Metaplace’s out of business; will Blue Mars outlast it?
On the same day, I got hold of two bits of news from the metaverse front: first, Blue Mars announced their pricing. Oh, all right, I know I’m behind the news… the point is that this relaunched the Second Life® vs. Blue Mars debate once again. I started following the SLED (Educators in SL) mailing list and how the academic community was not impressed — neither with the pricing, but much less about the requirements to run Blue Mars.
Then, several hours later, another bomb dropped in my mailbox. Raph Koster’s brainchild, Metaplace, went out of business, terminating operations on January 1, 2010.
If you remember late 2007/early 2008, you’ll remember what every “virtual world expert” was saying: the Metaverse would happen inside the Web browser. The future was supposed to be embeddable 3D VW applications, hopefully inside Facebook. Kids would be using virtual worlds like crazy, and a huge growth in that area was predicted. While nobody was really claiming that Second Life would disappear overnight, they were expecting a big shift towards completely different audiences and technologies, namely, Flash.
And people believed them. The Electric Sheep Company moved out of Second Life and started doing their own Flash-based virtual world — and made a few sales (yes, one was for a company wishing to embed it on Facebook). Raph Koster gathered venture capital and made a big splash about his notion of a virtual world with 16-pixel-high avatars on isometric landscapes which would become the next revolution in user-generated content — specially because you could use SketchUp for building things, or even just copy 3D objects from Google Warehouse and immediately upload them to Metaplace and start having fun. And of course they were not the only ones. A bit all over the place, companies and opinion-makers started telling us how everything we thought about the “metaverse” was wrong, and that concepts like Second Life/OpenSim were simply outdated and had to evolve or disappear.
At this point I did only gently cough and said, “follow the money”.
Metaplace’s closing down does not come as a surprise to me, but for totally different reasons. While I recognise that the funding method through venture capital is a good way to develop innovative technology, I still maintain that there is a huge gap between “academic research” and “successful business”, and not everybody is able to leap that gap.
Academic research brought us things like… OpenCroquet (now called OpenCobalt). Which is not dead yet, but it’s a telltale sign that one of their major developers, Duke University, has fully embraced Second Life and OpenSim — although they still allow Julian Lombardi to place a nice link to it under his personal homepage. It’s a nice technology, when you can get it working at all, of course. But it’s hard to put a valid business model behind it. It’s great for the research lab. But as a business model?…
There are thousands of “virtual world construction kits” out there on SourceForge and similar websites. Most are tiny one-person-projects. Many are research tools with solid development behind it. None have impressed us much 
… except occasionally for some nice graphics here and there or a paper or two showing how cool an obscure renderer was implemented.
Koster’s Metaplace had the advantage of at least having a solid technological platform — for the expectations generated in late 2007/early 2008. As for its business model… it was not clear. Everything was to be given away for free, except for some obscure licensing schemes, which were never the strong points. This is not surprising — almost all hi-tech virtual world start-ups keep giving everything away for free, and then suddenly realise they don’t have a working business model. VastPark, who had a cool 3D rendering engine, was perhaps one of the latest massive failures (they now released all the code as open source and closed shop). I’m sure that Metaplace’s ultimate failure happened for the same reason: once the venture capital was exhausted, the question was — how many sales did Metaplace actually make?
If you find it so harsh to judge technology by its failure to sustain a working business model, think again. We are supposed to be cleverer after the dot-com bubble burst! But we’re not. We’re still selling “ideas” and believing they’re valuable. They’re not; anyone can have good ideas. A few can implement them. But only a very, very tiny group of people can actually make them profitable. And it’s just those ideas that actually will survive on the tough marketplace.
It’s not about the “financial crisis”. If I were in a very sarcastic mood, I’d say that a solid business model, that is not based on sheer marketing but of actually fulfilling a real need, will survive any financial crisis, so long as the company behind it is not wasting money on unnecessary things. But that’s oversimplifying the issue, of course. Nevertheless, a good hint on whether a technology will survive or not is following the money.
Gwyn’s Golden Rule of Metaverse Survival: Who Makes Gold, Will Survive
My first instinct is always checking if I can understand the business model of a technological company. If it’s clearly stated on their site, and they can explain how they attract customers and sell them technology, there are good reasons to believe they’re going to succeed. If they have diminishing costs as the number of customers increase, they’ll be very successful at some stage (see eBay and Amazon). If their costs rise linearly over time as they get more customers, they will manage to survive (see Linden Lab) and might even self-sustain themselves when reaching a plateau (There.com is a good example). In fact, during a financial crisis, an “elastic” company that can survive without exponential growth is surely going to be around for a long time (Blizzard might be one of the best examples; they don’t need to duplicate or triplicate their number of World of Warcraft players to continue to shell out a billion US$ per year of profits).
But if you can’t figure out how they make money — they’re doomed to disappear.
Consider Twitter vs. Facebook. Twitter’s costs in infrastructure just grow and grow, as more people send more and more tweets through their gateways. Over half of the tweets never reach their sites — they just use the many (free) APIs to deliver messages among users on third-party sites. Twitter has no ads. They don’t visibly sell any service. They don’t report income. We all “know” that they sell profiling data, but… to whom? And for how much? We don’t know. So why are they still around? How long will their venture capital last? How will they turn Twitter into a profitable service? If you have any clue, please leave a comment — I’d love to know the answer
Facebook is an interesting example. They started just like Twitter — everything was for free. But although Facebook has several APIs as well, it’s far more complex to manage your account without ever going to their website. So this means that at least they had something solid: a webpage with lots of traffic. What do you do with lots of traffic? You sell ads (and, of course, profiling data; thus their draconian terms of service demanding “real people with real names”). This is what Microsoft told them when they bought a share, in exchange for using Microsoft’s ad-serving software on Facebook. This managed Facebook to actually start making some money out of their technology. We all understand web-based ads: we just need to look at Google to see how you create a huge technology giant out of that (while ironically, during the dot-com days, people thought that web-based ads were doomed to disappear… Google just laughed and bought the competition and established themselves as a quasi-monopoly on ad serving ).
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“One thing is for certain: unlike all other virtual worlds allowing any pirated mesh to be copied and uploaded, LL will provide actually quite reasonable intellectual property protection on meshes as well.”
I find that remark peculiar. What assures you that Linden Labs will be able to combat any pirating so completely while Avatar Reality will simply 'allow' it?
Policy wise, both's stance on Intellectual Property seems mirrored when it comes to recognizing and enforcing Trademark and Copyright laws: http://www.bluemarsonline.com/Legal/IP/index.html
http://secondlife.com/corporate/dmca.php
Policy aside, I'm going to assume your remark has more to do with the actual infrastructure of how meshes are pulled into the actual worlds. I don't know a lot about the Linden's upcoming mesh plan, but I assume it'll simply replace sculpt maps. Whether it'll be limited to the same 1,024 (or 1,056) vertex deal and strict topology, I somehow doubt it'll go beyond simply replacing sculptmaps.
The significance of that is Second Life will still remain largely a two-step deal. Upload sculptmap (or mesh in the future) along with texture, and apply texture. Have you had a chance to peek at Blue Mars' editor tools? Importing the mesh is easy enough and probably how you'd imagine, but from there you're in the world of material editors and all the editable parameters involved along with multiple map channels for different textures.
