Saving Facebook

It's all been said already by those who can say it better than I can:

The Children’s Hour: Facebook Apps Are for Toddlers (There, We Said It)
Blackbird, Rainman, Facebook and the Watery Web
Facebook ‘Grants’ Devotees a Disappointment

But when did I ever let that stop me before?

My history of "social web" goes something like this...

I've had a web page for almost as long as individuals outside of universities could have web pages of their very own. Why? Because it was there. I've always been more interested in the creating/writing/tinkering than with whether anyone was reading it. I've never even told family members or most of my friends (and certainly not employers) that I even had a web page. My web pages have always been anonymous, or as now, used an "online" identity, and I think with fairly good reason. Until someone pays me to be a journalist, I'd just as soon not have to worry so much about identity theft, stalking, and things like that.

In the time since the early Web, I've participated in dozens of online activities, chat rooms, IRC, instant messengers (just about all of them at one time or another), and on to 3D virtual reality systems, which led to operating a forum, creating a lot of content for the forum, starting a blog, then another, and another, buying a few domain names, and so on.

In the process, I've made a few online friends. People who I would never have met in real life, but who are just as much friends as those I have met in real life. Friendships are built on common interests, common viewpoints, common struggles, longevity, trust, and so on, and whether they are primarily face-to-face, primarily by e-mail, on-line chat, or Morse Code, I think is far less important than those other factors.

But I'm not sure the founders of Facebook see it that way. In fact they make it clear they want you to only use your real name, something I am loath to do. I know this because I saw one of them in a YouTube interview say exactly that, and that their goal was to mirror each persons "real world" network of friends, associates and relatives. I'm getting ahead of myself though, first back to my history...

One of the many things I did to experiment with the Internet was to set up a domain named "Paperworth.com". The original plan was very simple. At the dawn of the personal web page era, it occurred to me that there were far too many people giving far too much information out about themselves to total strangers. My plan was to do a tongue in cheek parody of such efforts as an example of what not to do. Paperworth, a name I chose because I couldn't find that real name in a phonebook or online anywhere (I have since) was going to be the name of a fictitious family in "mid-America" who's father had just gotten his very own web page for the family. I've told this story before, so I won't drag it out, but I was going to include photos of the family, pets, and kids, including such useful tidbits as where we hid the spare key to the house and what the kids route to the school bus looked like. I'd have photos that carelessly exposed credit card numbers, private phone numbers, and so on. The only thing that stopped me from doing it was having a real job at which I worked too hard, and too many other "hobbies" like getting drunk five nights a week and recovering the other two. OK, I probably shouldn't have divulged that last part, but I've reformed, retired, and told potential employers where they can stick it so many times that any career for me will have to start with busing tables anyway. Of course when I did have enough time to do the project it was too late. Real people everywhere were now telling more about themselves to the entire world than I could ever have made up, the joke had become real, only in its reality, it wasn't funny any more.

With that in mind, I've since anonymized my domain names, checked pretty carefully for identifying info on those web photos and so on. Do I think it would be impossible to track the real me down if someone were determined to do so? Of course not. Just as you can't keep some nut from picking you at random in the grocery store parking lot as someone worth giving a hard time to, nothing protects any of us from random acts of insanity, or from very determined villains either.

So, when I first wrangled an invitation to Orkut out of curiosity (and before they were acquired by Google), I used a fake name. Orkut was fine for what it was, but it wasn't all that interesting to me. If everyone I knew in the world had suddenly shown up at Orkut, I would certainly have wanted to continue using e-mail, the telephone and air travel as a means of communicating with people. The groups you could join on special topics were less useful than the average IRC channel or Usenet group or web forum on the same topic. I soon dismissed Orkut as not useful enough to stick with. In fact at some point when I realized that almost all the messages I was receiving in Orkut were in Portuguese I just deleted my account. Apparently it had become really popular in Brazil.

It wasn't until MySpace was in the process of getting purchased for billions that I decided to test those waters again. This time didn't take nearly so long. I hated MySpace. First of all I didn't know anyone there. The interface was cluttered from the get-go, and all the features that allowed you to customise your "home page" (or whatever they called it) only seemed to make it more so. Add to that the system was very slow at times, and the things that would often spill out onto the screen taught you more than you wanted to know about MySQL and PHP (or whatever language they were using at the time). My testing of MySpace ended after only a week. I kept the ID for maybe a month, checking back from time to time for an announcement that they had thought better of it, wiped it all out and started over. When no such announcement came I again cancelled my account. One less thing to generate e-mail reminders that I hadn't signed on for a while or... whatever.

Always a glutton for punishment, I was intrigued again by the hype over Facebook (instead maybe the nature of the hype should have served as a warning).

So I signed up. Nobody invited me. Nobody I knew had told me how great it was. I just made up a name, not my real name, and signed up. There was nary more than a mild warning that they wanted you to use your real name. But like the second thing they asked for, my credit card information (which they said would be for "my convenience" in making future purchases) I decided not to take that request too seriously. Like almost everything online today, my "proof" that I was a real person consisted only of my giving them an e-mail address they could send my authorisation link to. Whoop Dee Doo! But then, I wasn't as hung up on this "real person" angle as the Facebook people seemed to be.

Oddly enough, using my online name, I was eventually discovered by several of my online friends. Hey, this Facebook thing might be useful after all! Hopefully they weren't going around looking every new user up in the phone book or something. I continued to not worry about it.

