Not having an explicit (or even rough) purpose makes it really hard for the majority of people to get into it. Such an open ended environment and no fast easy way to connect with others who share your interest can leave people confused and give up. I also tried to love Second Life, but it really didn’t make it easy.

Especially these days when everyone is so busy and multi-tasking on multiple things at the same time..

Time for Second Life lite?

As the leader of a rapidly growing community myself, I can affirm that it is difficult to change the direction you have always gone when you see daily progress. You get set on your ways and afraid to make difficult changes. However, you must look beyond yourself and chart a course for the organization which addresses not only current user concerns but potential new features and services which will keep the company alive and well far into the future.

Too many companies focus on revenue above function. You must have function first in order to drive consistent revenue. If Second Life makes a penny at this point, it is doing OK. What it really needs is a better user interface. Anyone aged 13 to 60 should be able to open Second Life and immediately know what to do. That isn’t the case today.

I tried to get excited about Second Life. I bought land, created my avatar, built a house . . . then just sat around doing nothing. It really depressed me and I gave up on being a part of the community. However, I never gave up on Second Life as a company. I still think it has potential, they just haven’t learned how to crack the usability and community building aspects. They’ll do it, and I believe that Kingdon will be the one to drive those changes.

-The Dusty Sage of MiceChat.com

As Second Life continues to fail due to piss poor user experience, an unstable platform, a lack of true technical innovation, and competitive threats, Mark will struggle (and in my mind fail) to help them turn the corner. People are already abandoning the service in droves (the place is always empty) and nothing will help bring the buzz back once it is gone.

http://www.i-boy.com/weblog/2008/04/will-second-life-be-career-killer_7995.html

All that being said, it’s clear that more consumable, easier to use 3D Web apps like Lively, SceneCaster and Vivaty have the opportunity to claim a much larger mass market of users that a closed, more complex virtual world like SL. For example, SceneCaster already has close to 1.5 million users on Facebook alone. While this app doesn’t even compare to SL, it offers an easy and highly customized 3D Web experience in the browser and integrated with users’ social networking profiles.

This is where the battles will take place: between Web based and highly consumable 3D applications and large, almost monolithic virtual worlds like SL. Personally, my money is on the former.

Interoperability is a good thing, only so much as open is ostensibly better than closed, but it’s hard to say what the purpose of this is. On the surface, the idea that markets will standardize around implicit de-facto standards unless explicit open standards emerge instead, would seem to provide a high-level motivation for these efforts. However, the lack of a clear, and more importantly *proven*, business model for interoperable virtual worlds makes this a questionable priority. IBM’s motivation is quite simple, the company makes large amounts of software license and service revenues from collaboration technologies, and therefore can justify tremendous R&D resources in any area that might theoretically someday yield value for that business, even if no tangible results occur in the immediate future. The motley band of hobbyists who have driven the creation of technologies like OpenSim and the open source proponents at Linden Lab have an ambition to transform Second Life into the basis of the “3d web”. Is this viable? One could argue that virtual worlds are more similar to instant messaging clients, which still have limited interoperability, or social networking applications, which are struggling with the challenges of data portability. I suspect that a true “3D web” is going to be driven by the vendors and research bodies that drove the existing web, and Linden Lab has eschewed working with any formal standards bodies in its open grid efforts.

I wish Linden Lab best of luck as it pursues these ambitions, but I’d strongly urge them to stick to the knitting and focus on the innovations that still set them apart from their competition, such as a focus on user generated content, micro-transactions, and grid computing, before venturing into a murky strategy defined by byzantine partnerships with IBM and a standardization effort that’s neither guided by an urgency to address real world market demands nor tempered by any sort of formal standardization process.

Links to other organizations:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:AW_Groupies#External_Resources

Articles and projects specific to Second LIfe:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:Grid_Interoperability
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:Architecture_Working_Group
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:AW_Groupies
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:Pyogp
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:Grid_Interoperability_Chat_Logs