuff. If you want to hear my pitch sometime, let me know. But if I want to sell widgets and cool gadgets I’m a certified iPad developer, I’ll sell apps on that, I don’t need SL to be an iPad).
- Finally, the whole point of this post was to demonstrate that Second Life is NOT the Web, it’s different, and that any attempt to “fit in”, to accommodate to the Web, to follow the conventional wisdom of social media or ’sharable’ culture is an effort in vain.
If you take my post to mean that I advocate for linking out to Facebook or all of that stuff “out there” then that’s wrong. My belief is that all that stuff “out there” needs more of what Second Life has “in here” not the other way around.
So don’t put words in my mouth – I’m not advocating for connecting to Facebook or Twitter or any of the rest of it.
- Finally, I think we’ll just disagree on mesh. Second Life content creators are also privileged. You keep talking about all these external 3D content developers like they’re some super-privileged class who are going to come swarming in. But Second Life content creators are also privileged – they’re the ONLY ONES who can use the tools for content creation.
That makes one very small group of privileged creators, and one larger group of content creators external to SL, making very little money on 3Daz on Renderosity, who can only make a living if they work for some Indie game shop or some massive factory like EA Games.
I have friends who love Google Sketch-Up, who have made the most amazing ships – things I’d love to see in SL. They’ll never come in, because the tools are exclusive, and hard to learn, and have a barrier to entry much higher than the cost of, oh, Blender say, or Sketch-Up.
So I have no idea what this high end elite merchant class is supposed to be. I mean – really, have you taken a look at the content that’s actually OUT THERE? It’s hardly ‘elite merchant class’ material – what we have in SL can hold its own any day, and most of what’s “out there” are hobbyists who make neat stuff but have nowhere to sell it, walk around it, share it, or be inside it with other people.
And if you’re talking about professional studios or something, I don’t think I’d worry too much. They’re not going to be making a shift into SL any time soon.
I’m a very concrete person, and you tend to speak in high-level abstractions that I don’t always really grok, but I liked the last paragraph of this piece enough that I’d like to ask a few questions and say a few things.
It’s not at all clear to me what you mean by “walled garden” here. The original AOL was a walled garden, because you couldn’t get to its content or its function unless AOL was your ISP, and you were running the proprietary AOL client. WoW is a walled garden, because you can’t fight its monsters unless you pay Blizzard for an account and you’re running its proprietary client. But I can’t figure out why you say that Amazon is a walled garden: you can get to it whoever your ISP is, and whatever Web browser you use. If you don’t like Amazon’s web pages, you can use Greasemonkey to make them look however you want, or you can use most of its functions (browsing, buying) via the XML-RPC interfaces from some other set of web pages entirely.
If Amazon is a walled garden, then so are most of the web sites out there, and the term loses all meaning.
I’m also not really with you on “hacks”. The various things that people have built, and are building, on top of the basic tcp/http/html infrastructure, like the semantic web, various kinds of security and payment systems, aren’t “hacks” in some pejorative sense of “secondary things that don’t really work and if only we’d thought of them in the first place they would have been integrated into the base classes and would have been so much better”, as you seem to be saying. That attitude toward software and system development puts far too much faith in centralized and pre-planned development.
The things that have been built up on the basic Web infrastructure have been possible, not because people thought of clever sneaky ways to hack around limitations of the base, but because the base was designed from the outset to be simple, open, and extensible. This kind of hierarchical building of function is *exactly how it was supposed to work*, not some accidental or sneaky hack.
Systems designed to provide simple, open, and extensible bases on which more, unanticipated, functions can be built, are the things that have turned out to, in fact, work.
Systems where someone tried to anticipate in advance what all the uses would be, and provide for them all upfront so that no extensibility is required (see for instance, Ada, and yeah the early AOL), have turned out not to work so well, except maybe in MMO games.
Your phrase “invisible affordances” threw me for quite while.
It’s such an oxymoron, after all. I think what you’re saying is that if someone is very used to the affordances of the typical website, and comes to Second Life under the assumption that the important affordances there are basically the same, they are likely to miss important things. I agree completely with that; I groaned every time M talked about how wonderful and “Web like” some new feature of Viewer 2.0 was going to be.