In short, if you steal a mesh for Second Life, you merely need a baked texture and you're good to go. The epitome of quality considerations in Second Life tends to be baking lighting and shadowing. With Blue Mars, you're actually building items against real-time hardware shaders and however you chock it up, having stolen a mesh before hand doesn't make it too easy. Lots of things to consider; you probably only have the low polygon model, which means you didn't export the normal map for the high polygon model, or the specular and bump and so on. Even if you did steal all of that the point remains the same that its quite a deal more involving and from a thief's perspective, I don't see Blue Mars as more appealing to steal meshes for vs. what Second Life can be.
Developer thievery aside, what are the considerations on the consumer/populace end when it comes to the claims about IP protection? Technically Second Life's biggest weakness is every 3D renderer's biggest weakness; vertex and texture information is sent to GPUs, can be sniffed and put together by sniffers and content be stolen. I imagine it'll be quite a bit difficult in Blue Mars though. Granted I don't know a whole lot about how content has been stolen and repurposed in SL in the past, and can't predict the future on what security holes Blue Mars will inevitably have (though hopefully not.)
Those are just some of my thoughts as someone who's developed in Second Life and Blue Mars casually. Policy and software infrastructure considered, I can't see how you arrived to that rigid of a conclusion that the Lindens have the less accessible platform for piracy.
Great post Gwen. It is nice to see somebody who doesn't believe the hype and resorts to that age-old technique, common sense. Sorely lacking these days. If you can't see the money visibly flowing through a company, it probably isn't. That doesn't mean it won't, but it means that while the P-R people are lavishing the press with success stories, somewhere in the back-rooms, the CEO and others better be scratching their heads really hard trying to figure out how to solve the problem.
With Linden Lab, I think the biggest risk is that they have the profile of a hosting company, and that is their revenue. I still can't figure out why they released their viewer as open source. All that does is increase their dependence on the hosting model. Happily, I don't think anybody yet has created a product that competes for less. But, to me this is like a web hosting company in 1995 that charged $100 per month for a website. The days of such excessive pricing will end as soon as somebody comes up with a way to offer people the same experience for $9.95 per month, or less. It seems inevitable.
Oh, also, Vastpark has not “closed up shop” by any means. Where did you hear that? We know Bruce pretty well, and they seem to be hunkering down, frugal and careful, and continuing to pursue their vision. Given a few years, they may last through all this and come out on the other side with something that surprises us.
(Sorry, sorry for misspelling your name! I should proof before I click!)
Interesting post Gwneth, if a bit technical.. and even a little .. and i say this with all respect.. .geeky.
There is use of virtual worlds that falls between the two extremes of developers (those for whom terms like mesh are meaningful) and, for purposes of illustration, the educators, (those who aren't so concerned with making “stuff” but using it) and that is one that you touch on when you say you want to “talk to people.” I don't know what the numbers are of people on each end of that scale are, but I'm guessing the “rest of us” ..the mid section…are at least approaching the majority. Who are we? We are the people making connections with others across the globe, whether for ideology, or business or simply society. Connections make us spend money on virtual land, buy virtual party dresses, hire virtual musicians. In many ways, SL (and other worlds, i guess, i've not been successful accessing others with my high powered and ultra sexy macbook pro) is the watercooler of this generation, the coffeeshop, the neighborhood pub. Most of us don't have the time to participate in social community the way past generations have… the internet has made certain that there are no times of day where the office is closed, where work can't be done, and because of that the concept of leisure time continues to adapt. We can't pop into a pub for the 20 minutes we are waiting for a call, but we can pop into SL, and have a list of friends and acquaintances to welcome us. We can't leave the kids alone asleep in the house while we go hear the new band playing downtown, but we can plug in the headset and enjoy any genre imaginable … and some unimaginable.. in SL. We can't hop on an airplane to go explore the wilds of Lisbon whenever we feel the need to expand our horizons, but we can with a click of the mouse wander the landmarks of nearly any city in the world. At any era in time.
It may well be about following the money, but the people experimenting in virtual worlds are not in any global sense, needy. They..we… are willing to part with our hard earned dollars when we sense we are getting something valuable. When Rose buys a few dozen pairs of shoes, it may be about the shoes, or it may be a springboard to a political conversation (who do you think you are, imelda marcos? No, but how do you think the Philipines should handle xyz? )
The other thing that SL offers that i'm not sensing on other platforms(twitter, fb, blogs, etc,) is that the interactive quality of standing virtually face to face with others increases the need for emotional communication. I”ve heard many criticisms of Cameron”s Avatar, but i think a point made by it can be readily recognized by those of us experienced in SL… that we can accept the transferrence of our own emotions and personality to this virtual configuration and accept that others can as well. Editing is limited in SL… interations between people become more wysiwyg than the 140 words of twitte, the blurbs of facebook or even the edited diatribes of our blogs. I CAN interact with a redhead from Portugal, and assess her words for myself, without worry obsessively about the practiced persona being presented.
I disagree with those who assume that IP rights and educational uses are the driving forces of the virtual world. I think the virtual world is a wonderful extension .. and market.. for them, but for the rest of us, more than the money, connections create value, and dynamic creativity makes it delightful. I throw a good chunk of my “play” money every month into SL, with no hope of getting back a dime. Most of my friends do, too (at last count there were 437 people on my friends list, so its a pretty good sample!) Maybe the demise of other worlds has to do with where their focus was? (sorry for not logging in, i am still paranoid about all those other places!)
Hope you don't mind a longer bit-off-topic comment, but I just have to comment on the Twitter/FB part
Twitter will actually be slightly profitable this year (http://mashable.com/2009/12/21/twitter-is-alrea...) and they haven't even introduced the real services for business yet. And Facebook is cash flow positive too, ahead of their own predictions (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news...).
I really do wish I could have meetings in SL. But NONE of the people I usually do business with is in SL. On the other hand, I have many of my business contacts on FB, and it helps me to keep track of what they're doing and also connect with them on a more personal level.
I'm curious Gwyn, how many people that you know in real life are on Facebook? How many in Second Life? I tried to make my friends sign up for SL, NONE did. I didn't have to convince my friends to try Facebook, they all did, on their own. Yes, I did meet many wonderful people in SL, but the people I already know just aren't there, they're on FB. And that's one of the reasons that make Facebook so powerful. Facebook isn't just about apps, it's about connecting with friends in an easy way. SL is many things, but it isn't easy. And that's why it can't be mainstream (yet?).
On FB, if you want a quick summary of what's going on with your friends, you have the filtered News Feed. If you want to see everything, you switch to Live Feed. How is that too complex? Not to mention that you can easily create groups of friends and do your own filters. In terms of time, it takes way more time to keep track of what people are doing in SL than on FB, not to mention the group limitation, constant technical difficulties etc..
By the way: if you look at the comment module on your blog, you will see that you provide your visitors to sign in with their Twitter and Facebook accounts. Why not SL?
Facebook Connect is a very powerful tool that is making the web easier to use for many, many people.
