OPEN FORUM: 2007 PREDICTIONS, SECOND LIFE

Post your Second Life predictions for 2007 here in Comments, the more specific and broad-ranging, the better.  Next week, I'll select my ten favorites and-- leveraging the wisdom of crowds-- put them up for a reader vote.  And we'll check back same time next year to see how accurate they ultimately were.

To get things started, I've posted ten of my own after the break.

Hamlet Au's predictions:

At the end of 2007...

Very Probable:

- Peak concurrency will eclipse 100,000.

- Total registered accounts will exceed 10 million.

- Regular users-- defined as people who log in at least once a week three months after creating an account-- will exceed 1 million.

Probable:

- Accessing Second Life will be made illegal in at least one country.

- A Congressperson will formally introduce a bill which, if passed, directly impacts Second Life.

- The Second Life viewer will be open-sourced.

Somewhat Probable:

- A major party political candidate will open an official Presidential headquarters in Second Life.

- Linden Lab will announce plans to IPO.

- Linden Lab and/or Second Life will be purchased by a major corporation.

- Clay Shirky will write or say something to the effect of, "OK, I guess this thing's not as over-hyped as I thought it was last year."

Comments

[Nightbird Glineux]

OK, here's one:

Griefing will escalate as griefers start creating tools based on libsecondlife. There will be both attacks in-world (visible in the client like goo attacks) and against the grid itself.

[CJ CHRISTENSEN]

Another company will make a similar environment / system to secondlife.

The system will go offline for 14 concurrent days.

There will be a land price crash as large sections of new first land are launched.

[T_S_Kimball]

Linden Lab cannot IPO without doing some sweeping changes to the way it interacts with its residents (something they're just beginning to work on). If they had to answer to stockholders today it would have tanked awhile ago.

A more accurate (and safer) prediction would be:

- Linden Lab officially gets SAS-70, ISO-900x, or similar certification.

The idea of 'another company' working towards competition with SL may in fact begin this year, but not in the way people expect. I'm hoping to be instrumental in this effort as well. (Hamlet, if you're curious about this send me an email reminding to send links/info in the next few months).

--Timothy Kimball

[Celebrity Trollop]

Linden Lab completes and implements new avatar meshes around the same time it introduces "rag-doll" avatar movement and layered attachment points permitting multiple prim attachments at a single attachment point.

Because the new avatar meshes are vastly superior to the original design, many content creators re-release and fashonista customers must repurchase huge swathes of their most popular inventory items.

[Anonymous Celebrity]

Somewhat Probable: Database and asset problems will increase as user concurrency increases. Engineers will exhaust all available options for quick fixes, so instead the number of concurrent logins will be restricted and effectively shut thousands of people out during peak hours. This will continue until Second Life is sold and the buying company re-engineers SL's infrastructure for true scalability.

[dildo baggins]

Hamlets on drugs again.

Dude, stick to fluffing lindens and hyping amoocher demographers into virtual experts...you might be better at it.

[Alastair Chamerberlin]

Google will buy SL in 2Q of 07.

[Morris Vig]

A slight possibility: Linden gives up on server problems and labor shortage, sells out to IBM.

[dildo baggins]

IBM engineers would only be five minutes into the due diligence architecture/code inspection phase and they would be out the door faster than hamlet could fluff a linden.

Likewise Google or any other organisation with a modicum of risk management capability.

SL is a PROTOTYPE kids...not a production system.
Unless their is some key IP locked up by patents that is impossible to bypass, why in gods name would any intelligent deep pocketed company with engineering and market development capability not develop something from scratch. You think they don't know the BS behind the MSM hype fed by linden fluffers?

[luciftias]

Well, dildo certainly lives up to its name. But really, dildo, it's some rather sub-par trolling at that. Surely you can do better.

[dildo baggins]

trolling? sadly, I'm completely serious.

Surely you can do better?

I'm guessing you just experienced the only too recently forgotten .bomb hype period secondhand?

[NewYear Resolution]

A sweeping change in management takes place early in the year, as the Board of Directors acknowledges that some of the current lineup is in way over their heads.

