What happened to Second Life? The 3-D virtual world from Linden Lab is still very much around but I don’t spend much time there, do you? Second Life has peaked. And there is something to be learned from this transition.
Facebook is hot right now and Second Life is not, and some of that comes down to the difference between fantasy and reality. Second Life is a fantasy environment — an EverQuest without the quest — and that’s the problem. It has the heavy processing requirements of a game without the rich textural depth of a Tolkein or even of real life.
Facebook, being tied to the real lives of the people involved in it, never runs out of anything, whether it is server power (minimal requirements there. at least in comparison to Second Life) or stuff to talk about. Second Life is barren in comparison. By attempting to imitate life, it pales beside the real thing.
Take dancing, for example. In Second Life dancing performs the social function that in real life is performed by eating. You can’t eat in Second Life, yet most of the time when people hang out together in real life eating is what they do. So in Second Life, if they aren’t fighting or making-out, the avatars dance. But it just isn’t very satisfying.
Facebook doesn’t have a dancing/eating problem because it doesn’t purport to be anything like a 3-D virtual world — just a wacked-out representation of our individual lives for the benefit of our friends.
Another problem with Second Life is real estate. As many companies have done, you can buy 3-D virtual social prominence, whether you deserve it or not. What Second Life is actually selling isn’t real estate or even server capacity — what they are selling is us, or at least access to us by people who want something. I don’t like that. Facebook is not immune to this, either, as we see in stories this week about how to buy Facebook friends. But for the most part the way to get lots of friends in Facebook is by being interesting. Now there’s a concept.
The best purpose I’ve seen for Second Life is for showing videos to your friends. Everyone meets at a particular spot, watches an mp4 video (thanks to the iPhone nearly every YouTube video is now available in the H.264 mp4 format), commenting back and forth like Mystery Science Theater 3000. But now DeskTube offers a very similar capability with real faces, not avatars, and in Facebook, too.
There’s less and less drawing me to Second Life, though as long as its around I’ll never leave completely.
Where else would I do my 13 hours of aerobics and 90 miles of running per week?
facebook serves a purpose: i can stay in touch with my real-life friends and acquaintances, many of whom are too lazy to send an email or pick up the phone. second life… well, whatever its purpose i couldn’t be bothered to even take a look, and the same is true for literally everyone i know.
Second Life, being like a video game, probably is suffering the same problems: 35-year-old deadbeats having to spend more time working instead of playing.
I recall coming to roughly the same conclusion as Bob after spending 10 minutes dorking around. Other “virtual reality” implementations are similarly flawed — who uses Xerox MOO anymore (if anyone really used it at all)? Sure, it was purely user driven, user developed, but not very “used”.
I always felt that IRC was more compelling that Second Life — it made no claim to being anything more than a chat client, and it did it well (while still having plenty of bugs to exploit for no particular reason).
The draw to Second Life always befuddled me. It seems that it was a lot of sales people selling stuff (land, widgets, etc) to each other, leaving the rest of civilized society out, thank you very much.
“But for the most part the way to get lots of friends in Facebook is by being interesting.”
Do you actually use Facebook? In 1 month I added over 200 people to my Facebook list not by being interesting or famous, but because I play games that require I have a large amount of followers. Sorority Life, Restaurant City, any of the farming games… you name it, there are 30 “add-me” groups for it.
Seems to me you know as much about Facebook as you know about Second Life – not much at all.
those people are not your friends. i know, in facebook-speak they’re your friends, but facebook ought to come up with another name for them.
of course there are many facebook-friend-whoring ways to get thousands of people to ‘add’ you and vice versa. do you care about those people? are you interested in what happens to them? if not, i don’t think they’re who bob is talking about.
I am on Facebook and LinkedIn. On Facebook I have 643 very interesting friends, none of whom were acquired for playing games of any sort. My wife is on Facebook. Our nanny is on Facebook. So far the kids have been spared, but they are only 7, 5, and 3.
Second Life is a silly thing. I openly mock it’s users. 🙂
Careful, one of them might openly mock your misuse of the apostrophe.
Well played!