And finally, people DO click on links on Facebook, because they are shared by people they trust. For many sites Facebook is a very, very important source of traffic (http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/03/11/fa...), so you can't say people don't read links or ads on FB. I'm actually reading this post because I clicked on *your* link on FB
And people don't just watch ads on FB, they connect with brands on a personal level. Take a look at this survey: http://feed.razorfish.com/feed09/the-data/ (notice that SL isn't even mentioned?). It's again easier, cheaper for businesses to have a Facebook presence and engage with their customers than in SL.
So, while LL does have a nice business model and all, it's still a niche product. And that's why comparing SL to let's say Facebook is like comparing apples and oranges. And while I do hope that for a good, easy to use VW that we'll all be using for meetings etc., SL isn't that world right now. And honestly, I'm not sure it can be in its present form and leadership by LL. SL (and LL) will of course keep on making a good living, but I'm afraid the majority of people won't really notice it.
>You need hours and hours to keep up with your timeline. Unless you’ve got a dream job with nothing to do (and I was shocked to see how many of my close friends actually do not do anything at all the whole day and just spend their time at work tweeting and sharing links on Facebook!), it’s impossible to keep up with everything! So what do people do on an information-saturated Facebook? They play games. More precisely, they play Farmville. Farmville is saving Facebook from becoming irrelevant. But it’s not exactly a “new” idea; Flash-based gaming is a few years old, and it has always been a successful business.
Oh, come on.
1) it's trivial to optimize the time line – much more so for a user, versed in SL witchcraft called UI
2) recently, FB introduced the default news list which is the pre-optimized news feed for people that can not optimize it
3) the concept of “work” has changed. Most people work with small pauses in between – and Facebook is great for that. Posting a link on FB takes all of 2 seconds – heck, you can drag the link to the bookmark bar from the post item app. Unlike SL, which is very attention demanding, it's easy to have a FB tab open and check it for updates at intervals
4) Farmville is not the reason for continuted relevancy of Facebook; it is however the cause for dismay in many niche services, when they compare their user bases. There are more users of Farmville than of Twitter (to say nothing of niche virtual worlds).
Metaplace was 1980s graphics. I would never have gone there because I'm not interested in working in graphics that were already mature when I started in virtual worlds in the mid 90s. If I want to develop in 2d I can pick up learning Flash.
Metaplace isn't the only company on death's door either. Forterra is critically ill as well, yet There is still around and IMVU is still around… guess which have user generated content and active economies and what doesn't? But again, common denominator is 90s level 3D graphics and Second Life dominates them.
Linden Lab continues to push forward the platform, indeed they have deferred rendering which lurks in the debug menus and gives a glimpse to SL being able to eventually reach Cryengine 3 level graphics, and yes I said *three*, although we can argue about how LL does it in a zillion ways. Blue Mars has potential to also be still around in 5 years time and looks to the future and not to the past. From the past, its better to look at what's coming down the pike in 5 years time. Personally I will remain on Second Life, but I am loving working with Blue Mars as well.
No, I was not claiming that technologically Blue Mars is “more” accessible for piracy, but socially… Just go to the Google Warehouse and do a search on “Microsoft”. How many of those 440 items (at the time of writing) actually have the legitimate endorsement of Microsoft? Desmond, for instance, might just make a query for “Victorian” and gets enough models there for free download to populate Caledonia in BM.
And of course Warehouse is just one of several sites that disseminate free meshed content…
So my issue is not that BM makes meshes “easier to copy”. You don't need to copy them at all since you can grab all that content for free all over the net!
“but from there you're in the world of material editors and all the editable parameters involved along with multiple map channels for different textures.”
Materials in Blue Mars are literally drag and drop. You make a good material once, and reuse it again and again and again. You could probably even sell them to other developers as they are a file. It's not unlike some of the 3d programs I work with, that also save materials as assets: namely modo and Carrara.
It would be good to see Second Life get a materials system, and its been mentioned for the last two years in Sculptie Dev meetings… so I would not put it past LL to eventually do it. It's funny how people think LL can't do these things, they are going to get a rude awakening at some point I suppose because the graphics devs at LL are really talented people.
I agree that the biggest risk of being in the “content hosting” business is… banalisation driving the prices down. Still, that will not come so quickly. Let's imagine the following scenario: IBM and Intel, as soon as the Interoperability standard for virtual worlds is finished in mid-2010, launch their own grids, competing directly with SL with a similar infrastructure. That will push content hosting prices down. They will not drop from US$100/month to $9.95 in a few months just because the technology right now doesn't allow “thousands of sims” to run on a single server (while you can easily have thousands of users on a server, each hosting their own website…) and there is a limit to the number of technicians that are able to run an OpenSim grid successfully (unlike Linux/Windows system administrators for websites — there are millions of them, thus making labour costs cheap due to the competition).
Even so, when OpenSim-based grids start becoming 99.7% reliable and sell sims for US$9.95/month, Linden Lab will still not be out of business charging what they charge. Verio and Rackspace still charge US$500/month or more for a physically hosted server — just because they are selling to the top enterprise customers who require extremely high service levels. So there is still some room at the top price tier.
My apologies to Vastpark and their team. The site seems to have been given a redesign lately; last time I've checked it, several months ago, they sort of semi-announced that they wouldn't be in business any longer but still gave their faithful developers the whole source code to play with. I'm glad they've changed the way they expressed it, since it lead to confusion; I certainly had the strong idea that the technology would continue to exist as an open source project hosted somewhere on Amazon 3S and nothing else. This certainly seems not to be the case: they're even experimenting with OpenSim integration!. Well well. As soon as they launch the Mac client, if ever, I'll be certainly experimenting with it again!
Why do people compare Second Life to Facebook and Twitter? It's sort of like comparing animated sculptures and 3d movies to paintings and novels. Do you get the difference?
Realtime 3d is *hard*. It really IS. It's really hard for people to think in three dimensional reality. It's complicated and we want to Platonise and flatten the depth out of it.
It's amazing that Second Life is able to do as well as it does, considering that its *hard* to think in 3 dimensions, and four effective dimensions if you consider the time element. Facebook is flat well… like pages in a book. Second Life and other 3d virtual worlds have depth and immersion. They are different different different animals. Second Life and Blue Mars have more in common with 3d gaming than they do with Web 2.0 sites like Flickr and Facebook. There are applications that can only really be realised effectively in 3d. Facebook is no more suited to 3d visualisation than Second Life is suitable to reading large amounts of 2d content.
Oh yes, Rose — the socialisation aspect of Second Life is what I loosely bring under “entertainment”. Entertainment is not only watching artists perform; it's everything that keeps your attention during your free time.
That time is, of course, valuable — instead of watching TV, reading a book, or watching a movie, you're in-world in SL (well, some do both at the same time, of course). You might not consider shopping for sculpty shoes “entertainment” but that's what I actually meant: I didn't have strictly so-called “events” in mind.
Entertainment has value. We buy TV sets, pay a cable operator subscription, order CDs from Amazon.com. If our hobby is painting, we buy colours and brushes and canvas. So, entertainment time is something people are willing to spend some money on, even if they might think it “superfluous” (in the sense that, on the family budget, food, water, power, health, all have a higher priority than entertainment). So it's absolutely natural to spend money in SL in return of “entertainment”, even if it's not the technology itself that is “entertaining”, but the people we interact with. While certainly “free entertainment” exists (say, walking along the beach), most people are willing to spend something on what is entertaining to them. Shopping for avatar clothes is the kind of “expense” that you're willing to make if you find SL (the people!) entertaining — like buying a beer in a pub is what you “pay” for socialising with others, assuming that kind of entertainment appeals to you.
