For a month or so, I have been successfully using Google’s latest and greatest tool, Google Analytics. It provides mechanisms to do a statistical analysis on your site. I’m demo’ing it on my own blog, which is the only personal site I’ve got that has over 250 unique visitors per day (well, at least according to Google Analytics).

The interesting bit I found out is the type of browser people are using to access this blog. Almost all statistics I’ve found show Internet Explorer to have over 90% market share, and all the rest taken together are using the remaining browsers.

It was a bit surprising to see how different the statistics are for this blog. First, apparently, almost 12% of the users are Mac users. That is almost 3 times as much as the “official” number of Mac users worldwide — at a market share of around 4.17%, if I remember correctly.

Much more surprising was to see that Firefox users number around 40%, around the same as Internet Explorer users. This was by far the most surprising figure!

Sorry about the completely non-SL post of today. More interesting bits will follow over the weekend, if I can spare some time in collecting my thoughts…

It was yesterday, April 17th, 2006, around 5 PM PST (in-world time), that Second Life saw its 200,000th active resident join in!

Snapshot from the Second Life home page, taken several hours afterwards…

The amazing bit is that Second Life took something near 2 years to reach their first 100,000 users, but just 4 months for doubling that figure.

Congratulations, Linden Lab!

Let’s see if you make your goal of reaching a million users by the end of this year. If you can double the population every 4 months, that will be almost possible!

==========================
Franimation Overrider v1.7
Copyright (C) 2004 Francis Chung
Documentation by Gwyneth Llewyn and Kex Godel

Wet Ikon Distribution
==========================

Welcome to the wonderful world of animation overriding!

We hope that you enjoy this open source product.

Please note that although this object allows you full technical permissions, you must still abide by the licensing terms specified below.

You are welcome to distribute the Franimation Override script with your products in Second Life, compliant with the Gnu Public License. I would ask that you contact Francis Chung to add yourself to the volounteer support group.

———-
LICENSE?
———-

Scripts:
———
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

Model:
———
The Wet Ikon (amped) model copyright CCA-NoDerivs License.

—————-
Support Help
—————-
The following people have generously offered their time to help with animation overrider questions:

Ulrika Zugzwang
Water Rogers
Storma Amarula
Torrid Midnight
YadNi Monde
Wynx Whiplash
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Email: gwyneth.llewelyn@secondlife.game-host.org
MSN: gwyneth.llewelyn@secondlife.game-host.org
Yahoo: gwyneth_llewelyn

———————–
QUICK START GUIDE
———————–

So you’re itching to try it out and don’t want to read the whole manual? Good for you!

To get the Franimation Overrider working, there are just a few simple steps. If you need more help, details are provided in the Documentation/FAQ section below.

1. Rez the Franimation Overrider on the ground.

2. Drag your custom animations for walking, standing, sitting, etc. and drop them inside the “Contents” folder of the Franimation Overrider.

3. Open the “*Default Anims” notecard located in the Franimation Overrider and type the EXACT name of each custom animation below every “posture state” line. DO NOT add any lines or remove any lines to any part of the notecard. Just fill in the blank lines. Also note that spaces, punctuation, hyphens, etc. ARE relevant here!

Example: If you have a custom animation for walking called “Sexy-Walk #1″ you have to type exactly that on the line under the “-=Walking=-” posture state keyword. Your notecard should look like the following:

-=Walking=-
Sexy-Walk #1
=Running=-

-=Crouchwalk=-
[...]

4. Attach the Franimation Overrider to yourself.

5. That’s it! Enjoy your “new moves”

————————-
COMMAND REFERENCE
————————-

/ao on
Enable the Franimation Overrider

/ao off
Disable the Franimation Overrider. This will make you revert back to using the default animations.

/ao hide
Make the Franimation Overrider attachment invisible (if you don’t like it to appear with your current outfit)

/ao show
If invisible, make the Franimation Overrider visible again.