On the other hand I’d like to put in a strong word against overarching visions. Why would it benefit anyone for Philip, or the Lab as a whole, to have some theory about “how Second Life will take its place within the broader ecosystem of digital/social/Web-based/broadcast and other media”? All that would do, in my opinion, would be to disadvantage anyone who had a different theory, and to narrow the focus of the platform into some particular vision that would (as visions inevitably do) turn out to be wrong in the end.
I think Philip and the Lab will do best by sticking to the original premise: that by giving the Residents the ability to do whatever they want, even and especially in ways not anticipated and not fitting into any particular “overarching vision”, the most marvelous things will happen.
And there I agree completely with your last paragraph.
That’s still the most amazing affordance of all…
Second Life hasn’t made the transition from data driven wall garden to loosely linked services. The web allows linked data to put placed into new dynamic contexts. If more of the information held in Second Life was available as linked data and had an accessible information service architecture the bridging and blending between worlds would be much easier.
At an extreme I can build my world in Second life and hook my real world web service to it. But I would like my real world web service to be able to have an effect in my Second Life world.
The basic tools are in place, but the revolution never seems to happen.
We are Skynet now. Not Second Life. LoL
yadda yadda yadda
1. Internet was never a tool – “hammer:nail:engineers:etc” always a medium. information has been “freed” for centuries as other mediums assimilated us. books. radio. tv.
2. As a medium, the LL/SL /internets 3d walled garden experiment FAILS from “public day one” since it wont decide its its a “communications media ” or an “entertainmnet media” which oif course was the LAST BIG QUESTION left over from TV, the previous mass media.
yahoo, AOL /TimeWarner/etc etc.. media companies stuck as tech companies(tool makers) that vacilate ever 3 years as they cycle IN the medium of tech buisness that THEY themselevs created.
Cause MONEY is a Medium as well- virtualized and all as “electric” mediums grew as well over the last century.
anyhow-
Pundit Media praises Mcluen all the time, “Wireds Patron Saint since whole earth days”, but they keep the big truth to themselves.. that they keep selling/telling us its ALL TOOLS..but seceretly snickereing because they now it’s a Medium. and that a Mediums grip are only seen from the next ones vantange point.
I am really not sure that the vision splendid is a good thing at all. My feeling is that the vision splendid has interfered seriously with more mundane stuff like, um, making the damn thing work better. Philip needs to decide whether he is Sukarno or SBY.
Sukarno used to hold an annual lovefest in Jakarta where his rhetoric would reduce large sections of the audience (literally) to tears. Sadly, every month and every year the real economy went backwards and the living standards of his people fell.
40 years pass, most of them under a fairly grim dictatorship, and the current president, SBY does not make people weep with passion. But he gets things done. And the real economy is growing rapidly. You find the same division between symbolic leadership and reality in any number of countries.
Second Lifes fundamental problem I think stems from the architecture that its currently built around. Until that architecture is fixed, its hard to imagine going forward past where we are. While they do add nice shiny things and the world looks 10x better than it used to with Windlight, and sculpties and soon Mesh, but these things clunker on top of the already messed up platform.
Slow loading times, inventory, grey textures, green clouds, crossing sims etc. They are all part of a broken system that has no scalability. You have this amazing idea, this virtual world where anything is possible but you can’t congregate in large amounts, you’re immediately capped. Whats the solution? I’m not a programmer, can the SL server be reprogrammed to fix these issues? Or is the current system doomed? Can they recode Second Life and then reconvert all of the data over? To me this is the very basic root of all the other issues and until this is fixed its hard to go forward.
Since I’m down at the bottom of your page entering a comment, I notice you haven’t updated your own copyright since 2008. Might want to do that.
That aside, interestingly long article, starts out with viewpoints from Jaron Lanier and his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, which I own hardback. Then seems to proceed to buy into all that walled garden stuff. Seems like people are attending too many Engage Conferences trying to figure out how to make their own walled gardens for as many bucks as the going rate will allow. That’s why I think your a little wrong about OpenSim, yeah it is walled in a sense, but only because it requires a level of technical ability to setup and enjoy. This is quite different than a walled garden. And I just wanted to point that out.
“I’d love to have a Metanomics widget, for example, with upcoming events, a little chat element for live shows, a ‘question’ box to ping Beyers with questions during a show, a little polling device maybe which would display results near the stage, and maybe some sort of controller for our event staff.”
This looks pretty doable to me. If you want it, ping me.
