DISQUS

Agreed. But see my blog (or don't bother I'll say it here)....because Linden Lab has a secret weapon if this all goes the awful way it COULD - they can simply send Philip Rosedale down to talk about how the future of the Internet is really electricity (yeah, he actually said that), give them courses on meditation, and all will be well. :)

I've received an official comment from Linden Lab. The statement reads:

"Linden Lab has received no indications from the Australian government that it plans to block Second Life and will keep our community apprised of any developments on that front. In the meantime, we want to assure Australian Residents that Second Life remains accessible and functioning in your region.

Australia has and will continue to be an important market for Linden Lab, and we’re committed to providing the best possible Second Life experience for the users in that market. Some of the most exciting uses of Second Life have come out of Australia, a diverse community of Residents that includes major universities, large enterprises and many thousands of consumers, who spend hundreds of thousands of hours inworld each month."

I believe that's what Torley was referring to.

Ohhhhhhhhhh thanks Gwyn - I was trying to figure out what was so special about this approach.

The HTTP Get idea is kinda Metaplace'y.

Very cool, thanks for explaining.

Awesome - then I look forward to it. :)

Frankly, Lowell, I hope I don't sound upset with you - I'm still shuddering in horror if this is anything like what the final release will look like. I suppose I am pleading or begging, in a way, to make this picture I now have of "SL 2.0" go AWAY.

I've placed faith that Howard and M will help to solve some of the major riddles of the interface, the first hour, and other things... and if this is as far as they've gotten, my faith would frankly sink like a lead balloon.

Lowell - of course I would have. And I would have started with some context from the Lab: "I have this copy, tell me about it, will anything closely resembling it ever be released?" The response I received was "No, it was an early prototype in the early stages of the redesign process."

Against that backdrop, I would have reported that this early prototype gave a sense of some of the things they were exploring: better teleport histories and "web-style" URLs, better use of tear-off menus, different user-friendly naming conventions, and new thought on the menu hierarchies.

I then would have reported that as part of a design process, these thoughts would help to clarify and be a test bed for different use cases. That the particular client was likely a way of testing dozens or hundreds of use cases, to map out the number of clicks and friction points between a user wanting to do something, and actually doing it.

Then, I would have speculated that the results of this type of testing creates a sort of map: what is EASY, what is HARD, and that very likely, they would then have the kind of robust usability data with which to do the REAL brainstorming - the kind that leads to those "AHA" moments, the ones where you arrive at new usability and design metaphors that tie together the data from these early tests, and the creativity of the folks at Big Spaceship (about whom I'll reserve judgement, on the other hand, I have some faith in the guy who invented the Tivo interface, who is heading the project up).

I would conclude by saying that this type of process, which starts from what you have, builds usability models and insights, can often result in an end product that is similar, but can also result in something that is radically different.

Again, however, to call this a pre-release is erroneous. I'm wondering - can you confirm that someone at Linden Lab has informed you that this is a pre-release?

I was told that it was an early build during the initial phases of development.

If this really IS a pre-release, then heaven help us all.

Lowell - in what way is this a new version? In what way is it "probably a pre-release version"? And how can you call this Version 2.0?

These screen shots are from early prototype tests created during the development process of Version 2.0. Neither here nor on Massively has the Lab itself been asked: what was the purpose of this particular test? Was it menu functionality or hierarchy? Is it a design test? Was it one of hundreds of 'sketches' or prototypes? One of a dozen? The only one?

To even imply that a viewer that looks like this is what will be released under the SL 2.0 banner is misleading, or to imply that it's even a pre-release is misleading.

As the Lab clarified when I asked a member of the senior management team, this particular prototype happened very early in the design process, significant work has happened since, and there is significant work left to do.

A handful, all, or none of the features from this early test build may find their way into the final viewer....but for all we know, this was a test build to see whether command groupings made sense in the usability lab.

