If you have been reading Nodalities’ sister blog Panlibus recently you cannot have failed to have missed that we at Talis have not only been watching Second Life with interest, but are actively involved in aiding the library community experiment with it and understand what it is all about.

Most of the chatter in those postings, and many others on the subject, was around how you interact with people, represent your organization inside a virtual world. I attended a Second Life event in London yesterday to hopefully find out more about it and how it might influence what Talis is doing in Second Life. The presentations were slanted at the marketing fraternity, educating the audience on how/why they can represent their brands within Second Life. The main speaker was Glenn Fisher, Director, Marketing Programs for Linden Lab [The organization that runs Second Life], followed by a presentation from Rivers Run Red [a London branding agency helping to shape Second Life] ‘Creating successful brand presence in Second Life - Integrating Second Life in to your marketing offerings’ - see what I mean.

Nevertheless it was an interesting session which reflected the experience of introducing Adidas, BBC Radio 1, and others in to the virtual world. It was unfortunate that a demonstration of how to create stuff inside Second Life was spoiled by a combination of lack of Mac experience from the demonstrator and what looked like a fairly serious system crash. - The joys of live demonstrations, tell me about it!

What I found most interesting, and prompted this posting, can be summed up in a throw away line from Glenn near the end - “We want Second Life to become The 3D Internet” (my emphasis)

There was much questioning and discussion in the session about the quality of the experience for users of Second Life, and the addition of new capabilities such as the integration of mobile phone messaging, VOIP, and TV channel streaming in to the world. After a while a theme started to emerge, when the fact that Linden had announced that the Open Sourcing of the client and the Second Life APIs - soon was used as the answer to many questions both in and after the sessions.

• Are you working on the graphical side of SL, to compete with things like World of Warcraft? - No, but once we have OS’d the client and the APIs we fully expect others to build both cut-down and enhanced clients.
• Will it be possible to simply scan documents in to software in the real world, and have them appear as objects in SL? - With access to the OS Client & APIs, many things like this will be possible.
• Could SL actions, purchases etc., be fully integrated with a user’s real world? - Yes, by using the OS client and APIs ……..

In answers to questions about current performance, or lack of it, issues it was clear that Linden are concentrating upon the robustness and scalability of the SL Platform - not just as a short term strategy but as a business model. By opening up the Platform APIs and the client source code, we will attract others to build on our platform to add value for themselves and the community within SL. - not sure if those were the exact words, but you get the gist of it. With the odd word changed here and there, you could hear that same statement from, Amazon, eBay, Salesforce.com, the WindowsLive division of Microsoft, Talis and many others, each providing a Platform approach to facilitate the delivery of solutions which add value to all solutions built on that Platform.

One thing is different though with Linden’s proposition. Their Platform is one on which you can build an equivalent of every major Internet user interaction, but in a 3D world. Search, Chat, Messaging, Information dissemination, Blogging, Social Tagging/Networking/Interaction, Entertainment, Media streaming, Advertising, Retailing, eCommerce, Customer support, are all thing that could be replicated in [and in most cases be enhanced by] a 3D equivalent. Instead of clicking on your web browser favorite to be taken to view the local electrical retailer’s web site, you could activate your avatar’s favorite and be teleported to the retailer’s virtual storefront where you could not only satisfy your query but also opt to interact with other customers you find there. Suspend your disbelief (resulting from using Linden’s current UI) for a moment, and project forward a few years - I might just be describing the new metaphor for human Internet interaction

Yeah, so what you say - its only like projecting forward Tim Berners-Lee’s Web vision from the mid nineties to now. Well yes it is BUT, up until now nobody as such has owned the Platform people use to interact. Once you have paid providers to access the Internet’s resource’s is mostly open and free, and definitely not in the hands of one controlling body. Whereas the Linden Platform that runs Second Life, complete with its own currency, is owned by them. From a financial point of view Second Life is more like a Country than a commercial software application. Project it forward and we could all end up online-living in the same country under the governance of the owners of that Country

So today I think I might have seen a vision of one possible online future - The 3D Internet. [Now that would really warrant the use of the Web 3.0 label]. One which may cause some science-fiction writers to take the Google logo off their State Police uniforms and replace it with a Linden one

Or maybe I’ve had too much coffee…

(Second Life - Platform image taken by Eric RiceEr displayed in Flickr)

Technorati Tags: Secondlife, Platform, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, 3d Internet, Linden Lab

Share This