And yes, you're very right about the importance of avatars, which I have totally neglected on the article. Having gazillions of easy and cheap personalisation options on your avatar is very likely one of the most important features of any virtual world, existing or upcoming. I can definitely confess that it was the full range of tweaking that was possible to do on your avatar shape that totally grabbed my attention on my first day in SL… hours before I even engaged in communication and watching what others were doing
As for “real-time chat” vs. “offline, asynchronous communication” — I have no clue what is “best”. You remember my complains about the CDS that people prefer to discuss on the forums, while I always insist that the face-to-face in-world meetings are far more interesting for me. Others might disagree. And I'm not that consistent: after all, I'm writing this comment on a blog post, which is definitely asynchronous! But I can just speak for myself and say that between the choice of spending a few L$ on my avatar and discuss exactly this topic in-world with a group of friends, or doing the same on a Web page, I would never pay anything for the latter — it's a form of “entertainment” that is far less appealing to me, and, in my opinion, not worth spending any money on
Again, I do not claim that “real-time” beats “asynchronous” communication every time. But I can agree with you that it's one of the major advantages of Second Life when compared to non-3D “social networking spaces”.
two more points
“Now I have at least one partial answer to that: most of the content will simply come from the plethora of free 3D mesh repositories out there and tweaked to look “Victorian” enough to please Desmond’s future customers.”
I make my own content, thank you very much. Desmond did work with 3d creators who are on Google Warehouse, but he actually had personal contact with each and every one of them and had permission from them, and a lot of his own work went into Caledonia as well. My work that goes into Caledonia is MY WORK just as it has always been MY WORK on Second Life… and I can say the same for other content creators who are following Desmond into Blue Mars as well.
Second point is that “The Diamond Age, Or, A Young Girls Illustrated Primer” is a way better metaphor for virtual worlds than Snowcrash is. I even think Neal Stephenson would agree with this himself, as Snowcrash was a dystopia and “The Diamond Age” was a novel with far more philosophical depth about both the positive use of virtual worlds and how they can be used to improve the human condition.
Hmm I'm not convinced about Twitter, Alja
Adam Ostrow claims that these deals come from “search deals with Google and Microsoft”. Wellllll what are those “search deals” anyway? Do they give Google and Microsoft some special access to their database of tweets? What kind of product is that? Is it possible to grow and expand, or will they be tied to just selling it to two customers? What are those “enterprise products” claimed on the article? And lastly, how will they make money from ads as more and more users move away from Twitter's website but continue to send an ever-increasing amount of tweets on third-party applications…? Too many questions to answer 
Facebook is slightly different, because at least they have several revenue streams, ads being the more important one. However, as that article explains, their principal source of revenue comes from… selling shares of Facebook to companies interested in Facebook
In 2007 it was Microsoft that allowed them to survive another couple of years; this year, Digital Sky. All that's very well, but… it's speculative. Will they always be able to sell more and more bits of Facebook for more and more money, in order to foster profitability? When will the ad revenue be able to sustain Facebook financially?
Still, I'm quite sure that a site with 300 million users will sell a lot of ads!
As for the rest of your comment, Alja, sorry, but… it sounds like the kind of preaching I do about social networking tools on presentations
I don't believe a single word of what I'm saying when I quote from similar sources than yours, and I have lots of pretty graphics and numbers to back up my arguments too, but in the back of my mind, a tiny demon is hammering on my brain and repeating the mantra “dot-com bubble… dot-com bubble… dot-com bubble” 
I've seen several recent experiments being done to attract people to events, using Facebook, Twitter, and Second Life — as opposed to, say, placing ads on specialised magazines, or email spam, which is notoriously the worst way of disseminating information in terms of return. In the past year, I was shocked how people with “thousands of followers” on either Facebook or Twitter attract so little attention, while Second Life residents get easier — and faster! — a much wider audience. I've been repeatedly going to conferences (or knowing people who went to them) saying, “it was a good conference, we had audiences of 20-200, which is reasonable, since we didn't spend anything in traditional advertising and just used Facebook and Twitter”. People were actually very happy with those numbers! By contrast, a single event in SL during a whole day can attract hundreds or thousands of people, if you do your promotion well and have a good community manager doing the work for you. Most people I've talked to just shrug it off, saying that having “thousands of followers” is not enough, you need tens or hundreds of thousands to seriously be able to promote your ideas and business through FB/Twitter. Well, that just sounds like the spamming argument. Spam works. You just need millions and millions of addresses to get a handful of people buying a product or coming to an event — but the cost of getting those millions is negligible, and often just one or two persons clicking on a spam link and making a purchase will pay for the whole spamming campaign. I see FB and Twitter as the next-generation spamming tool. It's much more targeted, since you can see people's profiles and know who you're spamming — unlike email. You create your own databases and don't need to rely on spamming databases (although I'm sure this will come soon, if it's not already being implemented). People feel they have a better control on FB/Twitter spam, because they can, if they wish, just un-follow a particularly nasty spammer. So, as a spamming tool, I'm sure it will work far better than spam — either on email, on paper, on mobile text messages, or any similar technology.
While I just have anedoctal evidence to show in practice, what I see is that people will come to Facebook, connect with friends, find it interesting for a year or so, and then… go and play Farmville
Now that is real value for entertainment 
But someone playing Farmville is not interested in “connecting with brands” or anything like that. They will shrug it off as merely spam. Granted, with 300 million users, and a billion as a target, it's obvious that there will always be “fresh meat” for new advertising strategies — there will always be new users to Facebook that have no clue of what it's being used for (e.g. games 
) and eager to click on ads, because of the novelty. When the novelty wears off, they'll go back to gaming 
On the other hand, I agree that SL is not a “replacement”. It has far too few people for that. Nevertheless, it's definitely something you can compare with. Facebook, Twitter, TV, books, movies, going out, all compete for “available time” with Second Life. SL is both a competitor for personal, leisure time and business time. So while on a technological level I agree that you can't compare a magazine to Facebook or to Second Life, in terms of attention-gathering, you most certainly can. Magazines can have a far smaller audience than Second Life — not to mention FB! — but they still compete for attention to attract potential ads. If a company places an ad on a magazine with 15,000 readers and is happy with the way their brand awareness is recognised, they might be happy about placing the same ad on Treet.TV and see if they get the same brand awareness there. But if they have 15,000 followers on Facebook, 90% of which are really just playing Farmville… wouldn't it be better to sponsor a new type of cow or corn in Farmville instead?
After all, there are ore players of Farmville than Twitter users. That should make us think twice about what people are really doing on Facebook… they're certainly too busy (and happy!!) planting corn to follow boring press releases on a company's FB page 
Oh, and I'm sure that if LL allowed their OpenID service to be used for third parties and not only internal sites, people would be using that on lots of sites… but LL doesn't want it to be used that way. Lack of vision, lack of vision… I agree on that, SL's downfall, if at all, is just a question of LL's lack of vision. Sadly for all of us, the millions in SL do not have that lack of vision and continue to stay around in SL, in spite of LL's apparently masochistic streak to make things as hard for us as they possibly can
… in any case, it's undeniable that we can't expect SL to grow to a hundred million users “soon”. And this will ultimately decide what the technology is going to be used for. While both Twitter and Facebook can potentially grow to a billion users each.
