Should We Talk Less About the Metaverse and More About Shared Creative Spaces?

"The metaverse is dead. Long live shared creative spaces!" is the provocative title of a recent post on MixedRealities, which is Roland Legrand's thoughts on the new products from Linden Lab like Patterns and Creatorverse, and for that matter, the text-based creative platforms coming from Linden soon. As the company does this, it's re-branded itself as a "Maker of Shared Creative Spaces", which Legrand likes as a broader ideal:

I do like this notion of virtual shared creative spaces. It is exactly what we’ll need in many different contexts, as globalization increases dramatically and the technological possibilities multiply exponentially.

I agree. And unlike the "metaverse" concept, which Second Life was not originally designed to be, and is not being widely embraced in any case (at least not yet), talking about SL in terms of a shared creative space connects it not only to Linden Lab's other products, but creative sandbox games like Minecraft, or Roblox, or Garry's Mod, and many many more that have (I'd very roughly estimate) about 20 million total users. And if we start talking and thinking about Second Life on that continuum, I think we get at the crucial element that makes SL powerful, while connecting it in comparison to other shared creative spaces.

Thoughts to discuss over the weekend!

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Comments

[Sarge Misfit]

No, I don't think so. Its about perception. The term 'metaverse' brings to mind the universe, which is expanding and infinite. The term 'space' though brings to mind an area, which has its limits.

Let's not forget, SL is not the whole of the Metaverse. On its own, it is a shared creative space. But, once you include all the OpenSim, AuroraSim, Unity, and other virtual world platforms and instances in your considerations, then you have a metaverse.

[Ezra]

What we title Second Life doesn't make it any less laggy or expensive to create in.

Second Life doesn't have a perception issue that keeps it from growing. If it did, it wouldn't have 10,000 to 20,000 sign-ups a day. It has technical and pricing issues that keeps all those new sign ups from developing into a 20 million strong active userbase you say those other products have.

[Lani Global]

Metaverse requires inter-connectivity.

Ubiquitous interoperability, at the very minimum.

Failing to achieve Metaverse, perhaps "Shared Creative Space" becomes a fallback position, but nobody's being fooled by it. "Diminished expectations" comes to mind.

[Iggy]

I am with Lani. Give us enough will- and computing power, and we'd build a metaverse.

We could have gone to Mars with Nervas and willpower too, in the 1970s, but we did not.

Cowards.

[Lani Global]

One should be able to walk or teleport to Patterns from SL.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Reports of the metaverse's demise are nearly as hyperbolic as reports of its dawn. The party hasn't even started yet.

[Isadora Fiddlesticks]

There's a feeling that in order to win the MAJORITY and get more money flowing in, Linden Lab has to diminish its scope to something more accessible to the hoi polloi.

It's like those haute couture designers that are now in places like Target...which isn't bad, but they still haven't addressed the reason why not a lot of people can embrace this virtual world. It's like a big, white elephant that we all can see except themselves, or maybe they see it, but their pride is just up there to make themselves admit it.

[Hamlet Au]

"Metaverse requires inter-connectivity. Ubiquitous interoperability, at the very minimum."

Thing is, NOBODY is doing that anymore. Linden Lab and IBM gave up on that, and even OpenSim isn't really doing that in a substantial way either. Like reader Gordon pointed out in a recent post, "If you exclude the active users of the walled garden grids from the total amount, there are less than 7,000 active users in the hypergrid-connected grids." And I'm not even sure how "connected" those really are, without a shared currency or IP rights system. They seem *less* connected than the world wide web, not more.

[DD Ra]

Shared Creative Spaces? You mean several person opening a document in Goggle Docs, Hamlet ? ^_^

I think it as nothing to do with terms, but with a dire reality : circa 2006-2007 SL has known a buzz that flooded LL with money. At high level, they took that for granted, and since then have lost contact with their community, the real gold of SL.

SL is about community, immertion, identity and creativity, that's why the term Metaverse seems to be more appropriate for me.

The problem is, people want high ROI and need hipe words to "sell" it... they refuse to see that each well earned dollar means having to work... or to steal from someone.

[Masami Kuramoto]

Hamlet Au wrote:

OpenSim isn't really doing that in a substantial way either.

What makes you think so? Is the hypergrid not working? Is it no longer being developed?

Like reader Gordon pointed out in a recent post, "If you exclude the active users of the walled garden grids from the total amount, there are less than 7,000 active users in the hypergrid-connected grids."

Gordon was not stating a fact but drawing a conclusion based on incomplete numbers that you presented to him. Now you are pointing at Gordon as an authoritative source confirming that your numbers are complete. This is circular reasoning, Hamlet.

And I'm not even sure how "connected" those really are, without a shared currency or IP rights system.

They don't need to be connected, just connectable. New World Notes is not connected to Pravda either, yet I could easily set up a web page that links to both NWN and Pravda, and you wouldn't even know. This is what the metaverse is all about. You need to learn thinking outside the walled garden box. Of course decentralization makes it harder to count all the beans. This is a feature, not a bug.

There are more than a hundred million websites running the Apache web server, yet they have no shared currency nor any form of IP rights system. Obviously these things are not a requirement to build a metaverse of considerable size. All it takes is a shared communications protocol, so that people can hop from one site to another. OpenSim has that already. All the other stuff is optional and may be added later.

[Roland Legrand]

About interoperability and IP: let's not forget that in 3D-printing things are going rather well. People use various hardware- and software solutions which seem to blend together.

Fablabs and hackerspaces often have a policy of letting people use their machines for free, if the designs are shared. Which means that more and more designs are available for free downloading, while there are also various Creative Commons rights possible. More customized stuff can be made for a fee.

I really think the virtual 'shared creative spaces' should make it more obvious they can be great sandboxes for 3D printing projects or other hacking stuff such as designing drones or working out biohack-projects.