So no, I'm sorry, this is not necessarily a "new version"...just as a pencil sketch of a Web site on a napkin isn't necessarily a new Web site, which also doesn't make it a rough version, a next generation version, or a pre-release. It makes it an early prototype, and that's it.

When I saw Tateru's post, I had a very similar reaction and frankly couldn't believe it. So I actually ASKED the Lab whether this is anything like what the final release will look like, and the response was a firm no.

So the whole coverage is, I'd say, quite misleading.

Does this mean my Class 7 server is obsolete?

Tish - I think we're in agreement. We're already seeing applications, mash-ups, and wonderful experiments. I suppose my point here was to make sure that we not confuse OpenSim with SL when we discuss feature sets and advantages. If we focus on prim limits and concurrency we get stuck in discussions about whether the hosts are more or less trustworthy than the Lab. If we talk about OpenSim as a place to test new physics models, opportunities for real time prototyping, the advantages to shared inventories for co-creation - then we start worrying less about whether OpenSim "worlds" look like the SL world.

I use the term "features that LL doesn't" to draw the analogy. Having said that: is there such a list? Forget about comparisons to the Lab - and I've found bits and pieces on different blogs, but I'd really love to see more documentation and sharing around this. Or a point in the right direction.

I keep checking your blog Tish to find out the latest, of course. :) But maybe there's an aggregated summary of different experiments and tests that I've missed.

Now - what about the policy issues Tish? As I've mentioned before, your post with the interview with Eben Moglen was one of my turning point moments in virtual worlds. It pointed in the direction of really deep and compelling opportunities around identity, trust and so on - are we seeing ANY movement in these areas? (Other than OpenID...ick).

And PLEASE refute my claim that policy does not HAVE to follow code. In fact, that discussions of these issues can facilitate deep innovation ahead of code being executed, distributed, hosted, and ubiquitous. I keep hearing the arguments, and then I hear these things about standards and a growing sense that they are starting to emerge - but someone please set me straight on all of this, because I still haven't heard anything that sounds like a valid argument for what harm there would be in having more meaningful discussion around these issues - unless, again, I'm missing the really cool meetings where this stuff is being talked about without the room being dominated by folks solely interested in code.

My goodness. OK, just read Prok's comments and your reply - who knew New Years Day would be so, um, exciting!

Now...I'm not going to get into a parsing here, but first Gwyn, your reply to Prok is pretty astounding, clearing up some of the misconceptions I've always had and reminding me, yet again, that crossing sim boundaries is in fact one of the great technical miracles of our time. It's also one of the great barriers to concurrency - it's not having 100 avatars on a sim that's the problem, it's having them arrive around the same time, what with all those virtual machines or other fancy codey things that need to happen. (Thanks to Sidewinder for that last bit, btw, he gave me a cool little lesson on this).

In any case, on many of your points, I agree, as best a non-techy can with those techy bits, and the difference between the technology and the business issues. But I still take issue with the general thesis, I'm afraid. And the thesis is something like this:

- Code is code
- Policy and business issues are complicated and will require code, once its written, to enable different expressions and approaches to this
- Therefore, code will align with policy over time, because code is flexible, and modular, and business will demand it, therefore it will BE.

Now, I brought this up at the VW conference in LA at the OpenSim session, and I felt like I was being hectored and lectured by Frisby who, sure, is a little boy genius and whatever, but it made me feel like one of those people who just can't get their kids to listen to them, I've BEEN THERE dammit, but they need to learn for themselves, I suppose, and take us all down one more time, history doomed to repeat itself or whatever.

My point in LA was the same as it has always been: yes, code is separate from policy, but that doesn't mean they should be decoupled. I use the example of e-mail. I got the Frisby lecture in return, which focused on protocols and a lesson on how e-mail works, which was totally irrelevant to the main issue, which is that e-mail was constructed in a way that doesn't allow us, now, to somehow figure out how to get rid of all the SPAM I get. It's maybe a tangential example, but it's an understandable one: spam is a policy issue. E-mail is delivered because of code. If the code had been developed with an acknowledgment of this policy issue, (I'm not saying it wasn't, I don't even know), or if they had been able to PREDICT it, we would have better control over spam (whether that's good or bad I won't debate).

