Tom Hale, Chief Product Officer at Linden Lab, proposes that the integration of Second Life with social media may include links with dating sites so that you can take the virtual plunge before the real one.
Hale made the comments in an interview with V3 UK within the context of explaining how the Lab was aiming for “lighter engagement” with SL. (And on the topic of lighter, the conversation about that light and peppy Twitter versus that heavy and clunky SL continues over at Ad Age and Chris Abraham’s blog - check my comments at the bottom).
Tom referred to the new dashboard, which I think is close to revolutionary but which seems otherwise to have elicited yawns (am I delusional about this or something?
“Linden Lab recognises there’s a place for lighter-weight engagement with Second Life, and further leveraging the web is a strategic choice for the company, hence the launch of the new dashboard and web site refresh.”
As part of the move, the company has released a beta version of the new dashboard which provides a lightweight web interface to offer an insight into the world without having to log in. The dashboard provides access to several social networking-style tools, such as a map of Second Life, presence details of friends, upcoming events, recent activity and status updates.
This allows users to see whether anything of interest is going on in-world, or whether friends are online, before firing up the client. Similarly, it caters for a certain level of involvement in situations where the full application cannot be loaded.
I recently posted about the so-called “Australian ban” of Second Life, which is actually a much broader issue, and has garnered significant attention from both the virtual world and gaming communities. (My post also generated significant comments, all of it worth reading, thanks everyone for contributing).
Linden Lab has provided the following “official comment”:
“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 have to say, it’s really unfortunate that this issue has been misinterpreted - I’ve received messages asking whether Australia is ALREADY banned, and others who thought their friends were having trouble logging in to SL because of it. Read more…
Actually, I’m not sure the question is “can they”, but rather “should they”, but I’d better start at the beginning, because in case you haven’t heard social media is headed past prime, the next new shiny thing is on its way, (we’re not sure what yet, probably has something to do with cell phones and, heaven forbid, spimes) and social media’s bubble has burst. Or it has jumped the shark, anyways, which is what happens when Twitter appears on the cover of Time.
OK, sure, social media isn’t really “dead”, but the hype cycle is petering out maybe, all those Gartner curves come back to haunt us. It seems like there are a few problems lurking in the back channel:
- Everyone talks about how enterprise needs to “get social” but that’s not really that much different than “answer your phones” and “listen to your customers”. Enterprise wants to co-opt social media, but for the most part all it’s managing to do is use it as a giant focus group or news monitor, picking up who’s talking about what and why and trying to make sure that the ugly stuff doesn’t make it into the main stream media where it can really hurt.
- Social media ITSELF hasn’t, for the most part, shown that it can make money. Twitter lives off of the interest of its VC money and sure, some day it will sell to Google or whoever, but as an actual business it, well, isn’t one. MySpace is laying off huge chunks of its staff. And no one is really clear how youTube pays for all those servers. Doesn’t matter, I guess, information wants to be tagged and adworded, Google is making more money than network television on those little “learn to ignore” ads at the side of a Web page, so it will sort itself out.
- Social media can be mis-used. The day after all the Twitter/Iran hooplah was the follow-up - the stuff about fake Twitter accounts and furniture companies using Iran hash tags to sell stuff. The lack of identity verification is an issue, and even when it’s tackled you end up with the Facebook crowd having a fit about connecting commercial data to their identities, so the whole thing is a bit of a mess.
Now look, I love Twitter, I love youTube, I think all this social media is great, and I use it. (I hate Facebook, however - it’s infested with too many widgets, they keep doing things to make identity and data protection a crap shoot, and it took 3 months to disable the account of a friend of mine who DIED in spite repeated faxes of the death certificate, phone calls, and mixed messages about whether the account would be disabled or deleted - turns out the data will always be there, always owned by them, always sitting there on some server that I don’t have access to).
But the social media hype cycle will leave it fending for - well, relevance on its own, relevance outside of the media glare, relevance because it’s actually being used by people who don’t CARE that it’s not cool anymore. Read more…
There’s something odd going on - an increasing number of tools to back up content, even full regions in Second Life so that they can be ported elsewhere, and the odd thing I suppose is that I don’t hear all the screaming about copybots that seemed to arrive every time there was a new tool that let you save a single item, or integrate content development with 3DS or whatever.