The metaverse will ultimately encompass the virtual and the physical environments, which will be like one big network of creative spaces - so commonly used people won't even it consider 'metaverse' anymore, but just the new reality of things.

Okay folks, this is just a kind of weird Saturday-morning dream here, coming from someone who is not a hacking-wizard himself, so please tell me whether I'm being delirious here.

[Gordon]

Masami K. wrote:

"Gordon was not stating a fact but drawing a conclusion based on incomplete numbers that you presented to him."

Hamlet presented only the numbers from the sugarcoating Hypergrid Business. And these numbers are based on the top 40 largest grids running with OpenSim software. The fact that more than 50% of the active users in these top 40 grids are using a walled garden, is for me a good indication that the main interest of OpenSim users is not the metaverse or even hypergrid connectivity.

[Alberik]

Only in Lindenland. Your customer base is shrinking. Your revenues are in question. Your prices are through the ceiling. Solution? An unlovely polysyllabic phrase with the grace and impact of a rotted trout.

[Orca Flotta]

Gordon is correct: Most SL inhabitants are happy little bunnies in their walled garden. As the statistics show most aren't even leaving the sim they have logged into. And look at all the landowners erecting banlines and security devices so that others may not come in. What use is a hypergrid for them? They have other interests.

Alberik is right too: We just don't care how LL brands itself. We want the product Second Life. Many have set foot in other virual worlds, I myself have 3 or 4 accounts in worlds I can't even remember the names of. They all failed to satisfy me and other users. Either by lack of economy, physics, community or sheer size.
So most come back to SL. Or not.
Be that as it may, SL going belly up, SL thriving ... pffrz. SL is kinda perfect, just badly managed. I guess the worst mistake they (LL) can do would be to fiddle with the product itself, to turn it into something else. We're not in SL to play Minecraft, we're not in SL to have a 3D Facebook. We're in SL to do "our thing", regardless of what the platform is called.

Creative spaces? Pffrz! Most people are as creative as automotive robots. They won't even enjoy well-made shopping sims but get their stuff from LL's home-made nemesis, Marketplace. Why? Because they are protected from having to use their imagination.

Hypergrid? Haha. When most users won't even visit another sim how do you expect them to visit a different grid? And what would they find there anyway? The same shit as in SL, just not as good. Ever noticed how the bottom of the barrel residents are still hanging out in orientation centers and welcome areas, even after having spent months in SL? Why even bother making a hypergrid or hyperspace (or whatever fancy name you got for it) for them?

[Masami Kuramoto]

Gordon wrote:

Hamlet presented only the numbers from the sugarcoating Hypergrid Business.

Yes, but even the sugarcoating HB is struggling to keep up with all the "gridlets" coming and going.

The fact that more than 50% of the active users in these top 40 grids are using a walled garden, is for me a good indication that the main interest of OpenSim users is not the metaverse or even hypergrid connectivity.

The problem here is one of perception. If we see the hypergrid as one world, then active users should only be reported by their home grid, not by each grid they visit. But what if the home grid is a sim-on-a-stick on someone's laptop? How can we have comparable numbers if walled gardens require separate accounts for the same person, but the hypergrid does not?

[Archangel Mortenwold]

Why? SL and other metaverses are something that has far wider appeal. Blogging about niche products like Patterns is like devoting an entire blog to a single game like Starfox. It might score points with Starfox fans, but who else is going to read it?

[Masami Kuramoto]

Orca Flotta wrote:

Ever noticed how the bottom of the barrel residents are still hanging out in orientation centers and welcome areas, even after having spent months in SL?

Are they? How did you find out? :P

[Gordon]

Masami K. wrote:
"If we see the hypergrid as one world, then active users should only be reported by their home grid, not by each grid they visit."

But this is currently not the case. Which means that the small number of active users in hypergrid enabled grids are basically even lower, than the statistics represent. If user (x) from grid (a) teleport into grid (b), then we have already two active users in the statistics.

This fact strengthens my assumption, that more than half of all active users in OpenSim grids rather prefers a walled garden.

[Joker]

Meanwhile. hypertextual vrml files are being dropped into 3d printers by pundits daily. As they have been for almost 20 years.

[Orca Flotta]

Masami wrote:

Orca Flotta wrote:

Ever noticed how the bottom of the barrel residents are still hanging out in orientation centers and welcome areas, even after having spent months in SL?

Are they? How did you find out? :P

I don't have statistics but I often pass one or the other n00b island when sailing by. And there are always a lot of people on there. And when you check their profiles they are often not cluelsss n00bs but "old salts" who should know better than to waste their time in these terrible places. And I might refer here to a post by Hamlet in this very blog in which he states that statistically 80% of users never leave the place they have logged into.
Lack of curiosity, lack of ideas, lack of initiative, name it whatever you fancy what keeps them static. It's sad, I know. But that's how it is.

[Masami Kuramoto]

Gordon wrote:

If user (x) from grid (a) teleport into grid (b), then we have already two active users in the statistics.

No. Hypergrid logins are currently not stored in the services database and do not appear in regular OpenSim stats. The numbers reported are the local users of the grid.

Collecting data about hypergrid visitors would require a system to parse the OpenSim log for incoming HG agent UUIDs and storing them permanently to avoid counting unique visitors multiple times. Such a system may exist but is certainly not in widespread use.

Even if it were, most grid operators would probably understand that local and foreign users should be reported separately rather than conflated in a single number.

[Lynne Hand]

As one of the happy little bunnies, I am sticking with Second Life, but I do intend to dip my toe into OpenSim just to see if it would be fit for purpose for other educators.

IMHO - It is mind blowing what LL, and all the other creative people in SL, have created. For me, the shared creative space you talk about is already there, and it's called Second Life, but it would help if the space were a bit cheaper to rent. ;)

[Gordon]

Masami K. wrote:
"Even if it were, most grid operators would probably understand that local and foreign users should be reported separately rather than conflated in a single number."

