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.

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Linden Lab to Educators: Our Foot Is Bleeding

Am I being harsh in the title? Well, not compared to this tweet:
@john_carter Linden Lab to Educators: Drop Dead. Well, back atcha, guys. "

Kate Miranda posts a good explanation on her Music Island blog about why Linden Lab is acting stupidly in removing educator discounts. I commented, but I'll repeat my thoughts here, because I believe education is one of the strongest use cases for virtual worlds, and I hate to see a major player like Second Life snub the educator community.

People Continue To Use Software They Learned In School

But there's an even better reason why it is a bad move to remove the educator discount: Educational discounts is a standard in the software industry, and for good reason. Why is Microsoft interested in getting Office into students' hands, and Adobe getting Photoshop, etc? Because the alternative is that schools use Open Office and Gimp. And because humans are creatures of habit; if we learn on one piece of software, we like to stick with it.

So, as the kids these days say, "epic fail" to Linden Lab, who by the traffic on the Second Life educators' mailing list, are going to be dealing with students learning on OpenSim platforms.


Here's how Kate Miranda puts it:

"I don't have any research but anecdotally most of the interesting builds ... are all educational or non-profit sims."

"Despite the occasional platitude, all [Linden Lab's] actions seem to betray a firm mindset that Second Life's attraction and retention rate is solely or primarily the result of what Linden Lab has developed, Linden marketing and orientation of new avatars. What would Second Life be like without the user-created content?"

The logic being:
You lose educators, you lose most of the good content, and thus, you lose the community.

Or the expanded version:

Premise 1: What makes Second Life special is the community.
Premise 2: The community stays because of the people and because there are interesting things to see and do.
Conclusion 1: Lose the interesting things to see and do, and Second Life is less unique and thus open to its competitors. This is one of my key points in my last blog post, and Linden Lab's announcement yesterday seems to make me, and those with similar viewpoints, look prophetic.
Premise 3: The education and non-profit areas of Second Life are a significant portion of the interesting content in Second Life.
Premise 4: Linden Lab doesn't value educator content, based on the announcement of the rate hikes.
Conclusion 2: Based on 3 and 4, Linden Lab does not see *or* does not care that educators and non-profits provide a significant portion of the interesting content in Second Life.
Conclusion 3a: IF Linden Lab does not see the value in educators in Second Life, then they have a naive idea of where the value of their communities are. (As I mentioned in the last article, they apparently think it's in vampires.)
Conclusion 3b: IF Linden Lab does see the value in educators in Second Life, then the only possible reason I can draw from it is that they are grooming themselves for acquisition.

Is Linden Lab for Sale?

Funny I should mention that, that's what the rumors say, too. According to sources inside Linden Lab, there was an offer made to buy Linden Lab, but it wasn't Microsoft, and it was too low.

And why wouldn't Linden Lab try to be acquired? In 2006 they hired John Zdanowski, fresh off the sale of HouseValues.com. (Zdanowski left last year to go to Avatar Reality working on Blue Mars) Investors to Linden Lab have been in it upwards of 10 years, and the major venture for 5 or 6. After claiming to be unsuccessful in the Enterprise marketplace**, and laying off more than a third of the staff, "going back to basics" is hardly a growth plan. But, as Tateru points out her article, by all appearances Linden Lab's slimming down points to making itself more desirable for buyers.

And if I'm right in my last post, that Linden Lab doesn't have an apparent business plan, then this would make sense - their plan is to slim, sell out, and cash out.

Philip's Legacy

Many may have forgotten, but in 2005 at the first Second Life Community Convention, Linden Lab's founder Philip Rosedale said they weren't looking to sell the company. They have taken venture money since then, and with it goes some of / most of the control of a company. Would Philip allow a sale? Here's a clear utopian - he's "building a new country" as he's famously quoted. In his interviews for documentaries you always see him flying a plane or walking through a park, talking about how Second Life is changing the world. Why would he let that go?

Here's why. The open source of the viewer, and Philip's personal involvement in the project with SnowGlobe, has led to a proliferation of Second Life variant worlds based on OpenSim. And while I was in a wait-and-see stance a few years ago, OpenSim has come a long way. There are now a variety of solid virtual world service providers (VWSP - going to coin this if it hasn't been, already.) that are built off of the OpenSim platform that provide fairly stable environments with improved tool-sets and administrative abilities.

Rosedale's legacy is safe. Even if Linden Lab collapses, what Second Life has done for virtual worlds is clear, and be it called OpenSim or Second Life or whatnot - the shaping of how we use virtual worlds is permanently changed due to Linden Lab and Rosedale's efforts.

Dusan Writer, Metanomics founder and blogger who I agree with ... oh ... 65% of the time, disagrees with Tateru and me. I present a rebuttal in his comments of his latest blog. Which I've just linked here, because it's only fair you hear another perspective from a different outsider.

** (I will say this again: I still am unconvinced that they weren't making numbers - Linden Lab has not released sales goals and actual sales numbers for SL Enterprise.)

Special Disclaimer: The views I express are my own, and no one else's. I am not representing any company or organization. Additionally, I have previously contracted with Linden Lab under a previous company. I currently work with Second Life as a development platform and with other virtual world platforms.

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