Second Life: Where to go in 2010

Disclosure: My company recently completed the official Second Life Enterprise Orientation Island for Linden Lab. If you noticed I haven't been writing the "Linden Lab needs to do this and that" articles in the past few months, that's essentially why. I'm *very* pleased with the Enterprise Island, which is tentatively launching in Q1 2010, but other than that, I still can not talk about it.

That said, instead of a "predictions" blog as I generally do at the end of each year, I'm going to write a "How does Linden Lab kick Second Life to the next level?" Let's get right to it!

First, let's look at what Second Life is good at, and why it is successful. Second Life adds certain value over traditional Internet and interactive media in the following ways:

1. Immersion.
There is a visceral and subliminal sense of presence and "in the same room"-ness that you get when you are logged onto a virtual world. Communication with someone via avatar tricks the brain into thinking you're in the same room. It's far more effective than television, radio, magazine, and Internet advertising, outreach, and education in this respect.

2. Simulation.
Sure, Internet can handle some things, but let's say I want to go into a walkthrough of the human heart? Or enter a virtual community based on Victorian England? Or get to see a carbon nanotube as a large model that you can walk up to? These are just a few examples of why Second Life is great for simulation.

3. Rapid prototyping and collaboration.
Second Life has a unique thing that most virtual worlds do not have - the in-world 3-d building tool. Even if you're not an artist, you can go get freebies and buy items and customize space fairly easily.

4. Economy.
Virtual world economy and granting IP rights to users is still something that Second Life has uniquely. I mean, over the last 8 years, the Second Life Linden Dollar has been more stable than the US Dollar. What does that tell you?

While places like Blue Mars offers an economy, Blue Mars has effectively said that they will be 100% hands off with any sort of regulation. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be an entrepreneur in that sort of environment where I have no recourse about copyright violation, etc. Other virtual worlds generally sign up developers and require extensive Maya / 3DStudio / XML / OpenGL experience. That's not exactly open for the general public.

Room for Improvement: Integration

So, what are the limitations of Second Life that Linden Lab could improve upon? They all have to do with one key word: Integration. Social media is entirely all about integrating with different medias and giving people the ability to move between them and across them quickly.

1. HTML
This has always been my biggest request. Back in college when I was writing design documents of my own virtual world, I went on the assumption of reverse compatibility and/or integration with the Web. HTML will allow great cross-interaction with websites of all flavors, from entertainment to business uses and everything in between. Further, HTML needs to have certain qualities:
- Free. Any user should be able to use it.
- Interactive. Just displaying 1-way web page data is going back essentially 16 years in what the web is like. Web is all about interactivity, and we need interactive web.
- Security and administrative controls. Let me control who changes the web page, who sees it, and what sites can be used.
- Extendability. Linden Lab can't do every plug-in. Have some sort of API that we can add functionality that may not be immediately present.

2. Plug-in extension system.
Design the UI to be a basic "browser", and have an approval-based list of extensions to the browser the same way that Firefox does.

3. Voting
Let everything be voted upon and meta-tagged. Use it for search results for everything - locations, items for sale, and groups. Allow users to disable voting if they so design, at the sacrifice that their stuff isn't as easy to find.

4. More user controls
- Trash the group system. Replace with a real social networking web network. Make it compatible with other online identities.
- More privacy settings. Let me turn my entire virtual land invisible unless you're standing on it. Let me not only mute a person, but all objects that they own, group invites, etc.
- Ratings systems and filters. As with suggestion 3. Voting, make it so that I can filter content on Second Life to my own liking. Some people don't mind nudity, but can't stand violence. Some people don't mind violence, but hate drug use. Let users decide what they want to see, not ambiguous "PG", "M", and "Adult" ratings.
- How about a setting not to accept any items from new users that aren't your friends? Would you accept a random executable program from a stranger on the Internet?

5. Better Avatar Expression
Webcam -> Avatar facial expressions. How many times must I beat the drums for this? Stephenson predicted in Snow Crash, the book that inspired so many virtual world developers and designers: No one seems to care about facial expressions.

And it's funny, because every machinima I see about SL uses the lip-sync feature, because it looks a whole lot less creepy than the telepathic avatars talking. And that feature? It's not even built into the basic client. It *should* be up-front in the voice menu of preferences in Second Life, instead it's built into an "Advanced" menu that is only opened up if you happen to know to press control-alt-D and then go to Character -> Enable Lipsync. Why this isn't a default setting is beyond my comprehension.

But there you have it - my "what Linden Lab needs to do to push Second Life forward in 2010". Sure, it's a tall order, but, with a zillion companies out there on the web doing social networking, I can only say - the time of 2005 and 2006 when Linden Lab had a huge head start is over. It's time to stay ahead or watch someone catch up rapidly. I've been pleased with Linden Lab's progress recently, and hopefully they go the way of Facebook, and not Friendster. :)