The most grid owners are primarily interested to show up their grid looking good. Therefore, they are also count additional users if it is possible.
And I think it is possible. As you can read here:

"However, this does not mean that there are 7,193 different people on the hypergrid, since some people have multiple accounts. In addition, when a user of one grid makes a hypergrid teleport to another grid, they are sometimes counted in the active user numbers on both grids."

If this is not true, then HB is still more trivial than I actually thought. But no matter how you look at it: The majority of all users in the top 40 grids are active in walled gardens. This brings me back to the headline of this blog post. I prefer news about shared creative spaces, as there will be neither a metaverse in Second Life, yet in OpenSim grids, or even in a group of other virtual worlds for the foreseeable future.

Now I'm done with the topic.

[Masami Kuramoto]

Gordon wrote:

The most grid owners are primarily interested to show up their grid looking good. Therefore, they are also count additional users if it is possible. And I think it is possible.

I just told you it's possible. But it's not something that OpenSim does by default.

You may have a point about grid owners trying to make their grid look more popular, but then you have to explain why you take the walled garden stats at face value. This looks like confirmation bias to me.

[Orca Flotta]

@ Gordon + Masami:
Why are you guys so hung up on statistical numbers?

Just look for the grid that comes closest to your needs ... and settle there. For me it's still SL that offers what I want. No other grid comes even close, no contest. And I couldn't care less if SL is supposedly uncool now or on it's last legs. There are still enough cool kidz on SL (i.e. Orca Flotta springs to mind here) so it's not game over for SL. Not yet, gentlemen, not yet. Not on my watch. Not today!

[Graham Mills]

If we're doing numbers again, let's not forget the teachers and students using OpenSim off-grid, on a closed grid or even on USB sticks. An example of the latter is described in this paper which was nominated "best research paper" at a recent Australian conference acec2012.acce.edu.au/what-about-firewall-creating-virtual-worlds-public-primary-school-using-sim-stick.

[Adeon Writer]

My honest answer is "What's the difference?" To me the two terms were always identical anyways. I'm sure there are distinctions, but my interests consist of both of the two categories and they've always been the same to me.

[Shockwave Yareach]

Second Life. Virtual Worlds. These have everything a regular world have, like economy and the ability to create code/items that were NOT created or even thought of by the programmers of the company that put out the product.

Roblox, Minecraft, and the new Doritos Construction set, they are nothing but Legos in a computer setting. While the person can put them together in any way, the user is not able to create a new type of brick. Nor can they change existing bricks to do something the company never thought of.

Virtual Worlds like SL are to creative spaces what Automobiles are to Buses. A bus goes only where the bus owner says it goes, but the car drives anyplace the user wants to go. A Virtual world is not merely a computer representation of what the programmers wanted to visualize. For if the bar for being a virtual world is THAT low, then Origins's "Ultima 3" was a virtual world back in 1983.

[Poseidon]

I don't understand what Linden Labs' app for the iPhone does that couldn't have been done *to* Second Life on the same platform. The app seems like a step back to me. I'm a little confused about how SL doesn't qualify as a shared creative platform as it is now (and how it couldn't transition into a better platform with tweaks).

To me its always seemed like the biggest barrier to widespread usage of 3D internet was awareness and accessibility (maybe application...). Surly it makes sense to investigate how to bridge those gaps before investing in a completely different direction (at least for Linden)? I wish we would get to a point where 3D worlds weren't merely emulating the same things over, and over, and over again.

[Masami Kuramoto]

Orca Flotta wrote:

Why are you guys so hung up on statistical numbers?

Because, according to the author of this blog, the numbers determine whether a virtual world platform is "viable".

It's OK to look at the numbers. They tell us where we are and where we're going. What I find remarkable however is that some people start shifting goalposts as soon as the numbers don't support their chosen narrative.

Did you notice how frequently Hamlet reminded us recently that Linden Lab never intended to build the metaverse? That's what I call shifting the goalposts. The project is failing, so let's claim it was never supposed to succeed. For years, this space was all about "Second Life is not a game". Now it's about "Linden Lab was always a game company".

Mitch Kapor, member of Linden Lab's board of directors, once pointed out "how the long run favors the more open ecosystem". When asked whether he believed that this was also the case for Second Life vs. OpenSim, he replied:

"Linden too is subject to these kinds of dynamics, in the long run anyway. About all I can say."

If you look at the history of IT in general, the history of the internet etc., you can see that Kapor's assessment is perfectly correct. The IBM-compatible PC vs. the Mac, the World Wide Web vs. AOL/CompuServe, Android vs. iOS. In the long run, people always gravitate towards the more open ecosystem. In fact Second Life is not failing as a virtual world platform but as a planned economy. And that shouldn't really surprise anyone.

But instead of embracing the inevitable, Hamlet is trying hard to make his audience look elsewhere. Forget the metaverse, let's play Linden Lab's new Minecraft clone, he says. OpenSim won't be viable until it has active users in the six figures, he tells us. Hamlet was wrong about Blue Mars, wrong about Facebook, wrong about Unity 3D, and he'll be wrong about this one too.

Linden Lab will probably survive as a game publisher. Meanwhile, the hypergrid is becoming the metaverse, one sim at a time. Mitch Kapor would say: "I told you so."

[Drew956]

Well...
(and forgive me for writing so much as I look over what I've written)

Here are my thoughts:

We don't need SL to be the metaverse yet. 
Therefore I doubt it will become such any time soon.

I have been thinking about this issue, and I came to 
the conclusion that in order for SL to become widely accepted
it needs to become a standard experience, a way/part of life.

