Pretty fun article. Unfortunately, my favorite metaverse-meets-the-movies story didn't make the cut: When a rising tech CTO watched The Matrix for the first time in 1999 with his friends, he left the theater somewhat bummed.
"That," he told them, "is what I wanted to make."
And that man's name? Philip Rosedale.
My favorite lines for the CBC article:
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"What can the Metaverse learn from Second Life?" is a good new story for UK publication Engineering & Technology from freelancer Hilary Lamb, delving into the lessons that new metaverse platforms could learn from Second Life. For instance, technical debt:
‘Second Life’ is notoriously clumsy, with lag and lumpy framerates that put something of a damper on the virtual orgies. Some of this is on account of technical debt accrued early at Linden Labs – which cannot be righted without sacrificing vast quantities of user-generated content – but it also points to the challenge of generating high-poly content in the metaverse.
I chatted with Hilary for the piece, talking about that and other topics -- including, of course, those virtual orgies:
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Click here to register for free to attend a Zoom webinar on That M Thing in a conference hosted by Canadian non-profit org CPAC (Chinese Professionals Association of Canada), which kicks off April 29 at 6:30pm PT. I'm preparing a slide deck now covering a range of topics, including how to define the Metaverse, Second Life's role in shaping it, mass market and niche use cases, and common misconceptions around the technology.
Is there any particular topic around virtual worlds and the Metaverse that I should also cover? If so, please suggest in Comments below!*
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Update, 3/11: Zoom link/access details below:
Topic: Virtual Media Management Association Meeting on Monday, April 11, 2022
Time: Apr 11, 2022 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Meeting ID: 916 6233 8941
One tap mobile: +16465588656,,91662338941# US (New York)
I'll try to cover the topics mentioned in Comments below; feel free to add more of your own!
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Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse is a gratifying deep dive interview with me in the Atlantic, for Charlie Warzel's Galaxy Brain free newsletter. Charlie and I plumb into the virtual world/metaverse topics I've felt strongly about in recent years, and it's wonderful to get a chance to have the space to explore them in The Atlantic.
Here's some of my favorite highlights in a much larger article, along with some links to the New World Notes posts I'm referring to.
I’ve learned that, as humans, we take all of the big challenges of real life and the complex social structures of the physical world and they get re-created in weird ways in a digital, social space. Racism, for example, is an enduring issue and an interesting one in these worlds. There are very basic questions: If you can change your avatar to anything at all, what race would you choose?
What are some good examples of surprising things you’ve seen people do in Second Life?
[I]f you give a user community powerful enough creator tools, what they create in these worlds will be far more interesting than anything a major company can officially create...
One of my favorites is a mathematician who built a house that exists beyond three dimensions—a home shaped like a tesseract, a four-dimensional hypercube. If you walked through their house it would keep just regenerating in interesting ways and you’d walk through it eternally. It’s mind melting.
Philip Rosedale, one of the creators of Second Life, has mentioned that there are are 1,600 Second Life users who earn $10,000 or more a year selling virtual content. I know a few people on the high end who are making millions. And it’s not just Second Life; this is all happening now in Roblox and Fortnite and other places, too.
I’m still taken aback at just how little [the staff at Meta] seem to have learned from past platform iterations.
Also surprising is that Meta’s metaverse team has some Second Life employees on it, like Linden Labs’ former CTO. Another is the former Linden Lab employee Jim Purbrick. Right before Meta rolled out Horizon, he was warning the Meta team about needing guidelines for harassment on the platform, and it seems like the company kind of ignored him... [It] seems Meta is throwing money at the problem without throwing much wisdom at it.
[This new] metaverse hype wave is so similar to 2008. Everything’s being repeated now—the same news stories, the same assumptions, the same mistakes. During the 2008 hype, the tech was not ready for a mass market. Today, it has become a mass-market phenomenon with Roblox and Fortnite and other platforms. I think there are upwards of half a billion people who are now active users on a broadly defined metaverse platform.
Some more links after the break. First up -- my answer on the mistakes being repeated now:
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« Second Life », le métavers créé et géré par ses utilisateurs is a new article on French culture site featuring me talking with reporter Mathilde Loire about Second Life and the metaverse. And my quotes definitely seem sexier en français:
Continue reading "I Speak en Français About the Metaverse for 20 Minutes News" »
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NFT? Maybe that should mean Not Friendly Transactions. Allie Volpe of Bustle recently asked me who will be rich in the Metaverse:
Virtual plots of land or massive yachts won’t be signs of wealth in the metaverse if other users aren’t on the platform to witness it, especially if outsiders don’t see value in these items aside from their high price tags, Au says. “To me, the realization that these [metaverse] startups are missing is that community makes things valuable, social cohesion makes things valuable,” he says.
If you're wondering which metaverse startups I'm talking about, here's my post on the so-called Metaverse real estate "bubble".
I go into detail about what is truly valuable on metaverse platforms:
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For everything you hear about Facebook's metaverse, @slhamlet has heard it before with Second Life.@parmy will be chatting with him about the future of the metaverse and whether it'll replace the real world at 12pm ET https://t.co/uhRqpdd7sF
— Bloomberg Opinion (@bopinion) February 23, 2022
Update, 10:55AM: Click through to hear our recorded chat above, chat starts about 5 minutes after some technical issues on my side -- links to the stories we discuss below!
Live tomorrow (February 23rd) at 9am PT, join me on Bloomberg Opinion's Twitter Space for a chat with Bloomberg's Parmy Olson (author of the seminal book, We Are Anonymous) Here's some of the recent topics/articles we'll probably be covering:
And hopefully many more topics. Hope you join in!
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"Remember Second Life? That Could Be Facebook’s Future" is the title for my recent chat with Bloomberg's Parmy Olson (author of the seminal book, We Are Anonymous). Here's some of my favorite excerpts, along with some reference links where available:
WJA: For any story I’ve seen about the metaverse now, there’s an analogue to what happened in Second Life. This talk of a metaverse real estate boom? Yes, that definitely happened. Talk of big companies opening up virtual headquarters? There were a lot of other Fortune 500 companies that opened up a site in Second Life.
PO: What do you make of the metaverse worlds being created today by Facebook and Microsoft?
WJA: Well, Facebook’s [social virtual-reality app Horizon Venues] is not very impressive so far. And I’ve talked to people who’ve worked on it and there’s apparently a lot of churn, people coming and going. There’s not much design focus. It seems like they’re still struggling to get it into a mass market product. The great irony is that Oculus is selling pretty well, but there are other [social] platforms that are more popular, like Rec Room and VRChat, which have way more active users. VRChat hit almost 90,000 concurrent users on the platform at the same time last New Year, which is getting higher than Second Life...
I know a lot of metaverse evangelists who promote it as the next big thing. But what’s notable is that very few of them actually use the metaverse with the degree of frequency that they say we’re all going to be using it. Using the metaverse takes time — being able to log on and just the amount of focus you have to spend. You have to be very aware of your surroundings in the immersive space, including audio cues. It takes a lot of time and attention...
Still, to me, even if [the metaverse] only becomes a more creative, more democratic alternative to traditional movies, TV and even games, I think that’s a big win for humanity.
Emphasis mine! Parmy and I also got into the weeds about why Second Life failed to go mass market:
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Click here to listen and read the article summary, my chat with Nora of "Sparks", a tech show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (basically the NPR/PBS of Canada) about Second Life and the Metaverse. Some of my answers seem a bit stumbly to me (I blame my morning coffee for not kicking in soon enough), but it was fun to delve into some areas I haven't discussed as much before. For instance:
The looming question as to whether the Metaverse has a "killer app", My take:
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