Second Life has a variation of the same problem most VR worlds do – there isn’t enough interesting content or activities. Like the tech team’s earlier release (RealPlayer), it did achieve something of a first mover status in its field, but it stalled without more than an esoteric vision and quirky tool chain that isn’t accessible to most people who want to play with 3d content, and its technical limitations prevent scaling it most really interesting ways. VRML suffered the same issue – SGI subverted the early processes and achieved a de-facto adoption of their seriously flawed Open Inventor file format by a gullible community that wanted to believe SGI cared more about the community. Most other VR systems are too inflexible, or too heavily controlled by their corporate masters interesting in ROI and pushing their core brands…
As a related side note, and somewhat shameless plug, I lead a [very] small team of current and ex game developers that has been working for the last ~ 10 years to make what we always wanted VR to become – as open as the web, as interactive as any game, and safe for use by small children as well as fun for anarchists. Its taking far too long to finish, as we don’t want to repeat a misstep we took years ago where piles of VC money accelerated things, then the suits killed the effort (don’t make it interesting, make it an acquisition target so we can flip it! [Enter Television / OnLive Traveler, BTW…] ) We’re self funded, and building something interesting, that is built to allow people to build something interesting. MMO VR over P2P, integrated with a highly flexible and extensible game engine and tool chain, Creative Commons, content rating and DMCA tools built-in, and several tiers of content authoring from graphical procedural programming, to Lua scripting, to C++ content, all sitting over military grade PKI backed security. We hope to be done early next year. We’ve been saying that for a few years, but we’re almost there… And we will open source it all once we’re done…
Bob, not related to the topic — but the new font and format renders badly with Google Reader as viewed by Chrome. The paragraph breaks are gone and the font is unreadable.
The font isn’t that great with Chrome on the web page either.
Take a look with GR …
++ what John F sez above…need to mix in some white space, some CR/LF/css…
Looks crappy in Thunderbird (RSS, Mac), too.
Thanks for all your writings, Bob!
Looks great in IE 8!
[…] completely forgotten about Second Life until I noticed this post by I Cringley. There was a time when it seemed to offer something new and valuable. But now it […]
Robert, I’ve been writing about Second Life for six years, so I can say with a high degree of confidence that literally every single paragraph you wrote above has at least one highly debatable assertion or an outright falsehood. Let’s take just one of them:
“What Second Life is actually selling isn’t real estate or even server capacity”
Actually, the exact opposite is the case. Linden Lab’s *central revenue model* is based on selling virtual real estate, which is actually — wait for it — server capacity.
So let me ask: How much experience with Second Life do you actually have?
Y’know, Hamlet, I think you’re taking that a tad too literally. Yes, the business model is based on selling land/server use/bandwidth, but the claim being made here is that the reason people would want that land/server use/bandwidth is to gain access to other avatars. While one can quibble with that, it’s not an unreasonable assessment.
That last sentence goes for the article as a whole, too. And I’ve been pretty active in SL for about 3.5 years now.
Second Life always was a joke, another tech fad for dim-witted journalists to build up before tearing down, as you’ve just demonstrated. However, you have to give them credit, at least they implemented some interesting economic models, unlike Facebook. Facebook is somewhat popular today, but like Friendster and MySpace before it, it will fade. Both are silly and make little money, the only difference is one is temporarily popular.
Wow. That is a LOT of posts written by people who have literally no idea what they’re talking about (Wagner excluded).
If any of you actually explored Second Life, you’d know that this post is grossly misinformed. Second Life has not peaked; in fact, its active user base is stronger than it ever has been, and with enterprise applications on the horizon it has the potential to diversify greatly over the next several years.
All that has peaked about Second Life is the hype – when it was new, everybody was writing about it as an oddity. Now that the virtual world market has gained acceptance as a valid aspect of online culture, there’s less novelty media about it.
The platform, however, is still very strong, and to the contrary there is tons of rich content. In fact, content is produced at such a rate that no user would ever be able to explore it all. The very nature of a user-generated content model is such that any broad statement like “there isn’t anything interesting to do” is inherently flawed.
I have no problem with people naysaying the platform, but dismissing it out of hand without taking any time to verify your information is downright irresponsible.
Ignorant commentary is a silly thing. I openly mock its authors 🙂
I simply agree. 🙂
Facebook is nice occasionally for seeing photos of my in-laws’ vacation and meeting up with long lost friends. Twitter is wonderful because it cuts those six degrees of separation down to 1 or 2. LinkedIn is good for professional networking. But SecondLife is where I live online, where I go to meet my friends, where I love to dance more than anything, where I can create any content I want whenever I want it.
hmm well you cant compare Facebook to Second Life totally different social environments altogether. For me Second life is a place where things happen live.. especially music and performing arts and I don’t see how that even could happen on Facebook.