1) Trivial? Mmh if you say so…
Humans beat automated tools in narrowing down what is important and interesting every time 
And sorry, I didn't see your comment before answeringto Alja's (a big disadvantage of reading serially!) I agree that Facebook's relevance is not due to Farmville, but I'm now curious at how fast Farmville grows. Is it growing faster than Facebook itself? From the number of daily registrations on Facebook, how many of those have come specifically to play Farmville (or any of the other games, although, granted, Farmville is just a special case)? If Zynga, at some point, launches their own “social networking tool” that is just about connecting to fellow gamers, will a third of Facebook's users move over to it? All these are interesting questions to ask, because the answer will, indeed, show Facebook's “relevance”. I see Farmville as the World of Warcraft of Facebook apps 
2) That at least makes sense.
3) Well sure. You're right on that. But the sheer amount of information spewed by some people amount to hours and hours of time every day. For instance, I posted four comments here. That took me an hour of my time. What are 4 comments? Nothing! It's not just the time spent dragging a link from one place to the other: it's reading/watching that link, seeing it's worthwhile to pass along, go to the next link, and so on. I agree that some people are better at doing that than others (perhaps that's why some have millions of followers!) in the sense of doing it quicker. But I know the time that takes. At some point in my early days of Twitter I used to do the same, for a small audience of followers, for a period of 2-3 weeks or so. I was amazed at how easily I could spend 8-10 hours a day doing that … those hours just go away without noticing! These days, I follow perhaps 10-20 time more people, and I can just skim the very top of those, once in a while. Almost all the information I get is from people asking me in IM if I have seen “that Twitter link by X”
4) Heh I guess you're right
I remember discussing the use of email as a business tool to a friend that only has gotten his first email address a couple of years ago. He was surprised about me calling email a “business tool” at all. For him, it's just a way of sharing links, videos, and pictures — 99% of all his emails (I saw his mailbox once!) are all about that, and the remaining messages are vaguely connected to what he does for a living. He simply fails to capture the notion of the Internet as meaning “business”. He certainly spends hours on YouTube, though, and sees the whole of the Internet as merely entertainment, with an odd search for business addresses/locations once in a while. I'm eagerly waiting for him to join Farmville
By contrast, Second Life merges entertainment and business from the start
but I agree that it's not a tool for the masses. People who have barely learned to move a mouse around a 2D screen are comfortable with YouTube (or Farmville!) to get some entertainment, but they'll take decades to upgrade to a 3D virtual world 
Hypatia, I totally agree
Mmmh see below. You can compare them if you're not comparing technology but the ability to capture your leisure time (or, well, business time in some cases).
My apologies, Hypatia, I didn't mean to diminish the quality of your work or Desmond's ability to successfully create an immersive experience, be it on SL, Blue Mars, or anywhere else.
The point was not about “getting permission” to use content, but really about costs. While there are hundreds of millions of freebie items on Second Life, you can see that there are way more meshed content than that all over the place. Creating original meshed content is costly. You can't hire a 3D modeller for a handful of L$ per hour, unlike what happens on SL. Content creation in SL is dirt cheap. However, outside of SL, on the meshed world out there, content is actually free because you have tons of repositories with millions of meshes ready to be grabbed and used — no matter what the origin or the quality.
Getting back into my topic, I'll have to follow the money
How will Desmond pay for all that original, 3D meshed content in Blue Mars, if he's hiring out 3D modellers? 
An area as big as Caledon, if paid at regular market prices and wholly done from scratch, would cost roughly 1 to 10 million US$, and of course it'll require regular updating to continue to make it compelling. (In SL, of course, prices can be 100 times lower than that). So it's only natural to wonder how much Desmond is going to charge for people going to Blue Mars, and that was my point really…
< 1) Trivial? Mmh if you say so…
When you move your mouse over an item, a “Hide” button appears. If you click it, you hide the application or user from the timeline. What could be simpler?
3. It takes much, much more time to compose a coherent comment than it takes to share a link or status update. Since morning, I had a status update, a few comments and I shared a funny pic. Total time spent on FB: 2-5 mins.
4. Farmvile growth stats are easily available on the net (check Readwriteweb.com, for example). However, the life span of an average facebook game is short – few months to a year. Games change; the platform remains.
< By contrast, Second Life merges entertainment and business from the start
So do the FB games, using microtransactions (like in SL). Zynga is wildly profitable – they employ over 700 people at the moment and are preparing for an IPO.
I am unsure about the mass appeal of current universal 3D worlds – not just because of the technical requirements (those are moot already, my new mid-range XP laptop runs SL like a charm), but because I don't believe there is inherent value in simply “being there” – unlike Facebook.
> As for the rest of your comment, Alja, sorry, but… it sounds like the kind of preaching I do about social networking tools on presentations
I don't believe a single word of what I'm saying when I quote from similar sources than yours, and I have lots of pretty graphics and numbers to back up my arguments too, but in the back of my mind, a tiny demon is hammering on my brain and repeating the mantra “dot-com bubble… dot-com bubble… dot-com bubble” 
That is because you do not really use Facebook – and so do not recognize the value it provides.
What dot-com service had 350 million users and was marginally profitable within a few years? Only one – Google.
I completely agree, 2d social networking and 3d virtual worlds are very different.
Don't worry, I do understand the difference between virtual worlds and web based social networks. And I didn't start the comparison, I just thought I'd add some facts about FB and Twitter based on real evidence.
If you read my comment carefully, I mostly talk about Facebook. That's because I believe Twitter is also a niche service, just like SL is. Both appeal to specific types of people and probably won't ever see the same user number Facebook already has.
And it's not just pretty graphics Gwyn, there are real numbers, real facts. I don't see that when it comes to Second Life, sorry.
FB and Twitter aren't spamming tools, because you opt-in to receive updates from certain people, brands. Your followers and fans want to hear what you have to say, which is of course by definition the opposite of spam. And I have to yet see an SL event that enables millions of people to participate (FB example: http://mashable.com/2009/01/20/cnn-facebook-ina...).
Gwyn, I play FarmVille AND connect with brands on FB. Not just me, my friends and millions of other people do too. Don't make simple assumptions, talk to people who really use FB.
As a big FarmVille fan, I can assure you that we don't use FB just to play FarmVille. And FarmVille relies on FB's infrastructure to keep players' interest (wall posts). And I can assure you that almost nobody would move to Zynga's social networking tool, we'd play one of the many other similar games ON Facebook.
SL does a poor job at merging entertainment and business. It's unreliable for business and provides a very demanding for entertainment. When I want quality 3D entertainment, I go play World of Warcraft. And every time I log in SL after playing WoW, I quite after a few minutes because everything is soooo slow to load
Why is nobody mentioning 3D as a platform yet? Not 3D as an individual product — Second Life, Blue Mars, etc… — but as a platform for content, the way that the World Wide Web is a platform for content.