But then I looked up my university. Not working at the moment, I couldn't "join" as a member of some company, but I wanted to join something that was more than just a special interest group "sewing for men" etc. So I went to my university, where I found out you had to actually have an e-mail address associated with the university to join. Hmmm, I'm a member of an alumni thing. Is there an email address associated with that? Turns out there was, but I had never signed up for it. So off I go to do that. Of course they are fancy and really serious about identity, they get your name and address so they can send you letters begging for money. And of course if you are going to have a chance to contact old school chums through that (assuming I had any) using a fake name you just made up a few years ago would hardly do.

So now I was stuck. To test this whole social network thing with my alumni association, I'd have to change my name to my real name on Facebook. Could I even do that? After all, I'd already sworn on a stack of Bibles that I had used my real name in the first place. But the name change option was pretty easy to find, well trodden path I would say, complete with a fresh warnings like "You must use your real name", and "Facebook staff must approve your name change". Sure they do. The staff seemed to have done their work in mere seconds. My network of Facebook contacts didn't even notice a ripple in the space-time continuum.

So now that I was the real me, I could look up people and connect like crazy with other folks I went to school with right? Well, maybe. Only problem being that as wildly popular as Facebook might be at Harvard, and Stanford, and Starbuck coffee shops around Silicon Valley, it didn't seem to have caught on so well with my ole buddies at Podunk U. I couldn't find a single name there that I even remotely recognized, nor a picture, and similar to my experience with Orkut, it seemed that everyone who went to college where I had, now resides in India or Brazil. What-up with this?

Then I tried my high school. Well, I didn't see anything that required I have an old high school e-mail address, if there even was such a thing. Only problem is, they had a drop-down for the year I graduated, only the years didn't go back far enough to cover when I graduated. Now I know I'm old, but this is ridiculous. It's not like I was in the first (or 8th) graduating class or anything. I don't actually know how long the school had been around before I went there, but I know it had seen some wear and tear. So, essentially, there was not a single soul I recognized from my high school either, even though they would have all been younger than me, I should have been able to spot someone or some name, that I'd recognize. Well, at least they all hadn't moved to India!

Now this last week, a fairly well known online celebrity known as "Mini-Microsoft" was unceremoniously ousted from Facebook for the obvious TOS violation. Now MM couldn't exist as he/she does being critical of Microsoft from within, and I'm quite sure the individual made no effort to join the Microsoft employees group as that would have required an identifiable MS e-mail address. So what was the problem? Did some MS exec apply pressure to the company they were talking about investing a few million in? Inquiring minds are still inquiring on that I guess.

So there it is on "Real" versus "Virtual" identities. Facebook is only interested in the former (preferably with credit card information to go along with it), and not the latter (even if you have more REAL friends online than virtual friends in the real world). They talk a good game about verifying identities, but they really let alumni associations and workplaces do all the work. Want to game the system? Get a free web site from Google (or AOL), form a fake company and you and all your fake friends are off to the races! Are you getting the picture yet about what this company is really all about?

Now on to usability, and usefulness of Facebook. In short, as far as I can tell, there isn't any.

Is there an IM (Instant Messenger) capability? Well, no, unless you count keeping a web page open and bringing it to the foreground every 30 seconds as there is no beep or other indication of activity. Do they hook up with AIM - no, MSN - no, or the free and open Jabber used by Google - no.

They have something that sort of resembles e-mail, except that you can't send from a real e-mail system into it, or from it outbound to a real e-mail system. No, instead, you are supposed to go about your business as usual, until something important happens like, uh, someone throws a virtual pie at you from within Facebook at which time you get an e-mail message that summons you to Facebook where you are informed that "Someone has thrown a pie at you". And that's it. No fancy graphic, no splat sound, nothing. You have to wonder why they couldn't have just included the text with the e-mail message they sent you... as in: "Someone in Facebook has just thrown a pie at you, you might have better things to do than check on that right now, but if not, come on in." Who in their right mind would want to use this for business, or anything that remotely resembles business? Oh, yeah, Robert Scoble.

Yes there ARE some people who get paid to play with technology and write about their experiences. I don't begrudge such people the idyllic life they lead. I do get annoyed at the presumption that they have anything meaningful to say about how the majority of us... and by "us" I don't mean factory workers and plumbers, I mean people who work with technology, like payroll system, billing systems, aircraft avionics, and so on... how that fairly large group of people are going to benefit by whatever the latest fad is in Silicon Valley. (And while we are at it, shouldn't some of these WhizzBang things be of benefit to factory workers and plumbers?) I mean unless you are in some sort of specialized area, that somehow (and I can't even imagine how) benefits from sending and receiving a constant stream of text messages regarding what you had for lunch, how is a service like Twitter of any use to you? Sorry, but to me it can never be anything but a toy, and if you really need text messaging from anywhere at any time, then Blackberrys are already in place and do that job just fine. A better use of Silicon Valley's supposed brain power would be to duplicate the functionality of RIMs service at a fraction of the cost. How about free?

Oh, but back to Facebook, a program, that like Myspace, might dump screens full of MySQL and PHP statements out at you at any moment. The same program that wants my credit card info RIGHT AWAY, just in case they, um, need it for something, takes a regular DUMP (we used to call it that in my mainframe days and nobody ever laughed, I don't know why, it seems like such an uncomfortable word to use now) on my screen with all sorts of information that I suspect the programmers would rather I not see. How can they expect to be taken seriously? Just because the kid that started it, or stole the code, or whatever he did, looks and acts a lot like the young Bill Gates? Pull the other one. That seems like a reason to avoid Facebook like the plague. Why would anyone want to go down that road again? The biggest detour 'round the barn that technology has ever taken, Windows, and we are looking for someone just like that to invest our time, no, time and dollars into? OK, I'm dense, I admit it. So 'splain it to me Lucy.

