Whatever happened to virtual world Second Life after the flurry of hype and influx of brands in 2005 and 2006? You dont hear much about it nowadays.
Actually, Second Life never went away; it was the media and brands that once flocked to it who melted away. The worlds existing community of around 1m users carried on with their virtual lives much as they had before.
via Virtual world Second Life to be reincarnated, with Oculus Rift | Technology | theguardian.com.
Some on SLUniverse poo-poohed my post of this story there, since I thought it was funny to add a “What, we’re dead?” comment to the title. However, the mainstream media (or at least the headlines editor) described the next virtual world Linden Lab creates as a reincarnation of Second Life, which reinforces the idea that SL is, well, pushin’ up the daisies as far as their perceptions go.
This reminds me of another Pythonistic take on history: The Death of Mary, Queen of Scots.
The Guardian headline made me think of that sketch, complete with “WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM!” sound effects, because after all, is Second Life dead? No, we’re not (WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM some more).
Don’t take my long silence here for disinterest or disenchantment with Second Life, and virtual worlds. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about SL and my place in it (and also avoiding chores like inventory sorting).
Much of the time during the day I’m reading SL-related blogs and news stories in my Feedly category, and also keeping up with things on SLUniverse.com. There’ve been many, many posts by lots of people on this topic.
My friend Mistletoe on the topic: The Sky Is Falling (again)!
Jo Yardley: Ebbe talks a little more on the forums which linked to
Carl Metropolitan’s blog Offend Everyone “Ebbe Altberg speaks again on the SL platforms” (I’m looking forward to a transcript of Carl’s recent talk on remaking the new user experience at SL11B, which I missed due to having to take the monkey out for a movie).
More blogs on the issue:
Ciaran Laval
Danko Whitfield’s collection of links
I’ve just added a new Snapzilla account there, linked to my Flickr account, so you’ll see some activity. 😉
After futzing around recovering passwords on a couple of different accounts today, I will mostly be deactivating my lelanicarver AT yahoo.com in favor of lelanicarver AT gmail.com. Why? Because Yahoo! stinks! as a point of contact, since it keeps marking important stuff as spam, and spam as important. After that irritating chore, I took a break and went online in search of entertainment or distraction (or both)
I spent time at SL11B attending a lecture: Mesh-Creative group, hosted at the Fascinate! auditorium by Prim Perfect.
It was very interesting, partly because someone was spamming attendees with some texture that was a form of protest against Ebbe (Altberg) Linden’s recent pronouncements on the next iteration of Second Life (better! or differenter!). After shaking off that distraction, the panel, which was moderated for Prim Perfect by Saffia Widdershins, was quite enlightening. Look for a video and a transcript soon at Prim Perfect.
After that, I wandered at random – caught the end of a very interesting live set with a wild band called Drum! that played everything but the kitchen sink:
And eventually, ended up at the SLUniverse.com community exhibit, which is a relaxing pool party set right near the Cake stage.
My prediction is that the “new SL” will be a flop. The Lindens say they want the customers of their new system to be the content creators. Not the roleplayers, not the socializers, not the musicians or DJs or their listeners – in other words, not the people who *buy* the content made by the content creators. There aren’t that many creators, really – not enough to sustain a grid.
Other predictions:
1) All mesh – no prims or sculpties (“real” content creators use Blender). Possibly even avatars will require a full-mesh model instead of tweaking shape parameters.
2) Voice chat only – the Lindens have been trying to push voice for a couple of years now, and I think Oculus will make text chat near-impossible anyway.
3) No music channel – both because music doesn’t combine well with voice chat, and because I suspect the RIAA has been sending them threatening notes about the fact that most Second Life DJs or venues don’t have licenses to play/broadcast the music.