Philip Rosedale tells Der Spiegel online that “The early users of Second Life are simply people who have a lot of time” and outlines priorities and his thoughts on coming competition, including the fact that he’s worried that the competition has learned from Second Life’s mistakes.
The interview reiterates Rosedale’s current speaking points:
- Second Life needs to crash less
- Improvements will make it do more and look better
- Usability needs to be improved, for example the client
- Doing these things will create a utility that will attract business and education, plus a bunch of other people
I’ve spoken to this before, but I’ll reiterate: this is hardly a strategic vision for Second Life. Strategy consists of a vision that people can relate to and rally around, against the backdrop of core competencies (something that SL is paying a lot of attention to, which is why talk is always about code improvements, technical features, lag, and crashes), and target user groups.
It addresses the competitive landscape with the flippant insight that “geez, I sure hope they don’t learn what we did wrong and get it right”, and it continues to count on the concept of being an appliance:
“There might have been more enthusiasm and stronger growth in the first two quarters of 2007, but I think that the core growth in utility and in applications is still very strong,” said Rosedale.
In response to the question about target groups, Rosedale is elusive, bringing up eBay as a parallel.
I’ve been impressed with Philip and I’m going to let him slightly off the hook - maybe something was either lost in translation, he was having a bad day, or….well, I don’t like to think of the alternative which is that he really believes he’s creating the equivalent of an ISP and 3D Web hosting company.
What I would have hoped to hear is something more like the following:
- Early users made a choice to invest their time and attention in Second Life, building a creative storehouse of talent, objects, scripts, and best practices
- As we improve the platform, we need to realize that we can enhance the orientation experience, make the client more ‘newbie’ friendly, but at the end of the day this is like attracting new immigrants to a new country…we can’t simply count on people developing “apps” on our “utility” but we need to market, sell, attract and evangelize for the deeper potential of the medium
- More users can be persuaded to invest time in Second Life if we do this, but we’ll also need to create specific outreach strategies to different target groups. We’ll attract 3D designers, for example, by providing orientation packages on integrating 3DS and Maya work flows into SL. We’ll attract “game developers” by selling Havok4 and now Mono and we’ll be out there at conferences strutting the stuff of our highly active user community.
- We’ve already seen from our competition that they do a brilliant job marketing - Metaplace, for example, is highly active in blogs, has an effective PR effort, is accessible, and Raph Koster actually jumps into forums and responds personally. We’ll learn from them just as they’ve learned from us, and recognize that we’re in a war for people’s attention, and the idea of “build it and they will come” won’t fly in the face of competing worlds.
- We’ll attract new partnerships and stop acting like a walled garden. We’ll realize that any talk about being a utility and opening up the architecture is just tech talk. It’s no longer just about technology, it’s about competing for attention. We’ll talk to Facebook, and media companies, and cell phone carriers, and we’ll strategize new ways not just of extending the utility by shipping servers out, but by extending the brand into unexpected places, with unexpected partners, and in unexpected ways.
- All of which means these are exciting times, and these are exciting things that we’ll promote, discuss, and actively engage our current users in. Our current users are our best potential advocates, and it’s time to give them the proper tools so that they TOO can get out there and evangelize the cause.
Until now, we’ve played favorites and we’ve given them more reasons to moan and complain than to celebrate and its my personal obligation to stop calling myself an evangelist and start to call myself an enabler of an entire community of evangelists, individuals and organizations. My job is not to defend SL and spin the latest crash statistics but rather to empower others with a vision, enable them with tools, and make them feel engaged in a powerful and creative community that is not building just a utility, but is creating a new world.
per you point on bringing in different target markets by integrating 3DS and Maya: Having been part of the architectural community (RL Architects in SL, Studio Wikitecture) for a number of years now, i can say without hesitation if seamless import/export functionality were incorporated, there would be a huge influx of this demographic into SL. If i was given a dime for every time someone asked me if they could import their models, I’d be able to create my own virtual world.
Agreed Ryan. The limitation of course is that as soon as true interoperability is provided, the instant the in world economy is thrown out of whack. How could the current houses, prefabs, offices, and furniture market survive if you could easily import objects created with the more advanced tools, fully textured and baked, not to mention warehouses of current objects from the poser/blender/daz3D communities flooding into SL?
The current work-arounds at least place a time premium on converting objects that already exist, or require creating objects from scratch using SL plug-ins, thus maintaining the economy.