I’m not sure why I bother commenting on such uninformed commentary, especially when it’s so late at night. But two of my esteemed Second Live colleagues have taken the time to point out how off-base this post was (not t mention the judgements of people who spent…10 minutes in Second Life??
There are thousands of educators, scientists, artists, musicians, architects, entrepreneurs, and many more to meet plus events and seminars many times a day. Try reading Wagner’s blog for a start at http://nwn.blogs.com/ and then look at Not Possible in Real Life at http://npirl.blogspot.com. For physicists and philosophers, check out the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics at https://www.mica-vw.org/. Google and you’ll find over a thousand other Second Life blogs on a range of topics.
Do your homework. You are missing out on the future of virtual worlds bigtime.
I think the problem is considering any of these platforms or places as one thing with one use and way benefit.
Yes some places are social, some websites are social, some places are business, come websites are business related. Some people are serious, others not so.
If you consider places like Second Life as a huge 3d wiki with people interacting live in it then you start to remove some of either the prejudice of needing to tear it down, or the romanticism at the opposite end of the scale.
Facebook does have some interesting things about it, it is basically a rebirth of a portal. deploying apps and determining who is around. It is part of the equation, as it twitter, of being able to interact in a suitable fashion with like minded groups of people.
The avatar style interactions in virtual worlds allow people to interact with one another and with space and information or data. The shared visual and spatial experience, seeing who stood near who is much closer to general human experience than small text views of status or quick games of cards with people.
All are valid. I don’t think facebook is the pinnacle of human communication at distance, any more than I think a telephone conference is, I think that the virtual world explorations including second life are on the evolutionary path now that we are getting used to interacting with one another both live and nearly live online. None of them are perfect, none of them will ever be but they do help us hook up with one another in a suitably varied set of ways.
Its a complex subject, from mirror worlds training, to expressive identity and branding, to art creation etc. These places and platforms (including facebook) mean many things to many people too. That is the interesting part I think.
In 1982, Vint Cerf told me once, I was probably one of the first fifty women engineers on the Internet. I was Chief Software Engineer at DEC, matrix managing a group of 40 creating prototype applications for the first commercial multimedia authoring system in the world, IVIS.
That was the year I got into email, ftp, and USENET (back when USENET was useful, a decade pre-spam). I tried to explain to my parents what I was doing, communicating and collaborating with people continents away without even having to be at work the same hours.
My parents, born in the early 20’s, probably had images of 1950’s B movie computers, with me donning a heavy helmet with Tesla coils, to communicate with people across the world. They didn’t understand it, they didn’t get it, and they didn’t really think it was anything real.
It was confusing, silly, a little scary, and they didn’t really see how it worked, or how it would ever be useful. It’s a good thing some people have more perspective than snark.
Interacting in virtual worlds is as real as interacting via email, ftp, chat — probably more “real” than interacting via Facebook. Some people use Facebook for their professional life, but most folks use it for fluff.
Some people use Second Life as an art authoring platform (DC Spensely), an educational collaborative (Harvard), a way to have low-budget international meetings and conferences (IBM), or more personal technical support (Cisco). Like any medium, most people will use it for fluff.
If you’ll remember, about thirteen years ago, you were probably all thinking the web was silly, because all it had on it was porn and geeks.
Let’s revisit this question in a few years, and we’ll see who is smirking, eh?
Second Life is a fantasy environment? Facebook is … tied to real lives?
On Facebook I play silly games. In Second Life I run a real peer-to-peer support group for real people with cancer. Real cancer.
One of us is wrong. And it’s not me.
Hats off to you Poppy
Oddly enough, I find Facebook quite a bit more boring than Second Life. That’s not a criticism of Facebook.
It’s easy to dismiss SL. Serious Gamers think its graphically lame and social media dudes find that the avatars remove them from reality (which is kind of the point).
SL is a social space like Facebook which brings people together to socialise but it is a qualitatively different experience. For a start, I’ve never seen a place anywhere else where so many ordinary non-techy folks have managed to teach themselves how to program, I think that’s pretty awesome. It’s also a pretty great CAD package. Being able to collaborate and build things with others in 3D is a totally different feeling to using something like Google Sketchup or other conventional CADs.
