Look into the ball and tell me what you see.......

Yesterday was a serendipitous day.  First, I was very pleasantly surprised at Lisa's comment (and Dave's subsequent response) on the prior post.  Then, having pre-caffeine-bumbled my way through a comment response of my own, I headed into the office for a typical morning in San Jose (two customer meetings, a Video on Demand, and a couple of press calls).

One of the calls was from Larry Walsh over at VARBusiness magazine, with whom I did the fun Channel 2.0 event two weeks ago.  Larry and I spoke briefly and his primary question was EXACTLY the same as Lisa's, which was 'what is the future for Second Life, and virtual worlds in general?'

For what it is worth, here's my prediction:

In the next 3-9 months, at least two major players (Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc.), in addition to Sony Home, will launch their own virtual worlds to compete with Second Life. They will differ from one another, but each will be a walled garden in the sense that they will not interoperate with one another or other worlds.  Before we venture too much farther down this rabbit hole, let me digress for a moment  and propose a strawman taxonomy even though one or more probably already exist. First, lets break virtual worlds into a biological order:

(This is my first attempt at capturing this graphically, and it will be evolving, so bear with me)

Lets dispense with the formalities with regards to Walled Gardens vs. Open Network.  Incumbents (Linden, Entropia) would argue that their system is open in that it is open source (Linden) or interoperable between worlds within their own proprietary software domain (Entropia).  In contrast, when I say something is open, I mean open in the same way that I can take this browser, open a tab, and go to Wells Fargo and bank, and simultaneously go to Amazon.com and shop.  There are standards that web developers conform to so a wide range of browsers can access their content. 

What is needed is a browser-like approach to virtual worlds, where I can walk my avatar from the Black Sun to Amazon to Wells Fargo and retain my avatar, revenue balance, virtual home, and so forth.  Ideally, these sites (Amazon, Wells, Black Sun) would be hosted wherever the respective organizations damn well please, rather than being restricted to a specific location or administered by one for-profit company.  An Internet model.  And no geographic dependencies so you don't have to worry about sovereign nations projecting their will into the governance or economy.

What we have today is akin to what we had with BBS', and then walled garden providers like The Source, Prodigy, Compuserve, and America Online with proprietary software to access their services.  They had  specific companies (Sabre) hang out shingles in their administrative domain, so a Compuserve subscriber could access Sabre's travel reservation system, but those people on Prodigy had to use some other travel service (unless Sabre spent the money to be in multiple walled gardens, which is rarely cost effective).

Right now, I can go to AOL (oh, the irony), Sony, IBM, and a few others within the domain of Second Life. I can go to the excellent Stanford State of Play Academy lectures in There.com, and (if they don't deem me a sexual predator) go socialize with teenagers in Virtual Laguna Beach.  What I can't do is move one avatar that I have invested my time into between these worlds.  (And lets stop calling them worlds, which sounds horribly outdated, and use something more esoteric like ''verses' (short for 'metaverses' or 'universes')).  To sum up, lets define an attribute of an open network as Avatar Portability between 'verses.

Meanwhile, today, we are just starting the Source/Prodigy/Compuserve/AOL feudal struggles in virtual worlds.  Venture money is flowing into new companies making virtual worlds, and large companies are smelling blood in the water as well. As usual, successful early entrants will attempt to fortify their position as much as possible against new competitors (FairPlay anyone?) and there will be some messy consolidation and attrition as the market develops.  During this time, the underfunded startups and early casualties will start agitating for open standards between worlds.

Reuben Steiger, the CEO of Millions of Us, refers to this as a 'Las Vegas Monorail' event. His premise is that the only people who wanted the monorail were the casinos that had less customers than they wanted, whereas the successful casinos had no incentive to give people a way out of their casino, so therefore did not support the monorail.  This sounds like AOL/MSN/Yahoo IM interoperability hopes to me.

Having been the successful early entrant in some markets, and the late entrant in others, I regularly play both of these cards shamelessly.  If I am first to market, then I rationalize my proprietary walled garden system by saying that there is no standard to support and the customers demand certain functionality now, not five years from now when some greybeards in the standards bodies can agree on the proper sentence structure and obscure acronym for the already-obsolete standard.  When I am late to market,  I will gleefully tell the market that they are being overcharged by these horrible outdated proprietary systems (like PBXs) and could save money with an open, competitive market (like voice over IP).

