CROWDSOURCING THE METAVERSE

I'm beginning to believe Gwyneth Llewelyn knows more about where Linden Lab should take Second Life in the future than anyone in the actual company-- or more crucially, can explain her reasoning to everyone who isn't.  Don't believe me?  See some:

In the early 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee and the likes of Marc Andreesen helped to define the building blocks of the Web: the page description language HTML, and the transport protocol, for clients to request pages from a remote server, HTTP... So the web experience gets enriched by all the clever programmers that are constantly adding new and clever ideas, always on top of existing "content" and the very same protocol (as an example, HTTP hasn't changed much since 1998 — it's way stable. It's also tiny and easily defined!)

If Linden Lab understands this concept, they will deploy the "Metaverse Transport Protocol" as soon as it's feasible.

See all.

Comments

[Emerson999]

The question is, good for whom. It'd be great for me, and I'd actually log in more than once every couple weeks. If I could actually use real code I'd be on multiple times per week.

But I think they have learned a lesson from Tim Berners-Lee, and are hoping to actually make some money off their idea rather than keeping their fingers crossed that they'll get a charity gift some time down the road.

There's certainly a few open source engines which have the potential to overtake Second Life, and in the end we'll see if the right decision was made. Until then, they've cast the dice on making a few bucks on their venture, and I really can't blame them.

[Luis]

Yeah. They face a basic choice between trying to be MS, or trying to be Netscape. One of those approaches gets them lots of karma points, but not much else. The other loses them touchy-feely points, but might actually make them profitable at some point.

[Rik Panganiban]

This for me is the most important bit of Gwyneth's long post:

'The next step would very likely be a different client. Perhaps a light-weight version of SL, that doesn't look as cool, but is fast enough to run on an older computer. Or one other version that uses your GPU (and CPU) much more efficiently, and thus provides you with a much better experience. All this and so much more is currently in our very near future!'

I'm attracted to the idea of allowing other developers to create other clients-side apps for people to come into SL. If there were a dumbed down, terminal style version of the software that allowed people some basic access without the bells and whistles, that might be enough to get people hooked, or help people who only occasionally want to log in.