Maybe Second Inventory softened the ground or something, the idea of being able to move your inventory to your hard drive became a sort of standard operating procedure.
Or maybe Linden Lab doesn’t care any more - they’re letting you “peel off” mainland parcels and transfer them to a private estate, so the idea of backing up a sim and moving it around is just sort of the way it is.
Whatever the case, the move towards full region back-up has picked up steam, and it’s only a line or two of code away from being more than just copying YOUR stuff, but being able to copy EVERYTHING, it’s only the good graces of someone like, say, Adam Frisby (who is highly invested in both openSim AND Second Life) to keep that extra little code snippet locked down out of public view.
The Frisby Region Back-Up (Permission Checks to follow)
Case in point is his post on Maxping, where he outlines the tool he’s built:
I have for a few months been testing an internal tool which allows you to export a OpenSim Archive from a Second Life Region - it was originally developed to export a clients region (their IP); but ended up being handy to preserve some of our workshops and builds from deletion when we closed the sims or rebuilt them. Today, I rewrote it - the previous version was based on the old libomv PrimWorkshop viewer, the new version is now based on the Simian Periscope (Periscope is a kind of multi-user version of GridProxy).
Before anyone asks, the modifications aren’t public - unfortunately for every legitimate user for a tool like this, there’s ten asshats prepared to use it as copybot deluxe, so the source is going to stay private (although I might release a binary version containing creator and permission checks similar to Second Inventory - we’ll see what my schedule looks like in the next few weeks).
This new version is overall a bit more reliable - a number of small bugs and niggles got fixed along the way - but the key factor is it’s now not a 2 hour effort to run, a region can be grabbed with 95%+ accuracy in minutes. You can see here, my personal workshop region ‘Aleph’ in Second Life - it’s a fairly old sim, but it’s gone through a ton of revisions in it’s history. The current revision is a sort of moonbase cross sandbox, complete with orbital lasers.
Now, Fisby is a bit vague about whether he owned all of the objects being backed up. But I’ll take it that the fact that he still needs to write “permission checks” implies that the current one doesn’t have them. Read more…
Show Initiative has expanded its family of on-line blogs with the launch of the 3DTLC.Net Web site.
According to the release:
To support the growing community using virtual worlds for training, learning and collaboration, we have created 3DTLC.net, a new blog focusing on timely issues, trends and best practices of business applications of virtual worlds technologies. 3DTLC-related news that would have previously surfaced in VirtualWorldsNews.com will now be available on 3DTLC.net so please set your bookmarks and RSS feeds to 3DTLC.net.
3DTLC.net coverage will include detailed interviews, analysis, trends and news, with the goal of assisting corporate customers of 3DTLC-related technologies and services to allow them to maximize the value of their implementation. 3DTLC.net also reports on the individuals that are making virtual worlds a viable option for business, academia and research.
The blog looks at areas such as e-Learning, onboarding, sales training, teaching, meetings, conferences, and more. We’ll be talking with the companies and industries that are adopting these technologies. And we’ll look at how implementation is going, including success stories, hurdles faced and how goals and objectives were set and achieved. We’ll also post insight from leading analysts, consultants and others in the trenches.. And while 3DTLC.net is very much a blog dedicated to what works now, we will also be looking at emerging trends and what’s right around the corner.
Craig Thompson, a seasoned journalist with a Master’s degree in Journalism from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, is 3DTLC.net’s lead reporter and writer. We are pleased to have Craig on board.
The sooner they lose the term “onboarding” the better, and hope not to hear the “immersive internet” tag on virtual worlds.
I was starting to get a little anxious, like maybe I had placed too much faith in Mark Kingdon, CEO of the Lab, and all those adults he brought in to help run the place - the ones from Pixar and Adobe or wherever who have sort of toiled away behind the scenes doing, well, we weren’t sure what, we were told that they were smart people and things would change.