/ao reset
Reset the Franimation Overrider script. This can be useful if the script is acting strangely, or if you just want it to reset and re-read the default notecard.

/ao nextstand
Immediately switches you to the next standing animation in the list, or the first one if you’re at the end of the list.

/ao col [colour]
Changes the colour of the model. [colour] can be a name (such as red, tan, or mauve) or a colour vector. ( for blue)

/animset
This tells the Franimation Overrider to load a different notecard, in case you want to use multiple animation sets and quickly switch between them. You must specify the exact notecard name in place of “” above.

/anim
Play an animation. (eg. /anim hold_r_handgun)

/noanim
Stop playing an animation. Play an animation. (eg. /noanim hold_r_handgun)

/noanim all
Stop playing all animations.

For example, if you want to play a different set of animations when you’re tired, you can create a second copy of the Default Animations notecard, name it “sleepyanims” and then switch to it by typing: /animset sleepyanims

—————————
DOCUMENTATION / FAQ
—————————

Q> What is “animation overriding”?

A> This is a way to replace the default body movements that SL does on your avatar with custom animations.

Your avatar has different “postures”, which technically are a “state” you’re in, for example, “Standing”, “Flying”, “Walking”, and “Sitting on Ground” are a few of the many posture states your AV can be in.

An animation overrider makes it possible for you to play a custom animation whenever you are in a specific posture. This means you can choose to replace the way you look when you are standing, flying, sitting, etc.

This means that you can make your avatar move, stand, and sit in a unique way.

Q> Where are the custom animations?

A> The Franimation Overrider does not come with any custom animations, you will have to add your own.

Q> Where do I get custom animations?

A> You can get custom animations in stores, or from friends. There are also a bunch of free animations floating around the world and reportedly available at the Bazaar in Stillman.

There are nice people collecting dozens of freebie animations, for example, if you look or ask around some people have a “pack” of 200 free custom animations.

If you need more sophisticated animations, then you may contact one of the many wonderful professional animators out there or buying animations from their stores. You can search for them in world under the “Find” button, with the “Places” tab selected, or search the forums at:

http://forums.secondlife.com

If you feel bold, creative, and technically competent, you can try making your own custom animations.

All custom animations in Second Life were uploaded in “BVH” format from a software program called Poser. You can upload your own if you own a copy of Poser, or if you have any BVH files which are compatible with the exact format that Second Life needs. Most random BVH files will not work without first being processed through Poser with the P2 figure.

There are several public domain, open source or shareware alternatives to Poser, but so far, they all seem to need the final tweaking done in Poser to work correctly in Second Life.

There are several tutorials online (again, search for that in the forums) for creating your own animations. To help you get started, here is a rough guideline for creating a still standing pose with Poser:

- Use a P2 model
- Create two frames
- Set both frames as keyframes
- Leave the first frame unchanged (ignore it)
- Pose your model in the second frame
- Export BVH
- Switch to SL and select “Upload Animation” from the “File” menu
- In the preview window, check [x] Loop, and set “Ease In” and “Ease Out” both to “0.5″ (roughly)
- Click the “Play” arrow button to confirm it looks ok
- Click the Upload button

Important Note: Using Poser and getting it to work with SL can be very challenging. We really can’t help you overcome it’s learning curve in this document alone or through Instant Messages. If you do need help with Poser, *please* ask on the Second Life forum created specifically for animation discussion.

Q> How does the Franimation Overrider work?

A> The Franimation Overrider detects your posture and plays a custom animation whenever it changes.

The Franimation Overrider is an attachment containing a script and a configurable notecard. The Franimation Overrider script will read the notecard so that it knows which postures to override animations for, and the names of the animations to use in their place.

While the Franimation Overrider is attached, it will constantly monitor your posture state. When it sees that your posture has changed, it will send a command to stop playing the current animation and start playing the custom animation you specified in the notecard.

Q> How do I add animations to my Franimation Overrider?