As was the case with voice over IP, there is an additional variable in the equation in that there are two markets instead of just one, the service provider/consumer market, and the enterprise market.  In this case, an enterprise 'verse would simply be a 'verse for use within a company to allow it's employees and partners collaborate better together, whereas a consumer 'verse would be what we think of now with Second Life or There.com.  There will be another juncture (and blogpost) about when we need to cross-the-streams between enterprise and consumer 'verses, but I'll save that one for another day.

In the meanwhile, my prediction can be summarized as follows:

1) T=Now.  One major vendor, few minor, both walled gardens.  (Note: the recent disruptive major walled garden event with China and Entropia is a game-changer and also a future blogpost).

2) T= This time next year.  Three or Four major 'verses competing for customers with status/infrastructure innovation ("Transfer your avatar and property to our world for free from Second Life when you join, no charge!" (American and United regularly do this with frequent travelers)).  Voice is common, and the 'verse developers have finally figured out that the utility of their 'verse is directly effected by the amount of other data sources they can integrate into their environment (Note: RSS is a fine start, but it's a .0001 on a 10 scale).  Worldwide adoption of virtual environments as a dominant Internet tool is still <1%.

3) T = 3-5 years from now.  Consolidation and attrition has taken it's toll, and the 20 balkanized 'verses are down to 2-3 major choices.  The clamor from customers for standards is getting loud enough to bear mention in stockholder meetings. Adoption is close to 20% (sorry Gartner).

4) T = 5-7 years from now.  There is a rich immersive standard with avatar portability, with the major vendors still misbehaving with 'proprietary extensions' to the standard, and we look back and smile at the naive nature of the walled garden 'verses of years past. Adoption is >50%.

In retrospect, I should divide this up into about half a dozen blogposts, as there's a lot more to be said here.

Comments

[Jeff]

Christian,
First let me say, as a colleague (and general fan) of Lisa's we read your pre-caffeinated response last week and were thoroughly impressed. We wondered what a post-caffeinated Christian Renaud post could possibly contain. Needless to say the depth of knowledge displayed was pretty impressive. Your view of the future is intriguing. But a few things don't line up for me (I'm sure Lisa will be chiming in with her thoughts soon). Before I get into things let me give a full disclaimer. I have spent a grand total of about 3 hours within SL so my observations here are based on a very shaky knowledge base.

I tend to view SL and other 'verses as a sort of SNS's on steroids. Places for people to connect and interact based on common interests. So based on what I've seen within the SNS world, I can see the 'verses following the same path. The smaller/newer sites allow importing of myspace, friendster, etc. profiles. In fact, they probably encourage it. However, I don't see any signs of your 3-5 year prediction coming true within the world of SNS's. In fact I don't see consolidation...I see more of them cropping up. Is this because my SNS-'verses analogy is faulty or could 'verses actually multiply in number within 3-5 years? I look forward to hearing your thoughts...pre or post caffeine.

Jeff

[Lisa Amorao]

So my disclaimer would be that most of what I know about Second Life, I got from Jeff.

I'm not sure if (ok I'm gonna try getting into the new term) if this new (to me) metaverse can be compared side by side with social networking in the same context as myspace/friendster/facebook. Ok yes this is how people with similar interests might connect, but unlike SNSs people are not limited to rating others, making (and being a part of) a list of "friends" and writing comments amongst each other. But for the sake of argument I'll say that even in hat seems to be the now-"old school" world of social networking sites there still isn't a way to consolidate your profiles. Yes, you can aggregate them, but your facebook profile is still non-transferrable to myspace or friendster. And with more and more niche-oriented social networking sites come up, the less standardized these profiles become...and when standards don't exist, neither does consolidation.

And this may be where avatars in this/these new metaverse(s) might have an advantage in terms of consolidation or interoperability. (Please forgive my technical ignorance here...) Avatars aren't limited to the fields of data you choose to provide as profiles in SNSs are. And if the goal really is to provide a new universe that mirrors the offline universe in terms of commerce, interaction, etc...then it doesn't make sense to have multiple avatars (unless of course i decide to be schizophrenic). I am the same person when I visit a PHYSICAL Wells Fargo branch and my identity does not change when I go across the street to visit B of A. The credentials may vary (account numbers, PIN numbers, dollar amounts in accounts) but the identity does not. The same person interacts with the tellers at Wells and the tellers at B of A.

