Educators out of Second Life - Maybe it's for the Best?

I'm going to advocate an idea that isn't just mine - but of many forward thinking individuals working with virtual worlds.

The idea of the singular "Metaverse" is flawed.

The problem is that the Metaverse that we read about in Science Fiction was some singular entity - one world designed by one company. What a gross oversimplification! And how blind so many of us have been, myself included.

Philip Rosedale, and many others, openly talk about how books like Snow Crash and Neuromancer encouraged virtual world ideas and shaped the way they designed them. It's so tempting to want to realize a wonder that we read from science fiction. Truly, we live in an age of them - of communicators like in Star Trek, outpatient surgeries, spacecraft, of media that can store the Library of Congress many times over in a device as small as a thumb, and so on. It's long time people collectively realize the next - ubiquitous 3-D virtual worlds.

But simply copying what we read isn't working. While we were all dreaming of a contiguous, universal 3-D space,

But it's not going to be one singular world.

The Metaverse is all of the following:
- a collection of 3-D worlds
- 2-D worlds
- social networking sites
- plain old flat web sites.
- mobile communications devices.
- apps that work on all of the above

What I'm saying ---- I believe "Metaverse" isn't about putting everything under one roof, it's about allowing all different kinds of applications work together. And it's common sense - there are many use cases that don't fall under vanilla Second Life.

Where are the space sims with 0 gravity, a different sky texture reflecting a foreign planet? Sorry, gravity is hard-coded, and there HAS to be 1 sun and 1 moon.
Where are sims that are more land per sim for low-density behavior - you know, like flying / driving around? It's a trumpet-call I've heard from vehicle enthusiasts since I first joined Second Life in 2004.
Jumboprim native support?
Where are the interfaces where we can create menus on the browser that directly communicate with what's going on in-world?
Where are avatars that aren't based on human skeleton?
What about an avatar-less mode that would be just for mobile, or for events where we might want to cram 1,000 or 10,000 avatars to watch a celebrity? Or alternate low-res geometric models?

As soon as we start branching into different worlds, these questions become less of "Oh, our system would need MAJOR changes to do that". I'm super excited about the future of virtual worlds, because we're *barely* scratching the surface of the kinds of experiences we can simulate in 3-D in a social environment.

But why is Second Life so walled garden? Why are any of the virtual worlds so walled garden? Even the ones better architectured to be more open - such as OpenCobalt - are still imagining one-software-that-shall-rule-them-all. There's a variety of examples of companies trying, opening up a standard, and then pulling back a SDK in order to shrink into a content-creation company. (x3d, anyone?)

I sang praises of Linden Lab when viewer 2.0 came out - because of one simple reason: web-site integration. And when it bought Avatars United I thought, "maybe Linden Lab is going to use this to corner the cross-platform-avatar-social-network. In 2009, when Tom Hale announced at SLCC that they wanted to diversify sim offerings to offer a wider variety of sims based on use-case, I swooned and applauded.

Linden Lab still has a prime opportunity

But that opportunity is never going to be the end-all-be-all virtual world. BK Linden tweets about how they're focusing on making ONE product for a wide audience. That's fine, if they build a flexible, extensible product (like Facebook, Twitter, etc). Instead, they have taken step after step this year in backing into a corner into one niche. But Linden Lab can embrace the open source movement, and focus less on gaining audience, and more on gaining position. Things like economy, standards, Virtual World DNS, identity authentication, cross-world economies and marketplaces - these are the profitable future for Linden Lab. Not content creation, as this year's promotional emails seem to indicate. (Starting with Linden Homes, then moving on to their bikini, vampire, and Halloween ads). In short, if Linden Lab wants to be a centerpiece of the Metaverse, it needs to do it in a way other than becoming a glorified ISP.

I think educators are far more out-of-the-box thinkers than industry people. When I read about educators spreading out into OpenSim, and doing development projects themselves, I get excited because they'll have opportunities to do more creative ventures.

So, yeah, maybe it is for the best.