We've already got over 300 different grids running on the OpenSim platform, most on the hypergrid (allowing teleportation back and forth). The biggest, OSGrid, now has more than 3,000 regions. And this is just the grids that are registered somewhere (anyone can download the software and set up a grid without telling anyone) and while OpenSim is still in its infancy — it's still alpha software. By allowing anyone to set up a virtual world, at zero to no cost, it opens the door for anyone to set up their own grid, the same way that anyone can set up their own website. There are already online repositories of free regions to download, free tools, and free objects — and the major players here do check for copyright infringement. And professional hosting of regions is now below $20 a month from some hosting providers — well within the budgets of schools, non profits, gaming clubs, networking organizations, and of course, individuals.
In fact, this reminds me a lot of the early WWW. Lots of websites, most of middling quality, set up by everyone and his brother. It wasn't the value of any one such website that made the Internet exciting. Sure, Amazon and eBay and Pets.com brought in the attention and the venture capital. But it was the sheer total of all these sites that drove people to find and use the Internet.
I completely agree that we're about to see a new dot-com explosion. Probably not in 2010 – the technology still needs to be improved. For example, we're still waiting for a Netscape of the new 3D universe. The current browsers are non-intuitive, big, and slow. Maybe 3Di's Rei browser (which sits inside a Web window) or Unity 3D or 03D will be the basis of a new browser. OpenSim, Second Life Enterprise, realXtend and the other compatible platforms all need to become more stable, and allow more concurrent avatars. And faster Internet connections and more powerful computers will help. Mesh imports are definitely coming next year. A Geocities for the 3d Web will be nice to have, too — a place for people to set up free regions in return for advertising. (One way to do this: load up regions on the fly, as people visit, instead of running them continually in the background.)
2010 will probably be the year when we'll first start seeing what the new 3D Web will actually look like, and 2011 the year when we'll see growing adoption of grids for focused business applications like training, tours, meetings, conferences, and marketing.
By 2015 there will probably be an “enter our world” button on every Website — the same way that we're now seeing Websites and email addresses on every business card.
– Maria Korolov
Editor, Hypergrid Business
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com
What would stop a person from doing the same when it comes to Second Life's mesh system? Socially its the same incentive; merely find a site that gives files in formats that can be converted for use.
Realistically though, it isn't that easy. Not every Collada file you find on Google Warehouse will instantly work. I implore you download the Blue Mars Item Editor and give its 'Import' and 'Convert' a tour. If in your mind you're expecting a tree to turn out exactly how it looks on the Google Warehouse page, you're in for a surprise.
Obtaining the meshes aside, there's still the idea of quality amongst developers. Getting the mesh to convert inside of the Blue Mars editor is one thing, but doing the actual development inside of their IDE is a whole 'nother. There's a lot of low level decisions such as whether or not items should cast shadows, how much light the item receives, what color the reflected light will be and etc.
Not to segue back into technical talk. However, when you disjoint what's technical from what's social, its easy to arrive to the conclusion that: “unlike all other virtual worlds allowing any pirated mesh to be copied and uploaded, LL will provide actually quite reasonable intellectual property protection on meshes as well.”
I fail to see how on any grounds you come to that conclusion, at least between Blue Mars and Second Life specifically. There has to be the consideration that meshes are a smaller part of the story for Blue Mars than what Second Life's meshes stand to be for it, and that in terms of sites like Google Warehouse and turbosquid existing, who's to say Second Life meshes won't come from those sites as well? Why insinuate Blue Mars is perfectly subject to it (it isn't), and Second Life won't be?
There's a thing about “reuse again and again” however.
Let's say I had 7 shirts, 3 wrinkled, 3 not wrinkled, 1 bedazzled. The 3 plain shirts I'm exchanging diffuse textures for because they're different colors; I'm probably also tweaking the specular lighting. I could probably get away with using the same normals, bumps, etc. The 3 wrinkled I'm using a different normal and bump map, I'm using different specular as well. For the bedazzled one I'm probably also adding an environment map for the reflective parts.
“Reuse again and again” is true only if you mean you're saving a selection of 'starting points', but there's still 99% of the actual work to do considering the most important parameters, are the actual different maps when you're first creating in other programs and then pulling in.
So yes you can save a material and open it again..but what good would it be? The slightest of differences between two items will call for an overhaul of the material to apply the important details to that object. Two different windows have different sill arrangements thus they can't share the same specular map, two different doors have brass or silver doorknobs thus they shouldn't reflect the same color..etc.
My reason for bringing that up though was to point out that with Second Life, all you have to do is match a texture to the UV of a mesh (or sculpt map currently) and you're done…its much more involving an affair with Blue Mars. Granted there's some SL developers that make high poly, detailed versions of sculpts, bake lighting and detail and all that into a texture before complying with SL's strict limitations. So for the serious developers, due diligence will see the same amount of work between Blue Mars and Second Life alike…but only Blue Mars demands it as a basis, where in Second Life its more of a trick to get around a problem (the lack of a material system and proper lighting).
“Getting back into my topic, I'll have to follow the money
How will Desmond pay for all that original, 3D meshed content in Blue Mars, if he's hiring out 3D modellers? 
”
Seems that people are diving in and making their own, just as they do on other platforms. And sharing. I definitely see an informal market springing up, though, for those who want to buy a well made house.
“An area as big as Caledon, if paid at regular market prices and wholly done from scratch, would cost roughly 1 to 10 million US$, and of course it'll require regular updating to continue to make it compelling.”
Oh my! That sounds scary, doesn't it! Yet I've got the same situation back in Caledon on the Second Life platform. I certainly didn't build out or pay for the construction of every structure in Caledon. Nor did I set up everyone's avatar, either. People seem to do that for themselves. Delightful, isn't it?
“(In SL, of course, prices can be 100 times lower than that). So it's only natural to wonder how much Desmond is going to charge for people going to Blue Mars, and that was my point really…”
Right now, 20 bucks a month for a city parcel and 35 a month for a fairly sizeable country estate. Got dozens signed up and people merrily building things in Google SketchUp right now ~ offline building means they can get started early
* * * * *
Following the money is really smart when it comes to studying businesses, but of course, one has to know the business at hand to follow the money correctly. Rest assured Gwyneth, if I didn't see a probable 'win' here, I wouldn't be doing it.
Another key is timing. It's important that many others are skeptics right now. That's good! It means that (if I'm right) ~ I've had some vision and the guts to follow through on it, where others didn't. And capitalism rewards that handsomely. Failure's possible, sure. Of course it's always safer to put one's money in stable investments, real estate and retirement funds instead. Oh, wait…
One might have noticed that I didn't participate in the Blue Mars debates that have been going on for months here and there. Not one jot. Rather, I quietly did some homework to see if I should get involved. And thus, I've been quite busy while everyone else was debating. A curious strategy, perhaps, but luck often goes to those who dare.
Opportunities abound. There's hardly a time in history when success isn't available to those who simply reach out and take it.
The only assured path to failure, is simply not to try. Second best path to going nowhere is the delightfully comforting false~security feeling you get when in a warm office cubicle. But even the stupidest, biggest loser who keeps blundering up against the door of opportunity, is going to find that door wide open and fall through it one day.
For those who doubt that, ask yourself: is the owner of the company I work at a particularly intelligent individual, better than all the rest? And what's he doing while I deal with all this work? And: is he really going to use the profits of my 60 hour weeks to give me a lousy raise, while he lazily shops for a new airplane? grin… something to think about.