A> Just drag and drop them into the contents of the Franimation Overrider, as so:

- Rez your Franimation Overrider on the ground (must be in an area which allows building)
- Right click on the Franimation Overrider, choose Edit
- In the edit window, if you see a button which says “More >>” in the bottom right corner, click that so that it opens up the edit window to show you more options
- You should see several tabs “General”, “Object”, “Content” and “Texture”.
- Click on the “Content” tab. You will see some notes and a script, don’t mind them just yet.
- Now locate the custom animations that you want to use in your inventory, and drag-drop them into the Contents folder
- Right click on the Franimation Overrider and choose “Take” to take it back into your inventory

Q> How do I configure the Franimation Overrider notecard?

A> Follow these instructions:

- Attach the Franimation Overrider to yourself, or rez it on the ground
- Open the contents tab (as described above)
- Open and edit the notecard named “*Default Anims”.
- Reload the notecard by saying, “/animset *Default Anims”

Here is where you assign a custom animation to each of the possible “anim states”. “Standing” is a special state - you can have up to 5 different standing animations, and Franimation Overrider will cycle among those 5 animations occasionally.

The notecard configuration is rather simple. Lines starting with things like “-=Sitting=-” identify the posture that will be detected; the line immediately following that one will have the NAME of the custom animation that you have dragged into the Franimation Overrider’s inventory.

*CAUTION: It is very important not to add or remove any lines!

When you first open the notecard, it will have the names of all states, and all lines in-between will be empty. It is important that you only change the empty line between each -=Posture=- line.

The empty lines should be the name of the animation which will be played for the posture specified immediately above it. Make sure you write the name EXACTLY like the animations’s name - with spaces, punctuation, and caps.

Sometimes the name can be something very weird, or, if you don’t have an US keyboard, some characters may be very hard to reproduce. In that case, either change the animation’s name _before_ you drag it into the Franimation Overrider’s Contents, or you may open up Properties on that custom animation, use the mouse to copy the name, and paste it into the notecard. Just make sure you don’t get any extra spaces at the beginning or end of the animation name when pasting - Franimation Overrider needs the EXACT name to work properly (otherwise you’ll get some errors like “Couldn’t find animation XXXX”).

Example:

You want to override your default sitting animation with a custom animation called “weird0-S1tDown #345″. Your notecard configuration should have something like that:

[...]
-=Hover=-

-=Sitting=-
weird0-S1tDown #345
-=PreJump=-

[...]

Notice the empty lines after “Hover” and “PreJump”, meaning you don’t have any custom animations for those, and Franimation Overrider will simply revert to the default animations. Also note it is very important not to add any extra lines anywhere to the notecard.

USEFUL TIP:

You should make a copy of a blank notecard first to your inventory, just in case you delete too many lines and can’t remember the state’s names afterwards. And make a copy of your own, modified notecard - you’ll save time when a new version of the Franimation Overrider comes along!

Q> What if I leave a line blank?

A> That is fine, if you leave a line blank, the animation for that posture will revert back to the default animation.

Q> Why are there 5 stand animations?

A> The Franimation Overrider will cycle through all five animations every 40 seconds or so. This behavior is much like the default standing animation where you occasionally shift your avatar’s body to different positions.

Q> I’m having animation glitches with my vehicle/dance script when the Franimation Overrider is on.

A> Other scripts which also play custom animations may interfere with the Franimation Overrider. Turn off the Franimation Overrider before you interact with these objects (see command reference for the off command).

Also see the Drawbacks section below for more details

—————–
TIPS & TRICKS
—————–

* Proper Application

Most animation states are rather simple to understand, but some of them are tricky. For example, you can run instead of walking.

In most cases, the animation for one would not look proper for the other, which is why there usually are two different custom animations for those states (i.e. two different Sexy Walks or Power Walks).

Using the wrong one generally looks quite weird (i.e. avatars “running in place” or “taking too long of strides”).

Also note that there are two different sitting animations - one for sitting on chairs (actually, any kind of object surface) and the other for sitting on the ground.

