Arguments and counter-arguments for P2P teleportation...
Back when Second Life was a tiny world, Residents could magically teleport point-to-point: that is, from any place on the grid to any other place, just like that. Shortly after launching commercially, however, Linden Lab introduced "telehubs", scattered throughout the grid. From then on, when you teleported from point A to point B, you were actually sent to the telehub nearest to point B-- usually a few hundred meters away, meaning you had to travel the remaining distance on your own power (fly, walk, vehicle.) In the same way, in the offline world, that a public transit system tends to create a civic gathering place and neighborhood around each of its stops, telehubs were a way to mitigate the urban sprawl of a constantly expanding world. A place to meet folks, and a chance to look around, wherever you were going. Smart urban metaverse planning, in other words.
All that's about to change. Linden Lab recently announced that an imminent update would re-introduce P2P teleportation. Telehubs-- which, unsurprisingly, drove up the real estate prices of the surrounding land-- would then be transitioned into some kind of public/community space.
Also unsurprisingly, the decision has generated energetic Resident debate on whether this will be good for the world at large, so I offer two contrary opinions from the SL blogosphere. For P2P, there's Forseti Svarog, who addresses the fears that the end of telehubs will lead to urban blight with a 15,000 word rebuttal. (So to speak.) Offering close to 15,000 actual words is Gwyneth Llewelyn, who is decidedly more pessimistic:
In a sense, SL will be a place of isolated chatrooms, linked together through point-to-point teleporting. People will not care what is "in-between"... It won't simply interest them. Notions like urban planning or organic growth will simply not fit in this model — what will be important is the ultimate destination, not how and why you get there... This will definitely not "destroy" Second Life, or "destroy" SL's economy, or make everybody go away in disgust, or anything like that. The only thing that will happen is that Second Life won't be a "virtual country" any more — ever again. It will be a collection of snapshots linked together by teleports.
For my part, I wonder what will happen to the various technologies that Residents introduced in the era of telehubs to make traveling more efficient: specifically ROAM, created by Francis Chung and Rathe Underthorn, a fairly cool and ingenious means of traveling point-to-point through an auto-mapped, AI-piloted jetpack with a Google-style web interface for searching the places you want to go. (Torley Torgeson has write-ups on ROAM here and here.)
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