One idea, that I’ve voiced elsewhere, is that when they open up the architecture maybe they include this interoperability which private servers/islands can toggle on and off, much as the Grid will have different client and perhaps physics versions running as well. Current land and economies would thus be protected but architects and designers would be able to set up their own areas in which to accomplish what you’re talking about, which is to tap into the more sophisticated tool sets available out of world, and thus be able to more rapidly prototype.
Other grids and platforms are taking this weakness of SL’s and turning it to their advantage - being able to import Google SketchUp, or OBJ files, etc., but their economies are being structured in an entirely different way, often not based on in world exchanges but rather full integration into the “Web” (Scenecaster being a good example of this).
None of which negates my point - bridging can become a valuable service, and Linden should facilitate a step-by-step approach which maybe isn’t true interoperability, which places a time investment on importing objects so as not to undermine the economy, and which trains groups like architects on how to maximize the platform and not solely leave it in the hands of The Arch and others.
Other grids will be set up for the purposes of architectural walk-throughs for RL clients. But they’re unlikely to offer the sophisticated scripting and economic environment of SL.
For every future project different virtual worlds will compete for revenue and attention. SL needs to do a better job explaining what it IS good for, (collaboration, exploration, research, but maybe NOT full architectural prototyping in the short term just as it’s not a game engine either) and then facilitate the ability for users to maximize those particular features and benefits.
[…] Second Life Users Have Too Much Time On Their Hands: Philip Rosedale Quote from the site - Philip Rosedale tells Der Spiegel online that “The early users of Second […]
Once there is real interoperability, who would want to turn it off? Would you want to make your web page such that the user couldn’t click on another link while on the page?
I see the bigger question being one of intellectual property protection. In some sense, the genie is already out of the bottle, but reputable virtual world providers will have to provide some kind of protection against blatant rip-off.
In the end, I believe interoperability is about logging into your preferred avatar provider, and then navigating through a shared, interconnected world, using that avatar. This allows different VW providers to provide different price points on the cost/value chain, similar to how e-mail servers serve different users in different ways.
Hopefully we can find some way to avoid spam, though :-/
Jon, what is your basis for assuming that people want and need to have interoperability mean that their avatars can walk between worlds? Many people don’t have a problem keeping multiple avatars in multiple games and worlds. They like it that way, in fact.
Everything important about interoperability is about intellectual property. And because no one has a good way to protect it, that’s why interoperability isn’t needed in the burning way that you imagine.
Dusan, I realize, too, that this dream of Maya and working offline and all the rest is held by a tiny handful of geeks. But most people using SL don’t care. Eventually, if SL doesn’t supply this, some other platform like Multiverse will — and what of it? It won’t speak to the needs of the majority of users, who need creation of content not to be the property of a specialized few using complex utilities like Maya, but need it to be user-friendly and available to all on a continuum of ability.
More sophisticated tool sets are alright in their way, but if they can’t interact with the rest of the world, what good is it? A perfectly rendered Taj Mahal just sits there like a postcard.
There is nothing wrong with being a walled garden; people enjoy the protection and *the civility* of walled gardens.
External programs are becoming cheaper, more accessible, and as a result are generating huge libraries of beautiful, “user-generated” content.
These programs are no longer just confined to hugely expensive platforms like Maya and 3DS. It’s not just architects who are creating buildings, it’s someone at home creating the perfect cottage, or the most stunning bicycle. Because these objects are increasingly portable between programs, and because they’re spawning amateur/”user-generated” content, then at some point users will be attracted to the idea of porting those pieces of content to virtual worlds, and in some cases already can.
It’s not the specialized few who will have the deepest long-term interest in interoperability, it’s the non-specialized many. I may not be the best builder in SL, but I have fun with it, and then I hit a wall…I want to sculpt, I’d love to properly render lights in the build, or I want to create a custom animation. What happens (or happened to me) is I cross out from SL to try to build on what I’ve learned and discover a whole other world out there of software, different ways to build, and different ways to express myself. But I can’t bring most of it back….and so, some day, I find a platform that WILL allow that and maybe I go there instead.
Yes, I do believe that the “pros” will find their own homes with true interoperability so they can throw together 3D walk-throughs of a building design in a virtual world. I also believe that this capacity should be built into SL….because they’re not the only ones who would like to see their work on other platform brought into a virtual world.
IF SL doesn’t do it, someone else will…and that someone else won’t be creating interoperability to satisfy a few architects, they’ll be doing it to tap into an ever-growing community of SketchUp, Daz3D, Poser and other artists who are doing it for the sheer joy of it - kind of like what SL has been.