* Smooth Transitions

If you have an unusual custom walking animation, you probably will want to also customize the Turn Left and Turn Right animations as well. Otherwise your avatar will seem to go through a complex “dance” every time you turn left or right.

Flying is also complex, since you have things like “hovering” (standing in the air), flying slowly and quickly. You will want to probably choose a set of animations which makes these flow together well. Note that the “Flying slow” posture state is actually quite rarely experienced, unless you have a flawless connection and very high frame rates, but it does happen

Landing is also another problem, since you have soft and hard landings (depending on the speed) and free falling (not flying at all!).

So for most realistic appearance, this means that you have to “combine” all these animations properly and see how they work together - that’s normally not very easy when you just grab a few freebies (or worse, just poses and no real animations). The same, actually, applies to “swimming” - “flying” at the water’s surface or below.

* Idle Standing Cycle:

Standing is a special case in animations. The Franimation Overrider allows you to have up to 5 different standing animations, and will cycle among them every 40 seconds or so. If you just have one standing animation, be prepared to wait a while until it’s displayed!

* Multi-Animation:

For maximum flexibility, the Franimation Overrider also allows you to enable *multiple* animation with each posture. To do so, you put each animation name on the line, separated by commas.

Why would you want to do this? Well, often you will find that a single animation doesn’t fit what you want to do because of animation priorities. The problem sometimes is that high priority animations will completely override the lower priority animations.

If you are able to create your own animations in Poser, you can avoid this problem by breaking up your animation into multiple parts, which customize different parts of your body, then use the Franimation Overrider to re-play all of them together by specifying them as a comma-separated list on the line in the notecard.

This not only allows you to work around some of the limitations caused by animation priorities, but allows you to extract much more variety out of your animations since you can play them in different “chords”.

* Randomized Animations

You case separate animations in the notecard by a ‘|’ symbol. The Franimation overrider will randomly choose between ‘|’ a pipe separated list of comments. For example, suppose you have two separate jump animations, “gwinjump2″ and “gwinjump4″. In the notecard you can enter:

:: [ Jumping ] ::
gwinjump2|gwinjump4

So when you jump, sometimes you will jump with “gwinjump2″ and sometimes you will jump with “gwinjump4″. You can also use this trick to increase the number of different stand animations you use.

* Smooth Transitions (CONTENT CREATORS, PLEASE READ)

If you are creating and uploading animations, please note the importance of the “Ease In” and “Ease Out” settings. I strongly recommend setting these at 0.5 or higher, otherwise your animations will SNAP into place far too quickly, and it looks very unnatural.

By default, the preview window is usually set far too low. Every time I upload an animation, I usually set each to 0.5, sometimes higher (such as a slow dance movement where you want a very steady transition), and sometimes lower when applicable (such as the ease-in on a falling-to-the-ground animation).

—————
DRAWBACKS
—————

The Franimation Overrider is a nifty script, but as it is not part of the native code in the SL Client/Server architecture, you may occasionally encounter some very minor discrepancies from the intended behavior.

1. Animation Download Lag

Animations are rendered in the SL client program - and not server-side - so this means that all animations have to be loaded from the server into your program, for all avatars “seeing” you.

While the default animations are immediately available for everybody (as said, they already come with the SL application), your cool custom animations are not. This means that you’ll probably see them working for you, but on a particularly slow sim, others won’t see them immediately.

This is exactly the reason why sometimes you go to a club and nobody seems to be moving. After a while, you see everybody connected to the dance machine moving, and finally the one having dancing bracelets or loading custom dances.

The Franimation Overrider works the same way. People who haven’t recently “seen” your custom animation will have to download it from the servers before they see it in action. This means that probably just after teleport, or when using a “fresh” animation (say, sitting for the first time), people will NOT immediately see your custom animation, but the default one. There is nothing you can do about it, except fretting and wishing that Linden Lab(TM) gets you faster servers

2. Polling Lag

The way the Franimation Overrider works is by polling your current posture in a loop to retrieve your current state. This means that there will be a slight bit of response time between when you changed postures and when the next polling event occurs.

