I'm not going to try this year to make accurate predictions. Instead, I will predict outlandish ones that I have little evidence to believe will come true. If I accidentally get any of them right, we can have a good laugh. (It's all in good fun, right?)
1. Linden Lab will go full-on in content creation. With the new CEO being game-focused, and hints of other content creation (gambling ban purportedly being lifted, Linden Homes, Creative Lead job opening, etc), it seems natural, right? The motto will be changed to, "Your World, Our Imagination, Now Come Buy Some L$".
Examples of Second Life's new content creation:
- Custom avatars that you can customize via Facebook / web and buy before you even log in.
- A new, simplified interface where the only controls are movement and talking, with inventory only after you've bought things. Only premium accounts will be able to access content creation tools.
- Gambling. Lots and lots of gambling.
- Adult content. Linden Lab settles their longstanding lawsuit from Stroker Serpentine by making him Chief Adult Content Officer (CACO), and Stroker will never fear from copyright or trademark infringement again. The job becomes much easier, that Stroker has a daemon programmed to do most of his work. This will be referred to as the CACO Daemon.**
2. Facebook buys Twitter just to monopolize the friend feed market. It blows all of Goldman Sachs' money on it. Well, 490 million of it. The last 10 million will be spent to buy all rights to Radiohead's song "Creep" so that they can legally remove it from the Social Network trailers, and all references to it.
EDIT: I swear to God, I didn't read or hear about this until after I published this piece!
3. Three virtual world related companies (let's say ... Teleplace, Protosphere, and OLIVE) cancel their 3-D immersive platforms and jump on the "hybrid event" bandwagon to compete with the likes of InXpo, On24, etc. Online events get more generic until there's the overdue media-hype-backlash. Companies continue to to do virtual events, saving money and travel, but Wired will convince the media that it isn't happening.
4. Wired Magazine's last subscriber cancels. It was a dentist in Sheboygan, WI, who wanted to "stay on the cutting edge". Wired continues to publish online, out of spite, and switches to an all advertiser revenue model.
5. ReactionGrid and InWorldz merge to become "IntionGrildz". This is still a better name for a multi-purpose virtual world than "Second Life".
6. Google restarts Lively in October 2011 and re-dubs it "Undeadly". It becomes a highly successful meeting realm for Twilight fangirlz and Zombie fanatics.
7. Google successfully takes over the world overnight, after it realizes all it needed to do was to change all the countries on Google Maps and Google Earth to be under the United Google League of Earth Emirates (UGLEE). World Peace is achieved, after Google provides free broadband to everyone on Earth. No one feels like warring because of easy availability to porn. Productivity plummets, and religious conservatives attempt a coup. Google declares itself a religion, and the world is thrown into a thousand years of oppressi--- ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY GOOGLE! PLEASE GRANT ME YOUR GRACE AND BENEVOLENCE!
8. Philip Rosdale's "Love Machine" catches on like wildfire. Managers in tech companies rapidly start changing their managing style based on amount of love received. Workers doing un-glorious, low-visibility jobs are terminated for not getting sufficient love. Sycophantic subordinates and kiss-ups get huge promotions above their competency. IT departments are obliterated, companies fail due to bandwidth outages and hacked systems. Philip is quoted saying, "I'm not building a new country, I'm RAZING IT TO THE GROUND! BWAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
9. Microsoft releases a 3-D meeting room element for its LiveMeeting software. It is totally awesome, except for the fact that it only runs correctly on XP.
10. Net Neutrality ruling from last year is rendered de facto totally irrelevant due to its mobile market exception and mobile smart device ubiquity. Oh, wait. This is a believable prediction. Lemme see ... oh, I got it! All that happens, but people actually notice!
** +5 nerd points if you got this joke.
1/04/2011
10 Outlandish VW Predictions for 2011
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14 comments:
Very creative. Actually I am hoping for the Microsoft virtual world part badly, the rest are the kind of impossible mouse traps that can make us think. True Science Fiction at its best.
My favorite is #4.
And I laughed soda out my nose.
now you get it.
they all will be shown "correct"..but the time frame will be more like 5 years for them all to run their course...
"how i predict the future, by making fun of the present"---
c3
Great predictions, but you spelled "Sheboygan" wrong, and it matters.. to me, anyway, lol.
Maybe you're just messing with me on this prediction, but it just so happens that Sheboygan, Wisconsin was ground zero for my transition into virtual worlds. I was living just outside of Sheboygan when I happened to pick up Wired magazine one day in 2006 - a move that would subsequently upend and transform my life and career path in immeasurable ways.
Further still, one of the first people to learn about my newfound interests in virtual worlds happened to be our neighbor, a dentist.
None of this will make the prediction any less accurate though, lol!
Sorry, Jon! I actually looked it up before posting (hence the link to the Google Maps) but somehow that "c" slipped in there. FIXED!
RE: Your anecdote. Coincidence. Well, coincidence, if you don't believe in synchronicity. I picked Sheboygan because someone had used it as an example of a somewhat obscure place in America, and it was fresh on my mind. The dentist part was because my colleague Ted (California Condor in SL) got excited about SL after reading an article in PCWorld in his dentist office. (Also how he heard about me - it was my most public exposure. Thanks, Mark Wallace!)
Geez, man. Synchronicity! That is weird.
Wow, that really is some crazy synchronicity! I nearly spit out my coffee laughing when I read that.
hey btw, Wired was still cool back in 2006, wasn't it? ;-)
Wired was indeed cool back in 2006, especially when my very first professional virtual world project get a picture and a paragraph at the bottom of page 42 in the Al Gore cover issue. Heh. They became uncool when they trashed virtual worlds after having an unsuccessful go in Second Life. Their developer thought that building a building and then sitting on their hands was a good idea. Apparently it wasn't, and Wired trashed virtual worlds in general afterward.
Wired jumped the shark by web 1.0times -2001...the web killed wired...
suck.com was the last good thing.
entire articles in print about "green fuels" that profiled BOB LAZAR a few years later was my final nail in the wired coffin.. i stopped buying it monthly around then....
http://www.suck.com/daily/1995/12/15/
enjoy the irony
Wow! Maybe that article featuring your work was the one that kick-started this whole crazy trip for me!
shucks, it can't be... Gore was the July issue, and my rez day is in June. Looks like there was an article about Phil Rosedale in June. Oh well, still a small (virtual) world, lol.
@Jon:
Yeah, mine was just an uncredited blurb about the Landing Lights Park project.
Nah, I don't believe any of your predictions except, of course, for #8, which is the only one that is surprising and shows excellent predictive powers!
The rest is either obvious or it already happened. :) Google won't take over the world without buying Apple first, however :)
It was great fun to read... specially about Sheboygan, Wisconsin!!
Oh yes... and Cacodaemon... I remember playing D&D :) Who knows, some people believe that by playing pencil-and-paper role-playing games we were all somehow "predisposed" to find virtual worlds amusing and engaging, and this would explain the high number of "old-school" RPG players that are around virtual worlds these days.
Then again, people believe pretty much everything... :)
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