I'm jumping a bit ahead of myself in this discussion, but it needs to be elegant to use! 
(which you all mention it is not, as far as user-interface and creation complexity, hence noobies leaving all the time)

I believe before SL can achieve anything we immersionists imagine
we need a 3-d virtual operating system, complete with modules to do 
everything traditional OS's can do.
(needs to be extensible)

People need to be able to purchase virtual content and store
it on their home land, and all the data types in common use must
be brought together under one roof.
There should be a whole system in place for residents of these virtual OS'es to
contact one another.
It needs to be backwards compatible with older and other OS ware, likely
through the modules coded for specific OS compatibility.

Obviously it would be essential to be able to invite your friends to your virtual 
homeland and vice versa. 

We have to think big, think beyond SL.
The real question I suppose is if the technology would be immersive enough to 
warrant actually replacing traditional OS'es with one that is 3-D
(and by Immersive I mostly mean ease of working within the OS, and if it is an aesthetically pleasing ordeal to work in the OS as well)

This would make the experience of going into SL, or hopefully by then then a coalition of worlds known as 'the metaverse', a tacitly less shocking and foreign experience.

I think the possibilities for research and learning will increase, or at least be condensed to easily found locations, contrasted to the relatively dense 2-d web, with virtual public libraries and real people on-site, hopefully Polymaths, who could help you with whatever you need to research.

And to people who say that this will waste our time even more than the regular web already does, I don't think so. I think it will give that time we'd be wasting anyway, avoiding work or chores perhaps Idk, a whole new meaning and light that truly would capture the magnificent essence of this great movement.
People, at the very most, will still be wasting the same amount of time: any time they could afford to waste on traditional web media.
And arguments could be made on how this actually makes our time more productive, but I think that only counts perhaps on weekends.
(in my experience it is more likely to be an equal 'waste' of time at most on weekdays, with people doing less strenuous activities such as socializing, while on the weekends people get together to collaborate and invent, to discuss and engineer moby hacks)

One of the driving forces behind this vision would be the communities of people who interact on forums on the regular Web, and the social and immense trans-national potential for interaction and shared values.
It really shows culture more than the static 2-D web, visiting places that are decorated and set like those cultures truly are, rather than just reading the linguistically specific attributes of their cultures on forums. 

There is more I could write about, but that's enough for now lol.
(I have the whole vision outlined somewhere in one of my journals)

I would love to hear any feedback or counters, what do you guys think?

And as far as Hamlet's proposal to change the focus of the site..
I am fond of reading interesting articles about SL, especially considering I can't go in world very often.

I actually just finished reading Hamlets book today on my iTouch, it was a fantastic read btw, and I have to say the idealism and hopeful dreams of so many metaverse-believers makes SL a juicy topic, but one that is hard to cover without having a substantial in-world network.
(though I presume Hamlet has some pretty active and knowledgeable contacts that he converses with time to time)

I'm not going to give away any of the book, though I assume some of you were there through all the history and ideas within it, but I just wanted to touch upon the idea that everyone is always prophesying the death of SL from one week or month to another.
It may fall, and if it does hopefully they release their code opensource.
But I dont know how a bunch of clones each advertising their own grids will contribute to quality content, or even a standard of interoperability.

I think the blog should cover SL until the bitter end, especially since Hamlet has covered it since the beginning, assuming any end or similar design is anywhere near, and should cover other things of note like it always has. (as it is a blog about things like SL too if I recall correctly)

As a last note, I would like to touch upon the idea of lindens new products.
While not a LL product, Hamlet mentioned a viewer for android tablets recently which is exciting, but that aside, I wish LL themselves had made a SL viewer for the iPad as well as their Creatorverse app.
(More on LLs products in two paragraphs down)

Apparently it's really complicated to make an iPad SL viewer, involving the porting of libraries on standard computers, but that's all the more reason for LL to be taking the initiative and setting the standards!
Oh well, as long as it stands still there is hope yet.

I too think this new plan is a good idea for the company, although you can't help but cringe at the fact that they are diverting resources away from our (should-be-could-be-is-and-would-be)beloved SecondLife.

I can't imagine the source code, but honestly I'd expect the company to work furiously to make SL the absolute best it could be. Out of a shared belief in it's potential, our of a pride in their work, out of a duty owed to their paying residents who believed and continue to believe in SL, out of a drive for elegance...
(out of profits that should be used somewhat at least for improvements)

As far as the tools they made to make linden realms, those are welcome but other issues need to be fixed too.
Make no mistake, the introduction of those tools is a good, no a great thing for the community (you all know the hackers and inventors will always use tools in ways never intended, even if the tools were not useful for normal means, which I think the tools are useful in this case. (although I think I read about a lack of released documentation?))
It's a sign that LL is indeed still working on SL, but it's also another blow to all of us who have been asking for other, way more pressing, improvements to be made.
I am very curious to see what happens to SL in the next view years, what LL does and does not decide to do.

For now, Opensim is nice but SL is magical, beautiful, alive.
SL also has better physics, and has the psychological additive of being run by a known company-LL
Maybe not known for improving lag or other issues, but known as a provider of a service that has a long record of existence giving it's users a sense of security.

Well speaking of SL's security (ironically)...
I have a major issue with not being able to store any items I purchase in SL somewhere on my PC.
If LL died, if I couldn't pay my land rent as so many existing sites have been unfortunately unable to do so, all my work, time, and real money would be lost. There is no security in a system like that!
I don't want to spend money with those fears in mind!
(although I do acknowledge piracy fears, etc)

If I buy a virtual painting I want to be able to store it in my virtual, offline, house. (going back to my OS idea)
That would likely allow consumables in SL to be able to be priced higher, so they can actually be 'profitable' anyway, and would possibly give L$ a legitimate status as an internet currency.

