When the Metaverse Roadmap was released last year, people were excited. For the first time in history, several different technologies were planned out for the next 10-20 years, and their convergence — desired, or undesired — laid out and discussed openly, surveys were made, presentations were given, and a lot of documentation was produced. The Metaverse Roadmap is not a “prophet’s tool”. It sort of gave directions and guidelines; it tried to “define” what people’s expectations of a “metaverse” should look like, and how to slowly proceed to implement it. Although the Roadmap could and was criticised — for instance, it appealed to people’s participation on surveys; it extracted information from existing technologies; but it didn’t plan to implement anything — it was better than the alternative: having no information on what a “metaverse” should look like.

During Virtual World 2008, what suddenly happened was that the Metaverse went through an “identity crisis”, as Hiro Pendragon so aptly named it. Put into other words: apparently, the industry is not aligned with what the “Metaverse” is supposed to be. They have forked and gone different roads.
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The good news is that we now have HTML-on-a-prim, with LL’s recent introduction of the Release Candidate for 1.19.1. It’s a long-awaited release — four years of waiting for Havok 4, and three years of waiting for HTML-on-a-prim — but last Friday LL rolled out a server upgrade that even allows the Early Adopters to have both things on the same sim! (the picture is from one of those Havok&HTML sims).

This is a “first release”… but it’s already amazing. Sure, the scrollbars don’t work yet — the Web page replaces a texture, like Quicktime streaming, and that texture is placed on a normal prim. You can’t click on links either. Still, Javascript and animated GIFs work well (or reasonably well), and although Flash is as yet unsupported, standard HTML as rendered by the Gecko/Mozilla engine (used by Firefox, Flock, Camino, and a plethora of other web browsers) works quite well.

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First impressions on the newly released mega-feature in Second Life: HTML-On-A-Prim.

Well, of course this is for me personally the cream on the top. I’ve just returned from several sessions of using SL as a classroom for university students. The last conversation I had with one of the students (doing a mastership) was about a complaint regarding the cost of uploading textures. Well, “spending” L$400-1000 or so for a class is definitely cheap in “preparation materials”… but I see the point: after all, putting it all on a Web page is cheaper

Enough talking! By following the links to LL’s official blog, you’ll see Torley’s videos on how to set things up properly from the SL viewer. The techies among you might prefer to do it from inside LSL. It’s pretty easy, just use the following snippet of code as inspiration — go to a parcel where you are the owner or have permissions to change the media, drop a media texture on a prim, make sure it’s set to the same media texture on About Land >Media, and with this script you can type an URL and see it displayed on the texture.

Thanks, Linden Lab You made your faithful fan even more happy today!

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In this new year (*waves*!), the first thing I did was upgrading my Wordpress installation, and, while waiting, I thought it would be nice to read through DreamHost’s blog for some news.

DreamHost is my hosting provider. Any blog post I might make here talking about why I still use them for about a hundred sites (some of them quite “sensitive” for customers; several are just experiments, joke sites, or similar pretty useless things that need to be stored “somewhere” as one lives through the Internet age…) will just like advertising for them, and I apologise in advance for the “free advertising”. But for you Second Life residents, you might understand a bit of their philosophy: they’re to Web hosting what Linden Lab is to 3D content hosting. Namely, they are also somewhere in California (they used to co-locate pretty near to Linden Lab); they’re not the biggest web hosting company in the world, but they’ve got an impressive number of users; they are perhaps one of the few last hosting companies providing “best effort” service (as opposed to sign service level agreements, which everybody pretty much does these days); they’re strangely honest and open (the first question they answered to me was about mature content; they have exactly the same approach as Linden Lab); they’re also pretty much insane, as you can see from their blog, and nobody would take them seriously for doing business with (which does not explain why they have 600,000 domains registered with them, almost all fully hosted).