So from that perspective (if it made sense) I would have to say that the predictions Christian made in this post will most likely occur.

[Christian Renaud]

Thanks for the comments Jeff and Lisa!

Jeff, good points. Let me address those quickly while the thought is still fresh.

(disclaimer- I am not as active in social networking sites as I once was, so any SNS opinions are dated)

First- Yes, I think there will be a Cambrian explosion of different worlds before the attrition/consolidation events in 3-5 years. This is just due to the amount of press that Second Life has received....so competition is an inevitability (in my opinion).

Second- I tend to view SNS' as asynchronous discussion forums with some adjacency-affinity-linking done as secret sauce. If you look at Tribe, Friendster, MySpace, etc., they are generally blogs on steroids (and therefore asynchronous), with some 'find people who may or may not see the world the same way I do', as well as a number of sites dedicated to teenagers seeking to define themselves during their formative years.

In contrast, Second Life and other virtual environments are synchronous like instant messaging, however do not depend on a priori knowledge of the opposite party. This is an important factor, as you can have a serendipitous collision with someone of similar interests, just because you are in the same place at the same time. I've done this at a bookstore, or a concert, or even a teahouse, but never have I met a new friend on IM. But then again, I'm not trolling teenage discussion forums or MySpace profiles looking for a new friend. :-)

(Irony, which may invalidate the above: I've never met you yet we just asynchronously met on this blog)

Mat Small (from MoU) on the panel last week had a great phrase that my poor retention will now maim, which is that virtual worlds were the closest approximation of an in-person event, as far as intimacy and other social factors. You can't decide who is in Barnes and Noble with you in the Buddhism aisle, but you can choose (or not) to strike up a conversation with them based on shared interests. I don't get this on Amazon. Or MySpace.

One similarity to MySpace, to be fair, is that the people who spend copious amounts of time there also seem to work extensively on their MySpace page aesthetics. It is almost a 'personal brand', as they seek to define themselves. This is also true in Avatar Mediated Communications (AMC), where people invest themselves extensively in customizing their avatar and abode and even possibly their business(es).

What this does is increase the 'stickyness' of the particular site/world, as it is time consuming to replicate this customization in the next great world.

Another shared attribute is that the switching costs of losing one's friends/connections on one social networking site, unless entire peer groups migrate en masse, are too high and often lead to stagnation. This has been a well discussed drawback of the genetic diversity in SNS', as when the next great site comes along, I can't immediately move to it for fear of losing track of my connections on MySpace/Tribe/Friendster/LinkedIn. Also, for me, the non-pecuniary costs of switching, like the time it takes to invite all my friends to the new hot thing, far outweigh most coolness the new site has to offer. The same thing holds true of 'verses.

The fundamental difference in my mind between SNS' and AMC is the approximation of an in-person experience you get from the intimate, physical presence (albeit projected) of an avatar/person, versus the flat/soul-less nature of a standard SNS profile/homepage.

But then again, I could say the same thing about blogs. This is rapidly turning into some Escher/Borges construction, so I had best cut my losses.

Thanks for the posts. I'll ruminate some more and hopefully come back more lucid, if you promise to follow up with your thoughts.

[Leese]

I think there will be room for both SNS and AMC, asynchronous and synchronous social networking.

If someone were to randomly strike up a conversation with me at whatever aisle at B&N I may or may not go along with it, depending on various factors. Depending on how I size up the person (worth the 2-minute conversation or not) I might just drop a quick comment or carry on with the conversation. The basis on how I "size up" the person is unfortunately limited to just a few things: that person's physical appearance (let's face it, we all do our own profiling), their tone of voice and their approach (creepy? cheerful?). Unfortunately their actual knowledge of the subject isn't part of the list.