There's nothing really special about me, either, other than perhaps I have a very firm grasp of the obvious. Absolutely anyone could have done anything I've ever done, and probably done it better than I did.
I know, Raymond, you're right. My major problem is that I'm NDA'd not to talk about it and explain what LL is going to do…
On the other hand, you're right too about the varying quality of free meshes out there. And perhaps my estimate on how many of the millions of meshes available out there that will actually work is way too optimistic. Well, not “perhaps”, but highly likely
As for downloading Blue Mars' tools, I'd love to do that… once they're ported to the Mac, which will not happen
(at least not in the next decade or so; CryEngine is not planned to ever become ported to the Mac) That's indeed another issue I've got with the tons of platforms out there: as Apple's market share continues to increase, the number of applications that are ported to it seem to have decreased lately. 
Then again, I'm not the best person in the world to comment on the ease of content creation; I'm totally and utterly untalented to create anything even with Photoshop, which is pretty much the most complex “design-y” tool I can barely manage…
… which makes me think then how content development in Blue Mars will be cost-effective. But thanks for pointing all this out, Raymond. The whole “cost of development” aspect is so often overlooked (not to mention availability of qualified developers!); I barely touched that area. People just assume that if they're able to play around with SketchUp, they'll become expert Blue Mars developers. Not so.
You're quite right that it's soooo much simple in SL — even if SL's rendering engine will get more complex over time, e.g. flexible wearable meshes (for clothing!) are just around the corner and being tested by LL right now (I wonder how they deal with morphing anchors); one wonders how many of the current clothing designers will be able to manage that
Fictions/Internet avatars can't be NDA'd – they don't exist in reality.
Kingdon's marketing-orientated roadmap for Linden Research doesn't contain any “surprises” or “leaps”. More marketing, the deadViewer 2009 project, mesh upload/manipulation, unwanted policy changes, bugs not fixed, **increased rampant favouritism**, more *customers* selling and leaving etc etc.
This “NDA” is purely put in place to keep people holding their breaths.
Everyone's going to give up and abandon the platform, soon enough. At least all the smart/capable people will
Their “materials” system would probably only work (well) with the top-of-the-line nVidia graphics cards, leaving everyone else fuming once more. Just look at their deferred shadow renderer: Fast with TOTL nVidia cards, very slow with ATi and the older nVidia.
> By 2015 there will probably be an “enter our world” button on every Website — the same way that we're now
> seeing Websites and email addresses on every business card.
Almost everyone would probably be on bandwidth-capped internet connections by 2015 (as low as 100MB). Businesses relying solely on VWs to put food on the table are going to have to wait much longer – 2040s, perhaps?
very interesting and elaborate post. when talking about a proper business model i think many overestimate the ability of the average user to operate within 3d virtual world (it doesn't even have to be complex to be complicated or impossible to use for an average user).
i developed games for quite a long time (amiga, pc, ps2, xbox) and learned my lessons well. i doubt that overcomplex 'nerdy' offerings have an easy route ahead when it comes to earning money.
the matter of the fact is that if you widen the niche (virtual worlds are a niche compared to a lot of highly successful services) in terms of potential users you have to dramatically lower the barriers for your users to use (navigate, modify, create, …) your virtual world.
i claim that the vast majority of users do not care if your offering provides the top notch creation tools for those 1% of capable users to create whatever they want to. while this at the 1st view looks like a nice long tail thingy it brings a lot of problems in terms of unwanted content (adult, porn, violence, …). it definitely makes it harder for the operator to create a positive and friendly envirnment for users. remember that i'm talking about average users who might be in a vr for the 1st time. we are talking about a wide audience because we are talking about a proper and scaleable business model.
i see that many startups save time an use out of the box / open source solutions to launch a sercive to end users which in its core is not more than a polished (if at all) prototype. it happens often. why? lack of resources, impatience of the developer and worst of all pressure of the investors. whatever the reason is it will cause a lot of problems once your user base grows well.
many developers come from traditional 2d web and start developing a 3d virtual world experience (i'm talking about real 3d here … not those 2.5d offerings that claim to be 3d). this is very similar to the 90s when there was a shift from 2d rts to 3d rts (many experts back then claimed that this is not necessary at all, but that's another story). those rts guys dramatically underestimated the complexity of a 3d application in all its aspects. many of them failed or had to go the hard way and develop for many years until they finally had something enjoyable.
this is similar to what happens now. the investors just don't know about that complexities (they feel comfortable with high numbers of mau's of the average fb app that can be stitched together in holidays, let the users come we will charge them later … somehow). the user does not know and does not care (this is ok). however the developer has to know and has to care. but many of them can't.
i think once move real game developers more away from their traditional routes (which for many will lead to a dead end soon) and start developing suitable 3d virtual worlds for a wider audience things will get brighter.
cheers,
alexander (founder http://www.clubcooee.com)
“Fictions/Internet avatars can't be NDA'd – they don't exist in reality.” Where did you get that idea?
That's like saying that Marilyn Monroe couldn't sign a contract, since she was an actress, not a real person… anyway…
What's the “rampant favouritism” you're talking about? As for the rest, yes, I agree with you; there is not much announced that can be seen as a HUGE step ahead, except for a few technical/graphical niceties, and the intriguing new copy-prevention mechanism to be enabled “soon”.
As for the announced death of SL, well, I predict it'll end on Dec 21, 2012
I got to know about your past experience in second life but I would like to say that now more followers are coming like second life as we know that second life is the one who can provide good fun but a new site is emerged which is Ivou something like !
… and it remains the only one, Jan. As you well know, Facebook's income until 2007 was just due to selling shares of it. 2007 was the year when Microsoft finally placed some ads on it, and it generated for the first time some “real” income. Not enough to make 2008 profitable, but almost. That's an old story. Will Facebook be profitable in 2009? Oh yes — because they sold another share of it to a Russian company, so, yes, they will show another positive cash-flow this year, ads or no ads.
As for the value that Facebook provides… I'm sure Zynga is happy. And Digital Sky Technologies is not stupid: besides buying into Facebook, they also bought a slice of Zynga too — paying slightly less than what they did for Facebook's slice. I know this is controversial; but it shows where the money is — on companies developing games for Facebook. Perhaps that's why the Electric Sheep Company recently developed their VW Flash-based engine for another Facebook embedded application. So I guess that all these people are understanding and recognising the value of Facebook and seriously investing money on what Facebook's good for: a platform for disseminating games and similar entertaining applications.
Oh, I'm sure of that, Alja
In fact, I have no doubts that you and your friends do that, every day. My question is if everybody is doing that — i.e. if after playing FarmVille they still have time left to engage in, uh, “business networking”. Some definitely do that. So what? Millions do that in Second Life too, and nobody claimed that SL's primary goal is to enable business networking (except perhaps for some LL employees 
).
Oh come on, Gwyn. You know this.
Linden Research have given its' ass-kissers virtually everything that they desire: Free web adverts. Hefty land tier discounts. Exclusive access to GTeam staff – and much more.
With Linden Research subtly and unofficially admitting it all via their FAQ entry on the hugely unpopular, unwanted and biased “Community Partnership Program”. The “Partnership Program” that throws out Philip [Rosedale]'s “Your World, Your Imagination” motto and replaces it with something along the lines of “Linden World, Linden-regulated imagination”.