Robin and Cory are asked to focus on what they are good at, as seasoned pros are brought into their positions. The new people have a demonstrated abiility to lead internally (dictate priorities, stick to plans), and to communicate effectively with the outside world without having to be repeatedly prodded to do so.

Some staff leave (the prima donnas) because they cant bear to work on the important stuff, as opposed to their pet projects. LL is much better off as a result.

[Torley]

I am waiting for Second Life to be namedropped in a chart-topping rap song, following in the fine tradition of Cristal and Bentleys. More improbable is that my personal faves, Wu-Tang Clan would do this, but I'm up for any platinum verse, y0.

[dildo baggins]

more likely to be a tart, chopping, cRap song;-)

NewYear Resolution..I'll take $5 on yours!
Those old Vulture Capitalists must be getting mighty antsy about now I bet.

[Relee Baysklef]

There will be a Botter crisis, where business owners, chair-sitters, and griefers use scaled down versions of the SL client to create automated players irregardless of the 40 player per sim limit, choking players out of the world.

(As I already predicted in my new blog, http://rbaysklef.blogspot.com/ )

[rikomatic]

A non-profit charity will raise US $100K through an in-world fundraising event. Hundreds of non-profits will flock to SL as a result.

[Rockwell Ginsberg]

Tier will get more expensive. Income will become taxable. Google will bid (maybe not until 2008).

[Taco Bandit]

How would you be able to effectively count "regular users" as defined above? Does LL already do that? Didn't think they released those kind of numbers - - just stuck with their 60 day thing. I've heard Rosedale comment on what sound like internal numbers (~10% burn rate or whatever that was), but never quite these kind of hard numbers. You got em?

Predictions:

1. An uninterrupted cavalcade of grid failures and shutdowns every week for 52 weeks, patiently explained each time in detail by well-meaning Lindens to masses of would-be users who don't know or care what Gigabit Interface Converters are or what measures are being taken to make the database marginally less sucky that day. Somebody somewhere begins to capitalize on the supply-demand disparity with a better mousetrap.

2. The aforementioned open source viewer leads to a simple offline design tool (not tied to the avatar, please!) so that people frustrated by prediction #1 above from day to day can still build while the grid is down or dropping packets like rain. On a related note.

3. Some kind of experimental crossover (or pirate invasion, yarrr!) between SL and some other 3D environment such as Google Earth or one of SL's more game-ish peers. (Mii-ish avs proliferate in anticipation)

4. Companies rushing in-world begin to grok that their hosted events with more than 40 people lag things to a halt, defeating the purpose of trying to draw people to events in the first place, making them look bad, and not following RL promotions logic. Some companies give up and exit, others find ways to reach their target audiences via dispersed, gradual, asynchronous swarm methods native to the environment, satisfying themselves with numbers and exposure over time. "Free Prim Hair brought to you by the all new Pontiac Vibe" maybe. Companies trade RL contact info for top notch SL goodies.

5. Some smarty Linden figures out how to rededicate grid resources from empty sims to busy ones on demand. Prediction likely averted by some smarty commenter here offering an enlightening but withering retort as to how I don't understand how sims and the grid work.

6. Tai Chi is the next big in-world fad as slow-motion moving becomes the norm.

7. A law mandating that scripted penis skin tones must match naked body skin tones is passed at all major beaches and noob sex plazas.

8. VOIP integration creates a rift between the wanna-communicate-more-efficiently crowd and the want-the-anonymizing-shield-of-text-only crowd. "I'm On Mute" icons are created to hang over av heads in response.

9. Viruses coming down the pipe (same helpful/caustic commenter chimes in)

10. A griefer is RL identified, RL stalked, and RL retaliated against. His mom takes away his computer priveleges for a month. Strangely, female prostitutes are scarce that month.

11. The ignore function is expanded from text to the entire avatar and its actions/objects/physics.

12. The Nigerians arrive in SL (with billions of Lindens for you if you will just help them move it, praise merciful God.)

13. Silent login option debuts.

14. Somebody calculates the exact coefficient of drama-magnification generated by SL.

15. One person's absurdly prim-heavy hair crashes the whole freaking grid.

[iconoclasm]

IBM finds croquet project more suitable due to it's open-source nature and potentially superior tech; abandoning investments in SL.