Oh my, I have written way too much.
This is like my own blog post.
Oh well, I hope it was a good read ^.^

Sincerely,

~Drew956

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I think that a major game publisher (or a minor publisher soon to be major) will stumble upon the simple concept of having a common "hub" for a variety of game worlds, wherein a character can move between them. If they're a very, very clever publisher, they'll provide access to that hub for other developers and for hobbyists, and the Metaverse will form organically around that hub with more game worlds and eventually non-game worlds.

SL could be that hub, but I don't get the impression that they want to be. It'd be a hell of a lot of work to stow the baggage and install a turbocharger. I'm not sure LL is the studio for the job.

[Adeon Writer]

Arcadia: It sounds line you've described Sony Home.

[Desmond Shang]

I personally think Hamlet is right on this one.

I 'get' the "must be able to create your own brick" viewpoint for a flexible creative space, but honestly even as SL succeeds at that on some levels, it utterly fails on others.

Prims are quite malleable. But what if you need a creative space the size of Spain? Forget it, can't do that (unless you have 100 million dollars maybe). Need 5000 people in a theatre? Forget it, can't do that. Want to share a standard format business document with a client? Can't. Want to do some sciency stuff? We have collisions, sure. But no temperatures, no electrodynamics, no bulk mutable solids, liquids or gases. And not near enough computing power to touch those kinds of things.

It goes on and on. SL is very limited, very much a lego brick kind of world in its own way. And that's alright.

[Hamlet Au]

Drew956 - great comment, thanks, and thanks for reading the book! I still maintain a lot of idealism around all the aspects of Second Life that are great -- it's just that my focus is on how to bring those to a wider audience, even in very different forms. That's why I like the vision of shared creative spaces.

[Metacam Oh]

"Roblox, Minecraft, and the new Doritos Construction set, they are nothing but Legos in a computer setting. While the person can put them together in any way, the user is not able to create a new type of brick. Nor can they change existing bricks to do something the company never thought of."

shockwave, maybe you should do a little google search for Minecraft Mods. The innovation by the modding community is what keeps things fresh in Minecraft, that and people can modify the game to do what they please. Want to run a world where you sell land parcels? A mod for that. Now only imagine if people could mod Second Life. And I'm not just talking about using the natural SL tools like LSL scripting or building tools, I mean seriously mod the software to do what they want.

[Gaga]

As ever, Masami Kuramoto has put forward some of the most intelligent arguments to rebuff all the anti-Opensim rants above which come from people that hardly ever use the open Metaverse and understand it even less. The fact is that the Metaverse just keeps growing as sure as the world wide web did and that is it's main strength. It's open source too with many developers working on it so that gives me confidence it will still be around and have people working on it when Second Life is probably just a bad memory of the days of virtual monopolies and over pricing.

The beauty of Opensim is that it is truly our world and our imagination from the very workings of the platform and up. Second Life is not dead yet or even about to die but notice it has been in slow decline for the best part of two years. Since the start of 2012 the Linden grid has lost 2000 sims and has seen a a steady drop in traffic as Opensim improves with every release and other virtual worlds platforms come on stream. If all that was not bad enough SL has lost 1000 sims in the past 10 weeks alone and gained nothing but a hand full of simple video games for children to play. Linden Lab is probably too late entering that market anyway and I doubt they are likely rest away a whole lot of Minecraft and Farmville players. And I am pretty sure they wont gain too many Second Life regulars with such trivia either.

I think it is arrogance beyond belief that Hamlet and others announce the Metaverse dead and so-called Shared Creative Spaces is about to replace it and, moreover, I sense a lot of fear in some of the anti-Metaverse comments above. I sense they fear their gravy train is drying up and I got news for them. It is!

[Hamlet Au]

"The fact is that the Metaverse just keeps growing as sure as the world wide web did"

How is this true? In 1995, the web had 16 million users. By 1999, it had 248 million users:

http://www.nichepursuits.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/growth2007.png

Since 2008, all evidence suggests OpenSim has not grown beyond 25,000 users.

[Gaga]

@Hamlet

I would agree the growth is slow but you don't get 25,000 regions supported on thin air. People have to pay for that and see HB for the latest...

http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2012/10/top-40-grids-break-25000-regions/

Every month sees new grids and standalones opening, and those are just the ones that take the trouble to make their grids known. The growth in education grids has been quite remarkable and third world countries where people can't afford Linden Lab prices are starting to discover the value and free availability of the Opensim platform software.

Try this one...

http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2012/10/brazil-grid-grows-with-partners/

or, for sheer creativity, this one...

http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2012/10/art-show-spans-six-grids/

Rome was not built in a day as you seem to expect and nor was the World Wide Web but once it go a hold then all the proprietary boxes like CompuServe and AOL got push aside.

Opensim is not the be all and end all but it is the nearest thing we have to truly shared spaces in terms of an open Metaverse that isn't owned and dominated by the profit motives of companies like Linden Labs. The only thing I would ask for is the TPV developers to start working on mode switching technology so SL can remain in it's proprietary box and the grid manager/search can stay in so people still get the opportunity to explore the wider Metaverse beyond Second Life. In deed, I would go further and ask the TPV developers to begin work on a much more advanced viewer that can switch modes between a greater variety of VW platforms and utilities.