3. Conflicts With Other Animating Objects

The Franimation Overrider only knows how to override the default animation states. It will get into conflict with other objects which change your animation and should be turned off before using the other objects (see command reference for how to turn it off).

Examples of other objects which will probably interfere with the Franimation Overrider include dance bracelets, dance machines, and vehicles which use custom animations. Some other animation scripts may have some odd behavior as well, such as the hug animation script.

————-
CHANGELOG
————-
1.7: Added randomized animations, added fix for llGetAnimation bug for turning left/right

——
END
——

Documentation written by:
2004 Oct 17 - Gwyneth Llewely (first draft)
2004 Nov 28 - Kex Godel (edited and reformatted)

After a while, people are always bringing up this subject — when will voice be available in Second Life, and how it will split the community in two halves, the ones that will use it, and the ones that won’t/can’t.

The discussion is old and on the same day I have engaged in it twice; so I better use the basis of my own thoughts on a single place, and refer people to this article. I’m getting more lazy with age and lack of sleep…

Enjoy

As to the lovely gadgets and toys for ‘morphing’ voice (not really important for the educator community here, but since they’re being mentioned…), as well as text-to-speech and speech-to-text, well, they’re gadgets really. I’d like to compare them to SL thinking about the 1980s isometric-type of games, on 320×240 screens with 16 colours. Sure, with enough imagination, you got an ‘illusion’ of 3D, but it was simply way beyond what we can do with avatars with dozens of thousands of polygons today, rendered at 40-50 fps on a fast machine in SL. Voice Morphing software has improved dramatically in the past few years, but it’s a “toy” ? you can mask your voice, but it won’t get rid of your accent. For the Windows fans around there, I’d recommend taking a look at what companies like http://www.audio4fun.com/ are doing. Although I use a Mac exclusively, and they only do Windows versions of it (yes, I’ve tried to actively convince them to do Macintosh ports) I’ve bought one of their tools once to see the results, and are a somewhat lazy beta tester of their latest technologies. I managed to have some fun sounding a bit like Cindy Crawford or Humphrey Bogart with a toe-curling bad accent; lots of fun to be gathered that way, and the delay due to voice processing & morphing is acceptable (a second or so) for game role-playing. Still, this technology needs some years of development; it’s simply at the “cute toy” level. People will *always* know your voice is being masked; they might only get a bit confused as to your identity. So you’re able to successfully mask that, but a Russian woman of 50 won’t “pass” for a Valley Girl of 17 using this tool … or for an Orc, for that matter.

I’ve tried out several different tools at a time (almost 2 years ago!), some of them the result on academic research, and a few are for free. While there is really no much choice (and I found none for the Mac or Linux), the results are not much impressive. We’ll have to wait until this technology develops further (in 2 years of development, for example, the differences are not noticeable).

Text-to-speech looks (sounds?) much more promising. While demo’ing things like Rhetorical (now acquired by Nuance, http://www.nuance.com/, and called “RealSpeak”) and Oddcast (http://www.oddcast.com/home/), I was much more impressed. RealSpeak is far better in terms of quality (from the demos at least) but it should be incredibly costly. Oddcast is still too expensive for the average user, but it’s targetted to the medium-to-low market at least.

What this means is that at least on that front you’ll be able to use one of those technologies to “give voice” to your Orc avatar with ease. Of course, you’ll still be slightly handicapped, as people using their natural voice will be able to talk 4 times as quicklier as you can type. I believe that with a good combination of shortcuts (we’d need a better “gesture” system though) you’d be able to almost keep a “normal-speed” conversation using this. Definitely a “middle-way” solution. I suggested to Philip a long time ago that they looked into Rhetorical (now RealSpeak) and integrated it into SL whenever they wished to introduce voice chat in Second Life; “corporate pricing” would eventually allow LL to deploy something like that very cost-effectively, and in turn LL would be able to charge, say, an extra dollar or two per month for people wishing to use TTS. Both technologies allow you to get your “personalized voice” as well for a fee; so that would very likely be feasible (mind you, since this would be embedded into the SL client, it would be as low-bandwidth as regular text chat…).