But the thing about SL is thats its not about the collaboration tools or the supposed business cases. It doesnt exactly excel in anything other than the one thing that it does well, being a completely unique and open ended social space. It’s pointless to criticise anything other than the overblown hype that Linden Labs generated in 2007. That’s all in the past now.
Yeah, Bob’s right about the dancing though (however I still highly recommend Slow Dance Number 4.)
Bob, you couldn’t be more wrong.
There are so many powerful, real life applications of virtual worlds like Second Life for real world connections that I started the site http://Betterverse.org to chronicle all that was happening there / here:
* Urban youth in Chicago and New York learning about paleontology and Africa by following a real life team of fossil hunters in Zambia
* The FCC, US Army, NATO, and the United States main e-government services provider NIC creating Second Life presences
* Musicians, artists, filmmakers finding communities of practice and support in SL
It’s like Facebook — with more rich engagement, user-generated content and wacky juxtapositions.
My work (a school) once looked at Second Life as a virtual teaching environment for distance learning or for classes (German language) where kids would be spread all over the state. The biggest problems were content control, paying for class fees and then controlling access to the class. There was never an easy automated way of doing this, it all had to be done by hand.
OH I haphazardly neglected to mention… I did meet one of the best friends I have ever had in Second Life and now we communicate in real life daily. If it wasn’t for SL my life would have not become enriched by meeting my best friend, she truly is a special person I cannot live without now.
Yes dancing is hokey, but the content creation is what we felt really set SL apart from other environments. While we play WoW now we miss making “stuff” in SL. I for one got to indulge my creative aspiration for architectural design. My best gal pal was a wiz at landscapes, often they where romantic landscapes and some where whimsical fun parks. R.I.P. SL 🙁 May you have a successor that works for everybody.
What happened to the font? The comments are OK but the last 2 posts have been in really cramped, ugly, and hard-to-read fonts. Please put the font back the way it was. 🙁
Maybe you should spend more time in SL. You’re missing quite a lot of serious RL stuff happening there. For instance, there’s a whole region devoted to sci-tech called the SciLands (http://scilands.org) with members such as NASA, JPL, MICA (http://mica-vw.org), and my own organization, the International Spaceflight Museum. There are many, many universities using SL as virtual campuses or enrichment resources, and on and on. Like the non-virtual world, it is very difficult to generalize and be accurate all in the same breath about virtual worlds and especially about Second Life. IM me if you’d like more info.
They’re both just glorified chat rooms.
A cafe is also “a glorified chat-room”, as is a town-hall, or a senate chamber.
Ultimately, the glorification revolves around is what is done with that space. Other than that, they all serve the same purpose: Bringing people together, allowing them to collaborate and communicate.
Admittedly, some of them serve sandwiches, coffee and cake.
facebook has totally peaked.
Not until my Mom signs up. Just this year, she’s gotten in to emailing photos and video chats. Maybe this Christmas I’ll show her FB. Then it’ll be over.
The progression of the comments on many of Cringely’s critical postings is very interesting. For example, in this one, on the first day there are many people, many regular commenters, agreeing with the principle of Cringely’s post. A couple days later, there is one from the SL journalist and a bunch of SL users defending it, presumably because someone announced it on SL or an SL message board.
If you were to read the comments in random or reverse order you might come to some false conclusions.
As a person who owned a once thriving Sim is SL, made the best of firends, a few romantic
( yeah, I know, what a loser ) encounters I think I can safely say that SL was only good for the time that my Real Life was frankly, a bit shit. I think it can be a great tool for the socially inept, the depressed, the girl you fall in love with who is actually a guy called Frank in real life. Second Life is what I like to call makey-uppy and no matter how many prims you slap on it, it aint real. Facebook is interaction with people you can touch, most likely not get divorced for posting to, and Mafia Wars is for the win. But as I said when I left SL, I dont think I want to have to edit my ass size to get into digital jeans,to go to a bar I cant smell the after save of a cartoon, that is by all accounts, gender unspecific.
But thats just me.
