That’s the head of the nail. It’s not about the technical challenges LL face, those will just have to be dealt with, that’s a given. It’s actually about what people do when they get here (into SL) and i think the way forward is to adopt a more web-like model.

When you sign up for MySpace you’re not handed a book of html and a text editor to go write your own website – you’re given check-boxes to check and text-fields to fill with some details of yourself – all of which add up to your presence on MySpace.

Your equivalent presence in SL is your avatar. The first user experience in SL should be creating that avatar presence, then moving it out into the wider SL world then, at a later date if you want, you should be introduced to building and creating within SL. The point isn’t to make the 3D creation tools in SL more user-friendly (altho we need that too!) it’s to realise that many (possibly even most) people arriving in SL don’t particularly want to use them! They want a virtual world presence and the opportunity to explore, socialise and have fun within it – why aren’t we giving them that?

It struck me earlier that this concept is about to be put to a very good test – Sony’s Home on the PS3 is, rumoured at least, about to open for Public Beta in April. Their concept is very like this – a virtual presence with little or no creation tools – and it’ll be fascinating to see if it captures the imagination of PS3 users. Be very interesting to see what Sony have come up with after about 3 years development too…

Also, very intereting times in the metaverse for SL and many of the other worlds. We’re looking to expand the software and our 3D modeling community to support virtual worlds more effectively. I would love to get your thoughts on how we could help. Drop me an email when you get a chance.

Any talk of interoperability and relationships with 3d party developers (publishing some sort of forward-looking plan that developers can, well, PLAN against would be a nice start) and you end up sounding like you mean that the “walled garden” needs to come down. As I say in my profile, our focus is on vertical integration across platforms – not because different platforms need to integrate with each other, so much, but rather because when you go to create an experience you want to bring the right tools at the right time to the right person.

This might be a quick Papervision experience, a mini-game (Metaplace anyone?), a VIR-Tools environment, or an immersive sim. Within this range of experiences and then the communities around them, there is a role for a place like Second Life in facilitating game economies, avatar representation, and shared/co-created environments. Their protection of their brand, I believe, is an important part of protecting a “good housekeeping seal of approval” on the experience that they provide.

But they’d better make sure that the much protected seal of approval is sealing something of which we approve.

As you pointed out Giff, the platform doesn’t support its full promise, which is what I mean by ‘throwing in the towel’. The full experience, as initially envisioned (I imagine) by the CSI build, was meant to be mostly in-world (with Web and media outlets as the point of attraction). But SL can’t ‘bear the load’ of these kinds of concepts – full immersion, branded, cross-platform. Which is fine – SL wasn’t ready yet, as the Lindens then said (in retrospect).

So where does that leave us? Well, I won’t contribute to the stability discussion…but rather the discussion of experiences. And because Linden isn’t in the content creation business, they need to rely on others to do that part for them. And as the options increase, they need to realize that it’s Pro/Am time: if they don’t attract the right mix of pros and combine them with the vibrant community of amateur creators (many of whom are trying to BECOME pro), then they’ll lose both to other platforms.

And pros expect certain things. They don’t need source code but they need pipelines. They need to know that if they’re creating an experience that they can build it once and then place the same ‘objects’ within SL, and inside PaperVision, and maybe in a Vir-Tools demo room or an True Space gallery.

Lacking clear direction and poor developer relations, (I’m still waiting on replies to 3 e-mails through “The Grid”) they then put salt on the wounds of the “Amateur” part of the equation, sending little tremors and shocks, lacking a clear explanation of whether their crackdown on branding is an “Intel Inside” strategy, “Due Dilligence” ahead of a sale, simple house cleaning, or a well thought out desire to “brand” the future open architecture project.

As far as Maya for beginners, have a look at 3DVIA shape, sometime, for what a real Maya for beginners looks like – and frankly, in my early days of SL I would have welcomed an application like it – as user friendly as you can possibly get for a newbie to 3D modeling. They should do a deal with those guys and have an optional external building program!

So where does it leave us – they haven’t attracted the “Pros”. They’ve upset the amateurs (again). And they’re protecting a logo which has less and less value as a brand, because its associated with a lack of clarity (hey! Why just settle on one logo! Maybe if we have 3 or 4 we’ll confuse people and they’ll stop associating us with flying genitalia!), and their “fanzines” have been pretty much given 90 days to comply or … or what? They’ll shut down the people who are tirelessly advocating and promoting SL and who, ironically, don’t even work for Linden Labs.

I never believed I could have a Second Life. So maybe Fitzgerald’s adage isn’t true…”There are no second acts, but in Second Life’s case we’ll hope this isn’t true.”

I suspect that many of the 95% of new-users who don’t stay were expecting Facebook 2 or MySpace Plus but instead found themselves dropped into Maya for Beginners. I would never want to see the creative side of SL in any way limited – just the opposite, for me it IS the biggest draw – but I think we have to recognise the mainstream user will (mostly) only come for the fun and not the work of virtual worlds.

The dynamics are very different for community members and content creators. It is in their interests that SL provide a certain level of feature stability (don’t break my stuff!) and preserve the economy. There are not really a lot of places to go that offer such an economy — OpenSim, which lacks a permissions system, would totally remake the economy.

My perception is that Linden Lab has chosen their existing community (and opening their arms to collaboration/education experimentation) rather than risk too much pushing to be an open platform. It certainly protects their cash flow, which is understandable. But it slows down and reduces their chances of being the next big thing. But they are not out of the running. Time will tell!