It’s over a year now that Mark has been at the Lab. And I kept saying “give it time, he seems so damned organized and to be so consistent in what his focus is, surely that MEANS something” but regardless, I’ve had a few sinking moments, like the recent post of the “New” Second Life viewer, which turned out not to be new at all, just a sort of pencil sketch of some interface things that wasn’t really meant to be released.
Or the new Second Life home page, which I still think is a branding disaster, regardless of how it may have tested, or how many new sign-ups it generates, it lacks, well, focus or something, or a metaphor, and being a flat version of CoolIris doesn’t count as a metaphor. I wrote about some alternatives, pulling from games as my source of inspiration, and I still believe that what would make the sign-up process more powerful isn’t pictures of OTHER people in Second Life, but the chance to play a little before you even log-in, or to design an avatar maybe. Read more…
Apropos of yesterday’s odd and oddly disturbing move by the Australian government, a new blog post on Metanomics asks the question: “Who Should Responsible for Assuring Fundamental Freedoms in Virtual Worlds?”
The post, by Metanomics government and policy correspondent Sterling Wright asks whether virtual worlds should be considered services or places, ISPs or ‘cultures’. She points to Europe:
The Council of Europe seek(s) to define the responsibilities of ISPs. The Council’s Guidelines reflect an effort to apply to ISPs the responsibility of assuring “human rights” on the web. The Council argues that access to internet services is increasingly a prerequisite for engaging in a comprehensive, participatory democracy in an information society. Therefore, by providing the basic infrastructure that allows users to access and use the Internet, ISPs deliver a valuable public service and are in a unique position to promote human rights and fundamental freedoms, and may even have the responsibility to do so.
In a separate set of guidelines applying to games, The Council explicitly ruled out virtual worlds as games arguing that: “such universes only to a lesser degree constitute a programmed experience under the control of a game publisher. Virtual universes also lack a specified gaming scenario and set of goals to achieve.”
According to the Inquisitr, new laws in Australia will mean that Second Life is banned on that continent.
The site reports:
“The Australian Minister for Censorship has today confirmed what I’ve been reporting for nearly two years: online adult games including Second Life will be banned in Australia.
A spokesman for Censorship Minister Stephen “Goebbels” Conroy confirmed that “under the filtering plan, it will be extended to downloadable games, flash-based web games and sites which sell physical copies of games that do not meet the MA15+ standard.” In Australia, the MA15+ rating means that the content is restricted to those aged 15 and above. Australia does not have a R 18+ or similar rating for computer games, with all adult games automatically being classified as RC (Refused Classification.)”
Cybersex in virtual worlds is becoming as regular a feature as avatars. It’s common knowledge that cybersex is a robust area of cyberspace, and a sex educator and online columnist recently asserted at a sexuality conference that there will be few obstacles as it enters the mainstream, according to Canada.com.
Right now, cybersex - human/computer sexual interactions - seem to be limited to the tech-savvy and the sexually adventurous, as things like ‘teledildonics,’ the remote manipulation of sex toys in the hands of a partner, take hold in certain sectors of the world. But the article asserts that cybersex will enter the mainstream, bringing with it a new and changing set of rules.
“What I think people like about (sex on the Internet) is the newness and that online you can do something different,” said the educator, Cory Silverberg, to Canada.com. “It feels like the rules are different.”
The article also details the challenges that sex educators will face, and also how the very definition of infidelity is under threat due to the confusing, boundary-blurring sexual adventures in virtual worlds and elsewhere.
There was no comment on whether Microsoft’s Project Natal would allow for, um, teledildonic hand gestures.
And on a related note, since we’re posting ‘classic clips’ from this past season, a note from M on adult content:
Dusan Writer is my avatar name in virtual worlds such as Second Life where I like to wander, build, explore, and buy stuff. Interested in the metaverse and identity, education, visualization, and collaboration. Real life Doug Thompson, CEO of Remedy Communications (link below). Contact is at Gmail: Dusan.Writer
This site is not associated with the brands mentioned unless otherwise stated. Note in particular that Second Life, Linden, inSL, SL, and SLurl are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc. You probably knew that without us telling you, but we were told to mention it.