Voice recognition software is another beast entirely. I tried IBM’s ViaVoice and Philips’ own dictation system. Although both are also “mid-level”, they’re impossible to use on an informal setting, where people are talking all the time on a very busy chatroom, with dozens of different dialects. These are tools thought to work on “limited environments”, the ones giving the best results needing to be trained for a specific user. This is more than adequate for someone that has problems typing due to some disability; but it won’t work for “capturing” a busy chatroom and converting it to typed text!

So, except for using TTS (the only promising technology in this bunch), there is no way in 2006 to be able to fullfill the following requirements:

- masking your voice and personalize it to fit to your avatar

- making sure people that can’t type are able to use voice software instead

- no exclusion of hearing/speech-impaired people

- dealing with dialects and accents

- low-bandwidth (”low” in the sense that 30 people chatting don’t need 1 Mbps just for that!)

- the ability to keep written transcripts of what has been said

What MIGHT work is that all “chat” communication is text-only (low bandwidth), but at each end, you have both text-to-speech and speech-to-text (trained to the user’s voice). This, I think, will be the way to go; it fullfills all the above requirements, and the technology is available in 2006: it’s just very expensive for the average user.

Mind you, I do fully agree that first-person-shooters, fast-paced and full with action, do really benefit a *lot* from voice chat. Not being interested in that kind of use of SL, I tend to minimize the importance of voice chat; I still think you can use external software for that. When it comes to general-purpose usage of voice in virtual worlds, I think I have to side with [*DELETED RL NAME HERE*] on this: we need full immersion first, and that will take a few more years. *Not* 50 years as I originally thought, but perhaps 5-10 years to get convincing immersion. 10 years ago, we speculated on what we would “need” so that full immersion were possible. Nowadays we have all the tools we need:

- Tracking body motion and expressions; we have all the key components for that, and the required hardware (some sort of laser thingy) is cheap and available; software has made huge leaps in that aspect, is still expensive.

- Cheap web cams and microphones with reasonably high quality (we have all that already).

- Mapping expressions to avatar’s faces (LL has developed that technology for the Bedazzle group, it was demoed on the Silver Bells and Golden Spurs video).

- Text-to-speech and voice morphing technology (available, still not good enough for general purpose use, and still very expensive).

- Speech-to-text technology (still unusable, except as described above).

- Goggles with gyroscopes (they exist, they’re cheaper these days than we think, but they’re not fully supported by SL, due to the way their OpenGL implementation works ? there is a thread on that on the forums as well).

- Body suits (full or partial) for tactile impressions. They’re still expensive, but the technology is quite well developed, just not easily adaptable. There were rumours and urban legends that Linden Lab itself had started as a company developing gloves for virtual worlds, and that SL was a way to demo their technology. According to the legend, Philip saw that the future of LL was on the software and not on the hardware, so he dropped that path (imagine if he hadn’t!).

- Low broadband costs. We have that.

- Powerful computers. On average, a 2006-bought computer is powerful enough to drive all the above applications and devices.

- Second Life Ok, that we have, and the price is right (free )

So, compared to the mid-1990s, where all these things were “prototypes” or “things-we-need”, in the mid 2000s, we have them all, just most of them are simply too expensive ? yet. Thus the “prediction” that it’ll only take 5-10 years to have, say, full body suits + goggles + TTS/STT software for US$10 a month.

Again, this is wildly speculative, but I look forward to it; it’s not a “dream” right now ? it’s available to you in 2006 if you have enough money

Anyway, do not take my word for it. Read Richard Bartle’s old article on the subject; although everyone knows that Bartle is biased towards text-based communications, he certainly raises the correct points — and I must agree with him to a degree. What we should wish for is full immersion, not a crippled “voice chat”…

Warning: This article was naturally an April Fool’s Day prank!