[Sarge Misfit]

Is North America Dead? (circa 1500 AD)

Despite all the grand proclamations about the new North American continent, can we really say that it isn't dead? Despite the fact that there are over six billion acres, one would be hard pressed to see any people actually using the land. Other than the few thousands concentrated in small outposts, one can go days, weeks, even MONTHS, without seeing nary a soul. Not even the heathen savages can be seen unless one knows where to go.

~~~

While that was never written about the early days of the colonization of North America, people didn't give up then. They didn't declare North America a lost cause, that it was dead and not worth anything. People took their chance and boarded ships and the came to North America. It grew. Slowly, at first, but more and more came. And though it took time, there are now over half a billion people here.

This is what is happening in the Metaverse of OpenSim, AuroraSim, Unity and all the others. There's lots of land. Empty, for now. But people are coming, exploring, settling, developing.

So, those of you who believe the Metaverse is dead, you can go ahead and stay at home. I'm going to go ahead and keep on exploring the wilderness.

[Gaga]

@Sarge

Well said, Sarge!

[Hamlet Au]

"you don't get 25,000 regions supported on thin air"

That's true -- you get them from the 15,000 or so OpenSim users who can easily launch another region. That's one of OpenSim's main (only?) value propositions -- ability to cheaply launch a region. But that still doesn't change the fact that growth of sims (which there is some) is not the same as growth in actual users (which there is hardly any).

I'm still trying to understand why OpenSim advocates aren't concerned about this, Gaga -- are you saying it doesn't matter to you that OpenSim sim has few users, and hasn't grown much in users 4-5 years since launching?

[Ezra]

"To me its always seemed like the biggest barrier to widespread usage of 3D internet was awareness and accessibility (maybe application...). Surly it makes sense to investigate how to bridge those gaps before investing in a completely different direction (at least for Linden)?"

Even billion dollar companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google can't get the text web agreed upon and correct with their different browsers. They can't agree on video codecs, WebGL support, etc. It's incredibly optimistic to believe Linden Lab and any supporting cast could actually create a 3D internet that could be as encompassing as this text one given all the issues we have with it.

If the meaning of metaverse means connected, interoperable virtual worlds then I don't see that ever happening. A sooner reality would be WebGL being the primary vehicle of web content instead of text, images and videos.

If metaverse is to mean little more than a genre of virtual worlds of Second Life's DNA that need no interop, then that's feasible.

Second Life isn't growing but not many companies can say their software is the laggiest, buggiest, most money burning piece of software on their customers' computers and yet and still they rake in profit off of 75 million in revenue a year. Anyone should envy that and wonder what metaverse success would be like with actually good software.

[Gaga]

@Hamlet

With every new grid or standalone that comes on line, regardless of numbers or regions, involves one, two or even a whole bunch of friends and supporters so this represents growth in traffic where those people will be using their grid and some, no doubt, will visit others. I gave an example of user growth with the Brazil grid above. It's very easy to claim there is no growth but I would ask what you base your views on? Or even if you research wider than you appear to do. No one yet has figured out a way to properly collect all the traffic metrics for daily usage in the open Metaverse. It's easy enough for Second Life which is all under one roof so to speak but the Metaverse is more like a wild frontier with much of it hidden and difficult report on if the owners don't make the information and data known. Forget the Hypergrid traveling because that traffic dose not even figure on the individual grids unless the owners choose to run scripts to collect visitor data. And when I check through the many grids data that is available often I find some data is missing. The best data is the 30 day user count because from that you can draw a reference. Currently it is around 19,000 plus unique logins per month which is not exactly a tiny number but, agreed, it isn't huge. However, it is great enough and increasing month by month, and that is still not the whole picture for, as I said, a lot of the Metaverse remains hidden like my grid. I have portal sims in OSgrid and a standalone on Hypergrid as well as 2 sims in Second Life. I run a role play game that spans both the open Metaverse and Second Life and others are doing the same so trying to put a number on anything in such a fluid environment is going to be hard. whether Linden Labs like it or not a whole lot of their paying customers like me with 2 SL sims, also invest in Opensim and promote it to our players where ever they are.

[Gaga]

@Hamlet

With every new grid or standalone that comes on line, regardless of numbers or regions, involves one, two or even a whole bunch of friends and supporters so this represents growth in traffic where those people will be using their grid and some, no doubt, will visit others. I gave an example of user growth with the Brazil grid above. It's very easy to claim there is no growth but I would ask what you base your views on? Or even if you research wider than you appear to do. No one yet has figured out a way to properly collect all the traffic metrics for daily usage in the open Metaverse. It's easy enough for Second Life which is all under one roof so to speak but the Metaverse is more like a wild frontier with much of it hidden and difficult report on if the owners don't make the information and data known. Forget the Hypergrid traveling because that traffic dose not even figure on the individual grids unless the owners choose to run scripts to collect visitor data. And when I check through the many grids data that is available often I find some data is missing. The best data is the 30 day user count because from that you can draw a reference. Currently it is around 19,000 plus unique logins per month which is not exactly a tiny number but, agreed, it isn't huge. However, it is great enough and increasing month by month, and that is still not the whole picture for, as I said, a lot of the Metaverse remains hidden like my grid. I have portal sims in OSgrid and a standalone on Hypergrid as well as 2 sims in Second Life. I run a role play game that spans both the open Metaverse and Second Life and others are doing the same so trying to put a number on anything in such a fluid environment is going to be hard. whether Linden Labs like it or not a whole lot of their paying customers like me with 2 SL sims, also invest in Opensim and promote it to our players where ever they are.

[Gaga]

Oh, and actually, a lot of the growth has been in the most recent past since the software became more stable and usable. Two years ago it was pretty weak but usable and back then people had less reason to bother with it. Now it has improved no end and very soon grids like Inworldz will be implementing PhysiX and Opensim core will have a totally new Bullet physics and a more secure Hypergrid 2. Progress is not just limited to Second Life you know.