Avatars can't be compared with Stage Names. Marilyn Monroe sounds a lot better than 'Norma Jeane Mortensons' or 'Norma Jeane Baker', doesn't it?
Oh, and Gwyn, I'm sure you've heard the news by now – the Mayan Calendar doesn't end in 2012 – it ends in 2220. Second Life will long be gone by then, along with the Kurzweil modernCult gatherings.
Aw, dang! I was looking forward to see the world end 2012. Oh well, I guess that all it remains now is to predict if SL will be around in 2220 or not
Anyway, as long as Linden Lab exists, they've been accused by favouritism. Which makes sense in the context of a MMORPG. I hardly understand what favouritism means when we're talking about a company providing a 3D content hosting service.
As for the “mediocre treatment”… I guess it's all relative. I've seen companies giving way worse “treatment” (PayPal is probably at my top of that list) but definitely a lot giving much better “treatment” (like, say, Dreamhost). Does that mean there is a lot of room to improve at the 'Lab? Oh yes, there is! Does it mean that they don't care about their customers, paying or otherwise? Definitely not — it's just that they're perhaps not fully committed to all of them, but, then again, this is also arguable. For instance, LL fears lawsuits like the plague — and this has made them introduce a lot of impopular measures. On other areas, they're simply too slow to implement things to work properly, and we all suffer because of that. But, again, that's another story.
Quite so. That's why it's “very alpha” code. I'm surprised it works at all as it does on some nVidia cards…
Well, I agree that not everybody who plays Farmville does nothing else on Facebook. After all, there are a lot of more games to play… hehe
Seriously now, I think that Facebook actually hit gold with those games. In my mind, it will be the games that will make Facebook an ongoing success, long after the Web 2.0 bubble also bursts — I'm pretty sure that Facebook as a gaming distribution platform will become the new “Google of gaming” after the crisis. Google, as everybody remembers, was the “survivor” of the dot-com bubble bursting, when all of a sudden nobody believed in web-based ads any more. Google proved them all wrong, and has emerged as a giant. Facebook might very well do exactly the same once they leverage on becoming the most successful world-wide online game distribution platform (but I'm sure they can afford to wait; after all, they are a success right now with zero effort). I'm not sure if Zynga will go public — like Facebook and Linden Lab, the newest trend is not to go public, but just to make money if you can, out of your existing revenues — but I also agree that if they launched a “social networking platform”, nobody would use it — at least, not at the scale of Facebook, of course.
It's interesting that you consider Twitter a “niche market”
I guess that comes from being a minimalist technology, which, although it allows embedding and mashing-up to a high degree, it fails to be much more than it is: a timeline, which is nowadays a standard feature of almost all social networking websites anyway. But I agree that Twitter is not a “safe bet”…
As for the technological limitations of SL, I can't agree more with you
After a decade of existence, I was expecting a bit more stability, but I guess that we're all asking too much from the poor LL developers, who are not quick enough to fix everything, add new features, and improve the overall experience…
Ah, right, I stand corrected
You just resorted to crowdsourcing all the content development — well, it's clear now how your business model works! My apologies, I tend to neglect the power of free (or almost free) development when looking at business plans… and yes, I would consider you quite intelligent because you focused on a simple, elegant solution to deal with the obvious problem of moving over to a different platform (i.e. the cost of development).
I think you mean IMVU… yes, it's a pretty successful business venue! It has more regular users than Second Life, and a very well established content economy there, too.
Alexander, I totally agree with you in your analysis
As you so well put it, the complexities inherent to 3D VWs are definitely not apparent to investors, who really don't understand “why it takes so long” or “why it is so costly to develop”.
>I hardly understand what favouritism means when we're talking about a company providing a 3D content hosting
>service.
Ah! That's exactly what a hardcore Linden fanboy would say!
Subtly denying/brushing off that favouritism exists, just like the denial of Voldemort's return in the fifth Harry Potter book. Fact is, favouritism does exist. Philip & co have been treading the favouritism waters for a bit, with Mr. wannabe-marketer Kingdon going full throttle.
> LL fears lawsuits like the plague — and this has made them introduce a lot of impopular measures.
Oh, Please. Most of Linden Research's destructive changes aren't even related to law. Rather, Linden Research trying to stuff their faces with more caviar. Neglecting you-and-me customers and forcing the primitive platform on the Enterprise. The GSP tax. The unwanted facebook integration.
Anywho, Gwyn, you're sounding more and more like one of those hardcore Linden Research clappers/fanboys. Are you one of them?
No, Net, the point is, “favouritism” isn't really something you can apply to a company. Companies are free to deal with whomever they wish preferentially. There is nothing that prevents them to have partnerships with X or Y because they prefer to deal with them. Favouritism is something that comes from the online gaming community: the company running a game is not supposed to give some players some things that they don't give others, or the game will be unfair, and most people will not be interested in playing a game where some people have more advantages than others…
Unless you mean something else, which is called “unfair competition”. This is when some company actually forbids some of their partners/clients to do some things while allowing others to do it. LL actually doesn't do that — although I might have some doubts about the status of Zyngo. A typical example would be selling sims for half the price to just LL's “friends” and not to others, for some unknown reason. That's unfair competition indeed. While hiring, for instance, Big Spaceship to deal with the web consulting aspect of their sites and interfaces, just because Big Spaceship happens to be “good friends” with LL, is not really “favouritism”, but just two companies doing business with each other, because they happen to enjoy their current business relationship.
If your point was that it's often very hard to see the thin line between “favouritism” and “unfair competition”, well, you'd be right in that.
Interesting that you only now realise that I'm sounding “more and more like LL's clapper/fanboys”. I've been very openly a LL fangirl since September 2004, and never made it a secret — you can quickly Google for it and see how back my claims of being a fangirl go — in fact, it's something I proudly announce — online, in-world, and on my public presentations
That doesn't mean that I agree with everything the Lab does. I just take a detached viewpoint. I don't think “what is LL doing that affects me personally in a negative way“. Rather, my viewpoint is from someone who will always evaluate LL's decisions to answer the question “will this decision guarantee SL's continuing success in 2020 or 2050, or will it have the reverse effect?”. Very often, this means that some of LL's decisions will affect me negatively, sometimes very strongly so. But in the end, I evaluate what is best overall — myself being unhappy for a stupid decision, or Second Life continuing to go ahead? The latter always wins. I become happy because SL thrives even though some individuals (myself included) are not happy about many of the decisions.
For instance, I'm quite critical of LL's stance of “fearing the lawyers”, which, from my mindset in a Mediterranean country (where people don't “fear” government or the judicial system; they grumble against it, but they don't “fear” it), doesn't make any sense. A company cannot make their decisions based on terror. We live in an age where you can host servers anywhere in the world, and it was never so easy to establish offices in any other country. When “fear of the Californian law” forces LL to adopt unpopular measures, they should simply open up a grid elsewhere in the world. That would have gotten rid of the verification drama, of the adult content drama, and the gambling drama, among possibly many other dramas, some of which have lost, at some point, around 30% of the internal economy and possibly as many users too.
*** Avatars can't be compared with Stage Name ***
Actually, brainiac, they most certainly can. Gwyneth's avatar is controlled by an actual person, and I assure you that actual person can be NDA'd. Get a clue.