OK, so you've now figured out I don't have much use for Facebook. I don't. As it stands anyway. But I'm not above giving my advice, and then saying "I told you so!" later when the company has run aground. Like, you know, when I was against Apple's switch to Intel, which I'm still sure, eventually, in thirty years or so, or someday, will be seen to be the mistake that I.... Well, OK, I probably got that wrong.

Take Second Life for example. For the life of me I can't figure out what to do with it other than to go in there and play tinker-toys. It's fun. But I think it should be more than that. IBM thinks it should be more than that. I think it can be more than that, easily, relative to the difficulty of a virtual reality in the first place. I've begged in the forums (while they still had forums) for better interaction with the outside world. Nothing. But I go in to talk to an IBM guy, in a well built IBM "build" and he knows less about IBM than I do. Five minutes and I've done all there is to do there other than oooh and ahhhh over how nice their building is. But these things have to be more than just fun don't they? They have to be useful for something. I'm a big supporter of Second Life, have been since the beginning. I go to an IBM presentation, "simulcast" in "real life", "Second Life" and some other virtual world (one I used to use and don't have much ongoing respect for) and the whole thing seems silly. The slides aren't in sync with the speech, they keep having to pause for technical issues, and as far as I can tell, and I really had to stretch to get this out of it: "we're in there, because it's there, and we don't have anything better to do."

Well, there is nothing wrong with doing something just because it's fun. People play video games for fun, go bowling for fun, and if they want to send text messages to each other all day for fun, who am I to say they shouldn't? Just don't pretend to be anything else but a fun thing. Second Life, if after all this time you haven't seen the advantage of hooking your virtual meetings into an IM, IRC or other text interface, I guess you never will. Can I ever send a message to an SL user without going into the interface? Can't each SL user have their own web page? Can't Facebook, using standard old HTML and RSS and messaging technologies work seamlessly with iGoogle, MSN Live, and AOL Instant Messenger? It isn't rocket science, but I guess if you 're all about scoring the next big billion dollar buy-out you can make it look like it is.

Warning to investors: It isn't worth it. Scoble and some others will tell you that once a company builds that walled garden and gets a few million users inside you will never get them to switch. Some carefully chosen examples will support that claim. But tell Yahoo that people haven't migrated from Geocities or their own e-mail program, not to mention search. Tell Blockbuster that Netflix hasn't hurt their business, or tell Netflix that Walmart, Amazon and Blockbuster going online hasn't hurt theirs (even if some of those efforts haven't been spectacular). There is a healthy ebb and flow of customers in any healthy commercial ecosystem whether it's cell phone carriers or plumbing supplies. Where there isn't that free flow of consumers there is decay. Windows, and the ecosystem that surrounds it is a perfect example. That's being fixed though, it took way too long, but it will get fixed eventually, with or without Microsoft's cooperation.

I don't think the tech sector is stupid enough to go down that road again, not during this generation of users anyway. Maybe in another twenty years when the echos of "Where do you want to go today?" have faded.

What we need today are more projects like OpenID, Jabber, cross platform operating systems and browsers and a spirit that says "I'm going to compete on features, I'm not going to lock you in, I'm going to let you weave in and out of my system freely and into others that may be of more use for you in other areas. You can get my stuff on your phone, instant messenger, home page, or inbox, it's all up to you, and we will take input from all those sources as well. And one more thing, we'll value you as a person whether you use your real name or not. We'll take the real you or the virtual you, and let you hook up with other people however you choose."

I don't hear those words coming from Facebook, and until I do, they can't be the next big thing.

Update: Apparently Dave Winer has pointed out that Facebook is a closed system. So Scoble now agrees that it sucks. Which seems odd considering his name is on this document:

http://opensocialweb.org/

here are some other handy links on the subject:

http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability

http://movemydata.org/home.html

http://groups.google.com/group/social-network-portability

Second Life is trying to get rid of the nasties - Scobleizer

... and Scoble tries to free the stick from his craw ...

@24: You nailed it. (Even though your Vegas analogy seems to have escaped Robert's grasp.)

But don’t forget this is a long standing vendetta for Robert who isn’t so much interested in being a part of a community such as SL. He wants to be treated as a VIP journalist who is above the rules that others have to follow.

SL is a labor of love for the people who work there as well as many of its users. It’s a small company, and unlike Microsoft, potentially vulnerable to a media bully. I think nothing would please Robert more than hearing of a financial setback to SL that could be attributed to these all too regular pot-shots.

While I’m sure that all the decisions made regarding SL aren’t perfect, and I’ve criticized the bandwidth issues since the program’s inception, I also know that the people involved are not making these decisions in a vacuum. They have been involved and studied many similar programs that have gone before and are attempting to improve on limitations (like static content) that those programs still have.

SL was started on the premise that it would only perform well on computers 5 or 10 years out, and it’s getting there. It was promised to work on a variety of platforms and (finally) I can use it as well on Linux as I could on Windows or OS X. That last change took two years longer than they thought it would. I forgave them. If I were Robert, I’d be throwing eggs at their windows for eternity.

