From the esheep blog. Given these electric sheep guys would not even exist without Linden Lab and Second Life, this whiny diatribe by virtual world developer Electric Sheep's COO is sorta like a dog biting the hand that feeds it;
"I’m reading an oldie-but-goodie, Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold, and there’s a quote Takeshi Natsuno, one of NTT’s innovators behind the DoCoMo i-mode platform, who says: “AOL became the number one Internet service where so many others failed because they provided an easy to use interface, useful content developed by others, and ways for users to communicate with each other.” Unsurprisingly, I looked at those three items and stacked them up against Linden Lab’s Second Life, where the first two (usability and content) still get in the way of the last (a new form of communication). SL’s usability challenges are like a series of doors that all need to be unlocked. Open door 1 with a better, customer registration experience but hit door 2 with a large download. Those who open door 2 hit door 3, technical requirements (typically the graphics card). Get past door 3 and confront door 4, a difficult user interface. Start to unlock door 4 with the simpler OnRez viewer, but then the first thing people want to do is customize their avatar. Bam! That’s door 5, because the avatar skins and hair people really like are totally separate from the avatar sliders. Let’s skip past avatar and camera movement difficulties and get to… what? An event? We were creating compelling events back in 2006 with Major League Baseball (Yankees-Red Sox) and SonyBMG (loony Ben Folds concert), but scaling events in a user-friendly way in SL is cost prohibitive due to hosting fees, human support resources required, and inefficient sharding/load balancing systems. A game? We created some fun games for movies such as I am Legend and Smokin’ Aces, but lag, limitations of the SL scripting language, and word of mouth inefficiencies get in the way of scaling centralized games to truly impressive numbers (Tringo being a bold exception, which was a decentralized game which enabled land owners to make money). Usability and a compelling experience go hand in hand, and can compensate for each other. I found KartRider difficult to use (it also had a big download), but you knew what you were there to do and how to have fun. As open as Second Life is — anyone can rent virtual space and create whatever you want without asking permission from Linden Lab — it remains extremely closed if you run up against technical limitations (and you will). Then you have to pray that Linden Lab’s business priorities align with yours, and that they are able and willing to technically solve the bottleneck in a timely fashion. Linden Lab has been extremely helpful to ESC on many occasions, but the joy of open source platforms like Ogoglio or OpenSim (an open source version of Second Life) is that if something needs to be fixed, you can roll up your sleeves and fix it rather than crossing your fingers and waiting for someone else. My interests have switched over to lighter, Web-based experiences that change the situation entirely. Instead of thinking big worlds and network effects, I’m excited about melding the dynamics of casual games (i.e. light, efficient, fun user experiences) with the benefits of avatar communication and multi-user interactions. As I noted to Joey Seiler the other day, we are experimenting with Flash/Papervision experiences with Ogoglio and ElectroServer on the back end. Flash virtual worlds are nothing new, I think we can push them in some good directions. To be clear, I have a huge amount of respect for what Linden Lab has accomplished. Second Life has been an incredible innovation, and a wonderful platform to test the dynamics of virtual worlds. We have learned a huge amount by pushing the boundaries, watching usage patterns, examining voice versus text interactions, and comparing synchronous versus asynchronous communication tools. We learn from doing, from observing, and of course from stumbling. I agree with Charlene Li that if you’re never failing, it means you’re not trying hard enough. I think Second Life has been great for learning and great for PR, but by-and-large is a poor platform for marketing. I still think it could be an effective component of a cross-platform virtual goods play, especially if you use in-world entrepreneurs as a channel. Second Life continues to grow. If you examine their latest metrics, you’ll see that Linden Lab’s hosting business (the primary revenue source) continues to grow every month. New user concurrency records continue to be broken on a regular basis (latest high is over 64K). Second Life remains a hotbed of experimentation in education and corporate collaboration. It is still one of the cheapest and fastest places to prototype ideas and virtual world interactions. I think, however, that Linden Lab’s IPO goals are not realistic until they are able to (re)create a compelling story for their future — there are good reasons for them to go public, and their financials support it, but they won’t get the EV/R multiples they are dreaming of until the growth story sizzles once more. Perhaps it is very self-serving but I have always believed that Linden Lab’s strength would lie in enabling a deep and wide ecosystem of 3rd party developers. This requires both fostering that ecosystem and creating a robust and open technical platform for those developers to work upon. Linden Lab has been well-meaning with the former, but has fallen down on the latter. It has moved in inches, rather than miles, and been afraid to cannibalize its existing community and economy. Not surprisingly, many 3rd party developers have lost patience and shifted to OpenSim and Multiverse or shifted back to Flash and the Web browser. I would think that once OpenSim is able to create its own viewer from scratch and break free from the SL GPL license, it too will split from Second Life compatibility. Still, our culture is not quite ready for an avatar for every soul, and Linden Lab’s window of opportunity is far from over. Perhaps there will be a second life for Second Life. However, there are a lot of Linden Lab decisions and some very good technical implementation between now and then. http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/giff/?cat=6
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