[extropy-chat] An excellent overview of SecondLife from a futurist persective

[Jef Allbright]

On 4/2/06, "Hal Finney" <hal at finney.org> wrote:
>
> Jeff Allbright pointed to Giulio Prisco's essay on Second Life at:
> http://futuretag.net/index.php/Slgp1
> One of the articles Giulio references is this by Vernor Vinge on how
> the Internet is changing things, which also mentions 2L:
> http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060320/full/440411a.html


<snip>


Overall my feeling is that 2L works well as a platform for building and,
> to a lesser extent, scripting interesting objects and constructions.
> There are some very beautiful builds and the world is an extremely dynamic
> place, with new constructions appearing all the time.  But as a meeting
> place or conversational medium, it's still stuck in the 20th century.
> I engaged in real time computer chat in college in the 1970s, and aside
> from adding pictures of people standing around, that's still pretty much
> what you get when you meet people in 2L.


As a resident of SL for over a year now, I share Hal's observations of
inadequacies in the platform.  I invested a few hundred dollars on several
acres of land on a hill by the sea and near a busy telehub, spent many days
learning the scripting language and its quirks and work-arounds, and had
constructed a building with an elegant organic design to house a Futurist
Museum, a place to present and explore concepts familiar to the denizens of
this list.  The exhibits would be 3D models, images, video, books with
summary contents, all hyperlinked for quick and easy travel between related
concepts.

All of my work was predicated on the promise of HTML on "prims" and an
effective connection between the internal world of SL and the outer world of
the web--and my more powerful web server and database adding intelligence
and interactively beyond what was available in-world.  These capabilities
were promised many months ago, and when I met Philip Rosedale (CEO of Linden
Labs) in person in September he looked me in the eye and said they'd be
coming Real Soon Now.

Several months and several hundred dollars later in monthly land "tier"
payments, I decided enough was enough and liquidated my virtual holdings.
The developments that had been promised by Linden Labs are still off in the
indefinite future.

Since then, I visit a few times each week, and attend the SL Future Salons
and other events.

Lizbeth enjoys the social interaction, and hosts blitz-building contests and
show&tell events each week.

The Metaverse offers great promise as a real-time collaborative environment,
but it's not quite ready yet.

- Jef
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