Well, so after the good news on the new round of funding, it shouldn’t come to a surprise what the next step would going to be: Linden Lab is to become a Google Affiliate.

This news shouldn’t come as a surpise to most of us. Both companies have a similar origin: they started with visionaries who had access to a certain technology (available, but not being used). They are really not much spread in time: Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in 1998, Philip Rosedale started Linden Lab in 1999. They come from an Internet generation where a good idea could give a start-up a really good kick forwards.

Both also use the same approach: instead of buying supercomputers of billions of dollars in hardware, software, and, most important, maintenance costs — they created their own “grid computers” instead, using slim, relatively cheap Intel-based PCs, and running Linux on top of them. Google’s technological achievement was the so-called Google File System; Linden Lab’s technological advance was the grid with dynamically streamed content, since we all know that this technology was “invented” by Philip himself over a decade ago.

Both companies have a strange way to deal with the status quo; they simply refuse to work the way you expect companies to work. Google launches amazing services for free. When Microsoft’s Hotmail was announcing “10 MBytes” of mailboxes, Google Mail was launched with a Gigabyte. Microsoft’s never fully deployed “Terra project” (now replaced) was superceded by the incredibly successful “Google Earth” — superior in all aspects. Google launched Google Talk using Jabber (with Apple following suit) instead of creating their own IM protocol. All of these strangely for free. All of these also weirdly being paid for with advertising; in an epoch where advertising on web pags was supposed to be a finantial flop, after the Internet bubble. Google seemed not to care.

Second Life is also highly irregular. It has free access; all the content is created by the users; Linden Lab invented the concept of becoming the first 3D content hosting provider (or at least the first to successfully implement it). People are still fighting about what “land” in Second Life means. The whole area is so radically new that no-one really understands it, and even Linden Lab is not so successful in promoting it.

Users of Second Life were always afraid that Linden Lab would be simply bought by the big and ugly entertainment industry giants — Electronic Arts, Sony Entertainment, or Microsoft. They would swallow it up and spit it out as a completely different product. It would become a Disneyland, PG-rated MMOG, something like a direct competitor to There.com or The Sims Online. Philip repeatedly assured us that he wouldn’t do that.

So, why Google? Well, the content giant has a wholly different concept. Google is expanding to encompass all content, and make it searchable. They started with web pages, then images, then newsgroups, then mailing lists… and then it was videos… then, the whole Earth… and also social networking (Orkut). It seems that Google wants to index and search the whole world.

Linden Lab got funding from the “pillars” of the Internet as we know it: eBay; Amazon; Mozilla Foundation. Still, Second Life does not feature a good search engine. You develop content there, but you cannot index it properly, and it’s hard to find it. Users of Second Life have toyed with the idea of getting a Google search engine inside SL; that’s what we need, and some people have toyed with this concept.

All this seemed to be building up in the past months; Philip has been “absent” from the world and still telling us that Linden Lab was becoming more and more “profitable” (or at least not operating at a loss); after the last round of funding, we understood that what Linden Lab was after was growth. 170,000 users are simply not interesting enough. The goal to reach a million is very clear on Linden Lab’s roadmap; but even a million might not be enough. No, for 3D content hosting to succeed, it must reach the hundreds of millions, and very fast.

Sadly, Second Life could not go “the easy way out”: selling the technology to the military, and thus get the required funding to grow; There.com has beated Linden Lab to that. So, an alternative would have to be found — quickly.

Enter Google. For some miracle, two software engineers back in 1998 amazed the world with a technology that indexes the whole world, and is able to have half of the global market share of search engines. They certainly know how to handle growth, and not only deal with that successfully, but efficiently. Google was the fastest search engine in 1998 with a few dozens of thousands of users; it still is the fastest one in 2007, with hundreds of millions of users, and an Internet that is perhaps 100 times bigger. We know how they do that — through their technical papers — but implementing it is a completely different story.