Now, content protection: we KNOW, we can PREDICT, that this will be an issue. That it will be a policy issue, a legal one, a "trust" one. It's a cop-out to say "sure, but digital content in GENERAL is an issue, why should WE solve it?" Because the answer is: we CAN. And virtual worlds can demonstrate that they're not only a platform for innovation related to 3D space, but for innovations in content protection as well. And this means going deep into these business and policy issues NOW, at a time when the code is still sufficiently flexible to allow a deep think on what innovation around this COULD look like, before the philosophy of the people building what they're building gets so far along, and so entrenched, that it's too late for innovation of this sort.

I mean look - what's going to happen will be like e-mail. Once it's out there and people are using it, you think they'll swap out all that installed technology to make room for, what, identity and IP protection systems that benefit the USERS instead of the platform owners? Doubtful.

Imagine a version of the Internet where the copyleftists could live happily beside the publishing companies or music companies or whoever else. Hmm. Can you say iTunes? Maybe not perfect, but it shows how innovation can be derived from rethinking business models for content in a world in which, supposedly, all content is digital and should be free.

What about Better Places to go even further afield - forget cars, think about how cars are powered, build your business model on that. The received orthodoxies are simply that: received. It doesn't make them true, and this supposedly highly innovative community is simply receiving orthodoxies instead of pushing the envelope a bit more.

I mentioned this on my own post: look at Raph Koster, he didn't start to code Metaplace until he had thought through all these business issues. His model for avatar rights, content protection and commerce is as deeply embedded in his architecture as the mind set of the current OpenSim's coders is embedded in it. They've decided these issues are for future generations to figure out, or business, whoever - and they know better, why, they're even smarter than Raph Koster I guess.


My feeling is that OpenSim, by continually deferring these issues of content protection and policy, because we're "not there yet" are missing one of the most meaningful opportunities we may ever have to deeply innovate around issues that are far more central to our times than prim counts or concurrency. Issues related to identity, trust and content and with them the opportunities for collaboration, product development, licensing of creative output - these are THE hotbeds for our era.

Companies will be destroyed and empires built by those who can solve these issues. OpenSim, by generally putting to the back burner discussions of content, commerce and policy are denying themselves one of the key innovation opportunities presented by virtual worlds, as so ably demonstrated by the success of the Lab which, as you point out, wasn't built on TECHNOLOGY but built on the policy decisions they practically made by accident: why, this time, does it need to be accidental again?

So, you argue:

"So, to recap — the lack of groups, incomplete permissions, search features (or classifieds), etc. are technological limitations, they aren’t available on OpenSim grids because the software simply hasn’t those features yet. Not yet, but one day they will. Just not today. The aspect of IP protection, overall control of griefers and script kiddies, and trustworthiness of the companies running those grids — are business issues. Like any start-up, they have zero references, and no history to validate their claims of trustworthiness. That’s a completely different story, and one faced by all new companies."

And I respectfully disagree. Or, to quote someone who's thought about this a bit more than I have:

"It’s about all the script kiddies and code bastards all over the new grids who could give a flying fuck about private property, currency, commerce, values, etc"

Wonderful points Gwyn - I'll come back for a read of your response to Prok...I'm side-stepping some of those issues right now, although I touched on policy in my own post.

Regarding the Lab - I totally agree with you. I'm not proposing that the Lab's solution will be flexible, nor particularly configurable. What I'm proposing is that in the near-term when enterprise makes the choice in which they need to balance out stability, service (for what it is) and "proven" versus configurable and codeable they'll go for the first: for now. Many of them won't care about that coding bit you mention as long as they can save travel costs or whatever - it's only LATER when they start saying "OK, now that we've held virtual meetings, what ELSE can we do" and start wondering about product prototyping or data visualization or project architectures or whatever that they'll bump up against the limitations of monolithic code.

