Google’s Ultimate Mashup, The End of Web 2.0, and More Metaverse Wannabees

May 31, 2009 - in Homepage, SL Economy, SL Technology by: Gwyneth Llewelyn
20 Comments

Beyond mashing up: federating social networking in 3D

So what’s wrong with Metaplace, Blue Mars, or other runners-up that wish to replace Second Life and become a “better” Second Life? First and foremost, you know my opinion about how venture capital is handed out: ideas come first, business plans next, market analysis last. That this actually works is for me incredibly surprising (but it does work!), and definitely shows my own inability to grasp the concept. Namely, how people are willing to invest in companies without a viable business plan and a complete lack of knowledge of the market always baffled me. Still, Philip wouldn’t have had his own company funded if it had been otherwise (but at least he managed to “reinvent” Linden Lab constantly to adapt to changing market conditions), so I keep my mouth shut

Nevertheless, it’s now obvious that Second Life, which also started as a “creative environment for designers and programmers to develop their own games”, totally moved away from that original concept. SL’s organic development has came out with absolutely surprising results: SL is now mostly a marketplace and an immersive social environment, and the rules that regulate the adoption rate of SL are now completely different — in fact, they’re closer to the ones regulating RL itself.

If you have read Freakonomics, you’ve read a lot about incentives. What is the incentive for people to stay in SL? The funny thing is that the answer is different for everybody. For a small fraction of the resident’s population, it’s the ability to be creative. Another small fraction feels fulfilled with its ability to role-play and provide a highly entertaining form of escapism (compared to, say, watching TV or reading a book). For another slice of the population, it’s all about business relationships (often starting as purely SL-based business opportunities and evolving to relationships iRL too). These are all very strong incentives, and SL provides critical mass for those residents to stay.

But the vast majority is still in SL because of the strong incentive to socialise — be it for dating or for attending live concerts, or simply chatting away on impromptu meetings or on Group IM Chat. The need to “show off” is also a very strong incentive, too — people post pictures on Facebook expecting friends to comment on them; in SL, we buy homes or cute-looking avatars, but the reason is (mostly) the same: we create your own conversation pieces, assembled from pixels.

So, while of course individuals will agree more or less (depending on their incentive to be in SL), it’s a reasonable assumption that the biggest use of SL is for social networking (Prokofy Neva thinks it’s mostly about control — definitely another aspect of SL which is not to be scorned at. People love to control others and their environment; specially when they have no chance or opportunity to do so iRL, feel frustrated, and look towards SL to do that).

If that is the case — and although SL seems to indicate that as a possible major use of virtual worlds, even though it has just a small fraction of the regular users of, say, Facebook or Twitter — Second Life is the Google Wave of Virtual Worlds.

Consider what the competition is saying, and what they have always been saying, at least in the years I’ve been a resident. They claim to have “a better SL”: either better graphics, better tools, easier to log in, easier to create content, easier on your computer, with less limitations, and so on. But in reality they’re just at the Web 2.0 mentality stage: “come to our new shiny world, because it’s so much better than the old ones”. Early adopters will naturally flock to whatever is shinier and newer. But what about the rest?

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http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/ Prokofy

I’ve already explained how it is evil:

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2009/05/seasick-from-the-wave.html

Your enthusiasm marks you as part of the problem, not part of the solution for the next iterations of the Web, Gwyn.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/ Prokofy

What’s appalling about your fan-post here is that you can rag on and on about portals (portals are still a good thing, and still in fact exist in the form of popular news sites, aggregators, various communities that help people know *what to search for* as search by itself isn’t enough”.

You write something knowier-than-thou like this:

“Yahoo, Microsoft, and others tried to become “the portal that connects to everywhere”, and — according to their reasoning — once everybody in the world was registered to your portal, you could easily get a list of all sites to visit from one single place. It was exactly the same reasoning: compete to be the market leader, eliminate the competition, and you’ll find everything you need on a single source.”

making it seem like companies that try to be monopolies are evil and will fail, but then skip incredibly lightly over the fact that Google monopolized search, and research (by putting Wikipedia first), and monetarized it, and is now set to scrape all your personal communications, too (no robot.txt inside the wave, hmm?) Why are you not more concerned about that?

Common-sense boosters of tekkie stuff, like Fred Wilson, even if he has the overenthusiasm about Web 2.0 and its works that you do, still is able to say that Google getting too big will automatically fail, just like Microsoft or anything getting too big always fails because markets demand it.

Oh, unless you impose communism, then there’s no market.
http://gwynethllewelyn.net/ Gwyneth Llewelyn

Prokofy, for you, the whole of the Internet is evil! Look at it this way: *all viewable content is downloadable for free!* Yuck! Let’s bring the Web down, quickly!