What Philip seemed to have noticed is that this know-how is definitely what Linden Lab requires to reach his own personal goal of creating the roots of the Metaverse. Linden Lab is too small for such an ambitious goal. Google, by contrast, may be a specialist in indexing text (although they’re quite good at indexing images and videos these days…), but they have a team of a thousand software engineering experts (yes, a thousand…) who are at the forefront of overcoming technical hurdles of dealing effortlessly and efficiently with projects of a huge size. This is the kind of technology Linden Lab needs.

Why would Google “need” Second Life? Well, the Google guys have been online often (don’t ask me for their avatar names; I won’t reveal the RL data!) and have seen what Second Life is able to do. Google has some experience dealing with 3D worlds, as we can observe at their attempts with Google Earth. Still, they wish to do more; I think that the notion of the “Desktop Google” has been tossed around very often, but there was nothing “new” with it — still 2D, still looking too much like a browser or a common application, no matter how cool AJAX is. The Google guys are not afraid of doing things in radically new ways. The 3D desktop has been announced by many, but Second Life is the closest we have to it.

Second Life is also a social network (not unlike Orkut, just with less friendly searching tools), a 3D blog (much more sophisticated than Blogger), and, naturally, a self-sustained economy, “created” from scratch just because people have Second Life. This is not unlike Google AdSense — it only exists because Google invented it. So, it seems that Page & Brin and Philip ‘Linden’ Rosedale are very much aligned in what they think the “virtual world” of the Metaverse should look like. What Philip has is the radical notion that it should be a 3D world; Page & Brin, on the other hand, have the means, the technology, and certainly the money to make it come true.

Second Life, as a platform, will not “disappear”. What I’ve understand is that Linden Lab will just be an “affiliate” — ie. part of the larger “Google family”, but its identity and culture will remain intact. However, this “credibility” given by Google will allow Linden Lab, at this stage, to bring what we desperately need to Second Life: good searching and indexing for content. As a bonus, we might start to see our profiles searchable through Orkut; and in-world IM will be fully integrated into Google Talk; and highly likely we’ll have TypeKey to do single sign-on authentication into Second Life. People already are used to get a Gmail account with their avatar names. So, in a sense, all this will now accelerate dramatically, and Second Life will be “googlized” pretty quickly. I can’t see but advantages in this approach…

On a second stage, Linden Lab will be able to grow Second Life to a scale no one could imagine back in 2002. By the year’s end, anyone having a Google account will be able to have an extra link on the profile page saying “Join Google Second Life”; and this will mean hundreds of millions of users in a short time. Forget the issues of the grid growth; Google has enough horsepower on their servers to deal with that. Instead of having people fighting about a handful of sims, we’ll see sims being added to the grid at a pace that will make our head spin; if I understand the way the Google File System works, this would probably mean that each and every server of the hundreds of thousands hosted by Google worldwide will now be able to run the Second Life server software as well. Imagine what that will mean — not in 2020 or 2030 or 2050… but very likely before 2010!

I was always a bit confused why Google, on their Google Talk software, had so little features — just a “bare bones” messenger, while competing products add all sorts of niceties, talking 2D cartoonish avatars, VoIP, etc. Well, I think it’s now obvious. Google Talk is just a step away to be replaced by Google Second Life; if you wish to have the full experience of IMing in chat rooms, do it the 3D way — go into Google’s virtual world. Seriously, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ or AIM cannot compete with that. In another 4 or 5 years, they will be forgotten (who still remembers — or uses, since it’s still online — AltaVista?).

2006 will definitely be the year to celebrate; what encourages me at this stage is that now Linden Lab will have ample breathing space to grow. And perhaps now our close friends in RL who have shunned us while we invested our time and effort in building this virtual world will now understand why we do it every day.

After all, if Page & Brin got the message, I guess most of our friends and family will now understand us, too.