Wired will fail to cover the event and continue to glorify SL as the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's cool to feel l33t.

Linux client reaches beta, almost 4 years after it was falsely publicised to be ready for release.

[Taco Bandit]

Bald chicks everywhere.

[Frans Charming]

A more Recent Havok.
Html on a prim.
Avatar puppetering.
New avatar meshes.
Generalized Texture Layers.
Etc.

[Luciftias]

SL Haters will finally explain to us all why they continue to play SL and/or spend significant time in its discussion forums.

The explanation will not make sense.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Very probable: All the people that will continue to publicly predict the doom of Linden Lab and the end of Second Life will not get lucky in 2007. They will affect 100,000-200,000 people with their predictions — about a day of new sign-ins in December 2007, which goes mostly unnoticed.

Very probable: Linden Lab will indeed accomplish all that Cory promised in his last Town Hall meeting, just like what happened in 2006 with Philip's promises. People will mostly ignore those accomplishments.

Probable: Bill Gates will do his keynote speeches launching Windows Vista in Second Life _or_ Steve Jobs will do the same for Mac OS X Leopard (I'm betting on Bill, though, he already has his own island and Steve seems to be strangely absent). By the Winter of 2007, games magazines will write an article on "What is the best OS to run Second Life?" as the new "lightweight" and "high-detail" viewers (open source projects under way) become available, allowing versions of SL to run on the PSP, Xbox, or Wii (still on alpha, though).

Probable: Nearing 10 million users, Linden Lab will have forged strategic partnerships with Media Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM, or Sun (or all together). The "Metaverse Society" is thus founded and headed by Mitch Kapor, under the model of the Mozilla Foundation. Their role: to develop the open API previously known as "Second Life Protocol" and now known as RFC7331 to regulate the spawn of "SL-compatible" products (viewers and others).

Probable: OpenCroquet slowly changes its codebase to become OpenSL while retaining much of its features (*working* HTML-on-a-prim and peer-to-peer very simple grids). Companies like Multiverse start to rethink about their strategy. A new start-up will release an "SL IDE" designed to create SL-compatible viewers in a more straightforward way (everybody will believe that they'll be GOM'd in 2008). Blizzard launches "Realms of Warcraft" using parts of the code to allow some simple in-world prim-based construction as a new option.

Unlikely: The drama around SL will slowly trickle to a halt as more people who actually _understand_ how SL (and LL!) works will slowly gather the focus of attention and be able to explain things better. eBay and Amazon will allow trades on their sites using L$, with PayPal accepting that currency as well. The Vatican Museum will open in SL on a series of PG sims. Disney will launch a Virtual Amusement Park on the Teen Grid.

[Neptune Rebel]

SL will hit 4 million accounts

The Linden will be devalued to 400L/$1

Philip Linden will give himself the official title of "Supreme Overlord of SL"

[Boliver Oddfellow]

4 of the 5 leading metaverse developers will decide to merge and create a new company known as Millions of Infinite Visions of Aimee Weber's Electric Sheep. Combining their resources they will successfully but Linden Lab.

Hey! someone had to say it might as well be me :)

[Shockwave Plasma]

A resident known only by their SL identity, will publish a RL book, or get credit in a movie or TV show.

Someone will make it to the SL moon.

The grid becomes unusable at 26,000 ppl inworld, with it's current arcitecture.

A RL company takes or threatens legal action over it's copyright being used in SL.

Phillip gets a new pair of trousers.

Hamlet keeps his suit.

Hits 7 million signups around June/July.

IBM becomes a major investor, and finds a way to have it's mainframes run sims on virtualized loadbalancing linuxes. LL then moves from MySQL to DB2.

Credit Card ID is reintroduced for making accounts.

[Hiro Pendragon]

http://secondtense.blogspot.com/2006/12/predictions-for-second-life-in-2007.html

[humanoid]

Quadruped avatars will be introduced.

[Liparels]

Due to the " surge " , peoples will find better ways to spend their time and money.