I also know that the economic system of the program was changed many times before it reached relative stability, and I’m quite sure that many other aspects will look very different in another 5 years. Child users were NEVER a priority for the company during the early years. In fact I seem to remember them saying they would NEVER allow children users. The kids grid was only added long after (in Internet time) the adult nature of the main grid had established itself. Unlike the economy, this is not a parameter you can tinker with on a weekly basis. Whatever they come up with next in this area, whether an improvement or a step backward, will have to be stuck with for a good long time. I don’t blame them for proceeding with caution.

GDC07 Clip: The PS3's Home - Kotaku

Impressive!

More coverage:

Sony brings it 'Home' for the PS3

Compendium of Second Life Articles from Ziff Davis

Pogue’s Posts - An Experiment in Virtual Living

"Second Life, as about 2 million people have already discovered, is a virtual world on the Internet. You’re represented by a computer-generated character (an avatar) that can walk around, fly, teleport, or exchange typed comments with other people’s characters. You can make yourself young and beautiful, equip yourself with fancy clothes, build a dream house by the water, or make the sun set on command. The average member spends four hours a day in Second Life."

SL continues to get good press. From everyone but Scoble that is. I wonder if anyone ever helped him cancel his account? (I hope so!)

Solution to ID Overload

Here:

"...it’s just too f****ing bad I can’t remember my Yahoo user ID so I can log on to Pipes or any of this other “cool” stuff that Yahoo is doing. You say you want a revolution, well you can just count me out (in) only if you can remember one of the thousand IDs I’ve logged on to Yahoo with over the years of ignoring all their cool apps."

And here:

Well, I just tried to get back into Second Life to cancel my credit card. Problem is, I can’t get in. Someone changed my password.

The other problem? I can’t get my password. I think I signed on with my Microsoft address.

Are two bad examples of a real problem, the solution to which is known, and fairly easy to implement.

In the first case, celebrity journalist Gilmor can't remember IDs and passwords, so he makes up new one whenever he wants to sign in. Well, that certainly helps Yahoo inflate their user numbers for the "benefit" of advertisers. If you sign up for some new (as in new to the world, not new to you) service, chances are you can get your name, or favorite pseudonym as an ID, but for Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Google, chances are such an attempt will result in a friendly suggestion that you try something like "Gilmore4983" or "mac$beach_whoohoo". Nobody can be blamed for not remembering such monstrosities.

In the second case, Scoble has enough income that he can subscribe for months to a service he isn't using, and then blame the company for not magically being able to do anything about it even though it's the Sunday before a holiday, he has changed e-mail addresses, moved, gotten a new phone number. Secondlife has one of the better support systems on the planet, but he can't be bothered to even attempt to contact them. So, instead, he compares them by implication to Netzero, that has a truly deserved reputation in this area. Give us a break!

In days gone by, when there were only a dozen or so big names in "Internet Service Provision" it probably made some sense that you would get a unique ID for each of those dozen or so services. Chances were you would only be using one or two of them, and companies like Yahoo were sure you only needed one of them, so they set out to provide every possible service, proven or not, fully functional or not, buggy and broken or not, developed in house, or bought. Those days ended about ten years ago, but to this day, most ISPs (in the broad sense) still demand that you try and create a unique ID for yourself to use their service. Go ahead, try it! It's sort of like a game. "We have 75 billion users, see if you can come up with a short meaningful name for yourself"... "R6vnt_768x? HA! your going to have to try herder than that! We've never expired an old ID and we don't plan to start now succa."

Now for the solution. It starts with everyone, including Robert Scoble, obtaining a nice meaningful personal e-mail address for themselves. Preferably, the basis for the e-mail address should be a domain name, and that might be tricky too in terms of all the names already created. But the domain name system is far less tapped out than the Yahoo or AOL name systems are, for one thing, domain names aren't used as the basis for ad sales. For another, domain names expire, although you can register for 100 years or so if you really find a name you like. But while there are a lot of people out there who think having one or several domain names is the key to fame and fortune, there are fewer of those than the number of people who have signed up for free e-mail addresses from one or more of the above mentioned companies. Scoble owns (I presume) scobleizer.com, so he certainly should be able to use robert@scobleizer.com rather than a hotmail address.

Why is this a good idea? Well, that takes step two. ISP companies need to stop requiring people to have an ID that only goes with their service. If I am "macbeach" on blogger that should not tell you anything about my e-mail address, nor should it imply that I even have such an address at gmail. For most of these companies, identifying yourself as "macbeach" implies that you have an e-mail address by that name. That name also gets used for every other service you use from that vendor. That seems like a convenience at first. But what if I really like Flickr and I also really like Blogger, and I really like the MSN live web page system, it is very unlikely that the same name, unless I make it intentionally obscure, will exist for all three of those services.

Secondlife (while we are at it) makes you pick a first name, and select a last name from a list. I always thought this idea sucked. There was a reason for it, but not a technical reason. It was to provide something like a genealogy, except not really, of older names, and newer names, or something. Cute, but not really useful. I picked "Beach" as a last name because I was preparing to move to the beach, and since then the combined name has found a lot of homes, but there are a surprising number of places where the name is taken already. Maybe there is actually someone out there named "Mac Beach", but it isn't me, except in Secondlife that is. I also have short meaningful names at Yahoo, and Google, because I started using them when they were new. My name at AOL isn't very pleasant to me, so I use that service less as a result.

AOL has recently taken a half-step in the right direction. They now allow you to create a domain name of "your own" for free. So if your last name is "xxxyyyzzz" (sorry if that actually IS your last name) you could set up a domain at AOL called xxxyyyzzz.com (or .net I think) and allow your family to each have a personalized email address there. Half-step, because the "free" domain doesn't actually belong to you, and if you decide you don't like AOL e-mail at some point you can't move the domain to another service. It's also half-assed, so far, because they promised the ability to set up a family (or other small organization) web page, and so far there is no indication of when, or if, you will actually be able to do that.