I disagree with much of what you said, but I don’t have the time to comment on all of it in detail, so I’ll hit a couple of points.
One thing that jumped out at me was your comment about HUDs . . . I’ve never understood why anyone thinks they’re so difficult to build, but I read this complaint all the time. Many of the perceived difficulties of using the content creation tools available to us in Second Life are due to three things. One is that most content creators in SL are relative newbies to content creation with no formal training and very little experience, so what they think is hard is still just over their heads, even if they’re talented as heck – give them time. The second is that people who do have the experience and skills to make the most stunning and functional SL content are expensive, in part because many of them are already making piles somewhere else . . . so why do they want to start over learning a whole new set of tools? And the third is that it costs, and most inworld Residents consider a price like 1000L a “lot”. This includes many “real-life work” folks — occasionally someone from a big corporation or educational institution approaches me to give them, for free, content that cost my company thousands of real-world dollars to develop, and they are shocked when I tell them that it’s going to cost them actual USD. We’re still working on getting people used to the concept that, in a “game” where you can get free avatar clothes and even buy them mass-marketed for the equivalent of a quarter or a buck, top-quality commercial content is expensive to develop. C programmers’ or Maya-using mesh-makers’ work won’t cost any less than that created by LSL programmers or prim-builders, at least after the initial glut of hobbyists come in and disrupt the current economy and put a lot of established Residents out of business.
From my standpoint as a Gold Solution Provider: yay for new content creaton options that might be useful for meeting my clients’ needs! Despite that . . . I don’t want to see LL change SL radically too quickly. Because I don’t believe SL is best classified as social media. For Residents (as opposed to enterprise and education users and other third parties who would profit from the platform) I view SL as a medium for self-expression. Including the little dressmakers Prok champions, as well as all of the people who tweak their avatars, decorate their homes, plant virtual gardens, etc. What does SL really need to succeed as what it already is? Aside from a full-time, in-house, really great community manager, the answer is even more in-built content creation tools that every Resident can use to customize their hair or make their own shoes. SL is a world where the average person can make or be whatever they want, and even the “consumer” folks create a little bit, let alone, say, educators . . . who usually build their own content or have their students do it, and many of whom seem to be distressed that they aren’t going to be able to learn or afford mesh anytime soon.
People make stuff in SL instead of buying it, if they can, and shopping is never as engaging as self-expression. Requires more user hours, too. If I were running SL I would work on features to facilitate improved in-world content creation using in-world tools (such as an in-world sculpt or mesh creation tool) rather than going after a radically different market at the expense of current customers.
And now I have to get back to work!
One other thought: Do you grow an economy with imports, or with EXPORTS?
Mmmm Kimberly – your ‘throw-away’ comment hits at the heart of something really really important. Thanks for that!
Exports indeed.
Not a throwaway . . . the time I put into stating that last thought concisely (instead of indulging in rambling as I did in my previous comment) is an indicator of how important I think it is.
Besides, I didn’t think you’d need much explanation to catch the drift . . .
Dusan,
It’s too much to process right now, but a few quick responses:
1) if you are not for making Facebook link up to SL and be a little 3-D chatroom for my Facebook friends to jump into, like various little worlds tried to be (Vivaty, etc.) and failed, then…what ARE you about? Why *bother* with Facebook? Just WHAT are you pulling in to the side panel from the web? Here’s the thing: there is nothing that needs to be pulled into the side panel from the web. Nothing. What many people want is for that panel to fold back, not be in the way, and get to the world, where everything should be, rather than the viewer and the web piping in.
2) YOU JUST DON’T GET IT ABOUT PRIMS. Do you grasp that a prim is democratic? That anyone can edit a prim easily? That dummies who don’t design, who can’t operate Photoshop can at least place a house, change a texture on it, perhaps rez a dock next to it? This is central to the SL experience for lots of people. Decorating, making little things at an amateur level. All that is removed from them with mesh. With mesh, they can only be consumers, not adapters, and can onyl place the mesh.
3) it’s really, really contrived to talk about SL content makers being “privileged”. What SL is, is a democratic, easy way to content-create without buying Maya, learning Photoshop, etc. It’s *easier*. People can become merchants and sell stuff more quickly and more easily.
Second Life is like a Kodak camera.