Same shortcomings in Second Life. When I first logged into it I thought I would be eager to "meet" new folks, but instead I found myself overly cautious of other avatars. I think there were people trying to talk to me (because they were following me) but I would fly away because I felt like I was being stalked. They were probably great people to talk to but I didn't talk to them because one was half-something and half-human, the other one came out of an alley and was dressed all in black and I just flew away. Maybe they were great folks to interact with, but with no profiles to read through, I avoided them just based on my emotions (they creeped me out) and their looks. (Please excuse my lack of experience in SL, but I'm writing this thinking there's no way to check out profiles on SL).

Asynchronous social networking/SNS allows you to base your decision to connect or not connect on more in-depth factors. Do I like this person's writing style? Do I believe what this person is saying (blog)? Can I follow his logic (blog)? Is he credible (credentials on blog, LinkedIn)?

So I guess SNS and AMC will not only co-exist but will go hand in hand.

[Christian Renaud]

Good points Lisa.

I think you are right, there is room for both. I also think that there is a broader need for Internet reputation, that follows you across services, including virtual worlds. There will be anonymity concerns in SL, that's certain.

There is a default profile in SL, but it's relatively useless. There are others attempting to bolt reputation systems into SL, but, again, that's a walled garden reputation that only effects that 'verse and, most likely, that avatar. There are a lot of people I know with 2+ avatars in Second Life, so they can work with one and misbehave with the other. I used to know people like this in MMOGs.....one character for white-hat work, and one character for black-hat (griefing) work.

Your point about not wanting to be approached/engaged by the two questionable avatars opens up two topics of conversation:
social and cultural norms about engaging people nearby (even in person) and also presence (or your ability to be interrupted/engaged right now, or if you are busy).

Obviously, there is very little we can technically influence with regards to cultural norms as far as approaching strangers, in person or virtually. People may or may not do so depending on a number of factors.

(Quick favorite anecdote- I was with my PR people and Larry Walsh the Friday before the Channel 2.0 event in May doing a dry run, and an avatar appears and starts wandering around. My PR person (on the phone) says "who is that guy? what does HE want??", so I walk up to him and he says (while we are all on the phone together) "Yes, I am a channel partner in Rhode Island, and just created an account and avatar to attend the Cisco channel event....do you know where it is?". Needless to say, we were all floored at the serendipity. Moral to the story is that these collisions with others can be good or bad.)

But, if there was a reputation indicator (score? halo?) above these scary looking avatars, would you have engaged them Lisa? (given your cultural/social background)

As far as presence, something is desperately needed for Second Life, as you may be en-route to a meeting (flying, walking) and not have time to be interrupted by serendipity. The tools currently in SL are meager at best.

When people get to the point where they have a 'verse and avatar that they are comfortable associating with themselves (non anonymous), then perhaps we can tie it to a broader reputation service.

I'd like to see us reuse that same reputation as far as message signing for email, but that's a different story. Perhaps an extension to OpenID? Playerep? Opinity?

[Trevor F. Smith]

Considering that Open Croquet and Ogoglio already use the same avatar formats (link below) and there's noise about an OpenID extension for avatars, it seems like simplistic avatar motion is near.

http://exterior.trevor.smith.name/2007/04/open_project.html

[Christian Renaud]

Trevor,

It was great doing the Metaversed event with you last week.

I think the OpenID extension for avatars may be a good start, but do you think it will expand to include all the nuance (endorsements, reputation, property, creations and inventions) that people invest time and money into in each of these walled gardens? My experience with OpenID is that it wasn't really designed for this (like the various ways that people have feature-creeped DNS) and would distract from it's original use case, which is still not exactly widespread.

Not being defeatest or contrarian, just curious.

I would suspect that the answer from a Croquet/Ogoglio perspective is 'invest your time and energy into an open world instead of a walled garden', but that skirts the (albeit statistically miniscule) installed base of people and creations.

This would be another good roundtable conversation, in addition to the other two topics we identified at the last geek meet. You up for a little discourse?

[Liu Fang]

Hi All,would mind a new avatar appear in this blog? and his opinion ?

I think all of you miss something about the development of web technology.

When I was in my university,all computers are Apple,I had to face a small green screen full of white charaters.And in 2000,nearly all computers start to use windows,everything become beautiful and acceptable.

NOw,with the development of hardware and software,a new trend emerges:from 2D to 3D.

SL just give us a concept,a open world,players can decide almost everything.But as we all know,SL is not perfect at the view of a game expert.