Google on the other hand, appears to be getting it right (they didn't at first, but it's getting there.) You can now sign up for almost any Google service by using any existing email address. If you hate Gmail, you can still use most of the other Google services by using a Yahoo, MSN, AOL or any other e-mail address as your login ID. If you are not paranoid about security, you could also use the same password you use for e-mail, if you are both paranoid and have a bad memory, you'd better start recording things like this somewhere safe.

I did a test just the other day and signed on to almost every Google service using an external e-mail address. The exceptions (of course) are Gmail (for e-mail) and Googlepages (for personal web pages) neither of which would make sense with external IDs.

Imaging if all vendors took this step... I'd pay somebody (cheapo, or free if a truly open service were available) to register my preferred name (by the way I did this long ago, but I ain't tellin' what it is to just anybody until Gate's promise of "solving spam" is universally fulfilled) and then I'd direct that ID/domain name combination to my favorite e-mail service (and how many free e-mail services allow you to do this so far? I can think of only one) and I'd use that to sign up for all the Google services I liked, and if the other service providers would open up their name spaces the world would be a better place. TADA!

Can I do this with MSN? I don't think so, first, since you have to run Windows to even get to the sign-up page I'll likely never know how wonderful it is (although I've read several newsgroup messages from people that USED to use it).

Can I do this with Yahoo? Only sorta. They do allow external e-mail addresses for Yahoo Groups, but that's only if you are just receiving e-mail message from the group. Anything else requires you to get a Yahoo ID that you may have no other use for. They recently made some changes with the Flickr ID system which were unpopular, again, favoring the use of Yahoo IDs I would guess (I stopped using Flickr when Yahoo took it over).

AOL? Like I said they show a glimmer of intelligence in this area, but it is clear that their management shuffles make any promises they make for future capabilities suspect. My free domain name gets mail, and that's about it. Using it to log into almost every other AOL service gets either a cryptic, or just plain wrong error message.

How about the smaller players? Do any of them allow you to just sign in with an e-mail address as your ID? There must be some, but I don't know of any. I'm all sign-ined out. This wave of web services is (I hope) coming to an end. So many new things aren't really that new and are also not different enough to be worth even trying out, much less switching to. They current Internet bubble is ending with a slow pin-hole hissing sound, hardly audible, not with a bang, at least so far.

I'm just hoping that if there is a next wave of new technology, really new, not just warmed over, they will start out in such a way that everyone doesn't have to invent yet another new name.

We'll see.

IBM Gets A Second Life

Although it's a virtual world, Second Life is having a big impact on real world commerce and business. News agency Reuters has opened an in-world Second Life news bureau, Amazon.com's product database is available to book merchants operating within Second Life through an open API, and several pop stars have given concerts within the virtual environment. "There are all sorts of new applications for this technology," says IBM's spokesman.

Web pages in SL.

SL Feature Proposal Detail: "We will be working on things in this order:
1) static external webpage in 2D browser, no interaction
2) static external webpage on prim surface, no interaction
3) update URL for primitive, all viewers get update
4) LSL call to set URL for primitive
5) webpage from script/notecard/typed-in HTML
6) interactive web page in 2D

The first release of web pages in SL will not support animated pages (Flash, blink, etc.). There will be strong limits on how many web pages can be seen at the same time, and how many web pages can be used on a given object, in a given parcel, etc. We have to do this because web pages take more resources to load and display than regular textures."

Cool Beans!

O'Reilly Radar > Real Estate Development in Virtual Worlds

O'Reilly Radar > Real Estate Development in Virtual Worlds
Now if there was just a Linux version! Maybe we could have one of those cute little O'Reilly books with an animal on it.

Is it finally time for 3D online? | Newsmakers | CNET News.com

Is it finally time for 3D online? | Newsmakers | CNET News.com: "Now we're in a position where the timing couldn't be better. Every user has a computer that has 3D. Most people download some kind of game, or download music, or download a chat client--things that are outside the sphere of the Web browser. Right now we have these proprietary, 3D gaming universes, 3D chat worlds, like Linden Labs' 'Second Life,' and they're analogous to the Prodigy and Compuserve of a decade ago."

GamesIndustry.biz - PlayStation 3: The industry's best-kept secret?

GamesIndustry.biz - PlayStation 3: The industry's best-kept secret?
Word had leaked out that Linden Labs plans to replace its entire server farm with a single Sonly Playstation 3 when the product debuts next year. A company representative stated that they expect hardware costs for server equipment to drop to "somewhere in the $200-$300 range".

Virtual Power Brokers

Virtual Power Brokers: "'It's a job in that I am largely motivated by economic success,' she said. 'Here my achievement is creating real value for other residents.'

Graef sometimes is paid in Linden Dollars, the game's equivalent of Monopoly money. But she's able to convert that currency to U.S. dollars via several websites, including gamingopenmarket.com, which looks like a stock market, complete with charts and opening and closing prices. On any given day, a player can sell 240 or so Linden Dollars for one U.S. dollar. Payments are made through PayPal.

Game currency is among the most widely sold virtual commodities.

To Raph Koster, chief creative officer at Sony Online Entertainment, the company that runs 'EverQuest,' the notion that Platinum, or 'Plat,' is equivalent to legal tender is unreal.