But I'd still like to hear a clear list of use cases that OpenSim currently supports that LL can't. Physics, sure. Anything else? I'm not being snide, I'm sure there's tons, I'd just like to see a good list started somewhere.

The Lab will offer sufficient configurability, they'll add bells and whistles, HTTP-In and, who knows, HTML on a prim, whatever else. This will add a new layer of innovation, and then look for far more development Web-side over the next year. Take Justin's work, the Web-side integration, packaging up mobile phone SMS, calendar functions, all that stuff and expect to see more. I'm actually of the belief that there's a sufficiently high innovation ceiling on the Lab's platform that hasn't even been tapped yet - and if Mark is true to his word and we see "new tools for commerce and content development" then the ceiling will rise slightly higher.

Having said all that, I alluded to this in my post that I think the innovation on OpenSim won't be because it's a "deeply configurable" SL imitation Grid, but when they break loose a bit more (not that they haven't already - what was that Intel project with physics?) and demonstrate configurations that are TRULY different - not how it's scripted or deployed, but what use cases it can support that we haven't seen before.

OK. Now, back to reading your discussion with Prok.

Gwyn: So much to say, so I said it at here.

But just to say: I'll be circulating this to whoever will take a copy. I think this is the definitive post on OpenSim, at least as a "tick list" of what it is (and isn't), how it works, and what to consider if you want to host your own (or visit someone else's). Great links within the post as well - you've managed to aggregate some of the top posts and references elsewhere on the subject, including Prok's summaries.

I veer away from you a little on the latter parts and the implications for the Lab. Clearly, the Lab is launching stand-alone servers. What we don't know is what the "estate controls" for those servers will look like: will they include the ability to tweak avatar or prim limits? Plug in your own voice or chat systems? It's unclear - but for the 'casual' enterprise, the value proposition for using a Linden Lab "stand-alone server" (much like a Google search box) will be very difficult to resist. All the talk about modularized code and whatever will be lost: SL will be something you don't need an engineering degree to plug in and start up (if the Lab does it right, of course, which is unknown - all these new guys over there seem to have SOME idea what they're doing, at least based on their CVs).

OpenSim will give you lots of options and, over time, may be more scalable. But if I'm a medium sized business and I'm told I can order a server, have it shipped (or hosted by an experienced 300-person company that is currently supporting 70,000 concurrent users), and I can have controls over things like log-in, identity, prim and avatar limits AND the technology has been proven through X number of user hours (what do you figure they could claim? 200 million user hours? a billion? whatever), and is fully supported by a profitable company with staff in 5 countries or whatever, which would YOU choose? Most companies won't care that it costs something, or that you can't code in Java.

So, I'm not willing to say that the Lab is down for the count because OpenSim is cheap and free and will have as many deployment flavors as ice cream. The Lab has put the breaks on intergrid teleports because, well, they can: and this allows them to at least play catch-up, or secondly to get ahead of the innovation curve of OpenSim....they can worry about that next week, or next year - in the meantime, people like myself, trying to hypergrid all over the place with each server different from the last, with different bandwidth, with no inter-grid commerce: well, that's a lot of catching up to do.

Having said all that, you have still given us the post of the year.

All the best for 2009. :)

Agreed Roland. It's the "not yet" that's the important footnote.

Mind you, I also buy the other 'meme' - the one Tish picked up on in her interview with Tim O'Reilly, that there's a lot of innovation happening in avatar-less 3D space. Think Photosynth. But this fits in to the idea that the metaverse is more than immersive worlds - it's also mirror worlds, life logging, augmented reality, collaborative prototyping, and 3D information space.

Would love to see the user hours for Google Earth. We always talk about the importance of avatars and immersion and I don't debate them for some of the "use cases" (ugh, I hate that term) but there are plenty of other uses for 3D environments that may not require avatars as a key interface element.

Thanks for sharing this! I was so inspired by the amazing work of the panelists. It was an incredible reminder that the future is, in so many ways, already here - we just get so lost in the prim trees that we can't always see the forest!