[Creative Spacer]

Gaga say:

"I would agree the growth is slow but you don't get 25,000 regions supported on thin air."

After the next region clean of the OSGrid, the number will fall back nearly about 20k.
If every OpenSim grid would do a clean, then the numbers would decrease even more.

Same with the users. Remove all double (multiple) accounts of the same real person and you'll have a really small group of technophile OpenSim nerds.

It's fun, how the OpenSim evangelists interpret every presumption into a possitive message. In almost the same manner as the SL evangelists. °v°

[Hamlet Au]

"Currently it is around 19,000 plus unique logins per month"

And in 2009, OpenSim was estimated to have 15,000 users:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2009/06/small-opensim.html

So 3 years later, we're *possibly* talking about 4,000 new users. In those 3 years, SL gained about 200,000-300,000 new users. Since 2010, Minecraft gained about 3 MILLION regular users.

So again, if you don't mind, my question is this: Why doesn't it matter that OpenSim has so few users, and hasn't grown much in users since launching?

[Gaga]

@creative

Yes, and you could do the same with Second Life and remove all the empty sims and the empty sims LL keeps adding to offset the steady decline. Half of Mainland is empty and Linden homes are a wasteful joke. Few bother to occupy them! And of the many empty estate regions you only have to look back the what Desmond Shang said about Rip Van Winkle residents who pay their rent but never log in. Well, there are Rip Van Winkles in OSgrid too but the difference is their regions get culled if they don't use them. Funny thing is they soon get put back and the process begins again. Besides that OSgrid is the developers grid and people are free to connect their sims and do for, often is the case, new people do this to learn how to use Opensim and handle the server side. Then they will set up their own regions on Hypergrid and maybe only keep one portal region in OSgrid and close any others. As for the smaller grids very few can afford to keep regions that don't fit into their landscape or if they do they are usually large sailing spaces. I have 9 sailing spaces myself.

As for registrations LL could cull all the bots and alts, yeah? And wouldn't that amount to a few hundred thousand or even a million or two drop. You can say the same for many online platforms so it's not even an argument really, just an attempt at one.

[Creative Spacer]

@Gaga:
I only said, that OpenSim users always try to interpret their statistical numbers better than they are. And I agree, SL users do the same. But in my perception of related websites to both worlds, the OpenSim nerds are a exiguous group of people which make a lot of propaganda comments in SL-related blogs and forums. In my opinion you try to lure users away from SL. These attempts of bad "advertising" are deterrent.

Go and start a good website for OpenSim worlds (or the expected metaverse). And then show us the 'wonders' of open source software without provoking SL users!

[Masami Kuramoto]

Hamlet Au wrote:

"The fact is that the Metaverse just keeps growing as sure as the world wide web did"

How is this true? In 1995, the web had 16 million users. By 1999, it had 248 million users.

She didn't say "as large" but "as sure", as in: there's nothing to stop it, no infrastructure boundaries, no competition. When SL is dead, OpenSim will still be around. When Blue Mars is dead... oh wait! When Cloud Party is dead, OpenSim will still be around. Because both the server and the client are open source, and there is no way to un-release source code.

The only thing that could stop OpenSim now is a vastly superior version of itself, a competing system that is also open, but more capable. I don't see anything like that on the horizon though.

I agree with those who say that OpenSim should have a WebGL viewer. I think we will get one in the near future, probably based on RealXtend WebNaali.

Why doesn't it matter that OpenSim has so few users, and hasn't grown much in users since launching?

In a world where everything else is stagnating, shrinking or dying, small growth is a major success. The absolute numbers may not look impressive yet, but the relative numbers do.

Stop dragging your feet, Hamlet. "Old World Notes" is a crappy title for a blog.

[Gaga]

@Creative

Did you notice the tile of this article?

It reads "Should We Talk Less About the Metaverse and More About Shared Creative Spaces?"

Now that deserves a response from the open Metaverse community and every time there is an attack on what we hold dear the response is likely to be swift and well argued.

As it happens I only ever usually comment on attacks like this and I don't always go out of my way to attack Second Life but inevitably some of the attacks we get become irritatingly inaccurate and little more than emotional propaganda against Opensim.

And I do write often about Opensim and the Metaverse on my blog here...

http://metaverse-traveller.blogspot.co.uk/

And I am both a long time resident in SL and have had as many as 5 sims in use (but down to just 2 now). So, I kind of resent being told to where to go.

I don't owe a thing to anyone and certainly not Linden Labs. I have paid well over the odds for there "server hosting" for many years to provide a free to play role play game to the SL community at my expense. I have done as good as most and better than many for the SL community with no thanks from Linden Labs. I feel I owe my loyalty to my role players and not Linden Labs and for their sake and in order to do better for them I will continue to build a presence on the Open Metaverse and share my working hours with them in role play or creative and construction work both in Second Life and the Open Metaverse.

My people cross from SL to OS and back. SL still benefits because people that find Opensim will end up using SL too, probably. It's a 2-way traffic. In fact, it is a many-ways traffic for that is the nature of the open Metaverse. Linden Labs is just another self-serving, profit hungry monopoly so for the money I spend I have no quarms about recruiting on the sims I built and pay for.

If what we think bothers you then don't argue with us. You wont change anything and we wont change our views.

[Dizzy Banjo]

I personally dont think its a problem to talk about the Metaverse, although I think as a term it is sort of from another era and is primarily still a science fiction concept and not something which has come into existence driven by a tangible need.

While I love sci fi, I don't think we should be driven to make things because they exist in sci fi. I think this can be dangerous or time wasting. I think The Metaverse is a term similar to Cyberspace - its a great sci fi term, it feels dated, it doesn't really describe the world we really live in or our needs.

I personally think ( at least right now ) that an entirely 3d virtual metaverse which does not relate to physical reality is necessarily something desirable or likely to happen. I think something which is linked to reality or an extension of reality is far more likely. I think things need to have a reason to be 3d and virtual.

I think shared creative spaces are part of this really. It just happens that the technology at the moment is all virtual.

I would say I'm very happy that Linden Lab are focusing on creativity and collaboration again. I have always believed this is the key thing they have enabled with SL.