'You can't take Plat and buy groceries,' Koster said. 'Outside of EverQuest, Plat has no real value. It's just a string of zeros and 1s in our database.'"

Sounds like the people at Sony Online Entertainment are quite a bit out of touch.

A virtual world with peer-to-peer style - page 2 | CNET News.com

A virtual world with peer-to-peer style - page 2 | CNET News.com: "Today, all of those servers are run by Linden Labs, but the world was built to ultimately support a peer-to-peer model, where players might add their own 16-acre plot into the world from their own computer, said Linden Labs' chief executive officer, Philip Rosedale. For security reasons--including the fact that a real currency is traded inside the world--the company hasn't taken that step yet, however."

Solipsis: A peer-to-peer system for a massively ultra multi-participant virtual world

Solipsis: A peer-to-peer system for a massively ultra multi-participant virtual world

New Apple Notebook and SL

Haven't updated this for a while, but I answered an inquiry in the forums recently about laptop recommendations. Since I recently got a new Apple Powerbook it seemed like a good opportunity to brag...

The 12-inch model I got probably isn't optimum for running SL, but it does rather nicely. I wanted something small, no noise, no heat. I almost just got one of the new Mini's, but they only have 32M video ram, and my old Compaq could go at any minute so I thought another laptop/desktop-replacement-style might be better. The 12-inch model (well the new ones anyway) will run an arbitrarily large external monitor AND the built-in monitor at the same time in dual-head mode so I no longer need a 2-PC switch to run SL in full screen mode and still do web browsing etc. My external monitor (a Compaq as a matter of fact) has both analog and digital inputs and the Powerbook supports both.

The Apple OS is also quite compatible with Linux systems, so I can open up an X-window and run Linux applications remotely too, so, after I get used to this, I think I can give away my KVM switches... the never-ending transition from PS/2 to USB to wireless I/O devices making them rather hard to deal with anyway.

For LESS money I could have gotten one of those desktop-sized G5 systems which I'm sure do a better job of SL...but then I think the days of those big space-heater systems are numbered.

My only concern was if SL would cause the tiny fan in the Powerbook to run continually and eventually (fan bearings being the weakest link in most computers) overheat. But I found that if I use the option in the OS to throttle back the CPU (mostly in there to save battery power) SL is still useable but the fan doesn't run (at least not fast enough that I can hear it). Hint: This would be a good option to build into SL I think for those of us who don't really need 30 FPS when we are standing around chatting, but I couldn't figure a way to achieve the same results with the existing SL display options without cutting my visibility range down to almost nothing.

I'd be curious to know if others have run their laptops (of any kind) on SL for a long time (several hours a day for a few months for example) with no ill effects. Maybe I'm just over-cautious.

By the way, my model has an nVidia graphics card, I think the higher-end Powerbooks use ATI. I know the ATIs are supposed to be better but for my needs nVidia is fine, and ATI drivers are notoriously flakey. Having once had ATI drivers corrupt my hard drive (YES!) I swore never again. YMMV.

What's Wrong with Secondlife?

I've been following the forum posts

...here...

with some little surprise. Not surprise that people should be mad about billing errors or 24 hour downtimes, but surprised that in a few of the postings people touched on some more fundamental concerns that I've had from the beginning, and I've been a user, follower, and supporter of Second Life almost from its beginning.

Of the original 10 issues posted I'll just say that most of them are to be expected of any leading edge technology. Let's get to those more fundamental things...

"2. Our inventories are transient data, its seriously questionable that your data can even be recovered from backups. "

Not having a backup strategy that works (in a usable way) is a problem. It's not all that uncommon for small shops to have a "disaster backup" that could be used to re-build the entire data center, but not have any means to recover selective parts from that backup. The latter, almost requires that you write your own backup process almost from scratch rather than rely on an off the shelf solution. For some organizations this is "good enough". For an outfit that sells services to individuals, such as a web hosting company, you really need to find a way to make each user's backup individually, and easily, in fact, perhaps automatically, accessible. Knowledge of this backup process needs to be built into the systems architecture. If user A wants to reset his house to the way it looked last week, more needs to happen than load some files from a tape. Activeworlds never solved this problem either. Every database corruption that involved using the backups was always followed by hours or days of downtime during which the programmers manually repaired the damage without taking the entire "grid" (they didn't use that term) back a whole week. Finally, this relates to item 9. More there.

"7. I still, a year and a half after the issue was first addressed, cannot use my top of the line ATI graphics card, one of the most popular graphic card companies in the world."

I'll just add, that this must be a frustrating problem. With video cards representing in some cases half or more of the cost of a system, many people aren't in a position to switch brands easily. On the other hand I haven't had much respect for ATI for a long time. I question whether the company will even be in business a few years from now. It might have been better for Secondlife to take an nVidea-only approach publicly until all the problems with ATI were ironed out.

"9. The promise of Intellectual Property rights for content creators has been trampled on. The lack of adequate controls to prevent reuse and with no ability to guarantee the safety and continued existence of player creations negates it. The glowing PR release that brought many of us into this world a year ago seems little more than that, a marketing scheme."

I don't know about "trampled on". But I don't think I ever really understood the early marketing that was done around this issue. 3D (and other) content creators online have always had to deal with other people stealing their stuff. Let's face it, some of it isn't really all that valuable to begin with. The whole idea that something that takes you 15 minutes to create is now worth thousands of dollars is part of our whacked out culture. In the real world, things get more valuable as they become HARDER to do. The reason it only costs $200 to have my sink fixtures replaces (all of them, including parts) is that I had the option of doing it myself. For me, it was good use of my time to pay a plumber to do it while I did something else. Had the cost been $2000 I would have probably just visited the hardware store.

