It doesn’t matter how many people tell me about Second Life, or who for that matter. I’m just not impressed.
Don’t get me wrong, the idea sounds great. I even think “virtual worlds” will succeed. More on that in a second. Here is why Second Life leaves me cold:
- The experience sucks – slow, plodding, fiddly. And that is someone experienced controlling it on decent hardware. Yes I am doing the ultimate injustice to a product, trashing it without personally trying it. I don’t care. I think the masses of hype boosting this system lets me off. If not, I don’t really care. This is 2007. How long have we been seeing 3D environments, virtual reality, etc at least this good? I expect better than this for something so trumpeted, much better.
- I find it boring – other virtual environments, World of Warcraft, etc, have more and sooner. There is stuff to do. There is a social aspect to Second Life that takes an investment of time. I can only think the people who put this time in have to have a vested interest in keeping at it. Perhaps a good percentage of the populace are there because they already know someone in there or hear it is going to be good? That’s other than bloggers and journos there to write about it …
- It’s a closed system – the above two are just my gripes. Nobody cares what I think. Here is the killer. The internet was a success because it was open and distributed, on top of that was built the web, again successful because it was open. RSS worked where push did not. Why? Open. Second Life is commercial and closed. People are investing lots of money to rent part of a virtual world that could disappear if the company that really owns the “land” goes belly-up.
My belief is someone will do Second Life right. It will be open. You will be able to use a variety of interfaces and host your own world, connected to the larger universe or not. I can see gated-communities with border controls, free hosts, community contributed planets, plugins, modules and all the rich variety and energy of things as we would expect to have from any other internet advance.
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Completely agree. An open system (even better, an Open system) should be successful in ways that aren’t possible in a closed proprietary system (yes, they let you create objects in-world, and upload images as textures (for a fee), but it’s all done under the close watch of The Company)
I’m looking forward to seeing who loses the most money when it collapses. Sony or Telstra?
Virtual worlds are a load of crap, All this talk of “business drive” is complete drivel, these are virtually useless products in virtually useless worlds and only virtual idiots buy up on all the virtual crap.
Translated to the real world, the users of these systems aren’t a target demographic because they’re already stating the “real world” isn’t good enough for them by being members of a virtual one. Big business is going to flush so much cash into these stupid systems its laughable.
Do you like the excessive use of the word “Virtual”? A commonly used word back in the 90’s, it sat right up there with other stupid buzz words like “boo”. Ahh, boo.com… A web faux par, quite aptly inserted here.
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