Below are my personal interests and what I think are some of the key things going on today. I think all of these will eventually form something which is in some way related to concepts of the Metaverse. But I very much doubt it would be called The Metaverse.

Creative collaboration
Global Virtual communities
Unusual ways of doing "virtual"
Augmented Reality
Alternate Reality Games
Personalisation
Context Aware Computing
Restructuring of media landscape to be nonlinear / fluid

[Creative Spacer]

@Gaga:
This is exactly what I mean. If I follow the link to your blog, two of the first three blog posts are rants against SL an Linden Lab.
• Second Life the Video Game According to Iron Man, Rodvik
• Linden Labs At War With Opensim!

If I read further down your blog, more of such postings follow. In my eyes this is pure propaganda. Everything in OpenSim is wonderful, everything in SL is bad. Show me only one SL-related blog or forum with a vice versa appearance.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Adeon -- "Arcadia: It sounds line you've described Sony Home."

I confess, I haven't really kept up with Home or much of anything in the console space. Taking a quick glance, it looks like it has the potential to be a sleeper metaversal nucleus, except for its platform bias. I shall have to investigate further, if my beloved football fanatic will surrender control of the television :)

[Gaga]

@creative

You're just cheery picking now and ignoring all that is written about Opensim and the Metaverse on my blog. I could list 100's of attacks on Opensim from Second Life Xenophobic's like you on other blogs and not least New World Notes. I think the exchange with you has run it's course. Your tactic is to try and change the debate and steer the discussion away from the central issue of whether the Metaverse is dead or to be replaced by an arbitrary label, the so-called Shared Creative Spaces. I've seen this tactic before and you are clearly not interested in the central discussion anyway so there really is no point in me answering someone that is so disturbed by what is happening, and clearly feeling powerless to stop it, they can only think and argue in very limited terms.

You wont win any arguments by trying to turn this into a personal attack but thank you anyway for plugging my blog.

[Gaga]

@Dizzy

I think much of your list has been going on in Opensim worlds for a long time already and certainly a lot of the education regions that have been priced out of SL have gone there. The problem with Second Life is not essentially the platform which, buggy though it is, still functions ok for most things. The problem is Linden Labs and their over pricing. The World Wide Web is essentially free and what costs are involved are really very small. The Open Metaverse based on the Opensim platform is intended to serve like the WWW. Some even call it VWW. Linden Labs need to cut their pricing across the board by at least a third now and by at least a half in the not too distant future if they want to survive.

I would be happy for them to continue but not at the prices they currently charge. I just see it as a rip off when I can run 10 or 20 sims on an Opensim server for a little over $100 a month. And the software is vastly improved with new physics engines on the way very soon like PhysiX and advanced Bullet. I rent from a Land Baron in Second Life I don't mind admitting which means I can give it up any time and I don't need to find a $1000 setup fee but, seriously, if I needed more land for sailing perhaps would I honestly invest good money in SL only to have those sailing regions sit empty but for the passing sail boats. No way! I would be mad to spend that kind of money. Opensim can give me massive sailing spaces and I can remove borders with mega regions to ensure smooth crossings. The same in SL would cost an absolute fortune.

There is only one thing that Second Life has got that has any real value and that is the traffic but that is diminishing at a steady pace due in part to Opensim advancement but also because other platforms like Cloud Party are coming into the Metaverse. Rod is desperate to diversify to stave off total collapse so nothing is certain or safe. Not that it ever has been that safe anyway given that copybotters steal pretty much anything they want and sell it back to the community depriving the Merchants of what they should be earning from the hard work.

Is it any wonder so many of us have turned to Opensim as both a safe alternative and a life boat in case SL dose finally go to the wall?

[Sarge Misfit]

I tried to post this yesterday, but I kept getting a Page not found error when I tried to post. Anyway, here I go again ...

Where does this magic number of 25,000 Active Users come from? I went looking and just couldn't find it. As an example, looking through HyperGrid Business's numbers across the months, I see lots of little ups and downs, but my overall impression is a small steady increase, not a flat plateau.

So, how about citations, please.

[Aeonix Aeon]

The only difference between "shared creative space" and "Metaverse" is a single word: Interoperability. As for the 25,000 number, it's totally bogus at best... or more likely I classify it as a straw man argument.

Here's some *real* numbers across the board, courtesy of kzero, Quarter 1 2012: http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/universe-charts-q1-2012/

Now, we lump together MMO/Virtual Worlds because while they are shared spaces, they have different contexts. However, if we bring the word Interoperability into the mix, you have a greater Metaverse. I find it amusing that the straw man argument consists of "Well, SL and Open sim aren't showing millions of sims!"

Of course, anyone who leans on that is only showing how little they *actually* know about what a Metaverse would be.

As I've stated before, we're still in the walled garden mentality - the AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve pre-web days of the Metaverse, and every time the Metaverse even *hints* at actually evolving, a bunch of investors or a CEO gets their powerful panties in a twist and sabotages it - winding up with some video games or a lackluster service (sound familiar?)

To say Second Life wasn't meant to be a Metaverse or eventually *the* Metaverse (or part of it as a major player) would require us to ignore a majority of the actual years that Second Life existed to remain true, which Hamlet seems to like doing.

For all the times I see Hamlet point to the video game beginning of SL to justify how it was never supposed to be nor intended to be a Metaverse, all I can do is think of this video:

Google TechTalks
Glimpse Inside a Metaverse: The Virtual World of Second Life
March 1, 2006
Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrSCjSRMY64

So it was never supposed to be a.... oh wait. Yeah, that's the actual reality of it. It actually was evolving into the very thing that Hamlet enjoys denying it ever was supposed to be in order to justify turning a Metaverse company into a Video Game company. Sorry, but revisionist history doesn't work on me.

Second Life still has the potential, but until there's a CEO and board of directors who aren't too chicken to embrace what Second Life had become, they're going to keep trading 5 star Dining for Burger King.

[Hamlet Au]

"Here's some *real* numbers across the board, courtesy of kzero, Quarter 1 2012"

Unfortunately, Kzero's chart doesn't reflect real numbers in terms of actual users. Read:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/08/kzero-counts-virtual-world-churn-not-actual-users.html