Seriously, I read your article to the end and couldn’t find a single argument there. Just… a mashup of your oldest anti-collectivism nightmares, all jumbled up in the same post, with cross-references to whatever crossed your mind in the past month. In fact, if someone edited out all references to Google and Wave, your article would actually “make sense”, since it pretty much summarises all your fears and nightmares in a single place.

How does it relate to Google Wave?… Well, you got scared about people spell-checking your emails. Ok, that’s a point. I’m sure there will be an option to turn that off

But Google Wave is definitely way more than spell-checking emails.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/ Prokofy

This, I believe, is social networking done right. Instead of “forcing” people to jump to the latest and greatest social networking site and go “aaah” and “oooh” (while losing all their contacts on the previously greatest social networking site, as well as all content), you just give people freedom of choice on where they register (depending, of course, on the level of “coolness” and “features” and already existing friends on that particular service), but they will all be in touch — without needing to sign up on your service

I marvel at your lack of contextual conceptualization here, Gwyn. You keep talking about people making FB or Twitter “clones”, having whatever they do on those services show on up the Wave. But…you’re failing to grapple with the obvious fact that when you can clone those services, you don’t need them anymore. Who needs Twitter when you’re now all on g-talk/g/mail wave in real time? Only if it turns out the Wave has some kind of concurrency or “avatars on a sim limit” problem could this NOT be an issue. But of course, most people, like the Plurkers, don’t need 70,000 friends or the firehose of Twitter, they just need their 50 best friends that will fit on something like this.

You fail to see that Wave simply obliterates every other social service, and scoops up all that data into itself, for its own exploitation. Why you, who are Ms. Openness and Ms. Anti-Closed and Ms. Anti-Monopolist (seemingly) could not care about this massive global collectivization of everybody’s comms is breath-taking.

So it must be due to the fact that, true to the spirit of Neualtenberg (*waves to Kendra in socialist heaven!*), you LOVE collectivism.

Nobody but a minority of tekkies with opensource religious beliefs, and widgeteers hoping to capitalize on the holes punctured through platforms, “needs” to be able to send an IM from Facebook to Myspace, or to import all their friends from FB to Plurk. This is a fiction — a geek fiction.
http://gwynethllewelyn.net/ Gwyneth Llewelyn

Hah! I’m not an absolute fan of Google; in fact, it took me years to understand that Google’s only reason for launching Gmail (which was once just an “internal” project done on the developer’s free time, e.g. one day per week) was to get more profiling data — same as with Gtalk, of course, as well as most, if not all, their products. I wonder if they also index and profile data stored on Google Docs, too.

So, “the company that does no evil” is actually more dangerous than Microsoft ever tried to be (since poor Microsoft, at best, can send information about your computer, but not about your self). And yes, I’m sure that in a few years we’ll all be scared of Google as we were scared of Microsoft, and of IBM, and of whatever came before IBM. It’s only natural.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that Google sometimes has a revolutionary idea, now and then. They are also able to make huge mistakes (Lively is not even the largest mistake they made). Google’s not perfect. For instance, the world would have been completely different if they hadn’t bought Blogger, but a different company (Automattic or TypePad for instance) or had managed to get their design-your-own-webpage tool working (which they never did).

Ironically, it’s only in the past few months that Google has been beating Yahoo as the website driving more traffic. The difference is small, but Google is steadily rising; 9 months ago, MSN, Yahoo, and Google were constantly trading places as the “largest” (ie. more visitors and traffic) site in the world. MSN has been dropping steadily (far faster than Yahoo) but will certainly catch up once Microsoft launches their new search engine. Still, it’s interesting to see that Facebook (Microsoft) and YouTube (Google) are catching up, while Flickr (Yahoo) is now out of the league. Wikipedia (Wikia) is not doing so bad as Flickr, but it’s far worse than YouTube or Facebook. Soooo… there are a lot of companies out there to try to steal Google’s “monopoly on the Web”.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/ Prokofy

Um, the evil isn’t that it is viewable or downloadable. The evil is that Wave removes the desk top, removes me as a judging individual with integrity, removes the walls I establish — rightfully — in my communications and just scrapes them all relentless, and nudges me relentlessly into a collective where everybody edits my stuff, endlessly. No thanks. I don’t want to live inside a wiki, Gwyn. I’ll leave it to you and your socialist pals.

Collaboration, networking, etc. — these are all good things. Forced collectivization, which happens even in a “voluntary” service that inevitably pushes you to a certain worldview and to certain collectivizing behaviour, is not.

