This post was inspired by a meme making the rounds: "Is Twitter the new Second Life?" As in: Is Twitter as overhyped and lacking in value as Second Life was? It's not a surprise that this comparison upsets people - after all no one wants to read the premature obituary of their favorite system. And, to be fair, the comparison is a bit moronic: It is perhaps like asking if milk is the new lederhosen. Despite the absurdity, I couldn't help but use it to sort through a number of thoughts I've had about why Second Life is failing so badly to deliver on the promises of the "3D Web."
For those of you wondering about my motivations, consider this post tough love. I have and continue to enjoy Second Life, especially as a democratic platform for art making. It's the best option we have right now. I've also met a fair number of Linden employees (from managers to customer service staff) in person and I can tell that every one of them love their company and believe in the mission. These are great and smart people - but as a designer who researches social software for a living, I feel uniquely positioned to say that from where I sit, SL is failing badly in it's appeal to business. While a year ago my coworkers were often excited and curious to hear a remote meeting might include a foray into virtual worlds. These days I just as often hear how grateful they are to "ditch the damn thing" when we opt not to use it. Linden is a very young and agile company, but if we imagine it will still be relevant in 5-10 years, it's time think bigger than taking potshots at improving the search box or changing the color of the GUI. It's time to talk Design.
If you are reading this as an average Second Life resident, in particular one who has no interest in business use of virtual worlds, this discussion is academic. Second Life is and remains an excellent platform for individual social interaction, and will probably remain so for a while to come.
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As it is now Second Life will never be capable of delivering on the promises of the "3D web," nor will it ever approach the significance of a social networking platform like Twitter. To understand why we need to begin with the fact that SL has no content API, and nearly nonexistent support for external media. In addition, Second Life requires you (in gamelike fashion) to make artificial translations between real life and the virtual. While this is incredibly empowering for the individiual, it is death for business use. More importantly, neither of these conditions are an oversight, both are deliberate design decisions borrowed from the realm of MMPORGs.
Why is an API important, and why should a non-programmer care? We don't need to understand the technical bits. We don't even need to know what the API looks like, or what it can do, we just need to understand what an API does conceptually: it allows for integration. Integration is the major difference between open platforms with APIs (let's say Twitter and Flickr) and "Walled Gardens" (let's say Secondlife or Facebook). The open platform model assumes that you will make their service a part of your life. The walled garden approach assumes you will give a portion of your life to their service. Systems like Twitter or Flickr function as PART of your life. Systems like Secondlife or Facebook assume they ARE your life, or at least a unique chunk of it.
For a system like Second Life this actually makes perfect sense: Why would a service offering you a second chance at life want to integrate in any way with your first? If you are a student of virtual worlds in the gaming sense, the answer is incredibly obvious: you wouldn't! Integration breaks the illusion of immersion. Integration breaks Flow, it ruins the experience. It is not an accident that most computer games occupy all of your computer's screen real estate and most of its computational resources. This is by design - the world ought to become the whole of the experience. In this sense, real world integration is unwanted and unwelcome and it is, unfortunately, exactly what business world requires.
Most of the criticism I hear from would-be business users of Second really falls out along these lines - Second Life has poor support for real world integration. It does not support real world identities or reputation systems, it does not have a real marketplace (using a real currency), it does not allow transparency. Second Life is "heavy" and does not allow you to use your computer for much else. It is, in short, inherently about replacing the real with infinite possibility, at the cost of blocking out everything else. All of these things are true, and are by design. As a place for personal exploration this distance from reality can be valuable and deeply rewarding, but as a place to conduct business, it's a train wreck.
Returning to the notion of an API, consider the way that users interact with Twitter with the way users interact with Second Life. Twitter has no sense of place - it offers no "there" to go to. While you might visit the homepage, you are just as likely to be using a cellphone, a PDA or one of a dozen client applications on almost as many hardware devices. In fact, the 140 character limit built into Twitter comes from the limit placed on SMS messages. In other words, from day one, Twitter assumed it would be part of your existing life and infrastructure. The API makes this possible.
In contrast, Second Life offers virtually no way in which the external world can interact with the virtual. Even the "lightweight" SLIM chat client is proprietary and incompatible with every other instant messaging client. So while Twitter encourages users to bond by sharing the notion that they are distributed, Second Life encourages users to bond by forcing them to be located in the same virtual space, even when they would rather not be.
There are advantages to both approaches of course, but if the question is "what makes for a good platform for business use" it should be immediately obvious that the answer is that which is open, reaching people where they actually are, with the tools they're already using.
One final bit of criticism ought to be leveled at the death grip the Second Life universe holds on user created content. While it is true that the terms of service allow users to "keep their intellectual property," Linden does not provide any way to make this possible. In short, there is no API for content transfer, nor does the TOS adequately cover content transfer (other than promising swift expulsion for "violations"). For an amateur user (and by amateur I do not mean "unskilled," I mean "not done for a living") who keeps their universe contained in-world, this poses little problem, but for for a professional 3D content creator, this takes the proposition of working for a living in Second Life completely off the table, except where a company is willing to hire someone on salary.
Put another way: There are a class of professionals who generate incredible 3D content (for other virutal worlds, film industry, title design). These folks cannot apply their talents to Second Life without being forced into learning a new toolset which falls short of the one they are used to. Once they do, their work is locked into a proprietary environment. Thus, very few established professional content creators engage with the Second Life community. This does NOT mean that the quality of homegrown Second Life creations is lesser, it just means that the Second Life community is isolated from the existing professional community of practice. Seems like a bad idea? It is.
