Second Life Bloggers Make Predictions for 2010

Happy New Year, all! To start 2010, check out Daniel Voyager's round-up of predictions from several Second Life/OpenSim bloggers. Among my favorite is Eddi Haskell's forecast, which includes: "There will be increasing awareness that Augmented Reality, and not pure Virtual Reality, will be the future for what we now call virtual worlds" (I tend to agree) and "There is a 30% chance of Second Life being acquired by a larger company in 2010. IBM, Microsoft, Sony, Facebook, and Google are all candidates." (I somewhat agree, but would set the likelihood at about 20%, and think only Microsoft is a possible candidate, because turning Second Life into an Xbox Live offering is a plausible move, especially after Project Natal is rolled out.)

Lovely Gwyneth Llewelyn has ten predictions of her own. I agree with most of those, except I don't think "Interop will become a reality" -- in my opinion, virtual world interoperability is still a cool innovation without much market demand. (Why bother connecting Second Life to OpenSim when the latter only has maybe 10-15K active users?) As for "Linden Lab will experiment with new avatars but not release them yet", I do think the Lindens will release mesh-based objects/avatars in 2010 -- we saw a glimpse of them at the last SLCC, and in order to maintain a competitive edge over Blue Mars, I expect SL Residents will get to play with them (at least in Beta) before this year is out. What's the most interesting SL prediction you've read so far?

Comments

[Jovin]

A takeover is an interesting idea but seems less likely to me if it's true that SL concurrency (and by implication relevancy) is on a downward slide. No-one with any business sense buys a company at that point - you wait till it almost folds and buy it dirt-cheap in a rescue deal. Then you try to resurrect it phoenix-style, minus all the elements (or personnel) you didn't like. There may be some vultures circling, but they won't pounce just yet.

[Second Lie]

I predict that in 2010, 2 and 0 keys wear out just as often, 9's wear out a lot less, 1's wear out a lot faster.

-ls/cm
(channeling Kevin Nealon)

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

OpenSim has 5,000 active users... just at IBM alone. Guess who's bearing the burden of the more complex permission issues on interop ;)

So curiously the reason why I think that interop will exist is not to join all those hippy, techie, Stallmann-y OpenSim grids to SL, but to get the corporate grids by IBM, Intel, and other huge investors in OpenSim to interconnect to both SL and SL Enterprise...

[Hamlet Au]

Gwyn, you could be right, but I think IBM will shift a lot of its emphasis from interop to "through the firewall" solutions. Also, it's my impression Intel is trying to launch its own version of OpenSim as the standard, not Second Life, while a lot of leading figures in the OpenSim developer community aren't totally behind the interop standards LL and IBM are pushing.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Oh, yes, I'm sure of that. The point is, even if Intel wants to launch a virtual world of their own based on OpenSim, to avoid the inevitable comparisons — "there is nobody in your world! no content! no economy!" — what would make sense is to start from Day One connected to the SL Grid :) And, of course, the same would apply to IBM as well...

... oh, and a takeover by IBM or Intel would definitely be possible, although I seriously doubt about it. ;)

[Hamlet Au]

I dunno, Gwyn, Intel's play seems to be a limited-use research grid (i.e. "Science Sim") so I'm not sure they have an incentive to show a large user base. Or enable asset transfer between their OS grid and others.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Here's a prediction for 2010: The alpha transparency bug will not be fixed.

Yeah, I know. I'm playing it safe.

[Ferd Frederix]

OpenSim is not secure enough to support an economy.

I posted a few funny ideas of what Bill or Steve Jobs might say if Microsoft bought the Lab at http://secondlife.mitsi.com/Secondlife/Posters/

Feel free to add your own ideas!