There’s a bug with your header.. figured you’d prolly want to know
[…] has discovered is a dead dog from the start. While Bob C doesn’t really compare like for like here, his thoughts sum it up very well for […]
Well written site, well researched and useful for me in the future.I am so happy you took the time and effort to make this. Best of luck
Do you actually use Facebook? In 1 month I added over 200 people to my Facebook list not by being interesting or famous, but because I play games that require I have a large amount of followers. Sorority Life, Restaurant City, any of the farming games… you name it, there are 30 “add-me” groups for it.
Seems to me you know as much about Facebook as you know about Second Life – not much at all.cheap VPS
Bookmarked website. Appreciate giving. Absolutely really worth the time from our tests.
The new Zune browser is surprisingly good, but not as good as the iPod’s. It works well, but isn’t as fast as Safari, and has a clunkier interface. If you occasionally plan on using the web browser that’s not an issue, but if you’re planning to browse the web alot from your PMP then the iPod’s larger screen and better browser may be important.
; )!!!
Verry useull info, thanks.
nice post! I really like the style of your blog.
Struggling to find attempting for quite a while for a useful study relating to this one subject matter . Scouting in Yahoo and google I at last encountered this website. Reading these details I’m lucky to mention that I have a positive uncanny feeling I stumbled upon the very things I was ready for. I most certainly will be sure to don’t forget this web-site and give it a look constantly.
nvplmrczqvpjqij, zaposlitev, gOnjULjuTeBUMeomGnXu.
eryyjyrbkmtdlwaicl, william rast, eiYpLYhUfVlWeCUTFHJZ. smdryouokdgnzzuatr, gloria vanderbilt jeans, UdZzCYHtZYcGfvXTnqgb.
When I read a great blog post I usually do three things:1.Forward it to the relevant contacts.2.keep it in all of the best bookmarking websites.3.Make sure to visit the website where I read the post.After reading this post I’m seriously concidering going ahead and doing all three…
I just subscribed to your RSS feed, not sure if I did it properly though? Solid article by the way.
Proficient, thanks for sharing this information. Looks great on my iPhone, but on the Blackberry Pearl’s browser your site comes out a little flaky.
Hi, maybe i’m being a little bit off topic here, but I was browsing your site and it looks exceptional. I’m making a blog and trying to make it look clean, but everytime I touch it I mess something up. Did you design the blog yourself? Could someone with little experience do it, and add updates without messing it up? Anyways, good information on here, very solid.
good thanks o/
Between me and my husband we’ve owned more MP3 players over the years than I can count, including Sansas, iRivers, iPods (classic & touch), the Ibiza Rhapsody, etc. But, the last few years I’ve settled down to one line of players. Why? Because I was happy to discover how well-designed and fun to use the underappreciated (and widely mocked) Zunes are.
Solid write-up and certainly can assist with becoming familiar with the subject matter better.
Oh,nice article. Good informations..
Very interesting read. I’m a blogger myself and of lately I’ve discovered that managing my very own site has been a pain in the neck, particularly for those technical jargon i have to solve. I recently discovered a brand new running a blog neighborhood the place you’ll be able to simply setup a weblog and forget approximately it. Check it out, could be helpful l
The wrist watch is making a return! What would be a good watch to get my father?
I really don’t think I have it in me to keep up with managing a place like it! Awesome job and I truly hope you keep going for a long time.
I have searched this information for a long time.
say taht I’m greatfulfor all the valuable information that has been suggest on this page.
^^ yeh that is so true. I have to agree with you
online eweb site Really glad I found this article! Thank you so much for submitting.
good post good subject thanks for this site’s admins :=))1049
This is a very nice blog you have here, I’ll be sure to mention it to some friends of mine
Thank you very nice place to implement for Happy
My developer is trying to persuade me to move to .net from PHP. I have always disliked the idea because of the costs. But he’s tryiong none the less. I’ve been using WordPress on various websites for about a year and am concerned about switching to another platform. I have heard great things about blogengine.net. Is there a way I can import all my wordpress content into it? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
pemutih badan
[…]check beneath, are some entirely unrelated sites to ours, nonetheless, they are most trustworthy sources that we use[…]
e wie einfach
[…]usually posts some incredibly fascinating stuff like this. If youre new to this site[…]
https://www.adsbeta.net/uHFGY
[…]although web-sites we backlink to below are considerably not associated to ours, we feel they’re actually really worth a go by, so possess a look[…]
HITRUST Readiness
[…]Every the moment inside a whilst we choose blogs that we read. Listed below would be the latest web-sites that we select […]