You might find this “metaverse short story” interesting… specially because the author never logged in to Second Life (although he has heard of it)!

Architects do really understand what SL is all about.

Of course we all know that this number only means: “one million of avatar names with valid UUIDs on Linden Lab’s database servers for Second Life” and not really “one million users”. Still, it’s a nice metric, and one nice to follow since the end of Beta in June 2003 or thereabouts. Three years later, we’ve grown from 300 users to a million users (using the same metric). It’s cool. It’s something to be remembered

Congratulations to all who believed that Cory & Philip would win their bet of having a million users before the end of the year of 2006

For myself, I was expecting a million of users only between October 20th-22th. Yahoo’s putting Second Life on their front page accelerated the change of new users.

Our next step: reaching one million users logged in the last 60 days. Let’s see if we can reach that mark by the end of the year (highly unlikely)

Jeffrey Zeldman proposes a cute game of “find the differences” between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 using the pretext of Google’s buying YouTube. While this is of marginal interest of us Second Life users and Metaverse wannabes, one should also learn some of the lessons from this merger:

• YouTube is a 60-person company. Like Linden Lab, they did not make a profit. Still, they have millions and millions of users.
• Google seems to be interested in driving the “Web 2.0 Bubble”. They bought YouTube not for the technology (after all, Google Video, already deployed, is a competing product, and one where legitimate videos are actually for sale — unlike YouTube’s approach), but for their market and user base.
• Google is interested in leveraging the copyright wars. The more “borderline” companies they aggregate under themselves, the more tremendous Google’s impact is going to be on the lawsuits. In the end, Google might be so huge that the whole industry relying on their copyrights to get royalties to survive will need to strike a deal outside the court — effectively allowing Google to freely allow the distribution of copyrighted material, by being exempted from controlling the content they carry (which makes sense).

So, where does that leave us? With the impending concept that there is “Nothing else” but “social webs” in Web 2.0, but that they’re consolidating. I mean, just take a look on what the social Web is about:

• sharing texts
• sharing images
• sharing music
• sharing video
• sharing contacts

So we have listed all possible media, list the word “shared” before it, and we’ve covered the whole spectrum of possible Web 2.0 applications. Also, we’ve placed the human factor in there: sharing contacts.

Is that all?

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Once more, I welcome Extropia DaSilva’s insight and her most excellent newest essay, that she so kindly allows me to reprint here. Enjoy her fascinating thoughts - Gwyn

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that the pace of technological change is quickening. One of the surest signs of this is the tendency for useful analogies and metaphores to become defunct with almost alarming swiftness. A company releases a virtual world and it easily fits into the catagory MMOG. But another company releases an MMOG, does away with the end user license agreement and the notion that all content belongs to the company, putting creativity in the hands of the users, and we find our old analogies no longer hold.

Still, while those lured into these metaverses might consider it vital to understand what this brave new world represents, others might consider it an ivory-tower debate quite unconnected from everyday concerns. Fair enough. But let’s consider another technology that has become rather more integrated into our everyday lives, namely: The Web. For here we have another example of sweeping change making metaphores and analogies redundant.

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Reuters has now a special channel for Second Life — http://secondlife.reuters.com, brought to us through the amazing work done by the ever so bright Electric Sheep Company. I don’t know exactly what that means. Again, all I can say is that worldwide, news snippets are being sent to the media world-wide with the tag SECOND LIFE, Oct 15 (Reuters) and that Adam Reuters is their in-world journalist, paying attention to what goes on in this strange new world with its booming economy and exponential growth.

Somehow, this fits very nicely into the critical mass concept. For some reason, as we approach a million users (yes, I know, many are alts, but that’s actually irrelevant), things are just “bubbling” towards that mythical mark. Something is going to happen, and people are maneuvering towards that something. Perhaps it’s Second Life that enters its first stage of maturity — not technological maturity (as the past few days have shown, anyone with a borrowed script can bring the grid down to its knees), but a conceptual maturity. This is like finally placing a sign in the middle of the grid and saying: “So there. We’re not childrens any more. From this day on, we’re part of human history.”

We can’t foresee what will happen with Linden Lab and Second Life in one year, much less ten years or twenty. Dot-com burnouts are much more careful these days with their “predictions”, even if they still are enthusiastic about SL’s growth. I’m definitely an enthusiast, and one that has seen SL grow faster than expected — somehow, it seems that things are happening “too soon” instead of at a more leisurely scale. I fully embrace that change, and the enthusiasm that drives this change to happen sooner rather than later. For me, the worst case scenario will be LL’s downfall and disappearance, but people still being able to point at Reuters’ website and say: “well, at least a Reuters journalist was there to report the downfall”.

In a sense, Second Life might disappear some day, but it won’t be forgotten. Not any more.

Shameless plug: http://pixartisan.com/g_llewelyn_1.html

Well, at least that’s what they’re “showing off” with the new Economy statistics:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/02/new-statistics-on-second-life-population-growth-and-the-economy-now-available/trackback/
It’s interesting to see that a few hundreds of people are actually able to live off Second Life, or, at the very least, have a very interesting and profitable part-time job!