Likewise, if I take a photo, diddle with it to make it a seamless texture, apply it and several others to a cleverly thought out prim, I MAY have something that someone will value more than the time it would take them to create such a thing themselves. If I get good at this, through talent, or hard work, I can increase the difference between the cost to me (in time) to make the thing and the cost (in time) to a beginner to make the same thing.

The rub comes when we get into this process on a regular basis, thinking we might make a little pocket money in the process, support our hobby, or even, in our fantasies, make a living at it. Once we go down that path, finding that our works have been misappropriated by others becomes very frustrating. How much are we willing to pay a lawyer to settle such a thing? Should we engage a private investigator as well to see just how extensively our products have been sold by others? The folly of this is obvious when you see that even well known recording artists don't go after piraters of their music on their own. It takes an entire industry, in the form of the RIAA to track these things down and prosecute them, and in the end, how effective is it?

Linden labs/SecondLife though, has offered to help us with this in some way. I'm still not sure how. Not allowing us to take physical possession of our own creations might be offered as a security aid, to keep such things from being stolen. On the other hand, to really be effective, the object would have to be visible on any users computer, without any user being able to "capture" the essence of the object. Simply making something difficult to steal, but impossible to get hold of legitimately doesn't make a lot of sense, but as far as I can tell, that is pretty much where the technology stands.

Again, this might have been a promise best unmade by Linden Labs. Let users have their own backup files, allow offline manipulation of them (as a feature). Let users solve their own ownership issues (which it would seem they have to do anyway) and at some point in the future, revisit this when (perhaps) better encryption or other display technologies are available.

"10. On top of all these issues Linden Lab has announced that they are now dividing their efforts and creating what amounts to a second program, catering to children without seeming care to the fact that the residents are fairly unanimous in the opinion that this world is still half baked."

Actually, from the beginning, I have thought that the idea of offering a system for "adults only" was half-baked. Of course there are such offerings on the Internet. We call them "Porn Sites". Do porn sites offer online banking, tick-tak-toe, put-put golf, educational services, as an added convenience for their users? Not that I've ever heard. Generally when people go online for sexual gratification they are not interested in much else, and when they are done with that, they go back to accessing the web at large (hopefully). I've always thought that Secondlife should be FOR EVERYBODY, just like the Internet is. If there is a need to support those "special" activities we normally associate with being an adult then it is THAT activity that should be on a separate, isolated grid.

Maybe my vision for Secondlife (or something like it) goes way beyond that of Linden Labs. It's awfully easy to see LL right now, not so much as a visionary 3D-VR company as it is a visionary marketing company. It's well known that porn is the most profitable business on the Internet. What might not be well known is that trend is starting to change. There is only so much of that that the market can absorb, and Secondlife, with so much of the space dedicated to scanty clothing, and the like, may be finally bumping up against that trend. I can see a children's SL being a very popular thing. With it though, LL will have bitten off the censorship responsibility that they have tried so hard to avoid (unsuccessfully) with the original grid.

Maybe in the long run there will be three grids: the new grid for children, where parents can with relative safety park their kids while they go off and do other things, (2) the Adult grid where anything goes, and (3) the grid in-between where people of all ages can come and interact, conduct business, chat, educate, and essentially, behave by doing things we do during our normal lives (as we would, let's say in a mall rather than in a strip-club).

The irony is that it's that third grid, the normal-life grid that does not seem to be in the LL plans.

Well, thats what I have to say about the original ten points. Some other, even more interesting items came up during the thread that follows though. I'd like to comment on them without using names, or numbers. Here goes...

Viable Infrastructure. (I'll go with that as a working title as I can't think of anything better). During the Beta there was a series of teleconferences during which Philip talked about the direction of the product and asked for feedback. I say "there were a series", but I was only invited to the first one. Maybe there is a reason for this. I pressed real hard, maybe too hard, on my concern about the resources that SL consumed. Not so much the CPU resources, as there was a statement that SL was being targeted at the typical PC "5 years hence". I had no trouble imagining that a PC 5 years down the road would handle the 3D content, and the even harder realtime display of it with much greater ease than my old (barely capable) Dell. The five years hasn't passed by the way, so I can imagine multi-gig memory machines, super fast hard drives with tons of space, and processors with multiple cores (in other words four PCs on one chip for example). These divices may even get here soon enough that by the time the 5 years have passed they will be affordable.

What hasn't happened, and isn't happening, is better bandwidth. We don't all have fiber optic links to the Internet, and we don't live in a country with a backbone capable of supporting us all having such connections. The Internet, by my reckoning, is getting slower, not faster. When I sit here and wait for a page to "rez" on the web It's not my bloody PC thats the problem, nor is it my DSL connection. It's the fact that bandwidth on the net is becoming more unpredictable, and in many cases it's the bandwidth, at the source, that is bogged down. In SL terms, it's the servers on the grid that are maxed out, and in spite of regular denials, I'm quite sure that there are issues there at the data center, not of total bandwidth, but on instantaneous throuput: Your at a meeting, several hundred users, someone rezes a heavy new object, how fast can you get it out to everyone and still maintain all the chat about it and the audio, and the clapping, and the body language, and the scripts firing off?... We know of course, that SL cannot yet support a meeting of several hundred individuals. Will it ever be able to?

