Why Second Life is Important
05. Aug, 2006 
7 Comments
I spent a lot of time hanging out with Miguel de Icaza and Jim Purbrick in the evenings. On Tuesday, I realized that Jim worked for Linden Lab. Now, you almost have to
be living under a rock to not have heard of Second Life. However, even though I distinctly remember Robert Scoble describing Second Life as a computing
platform, I totally didn’t get what that was about.
So I decided to ask Jim what the big deal was.
I started off by suggesting that I was way too old to ‘get’ what was going on in Second Life. Usually, when I see a 3D world, my first thought is OK, now who do I kill? However, Jim gave me this funny look like I was from some other planet and then proceeded to give me a demo of Second Life.
In his demo, he showed us how to create objects, and a bit of the Linden
Scripting Language which is a programming language that you can use to control
the virtual artifacts that you make in Second Life. Now that was kind of cool, but it wasn’t the hook that I needed to invest any serious amount of time in Second Life.
I finally ‘got it’ the next day when Cory Ondrejka, the CTO of Second Life, opened with
an amazing talk that explained “Why?” in a way that even I could understand.
He discussed the social and economic implications of humans collaborating with each other inside of Second Life. Here is a quick summary of his talk:
- It is not a ‘game’, because games have objectives, winners and losers, ‘leveling’ etc.
- A virtual world where computing resources are represented by a land ‘proxy’. More land equals more CPU resources in Second Life.
- More land equals more money that you pay per month. This lets people pay for more power.
- Vibrant and growing internal economy – $1.3M USD exchanged hands in July.
- 140,000 residents in July sold 380,000 items
- You have intellectual property rights to things you create in Second Life. Case of Tringo which has been licensed for distribution in the ‘real world’.
- Whereas only 3% of web users have ever created any content, 65% of Second Life have created content. That translates into 36,000 hours of content creation per day. Currently that’s 23TB worth of user-created data.
- 15% of their users have written code in Linden Scripting Language.
- 350,000 residents in Second Life, growing at a rate of 15% per month.
- Median age of 32 years (there goes my ‘too old to get it’ argument).
- Gender neutral by hours of use.
The thing that really grabbed my attention was this photo:
It shows the Beyond Broadcast conference at the Berkman Center at Harvard both in real life and in Second Life. If you look closely at the MacBook Pro, you’ll see that there is a back-channel conversation that is going in real time. And, of course, most of the attendees in Second Life were not physically present at the real conference. Check out this link to see how they did this.
Now this is my hook to do something real with Second Life.
Hey, there are lots of people in SL probably much older than you and me
)
I am just wondering if you are now exploring it. If you need some hints, just ping me
(great photos, btw
I’m exploring a bit in the evenings after the kids go to bed. A guided tour would rock – I’ll definitely ping you in the next few days to learn more about what’s going on in there.
Thanks!
Hi John,
I’m Mocc Spatula in SL, and a Toronto Beach resident in RL.
Weird serendipity here – I was just reading David Crow’s blog a few minutes ago, where your name came up – then I was googling some SL info, and I found this post of yours. Spooky.
Drop me an IM in world sometime. Or maybe we’ll run into each other at a BarCamp or something.
Cheers.
I started out in SL with the idea of creating and selling content to cover my tier (monthly land cost). I’m now not only selling the virtual “things” I make in SL, which are definitely scripted, textured, photorealistic…but I am now teaching others as well.
Building teaching aids in SL is a snap..and there are some exceptional tools that push scripts..push samples…track student attendance…
In Real Life my son is finally motivated to write code/LSL Script in the Teen Second Life Grid…Woohoo!
Drop me a line in world…
EmCee Widget
MC Designs Fine Jewelry
New York, London, Milan, Lida (SL)
(Real Life Name withheld)
SO WHAT?
The technology is impressive, but how much of the information conveyed in that picture is in actually relevant to what a real meeting or conference would be about? I need to know what the speaker is saying, and I might want to know what other participants think of the speaker or what they have to contribute… I don’t need to know where other participants are sitting, especially when they’re not really sitting anywhere. I don’t need to know what they look like, especially if they don’t really look like that.
I attended a lug (linux user group) meeting in Second Life, and it was incredibly static and boring. Nobody moved, everybody just sat there. It was like an oil painting of Dogs playing poker. and the real information, the meeting part of the meeting, was deemphasized, a tiny line or two at the bottom of the page.
I saw in article in Fortune about how Second Life will be more successful when you don’t need to be a techie to use it, but you don’t need to be a techie; you need to be a gamer. I’m a lot better at the Linux Command Line than I am at dragging my avatar through the brightly colored streets of virtual nowheresville. To non gamers, it’s a big bloated cumbersome interface, and it adds nothing.
Virtual reality will always be important for flight simulators or whatnot, but I can’t see where this sort of thing has any applications other than entertainment and advertising. I’m hoping that the internet of the future will help us shape and process information, not just envelop us in information that isn’t even real.
sorry about the double click… I wanted to add that the title of your blog (less is better fits nicely with my there here.)
I’d also like to add that I don’t want to ruin anybody’s fun, just keep it away from my fun.
my “there here”???