The still photographers in their studios with their elaborate equipment and their drapes, you don’t want it to be a Kodak camera, because then you don’t have a job.
The things that have been built up on the basic Web infrastructure have been possible, not because people thought of clever sneaky ways to hack around limitations of the base, but because the base was designed from the outset to be simple, open, and extensible. This kind of hierarchical building of function is *exactly how it was supposed to work*, not some accidental or sneaky hack.
There he goes again.
The reality is, the entire Internet itself is a sneaky hack on real life. Tim Berners-Lee knows it; Mark McCahill knows it; all those sneaky hacks know it.
It’s all a sneaky hack, and it has spawned the destructive culture it has precisely because of its provenance as a sneaky hack.
Prok: I think the term “Web” might be a misleading term, or the way I used it was misleading.
When I saw the side panel and realized it was showing content that wasn’t being pulled from the big lumbering databases on which SL is built, I couldn’t help thinking that if you could pull in the equivalent of a Web page as an interface element, you could fix something like groups by shifting them from the custom built, never-quite-working system that the Lab has with something that uses more common Web-type systems.
Maybe I’d be able to sort my friend’s list in that side panel, or maybe group notices and event listings could be handled in a different way.
The whole thing was borked though. I was excited about Viewer 2.0 when I first saw it (I was, admittedly, ’spun’ heavily by the Lab and most of that spin was screen shots) but it took me about an hour of using it to find it unusable. (I couldn’t even see those little chat chiclets in the bottom right – must have been designed by young’uns who still have 20/20 vision).
2. I’ve written dozens of posts on the power of the prim and the atomic world. Yes, I’m proposing to change some of that dynamic. Prims won’t disappear, you’ll still be able to rez in-world, object creation wouldn’t move off grid entirely.
Much like sculptys, you’ll be able to mix and match prims with mesh – much as people do with sculpty staircases, for example, in a prim house.
I’m aware this shifts the balance. My personal belief is it widens access (and is thus more democratic) to the ability to create because it builds a bridge between those who will still rez prims, and those who do something in Sketch-Up. I really don’t think that the Maya/3DS crowd which is out there doing mods for Fallout are going to come rushing into SL.
I DO think that many current SL content creators will rush to use mesh and incorporate it into prim-based or stand-alone work. I’m personally of the belief this would be a boon to the economy.
Long post. What I want is:
- no Windows, no interim OS etc. I want to turn on my PC enter my user/pass and find myself at my 3d desktop. That is like a desk in SL. I can invoke my apps with a click, sending them to my other display.
You ask about the web… to the hell with most of the web (wth is faisbook?), why would I want to visit hondamotors.com when I am in the matrix (Gibson)? They have a hq in here too and of course if they have quite the load, they can instantiate another region instance on demand.
If I miss the speed of ol’web, i can just type in a keyword into a transparent search window flashing up in the middle of the screen and get insta tp-d to the relevant location in that particular region.
Really high traffic sites like importantnews.com and ohmygod.com could still come as inworld newspapers or as part of the old Internet, web on a prim.
Though my inworld PA (a bot) would just tell me the news when I arrive home and I can get my customized news report listening to her. (I mean… widgets? WIDGETS? Thats freaking bs and so past!)
Also I want to be in my very own region for max. $5-10 a month. This region can be hosted anywhere, possibly not in the US, but my home country.
Publishing regions would be another important feature: users (proxy servers too) would only download the difference between their own cache and the changes since the last published state.
Ok, so if LL were brave (or suicidal) enough, they would step up, count one mesh as one prim (or kill prim limit for meshes), would radically decrease prices for home regions and start to develop the Net Life OS.
And yes, prims should be killed off or exiled to sandboxes. We need performance and prims just kill them.
Most of the above may sound futuristic, but most of the above is actually not that hard to implement. (I mean hard, but not impossible.)
Also imagine the headlines, it’s not like… Second Life this and that, it would be a new chance, like Linden Lab developing their own OS!
Matrix OS will be out in 2012. dec. 12.
So stop thinking about social networking and all the overhyped stuff, these are putting you in a box. “If you are in a box, how do you think outside of it?”
I will post more sometime soon, hopefully. I want the future.
I feel like being self-indulgent, so I’m going to rattle the keys a little more.