I've had several new users comment to me "they don't seem to be using cache here". That was my impression too. Still is. I'm alone in a Sim. I face a wall. There is no script running nearby, no sounds, no animated textures, I'm not moving, and there is nobody here to chat with, and my router light is "blinking off the hook". Now these may all be very tiny packets, but there is absolutely no way that I've been able to quiesce that router activity in SL, and obviously other users have noticed the same thing. What are the latency requirements of all those packets? Are they just pings to make sure I'm still here? Are we updating the grid as to my location 10 times a second even though I'm not moving and there is nobody around to care if I was? Who knows? I don't, and I'm not likely to do a packet trace to figure it out. Someone has, presumably, been paid to do that basic back of the envelope calculation regarding the total number of users that the infrastructure can support. And that number has supposedly been used to figure out what the cost of the basic service has to be in order to be profitable. Will there be dozens of grids around the world to distribute the load? Will there be a higher two way minimum bandwidth requirements per user? Who knows? I hope it's on the back of an envelope, somewhere.

If those questions haven't been asked, and answered, LL won't be alone of course. My last "gig" with the government involved a rapidly growing database. I asked embarrassing questions about that too. How fast is is growing? What is the backup plan? Can you do an incremental and partial restore? Is there an archive? Has the raid array been live-tested? Blank stares. That of course from the PC part of the enterprise. Those questions have long ago been asked, and answered for the mainframe side. It's a cultural thing. One that will work itself out eventually, I hope. Even that government group was recently hit by a virus that took much of it down, they trotted out the mainframe group to say (truthfully) that they didn't know anything about a virus and everything was fine. Let's hope they don't have to resort to such subtrifuge indefinitely.

Viable Staffing. The other part of the equation is the staff. The founders of TSO soon found that they continually underestimated staff requirements. Not for programmers, but user support. It's tempting for a business to think that they can define a product that has little or no support costs. Built-in help systems, automated accounting, and on and on you would think it ALMOST possible to eliminate the human element. But the science of Artificial Intelligence hasn't come that far after all. Disputes between users, censorship issues, and those nagging questions that no amount of help text seem to be able to cover. Of course none of us want to the cost of using the system to skyrocket in response. The trick is to grow the user base steadily, rely on volunteers for many things, maybe even, eventually, franchise some of the activities out to others. On the other hand, this is where I think Activeworlds started to run into problems. They got in too big a hurry to build a cash inflow for themselves that they produced a system that nickled-and-dimed to death anyone who wanted to participate at other than the basic level. To be a content provider you might have to deal with two or three other vendors, unless you wanted to take on all the responsibilities yourself. Fortunately, SL hasn't grown to that point yet. But with the dedicated Sims, we might be getting close. Time will tell.

Finally, by way of a disclaimer for the above, I should say that I admire and respect SL and LL, flaws and all. I gave Activeworlds the same respect up to a point, and had high hopes for Adobe's Atmosphere, up to the point where they discontinued it in mid December. What the 3D-VR "space" needs is more players not fewer. LL seems to be the sort of company you'd like to see succeed at this. Are they really such a company, or is it just a good act? Again, time will tell. So far, it's hard for me to detect anything but sincerity from them. That's different from saying that I think they will be THE 3D-VR company in the long run or even that there will BE such a company as opposed to a standard (such as HTML) around which many companies compete.

I don't pay to use SL. I find it amazing that anyone would spend $400 a month on it, although, when I had a high paying job I spent lots of money on things I didn't need. I have the advantage of seeing SL from both perspectives. During the Beta I decided that I would be willing to pay a one-time price for SL use if it was reasonable but not a monthly charge. Maybe they read my mind, or my chat sessions, but that's what they provided and I am most gratefull. I think SL could be one of the "next big things", as the industry has advance beyond the point of having THE next big thing, and it is a privelege to be a witness to whatever happens. I don't ever have to worry about "putting my money where my mouth is" and signing off one last time in a huff. I've been there before though and I understand the difficulty in making such a decision. I hope, that anyone contemplating such a thing at least do only a tier down rather than a tune-out as I expect that there may still be good things to come.

Or not.

Second Life Q&A

Q: Is Second Life Like Snowcrash?
A: Yes, very much so. I have used other systems loosely based on Snowcrash that made dogmatic concessions to the book such as units of measure etc. Secondlife hasn't done any of these things, but has attempted to make the environment as realistic as possible, including scripting, full physics, an in-world economy, mutable avatars, so that you can look like you and many more.

Q: Do you work for Secondlife?
A: No. Just a user. If you sign up using my link I get credit in-world though. That is my incentive, plus I like the program and wish it to succeed.

Q: Why doesn't the program support Linux, you seem to be such a fan of Open Source, Linux, and OS X.
A: I only works on Windows now, but they have short term (later this year) plans to make it work on Linux and OS X. having seen how fast these guys work during the beta I am confident they can do this. MOST of the action is taking place on the server side, and that is already running Linux. The client part of the program is relatively small and should be easy to support on other platforms. UPDATE: The OS X version is out and apparently works well enough. The Linux version proved more difficult and has been put off. People are running SL using Winex with some tinkering, some even say it improves the experience. I'd still like to see a native version.

Q: What are other requirements for the program.
A: Because it is server-centric, you almost have to have broadband. I know one person who has used it via dial-up but it is a very frustrating experience I have been told. You also need a modern computer running at 800MHz or so 256M of memory or more and a fast hard drive all help to improve the experience and finally you need a high end 3D capable video card, nVidia or ATI, with 32M I think. Best to check the site to be sure. Since there is no charge to download the program and try it, there is no risk to find out if your PC will support it.