Um, it’s not about spell-checking my emails, which they won’t be doing, as I’m a good speller. It’s about them EDITING all emails and constantly creating collectized mash-ups that Playback cannot really cope with. In any collectivizing situation, the few collectivize the many, it’s never equal.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/ Prokofy

AND the reason you can think my carefully-argued arguments against Wave are just a jumble of my existing prejudices and “FUD” is merely because you just don’t see collectivization as the problem I do. You think it’s “fun” because you assume you will code it and control it. That’s all, Gwyn. That’s all it is EVER about with you.
http://meta-LIFE.net/ Robbie Kiama

Amazing link and post Gwyn.. Great news coming from Google this time, Google again proves to be one of the most innovative companies out there!
http://gwynethllewelyn.net/ Gwyneth Llewelyn

Oh come on, Prok. I wish you’d had been around when we had this discussion about email in 1992-4.

Your arguments for an “isolated Internet” are simply preposterous. The reach of the Internet has always increased with common protocols, while isolated islands, unconnected to anywhere else, tend to be submerged in the vast ocean of interconnectivity after enough time passes.

Don’t confuse universal standards with collectivisation. Think about what the world looked like before we had a single standard for car fuel, or even more trivial things like paper sizes, nuts and bolts. Not to mention world-wide telephone and TV systems. Industry standards don’t exist because of “collectivisation”, but because they further the reach of a specific technology, allowing consumers to buy or focus on the brand they prefer, knowing that any product will work with any other.

Or are you seriously promoting that TV stations ought to go back to their own protocols and force you to use special TVs just to watch their shows? You know, it used to work like that. Even on the dawn of electricity distribution consumers suffered because when they switched power suppliers they had to get rid of all their electrical appliances and buy new ones!

I’m pretty sure you know that all very well — even better than I do — and will be the first to defend standardisation to allow a larger consumer choice, and vendor-independence, which leaves consumers to pick the product that offers best service or best price, and forcing suppliers to compete in both, thus making the market more dynamic, and consumer’s choice more democratic — they can vote with the wallet.

Instead, you’re refusing to admit that the Internet won’t benefit from the same thing. So why should everything else in the world benefit from industry standards but NOT the Internet?

That argument would make sense in a state economy (preventing consumers to have choices, but force them to buy only the products that work with state-approved standards), but really… you aren’t promoting that, are you?

Google Wave Federation Protocol is just a proposal for an industry standard that will possibly stop social networking consumers to throw away all their data and continue to register for the “next best thing” over and over again, as the “next best thing” suddenly pops into existence. Sure, Google will profit from more indexing. Guess what: they already do that, in spite of isolated social networking sites! I’m sure they will have a benefit with the sites federated with them — or else, they wouldn’t be doing an effort — but can’t you understand what “customer choice” in this context means? Right now, it means that you have to pull all your friends out of a social networking site into a new one, each time someone comes up with a clever idea. Google Wave will allow you to pick the one you like most — be it because of price, functionality, good technical support, or because it uses prettier colours — and continue to keep in touch with all your friends and business acquaintances.

Same as email. Or do you still have a Compuserve address?
http://gwynethllewelyn.net/ Gwyneth Llewelyn

Standardisation is not collectivism. See my answer below. Standardisation is about consumer’s choice, and companies aggressively competing for making better products, for a better price, and with better customer support. Lack of standardisation means that consumers are stuck with a supplier, and if they are unhappy with it, they cannot replace it — they have to move elsewhere.

It’s only collectivism that disregards consumers in the process. It’s lack of standardisation that enables control. Replaceable products keep the power in the consumers’ hands — they vote with their wallet, picking up the best products that way, instead of being stuck to a single supplier.

You actually have your arguments upside down!
http://gwynethllewelyn.net/ Gwyneth Llewelyn

… even though sometimes they don’t get it right But this time it *looks* like they actually have hit gold. And have the leverage to pull it off.

It’ll be interesting how Microsoft replies to this. They might launch the “Facebook Interconnection Protocol” as an alternative protocol. And they might beat Google to it: after all, Google’s effort to enter the mobile phone market with Android didn’t work out that well — Microsoft continues to have a growing market share even in spite of the iPhone.

But… we’ll see what happens I’m sure a lot of people at Facebook are now thinking what to do to reply to Google. Twitter, however, is probably regretting not having accepted the offers to get bought…
http://gwynethllewelyn.net/ Gwyneth Llewelyn

Very likely, the ability to edit emails will be opt-in, or Google would be in serious trouble when providing services on countries that consider viewing or tampering with other people’s emails without their explicit permission or a court order as a criminal offense… I was a bit baffled at how this will actually work in practice. To the best of my knowledge, not even Google is above the law…

And for the sake of argument, Wikipedia is evil, as the power of deciding “truth” for the whole world is in the hands of 150,000 Wiktators — who, more often than not, all agree on their version of truth…
http://gwynethllewelyn.net/ Gwyneth Llewelyn

Oops. Actually, Microsoft has replied: they already had announced their new search engine, Bing. I’ve missed that!
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/ Prokofy

You don’t understand universality, Gwyn, and never have. Universality trumps “universal standards”. Universality, as I tried to explain in a post that got cut in your rants about MMOX and my critique of MMOX, is the rule of law with universal *principles*. Universal standards are just what gets to trump everyone else by force, market decisions (not always so markety), groups of tekkies humming — literally — at Internet decision meetings without any Congressional oversight, democratic voting — anything.