Imported meshes and social media are not what we need. What we need is an easily accessible, in-world mesh creation tool that anyone can use. While INWORLD, with friends and colleagues around and able to give input and even collaboratively work on the model. With the ability to EXPORT those models in a standard format, and a Second Life Marketplace where people *outside of* SL can buy them for other projects (in Open Sim, for example).
*That’s* what SL should be . . . not some sort of Frankenstein’s monster of mismatched, stitched-together odds and ends imported from other sources. The company offering the tool that is used to create the exports makes the real money. The content sellers make the money, not the buyers.
To focus on only the top content creators — people who aren’t even in SL while creating content because we have to use an external script editor or modeling program — is a mistake. A huge, stupid trickle-down-economics sort of mistake.
Second Life is supposed to be a world-changing, better-world-creating thing. It can be that, but not if everything it offers is imported from somewhere else.
It’s easier for your big content creators to go away somewhere else and ditch SL when they’re never inworld because they’re using external tools. It’s easier to make flippant statements in support of wrongheaded inworld policies when you aren’t inworld because you’re using external tools. If Linden wants to hang onto its Residents, *keep them inworld.*
Don’t send us to a web-based shopping site for inworld products. Don’t force us to use external tools for scripting (give us a decent inworld script editor!) and voice (Skype’s still more reliable) and animations and sculpts and meshes.
It’s the content creation and the ability of even a newbie or a non-artist or non-programmer to build simple things, to customize complex things, to learn and become a content creator themself, to run a business, to express yourself — that is why SL has been as successful as it is. Not because we can use Facebook from inworld, not because of Voice, not because of sculpts, and not because of the shopping itself.
I mean, really, look at Spore. People pay money and spend countless hours fooling with it because it has tools like the one we use to edit avatar appearance, so they can stretch their little creature’s legs or recolor its eyes! They aren’t there for imports, for Twitter integration . . . they’re there for the same reason a kid likes to play with blocks. And that’s what makes SL special, too.
Anyway, I’ll shut up now, and thanks for reading if you got this far. I just get frustrated that I’m too busy using SL to blog about SL. The whole blogosphere is skewed that way, though.
Spore was a bomb.
It was poorly handled DRM policy that hurt Spore, along with too much hype (too many delays in development and increasing hype the whole time) and very limited interaction with other users. That aside, Spore might look like a bomb to the typical SL user, because we can create better stuff more easily using SL tools, with our friends standing right there to see it.
@Kim:
I imagine that your suggestion of the in-world mesh building tool would require as a sub-component … that in-world mesh works in the first place. So I don’t agree with your “don’t need mesh import” statement. The importing itself is trivial – that’s just data-sending. It’s the supporting of mesh that’s 99% of the work, and you’d need that for your suggestion.
And as to your suggestion for mesh, I would agree that the next logical step is to make an in-world mesh tool, even a basic one like blender. I think, while we have a limited window of Philip Rosedale’s attention, that now would be the time to push this.
As for social media integration, I disagree completely. It’s the walled-garden approach to virtual worlds that has kept them unusable. By reaching out and interacting with the rest of the web, one forces oneself to consider the larger picture of what users expect and how to satisfy needs for easy-to-use software. Integrating with social media flows naturally with this goal. There’s no good reason why I shouldn’t be able to IM an avatar from AIM or Skype, to look at a user’s profile from the web, to tie in my additional information – blogs, websites, de.lic.io.us, diggs, facebook, etc.
Well gee, Hiro, of course there has to be mesh support in order to offer mesh creation, and everyone knows it exists, even if it’s not completed. I think exports will have a far greater positive impact than imports. And yes, now is the time to push for it. That’s why I’m here cluttering up Dusan’s blog.
The problems of social media integration, for the average Resident (not people who are working for enterprises) have been discussed over and over by others who will be more affected by them.
There was already a way to IM an avatar, as well as a way to SMS an avatar, years ago (before SLIM, Avaline, and etc.). Can’t recall if it was using AIM or Yahoo or both without digging up the documentation, but I have in my Inventory a scripted “cell phone” which I purchased years ago which did this. This sort of thing was very popular for a while, as a novelty and a status symbol (the sim would get full and I’d have to wait to go to the store for more ringtones and updates). But it didn’t last. Because it’s easier for most Residents to use a regular SL IM, since they’re usually talking to other Residents.