While there are ways to move content around, they are fraught with legal and technical difficulties and effectively render the environment hostile to professional engagement. (If the World Wide Web required web designers to make sure they had the "transfer" box ticked on every bit of javascript they wrote, there would never have been a dot com boom!*) This leaves the bulk of Second Life to the amateur content creators . It's absolutely true that this creates an incredible democratizing opportunity for participation, but it does nothing to encourage engagement with the business or art worlds, which (like it or not) still exist in "meatspace." Amateur content creation is a wonderful thing, but it was never Geocities that made the web a successful platform for business.
If Linden does nothing, Secondlife will remain what it is, and for almost all of the current users, this is more than enough. If, however, the company has any thought towards delivering on the "hype" of the 3D web for the Enterprise, serious steps must be taken to abandon what currently amounts to an isolationist strategy. This process can begin with a concerted effort to produce an API.
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* It is a persistent myth that the presence of tools such as copybot "destroy creativity" and "ruin the marketplace." As a former creative for hire, I can assure you that you can make both decent money and a solid reputation as a designer of websites. This is true despite the fact that nearly every computer on the face of the earth has the web equivalent of "copybot" pre-installed, in the form of a web browser that allows view source. Why then didn't the web fail spectacularly? The web didn't grow into the force it is today in spite of the fact that it lacked copy/mod/trans permissions, it grew BECAUSE it lacked such permissions. It did not grow because it insisted on being the one and only place to go for content, it grew because it was predicated on the assumption that content should be distributed widely.
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4 comments:
This is tangentially related, but I'd be interested in hearing your response to Malcolm Gladwell's critique of “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” by Chris Anderson. They aren't discussing virtual worlds, but they talk about content and price points - which pricing models work and which don't in the digital age.
Your footnote about web design made me think of it.
"In contrast, Second Life offers virtually no way in which the external world can interact with the virtual."
Not sure I follow that. There's email-to-SL, there's browser apps like AjaxLife for web-based IM and chat to SL, there's the new "phonecall an avatar" feature, there's streaming video, there's screenshots that can be emailed from SL as postcards, there's even Twitter apps for Tweeting from within SL and vice versa. How are you defining "virtually no way"?
@slhamlet:
All true, but I'm making the point that SL needs an API - these examples underscore the point.
It's not that integration won't happen (because users will force it to), it's a question of how it happens. Every example that you gave falls under two categories: 1. Proprietary support written by Linden, 2. A hack.
No matter how good Linden is, they have finite resources and cannot possibly cover every use case. They could, however, attempt to provide a platform for other people to expand on (via an API). In the absence of an API, won't people make it happen anyway? Of course they will! Case in point is AjaxLife, which is a beautiful piece of work. I particularly enjoy the thrill of logging in via my iPhone. Mostly though, AjaxLife is beautiful because given the tools that Linden has provided the developer community, it shouldn't work as well as it does. There is simply no developer support for such a thing. It's a beautiful, astounding, well written hack.
While someone really ought to hire Katharine Berry, one also needs to ask why it wasn't easier to write in the first place, and why there aren't a dozen such clients out there now.
Lack of external developer support is particularly galling if you read early interviews with Kapor, Ondrejka or Rosedale himself (some of these appear in your book, Hamlet). The vision was there to create an expandable, scalable virtual platform. These days it seems the Linden approach is to single handedly control development and integration through feature additions, while forcing third party developers into a frustrating and occasionally legally ambiguous area of reverse engineering and torturous overloading of the few (barely) open channels. Their answer for enterprise users is to provide grid in a box or sharded approach, but not to integrate with the existing grid.
I don't believe this is in any way malicious. Every one of such decisions make perfect sense if you're thinking like a MMPORG developer (WoW for example, has every reason in the world NOT to undermine their business model by allowing third party development). I think these game-like design decisions are made because SL is a first of a kind, and the only previous examples have been MMPORGs (arguably though, SL ought to look back a bit further at the way text based MUDs with open engines function). But SecondLife isn't really a game, and at the moment the company is so far ahead of the competition (and if we believe the reports, solvent to boot) that a Design decision to provide expansion could be made now, and the results would be incredible. Secondlife could become the next Lotus 123 (or better yet, Google Docs), unless by force of will it remains Visicalc.
PS There is a third category in your examples, that is support given by other companies: Twitter integration to SecondLife works for one reason: Twitter offers an API!
@anindita:
I rather enjoyed the Gladwell article. Probably deserves a longer treatment, but the ideas/stuff dichtomy is slightly strained. Good stuff is always about good ideas!
Still I like the inherent distinction between value and price for distribution. A lot of confusion swirls, especially around music, but in the end it seems people value music and art quite a bit. What they don't value at all is the role of some intervening third party that wants to be paid for an introduction, especially when distribution costs nothing these days.
Even so, what things like record companies, newspapers and publishers do provide is an editorial "filtering" function: a baseband of quality and/or similarity (IE I enjoy the artists on label X, or the articles in journal X). My gut feeling is that editorial is an undervalued commodity, but that will change - it's the obvious solution to information glut and it forms the underlying attraction of blogs and other self publishing, which are in a sense pure editorial.
We're still in the novelty phase of so called long tail publishing, but once we become more media literate we will come to value clear thought, not just thought. At least I hope that's the way the story goes.
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