Also, like Linden Lab, they’re plagued with database servers going rogue, routers that fail with improper software, servers that drop out of the network without reason, and basically handling too much traffic for what their over-stressed hardware can handle. And, yes, they have to deal with the equivalent of griefing — nasty customers running rogue applications that take all available CPU time (like, well, spamming…) and/or consuming all traffic to a server, thus demanding that someone manually logs in as administrator and shuts that rogue customer’s script down. This gives non-DreamHost customers the idea that they’re unreliable, always failing, don’t care about their customers, and are making millions of US$ every month out of the poor customers who don’t know better and refuse to move elsewhere for some reason.

Well, why do customers remain faithful to DreamHost?

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Linden Lab is definitely spoiling us. One day after the release of a new Release Candidate with the awesome in-world Search, Linden Lab released a new WindLight client!

We all knew that they had it “almost finished” for previewing and gathering data, but I guess it was a surprise to have it released just a day after we got a new release candidate to play with! Fortunately for us, they’ve released WindLight with the new search, too, so you can experiment with both at the same time if you wish!
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So you haven’t downloaded the new in-world release candidate? You really should, it’s awesome! Linden Lab is converting all their object/asset data into HTML pages, feed them to a Google Search Appliance, and let us do complex queries on it.

If you’re afraid of downloading “unstable” versions, you can still get a hint on how it looks like, since these are pretty normal webpages, all you need is a Web browser and an Internet connection For instance, this is what Linden Lab returns when searching for Gwyneth Llewelyn. Isn’t it neat?

Congratulations to Linden Lab for this extraordinary development — it was definitely quite needed! And, unlike the worst fears of many residents, it makes teleporting to content actually quite easier… and since these are web pages, it also means they’ll get picked up on Google, Yahoo and other search engines, so, one day, you might be able to do a search on Google, see an item in SL, click on an URL, and be directly teleported to the place where that object is found. Now that’s quite fantastic!

Now I only wonder what this means for the dozens of “in-world search engines” like the ones I’ve listed on my blogroll, who use libSL and a pseudo-avatar-bot roaming the grid searching for content. I guess they will quickly become obsolete. Ah well…

No, this is not about Europeans having now to pay Value Added Tax to Linden Lab — I’ve covered it on SLOG already — but something far more unexpected: Havok4 Is Here On The Beta Grid!

In a completely unexpected turn of events, it seems that a “secret team of Linden developers” have finally managed to change the server software to implement a much more recent version of Havok (it’s currently on 4.5, shortly launched before Intel bought the company that created Havok)

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Although it doesn’t come as a surprise to many of us, Linden Lab has slowly gathering up momentum on their future development strategy for Second Life, which, as we all know, is making the whole code open source.

We know now that the major reason for doing so is not simply “being nice” (which they certainly are ). The whole point is that Linden Lab is unable to hire the thousands of programmers it needs to make Second Life, as a product, do everything we wish. And I’m not simply talking about “fixing bugs” (which is always the first thing that everybody mentions) or “getting rid of lag” (which would be the second one!).

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Recently, Gareth Ellison, one of the promoters of the Open Source Grid, did a promotional event by being in-world to explain how exactly the OS Grid works and how people can connect to it.

The OS Grid is one of several that run the reverse-engineered (but Linden-approved) Open Grid Services / OpenSim software suite. Each has a different goal, but OS Grid is strongly encouraging the creation of a completely free environment, and want to establish a foundation to draw resources (financial and human) to support a free, costless, Second Life-compatible grid.

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The quest for the ultimate “SL Killer” continues. I made a few comments on yet another “ultimate virtual world” on SLOG, but the reality is, there are more, and more, and more… and every week there is a new one popping up next door

As part of my curiousity — and to a degree my professional work as well — I tend to keep abreast of what Linden Lab’s “competition” is currently doing. Yes, I’ve put quotation marks around this word, deliberately so. You’ll soon understand why.

It’s hard to believe that Second Life has reached 4 million accounts, a third of which have logged in the past two months, and not believe that the rest of the world is silently ignoring Linden Lab, and simply waiting for something for making an appearance. The strong-willed naysayers of Second Life both try to push their arguments claiming that all those numbers are fake and that “social games” without goals nor purposes have no real long-term success — it’s all hype.

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