You can already look at much of a Resident’s profile from the Web. http://world.secondlife.com/resident/avatar UUID here] I turn up SL user profiles all the time when doing Web searches. Sure, this could be improved . . . but I wouldn’t want to see Linden putting resources into this before they focus on other things that are more important for the average Resident.
The real question is . . . do you really think SL and other virtual worlds, with their walled garden approach, are “unusable”? If I thought that, I would be in a different business. And if it were true, no one would be inworld and we wouldn’t still be around having this discussion. What you’re really saying, Hiro, is that this walled garden approach makes SL less useful for meeting *your* goals . . . which aren’t typical for Residents.
I’m not a typical Resident, either, but I have enough vision to see that at this juncture it’s particularly important to focus on SL as a whole. Mainstream users do and always will outnumber Solution Providers. We depend on them, not the other way around.
Walled garden . . . works for the iPhone (with third-party apps, just like that cell phone in my avatar’s Inventory). Works at the local amusement park, and at the upscale subdivision down the road, and the nearby corporate campus with the guards checking badges. Works at a movie theater that doesn’t let you bring in your own popcorn. Sure, opening it up would be better for some (not all) Residents. But this is a debate I don’t have time for today.
Anyway, here’s another piece of the puzzle . . . thinking about LL’s goal of a web-based client and living in everyone’s pocket on their mobile device, check out an iPhone app called SculptMaster 3D.
Here’s an example to replace that botched URL http://world.secondlife.com/resident/fd7902f8-834c-4cbc-84d3-25cb5a823053 (Jeez, I need to update my Profile!)
If your looking for good OpenSim viewers, I strongle recommend you check out this website called inflife.net, All the viewers available there have loads of features and are Easy to use. Cheers, Hope this helped someone
@Kim:
“I think [mesh] exports will have a far greater positive impact than imports.”
I’d be curious to hear your rationale and examples of what kind of impact that export would have, aside from simply making OpenSim variants much more appealing? (As in, you elude that residents will build in Second Life and sell to other platforms. I think the exact opposite is more likely.)
“Second Life is supposed to be a world-changing, better-world-creating thing. It can be that, but not if everything it offers is imported from somewhere else.”
If user-created-content is “world-changing”, then why have dozens of other virtual worlds that *did* have exportable content not change the world? Seriously, Second Life being world-changing has nothing to do with object-export, and everything to do with eroding geography and physical limitations as a barrier. These are things that have to do with access and community, not building tools.
“The problems of social media integration, for the average Resident have been discussed over and over by others who will be more affected by them.”
This “average resident” understands how to use social media, but I don’t automatically grant that they get the “why”. The how is a matter of implementation – certainly there are silly ways of integrating social media (for example, forcing real identity). The “why” is much more of the big question, in my view. Second Life’s community is limited by Second Life’s log in. There really is no convenient way to share in-world events without completely writing new ones in a different medium (google calendar, facebook, whathaveyou), and that doesn’t lend itself to easy sharing in-world. And speaking of limiting community …
… your example of “but profiles CAN be accessed” is exactly why it’s bad. First, you didn’t have the right URL – it wasn’t intuitive enough to grab easily. Secondly, it’s an obscure URL. Why isn’t it just http://www.secondlife.com/residents/yourusernamehere? Thirdly, the information is missing the majority of the elements of a SL profile.
“The real question is . . . do you really think SL and other virtual worlds, with their walled garden approach, are “unusable”?”
No, actually, that’s putting words in my mouth. I never alleged Second Life or other virtual worlds that take a walled garden approach are “unusable”. What would be more accurate would be “are not usable in as many ways as one that takes a more interactive approach”.
“I’m not a typical Resident, either, but I have enough vision to see that at this juncture it’s particularly important to focus on SL as a whole. ”
If you were aiming to name-call me as lacking vision, you’ve succeeded.
But furthermore, I think “focus on SL as a whole” is a vague statement. You mean it as far as the majority of Second Life’s residents. But at the same time, any time revolutionary features come to Second Life (music, web, sculpties, etc) – residents adopt them and the idea of what most-residents-do expands.
Also, there’s another flaw to your logic, here. Most residents never make it past orientation, let alone past the first few hours of using Second Life. Your statement assumes *active, long-time committed* residents, and in that case, you’ve mapped out a plan for Second Life to never expand to new audiences.