I’d like to protect the garden. I’d like to make sure that if SL expands its reach into other creative communities that it doesn’t do so at the expense of the economy (in objects, time, real estate, etc).
My issue with the walled garden isn’t that the garden shouldn’t be walled, it’s that its boundaries shouldn’t remain static. The issue of interoperability is a question about whether to shift the garden’s boundaries and cultivate new soil.
I’m not sure my idea of ‘walls within walls’ works, it’s just an idea.
What I am sure of is that Second Life does not have a lock on content that’s “user friendly and available to all”. This is the very premise, for example, of Metaplace and will be the premise of platforms to follow, none of which is worrying particularly about the architects, but *are* worried about being able to tap into the widest available tool sets being used by the ‘non-professional creators’.
As Prok says:
“More sophisticated tool sets are alright in their way, but if they can’t interact with the rest of the world, what good is it? A perfectly rendered Taj Mahal just sits there like a postcard.”
Now…replace “more sophisticated tool sets” with “Second Life” and that’s the argument I’m making:
“Second Life is all right in its way, but if it can’t interact with the rest of the world, what good is it? And in Second Life, the Taj Mahal that sits there like a postcard isn’t even perfectly rendered.”
[…] about Second Life from…Google? February 5, 2008 — dusanwriter Linden Labs is worried that the competition may have learned from its mistakes. In the meantime, it’s by way of […]
Prok’s comments are business as usual - same hatred towards geeks and hackers, growing on soil of own software creation impotence and feeling insecure in world where everyone and his dog can pull the carpet from under his presumably almighty all-things-shall-be-Proks-way-or-go-off. Prok, please, get a life, stop whining - you can’t stop change in software world. Just get used to it - resistance is futile, all your bases belong to us
I’ve been pondering the import/export problem. I think that there may be a way to do this with LSL… I need time to toy with it, but the general idea is that a script can tell the dimensions of a prim, as well as the textures on it.
the trouble will be… (1) scripts won’t be able to be sent, (2) texture UUIDs might be considered a bypass of the inworld permissions system (see http://www.your2ndplace.com/node/889 ).
Then, (3) - converting abscissa,ordinal and azimuth plus dimensions to a format another application can read. I haven’t looked into this… I’d expect someone has a CSV format, but… with all the proprietary data formats out there, it is hard to say. Still… it could be a base for rezzing stuff on an OpenSim simulator.
The question is whether or not it is as efficient as hacking a client bot to do the same. But then we get into bypassing the de facto DRM, which can be very problematic from a legal standpoint.
Taran:
The technicalities are a bit out of my league. Er, not a bit…a lot. What you’re describing sounds a lot like what SimTools did with Maya.
http://www.simtools.jp/sltk/en/index.php
It has a plug-in for Maya which includes a little side bar with standard SL prims. You can texture them using textures from the SL library and as I understand it, if you can figure out how to work the script within Maya you can also load additional textures of your own and just code in the UUIDs. You then rez a ‘build prim’ in SL which rezzes the full build (as many prims as included, up to a full sim’s worth they say) including the textures and placements.
Now, it’s wonderful, but it’s Maya specific. I assume the other work-arounds are program specific such as a work-around I saw for importing Google SketchUps.
I wonder whether what’s needed is a bridge to Collada? Seems to me most game engines and so on have a Collada import function.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA
If you could build a bridge from SL to Collada, then you’d have a bridge from Collada to most third party applications. You’ll always run into the texture UUID issue, but I’ve been working with someone to see if there isn’t an automated way to upload textures and then collect the UUIDs.
I know with sculpts that they recommend loading your sculpts directly to the library rather than through the “upload texture” feature, so seems to me there’s a way to connect to the database outside the viewer.
Complex problem! And as I say, this isn’t my area, just sharing a few of the tools I’ve run across and little bits and pieces.
Thanks for the post Taran!
Go visit Mindies.org (Metaverse Independent Developers). There are a lot of emerging tools in terms of content pipelines between worlds, including Second Life to Multiverse pipelines. It takes everything through Collada as the middleware layer. There is a video of it in action at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TETMEkBteS0
Thanks for the post Dixie - read this on Vint’s blog I think? Really wonderful and intriguing and Collada is the way to go. Can you reverse engineer it so it goes the other way?
[…] I suppose puts the early adopters in the category of refugees from reality? In fact, Mitch echoed Philip’s claim that the early users of Second Life were people “with too much time on their […]
[…] Essay questions: Describe how the following is useful for positioning yourself in the media, or towards strengthening relationships with […]