In face ,I guess in no more than 10 years,our operation system will be 3D,when you power up your computer,you can see vivid screen.With this trend ,there will be many new game on such platform.

And then ,another question is back:what type the new game will be?Traditional or something like SL?

Just as Renaud said,several new games will release in no more than one year,so the competition will be hard.In the future,if the mainstream become 3D,what will happen to Myspace and facebook?will they become 3D ?

in a long future,if everything become 3D,and you can travel everyworld,use the same profile,would you like to living in such a world?but anyway,I guess it will come true

[Ognyan]

Christian,

the fortune of a translationing is part of the game: "hang out shingles in their administrative domain", is by default to work - even, even ....

But if we discuss the competing, my opinion is clear and posted, currently I sponsorize pgi4e.org with some share.

But if LISA is what I have hered about, AI robot at MIT, well there is aplace for discution, if it is not - take my appologize.

The reason to wright You is the term "suitable substitute" used at http://www.news.com/2102-1043_3-6213148.html?tag=st.util.print.

I Am Open For Discutions, but before that take my advice and deeply keep you terminology as I see that mine is different.

Regards, Ognyan

[len]

While the discussions of social networking make for a fascinating coffee table book collection of musings, the elephant in the room is standards for interop.

1. Platform unification: pick a winner among the various competing gardeners. That's a non-starter for obvious reasons.

2. Keiretsu unification: a consortium of non-standard technologies are pulled together to create a network of interlocked walled gardens. Christian, you might want to use a different analogy than speciation. Look at the emergence of cities and city states. This one succeeds for some time but it is the Roman Empire approach to civilization. It has the advantages of money AS a force for integration but it creates a short lifecycle for the content. 3D content minus RADs is very expensive. Caveat emptor.

3. The Language IS the Platform. This approach has historically produced the healthiest ecosystem of standards. Languages are much more like living entities in their development cycles if you want to use speciation metaphors. The lifecycle advantages for the authors and owners of content are far greater as they force system vendors to compete for talent by offering better rendering and other services. The service bundle becomes the product for host vendors. In the X3D/VRML history, multiple vendors vied and died. Had it not been for the language basis, the content would have died with them. That is the ultimate outcome of building walled gardens in the desert. Archaeologists are the inheritors.

The problem is the Single Language Theory. It postulates that multiple languages create fractures with the most popular meme being the Tower of Babel myth interpreted as "God's vengeance on audacity". The counter interpretation is that it was God punishing one King who wished to become the single intercessor and that multiple languages enabled all to pray with their own expression.

The second analogy more nearly fits the situation we encounter with 3D standards. The problem is as Watte points out at Forterra, performance. This is the place to start thinking about 3D interoperability: runtime languages with high performance versus design time languages (eg, X3D, Collada) with desirable lifecycle characteristics.

That is the convergence we have to solve. The rest is marketing politics.

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[Stefano Crosta]

So much meat in your post that as u say u could spawn ten on the different subjects.

This comment is to say
1) I like your taxonomy and am waiting to see it expand and include the open ones such as Croquet and OpenSim (hey, where would you fit that one? ah, taxonomies have always ambiguities)

Then I'll split your interoperability dream into two.

2) the 'one-browser, many verses' interoperability you mention is the objective of MultiVerse, I know you know them but it's worth mentioning I think. Of course i'm only talking about real development, not standards

3) Avatar Portability is extremely interesting but have all sort of 'philosphical' issues to be solved.
I'd call those 'metaphor contradictions'.
Eg.
How do you move you Sci-Fi looking Entropia avatar into a fantasy World Of Warcraft scenario?
How do you bring your Second Life self-built snow crash swords into There.com? How do you harmonize economic approaches and 'game' models (eg. Entropia way of building objects)?
I'm not gonna keep on with examples, I'm sure you get my point.
Quite some issues that i'm not sure how to solve - not from a technical rather a 'philosophical' point of view.
Some points seem to me really unsolvable, but I might be wrong. Others I can easily imagine how to solve with a flexible enough interoperable platform and standards.

[Stefano Crosta]

Ops forgot to put the introduction which was in my mind:

how's the crystal ball vision doing?

I saw google getting into the game of course, late thou, and not to exciting. I still do not see the avatar portability happening any soon. Back to my comment now.