“Walled garden . . . works for the iPhone”
This is an invalid example. You’re now redefining what I mean by “walled garden”. What I mean is interactivity with the rest of the Internet. The iPhone store is a walled garden in a completely different sense – in the proprietary store and hardware. Equivocating the two concepts is apples and oranges. The iPhone is a success *precisely because* it is not a walled garden in my sense. It connects to the Internet. To your favorite chat programs. To searching for things using GPS. Etc.
“[walled garden] Works at the local amusement park”
If we equate Second Life to an amusement park, there are literally hundreds of online games with a market much, much larger than Second Life. Second Life rakes in tens of millions for Linden Lab. The gaming market rakes in tens of Billions. So I don’t think this example works too well, either.
“[walled garden] and at the upscale subdivision down the road”
I don’t think equating Second Life, or any other Internet service, as a place of shelter and physical safety works.
“and [walled garden works for] the nearby corporate campus with the guards checking badges.”
Here, and with the last example you’re defining “walled garden” as security. That’s not what I’m talking about at all. I’m talking about interactivity with other mediums of communication. Naturally, any piece of software should be secure and not hackable. But that has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.
“Sure, opening it up would be better for some (not all) Residents. But this is a debate I don’t have time for today.”
You make the assumption that by integrating social media, suddenly everything is “opened up”, or whatever that means. This is a *privacy* issue, not a walled-garden issue. No one here is lobbying to enforce 100% user transparency. We’re simply endorsing integration with other mediums of communication.
OpenSim variants are already getting more appealing. For more insight into the impact of export versus import I suggest thinking about economics instead of online games. Other virtual worlds have come and gone for a variety of reasons, more of them and for more reasons than would make sense to cover in the scope of a blog comment. I didn’t say that exports would magically make SL into a world-changer; I said that it can’t be a world-changer if it’s just a collection of odds and ends imported from other places. Those aren’t the same thing. It is, however, the building tools (and Residents’ ability to retain their rights to their creations) that set SL apart from its competitors. It’s going to have to be tech that puts SL ahead again, because I haven’t noticed them hiring a community manager, which is, as I said in my earlier comment, what I think they really need. Unfortunately, in 25 years in this industry, I have seen far too many companies lay off community management staff in order to hire marketing staff and the like, to their detriment, and I’d be shocked (but pleased) if Linden does otherwise. I’m not going to comment on social media here again, because I suspect our views on it are so opposed that we’d end up off-topic discussing it.
Here are a few other points . . .
The URL was botched because I made an attempt to genericize it as an example, including a character or spacing the comments section didn’t parse correctly. An important discussion shouldn’t turn on a typo.
You wrote, “I never alleged Second Life or other virtual worlds that take a walled garden approach are ‘unusable’.” But what you actually did write before that was, “It’s the walled-garden approach to virtual worlds that has kept them unusable.” If I’d posted that, you would have questioned it, too, but I would have admitted my wording hadn’t been quite right instead of blaming you for putting words in my mouth.
“Walled garden” is a bad term to use because the definition is inexact . . . and it’s pretty funny how definitions of it vary, and how they have changed over time. I didn’t change the meaning of the term on you . . . it’s a vague term in the first place. Even if there were Facebook and Twitter integration, SL would *still* fit the definition of a walled garden, just like an iPhone.
I didn’t say more about export vs. import for three reasons. One, I’m busy. Two, I believe Dusan probably has a lot to say on the matter, and it would be rude to upstage him any further on his own blog. Three, it’s been a long time, but I think I initially got the idea from Csven anyway, years ago, and it’d be better to look up what he’s said about it first.
What I see going on here is an attempt to make a mountain out of a malformed URL, getting bogged down in terminology, upset because I said I believe I have vision (saying I have two arms doesn’t mean you haven’t got any), and other distractions. I didn’t post here because I felt like having a contest to see who’s the most slippery debater, but to discuss the future of SL. I feel we’re on the edge of that ugly territory wherein a spelling error is used to question the validity of someone’s views, and I wanted to have a discussion, not a debate. If I upset you, I apologize. We’d be better off discussing this inworld without an audience to impress.
ah. the interference medium strikes again.:)
inyaface….the belief of a generation;)
and yes..community managers are the true mediators in communities..be them physical or digitally constructed.
another reason SL died of LL this last 3 years.:)
That popcorn smells really good, Cube.
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