You treat your “universal standards” as if they are something sacred. They aren’t. They are often trumped the next day after they are made. Who gets to decide what a universal standard is, Gwyn, by which process?

Nobody got to decide if all email should now be editable because some “federation” called “Google” “needs” to scrape your data. It just “happens”. And scrape it they will.

There is no robot.txt inside the wave, and yes, emails are editable, and no, there isn’t some opt-out of this, they made it clear that the Playback is the only accountability mechanism, like a wiki history — snort!

Honestly, I hope this gets savagely killed — but it will likely survive in some form precisely because Google cleverly incited all you tekkies out there who just LOVE stuff like this — you completely roll over for it. So they create an enforcers’ New Class to evangelize — aggressively — a platform that nobody knew they “needed” before a million widgeteers descended on them.

When there are a variety of widgets on a variety of standards in fact we have more choice. Standardization that supposedly eases things for the consumer often ends up merely obliterating competitors. We all have Microsoft Word, not Google Docs, for now anyway.

Your arguments are simply blind to the problem of the principles of real rule of law, and choice that comes from having a democratic system, by bleating about universal standards like they are wonderful even if only one company gets to impose them. That’s not universality, it’s monarchy — or communist autocracy.
http://www.converj.com/ David Burden

Nice post. I think we’re on the same wavelength – see http://www.converj.com/sites/converjed/2009/05/toward_semantic_virtual_worlds.html – and having only just got used to calling SL an application platform not a destination I’ll have to learn to start talking about it as a protocol.
Anonymous

Google _is_ getting there, isn’t it? Maybe Ian Jukes’ marvelous and maybe scary vision of Google world domination isn’t too far off the mark, assuming they continue this kind of creative and visionary innovation. I watched the whole video, just about the length of a full-length feature film, and was mesmerized. Makes me wish I had some programming talent so I could contribute!
http://www.inetsoft.com/ Mark Flaherty

Yes, the fragmentation in the social networking space is especially frustrating. There will be a Darwinian reduction, like there was in the search engine area.
Jared Spurbeck

Being autistic, I’d just like to point out that we aren’t “isolationist” so much as that certain forms of socialization tax our resources a great deal. ^.^; There are a lot of autistic bloggers online, even “low-functioning” ones, and we make friends just like anyone else! Often we’re more at home in places like Second Life than IRL … you’ve probably run into a few of us already!

Er, this was with regards to the remark you made on page 10 in which you used the word “autistic” as a derogatory term and conflated it with being “isolationist” …
http://gwynethllewelyn.net/ Gwyneth Llewelyn

I apologise for that, Jared! The English language, with its myriad re-appropriation of meanings, fashionably using some terms one decade and neglecting others, makes it so much harder for non-native speakers to keep track of what currently is or isn’t a derogatory term. I just employed an old, outdated definition of autism that meant basically ” withdrawal to its fantasies, against which any influence from outside becomes an intolerable disturbance”. This certainly applies to companies creating social networking tools that do not communicate among each other, and, worse, see each other as “intolerable disturbances” (in the sense that for each social networking tool designer, all others are “nuisances” that ought to be removed for them to become the ultimate monopoly).

I fully understand that not only this definition is hopelessly outdated, is not a scientifically correct description of the condition that humans suffer from, and the confusion from employing it in that context might be seen as derogatory or even insulting. My apologies, I did not intend to mean it that way!

And yes, of course I have run into many “autists” (of all forms) in SL Not only I’m good friends with several (and have been so for a long time!), but I actually have employed them in the past to work for my company — they’re excellent workers, unusually bright and intelligent, and quite hard-working and keen on delivering high quality work in time. As a matter of fact, I should add that I have absolutely no clue when I’m talking to someone in SL that later claims to have been diagnosed with Asperger’s or any other similar disease. Unless I’m told, I hardly notice a difference. Your comment of “being more at home in places like Second Life” makes a lot of sense of me: it is also the experience I have with many friends and colleagues who are diagnosed with Asperger’s. In SL, there is no way to notice their condition. Even some extreme cases are often hard to tell. At least, that’s my personal experience!
http://vidasegunda.blogspot.com/ Melissa Yeuxdoux

A quick scan turned up “…given that her lefty views aline…” in “The Fog of Blogs”.