Not sure you saw being able to move prims with your eyes? Amazing!

A stunning time to be involved in virtual worlds.

They want to be a platform and not a world. But they've got this darn world on their hands, and having 'worldly communications' with it, within it - well, it's not very platformy is it? Shifting anything smacking of community off into a separate part of the Web site, and then attaching "experts" to different topic areas, speaks to their internal dialogue which excludes community relations and includes words like "user case" and how to partition off the service functions into technology platforms that can later be white labeled for corporate consumption.

All of which is fine but as always you get the sense that they have a poorly implemented road map for getting there. You shouldn't need to announce something like this 2 months before it happens unless there's something else hidden behind the curtain - a major launch? A buy-out? Merger? Or just the usual attempt by Robin Linden to fight fires but leaving us all sprayed with flame retardant foam.

Thanks for the post, this seems to be the topic of the month (or has this topic been around forever).

I spoke about this on my blog as well - I'm of the opinion that orientation island should be killed entirely, and when you log-in you should be teleported to a social space, because that, in the experience of many, is what keeps them in SL. If they manage to make it OFF orientation island that is - first, they need to learn the interface (and thus the intention of my UI design contest - surely 800,000L will generate some kind of idea stream on that score?)
http://dusanwriter.com/?p=557

But if you kill orientation, then how do you allow people to learn and get engaged? I wrote about the idea that orientation should be external to the grid, and should be wrapped up in avatar creation and customization, including little mini tutorials within that process. I was really pleased to see that Spore is doing exactly that, including the idea I had to allow widgets that would allow you to post your avatar to Facebook, mySpace or youTube.

My post on killing orientation:
http://dusanwriter.com/?p=508

And a comment on Spore:
http://dusanwriter.com/?p=602

Sorry for all the links, don't mean to spam, but it's probably more useful to send you there than repeat myself! I do tend to ramble.

Clever Zebra has the right idea, but the model might need a refresh. The idea that businesses need a source of builds, desks and vendors and that by providing this for free will generate significant flow-through consulting work might have been useful a year ago, but I'm having trouble making the mental leap now. Others might say that the way to make money in the SL economy is to make stuff and charge money for it, but the reality is that everyone's bought into the "Free" meme thanks to the Long Tail and open source and other assorted coder chic and so I see the economy for objects shifting to either objects with considerable brand cachet, or to services.

Now, going on the "get it for free and then hire us to help" idea, this idea in the wrong hands means you end up with, well, a lot of stuff that's free, and a lot of venture capital money floating around, but nobody making any money. Remember the last bubble anyone? Back in the day, everyone said it was all about the eyeballs and first mover advantage. Forget about revenues for now, just get the traffic and go IPO like Netscape and we'll all retire to Tahiti.

Now, I'm not saying Clever Zebra isn't getting the add-on business. They get some press. They're building an ecosystem, and that takes time. And I visited their sims and the builds are great (although not everything there is free, and some of it is waaaay over-priced).

But I had no sense of solutions. And having joined their group and having visited their sims, it's not like I've become engaged in something deeper because no one's asked me what my problems are. There's no add-on service to be had if all I end up with is an auditorium but no one pinging me and saying "Hey, what are you using it for, have you considered...." In other words, if you're going to do free, you also have to do the follow-up exceptionally well.

I don't have anything against CZ....although maybe today it feels like it lol but it's just a coincidence.

I'm pointing out that I'm not sure the "free stuff" approach has legs - look at Slippcat - whatever happened to their embedded viral sofas or whatever? Maybe Millions of Us will make a go of it with their celebrity endorsed shoes and animations and whatnot...don't we all wanna look like Paris Hilton or Justin Timberlake afterall (I kid you not, that's what they're doing).

What I DO think is that the problems are becoming more complex - it's not about the build, it's about how to structure interaction, narrative, and experience. It's no longer enough to aggregate objects and add on services, you now need to aggregate services and add on deep strategic, IMHO.