I’m going to be publishing links to every kind of machinima on Twitter. Twitter is a great way to get instant updates for all kinds of information that people are sharing. You should consider joining and giving it a try, http://www.twitter.com.
If you’re already a member of Twitter, start following http://www.twitter.com/machinima.
I wrote the following this morning in response to a question someone had about how to market their new web service. Based on my own experience, I think its generally correct. No matter what your business size, you have to respect your users.
In Second Life, there has been a problem going back at least 6 months involving group chat delays. Typically this has manifested itself in the form of timeout delays, failure for chat to be registered, massive lag between the time you say something and when it comes through, and chats showing up out of order.Today Phoenix Linden closed one of the main JIRA bugs that people have been posting to about this:
Phoenix Linden – 03/Mar/08 02:28 PM The code now runs in parallel when possible. Large groups (>1000 or so) will still experience delays.
Given how large a problem this, its great to see some action being taken. Its still too early to see if the improvements will visibly be seen by the community. Group chat in Second Life is very important to the social nature of the residents of the virtual world and its frequent… problems… have been loudly and constantly complained about.
I had a short exchange of emails with Robin Harper, Community Development VP, a few months ago where she acknowledged the problem existed and promised it would be put on the radar of the Linden Lab dev team. To her credit, she has been very involved in the larger community’s needs around groups, such as Wagner Au posted on his blog recently.
To: Robin Harper <robin@lindenlab.com> Mon, Jan 7, 2008 at 8:31 PM
Hi Robin. I don’t expect a response, but hopefully you at least get a chance to read this.
There are major problems with delays and inability to communicate in groups. Two JIRA bugs that have a combined total of over 100.
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1298
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1298
This is something every single user of groups experiences everyday. Some days are better than others, but there’s no visible reason why and to my knowledge, no recognition or explanation of the cause from Linden Lab.
Please forward to whoever should see this.
Thanks,
Geuis Dassin
From: Robin Harper <robin@lindenlab.com> Mon, Jan 7, 2008 at 8:36 PM
Hi Geuis,
I passed your note on to the development team. I can’t promise any sort of immediate response, but please know that the right person has seen your mail.
Cheers,
Robin
So it seems like progress is being made. Phoenix does mention larger groups of over 1000 members will still have problems, but most are rather smaller than this. With that in mind, hopefully we will be seeing a better chat experience in SL. If not, on to JIRA!
Photo credit Codebastard Redgrave, http://www.codebastardredgrave.comhttp://www.codebastardredgrave.com
In the future, there is no “web 3.0″ or “semantic web”. Whenever we start naming the next big thing before it even exists, later on that thing is called something completely different or it never comes to pass. Think of all the predictions made in the 1950’s that are laughably ludicrous today.
Bill Gates of Microsoft once stated, “Why would anyone need more than 640KB?”.
Its “internet” or “web” not “information superhighway”. When the mass media tries to predict the next big thing, they tend to fail dramatically and, more importantly, predictably.
“Virtual worlds” are not “virtual reality”. The key difference is that virtual reality has become culturally associated with completely immersive 3D environments. Whether talking about helmets or goggles, virtual reality as a concept is something else. Virtual worlds now imply community in virtual spaces. The original popularized concepts of virtual reality talked about the technology, not its social implications as much. What the rise of MMO games like World of Warcraft and environments like Second Life have shown is that human beings develop important relationships inside virtual environments. We are capable of becoming immersed in places that don’t require us to wear hardware.
The children that have been born in the last 5 years are growing up in a world where they will have relationships with people their own age anywhere in the world. We can extrapoloate and predict trends for the next 15 to 25 years with reasonable accuracy when those predictions are related largely to technology advances. However, trying to forsee the social actions and conventions of people growing up with completely new ways of interacting is chaotic and highly inaccurate.
The future unseen social mechanisms of the virtually connected populace will affect business to a greater degree than the adoption of the web and the internet have since the mid 1990’s.
The next time you witness a concept being pushed as the ”Next Big Thing”, stop to think about the long littered history of the ”Last Big Things”. Twist it, bend it, throw it in a blender with a twist of lemon, and then see if it still sounds like a world changer.
I was given links to two great new machinima pieces a couple of days ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
This is Mescaline’s first SL video. Its a gorgeously shot and edited piece with music by Duran Duran. Mescaline is a film professional in the other life, and his skills certainly show.
The second video is http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm
Its visually very appealing, though its rather slow and monotonous until about half-way through.The second half is both visually captivating and the music really picks up.
I have been working with representatives from the Woodrow Wilson Institute for the last few months to produce a new machinima video to highlight eco-related areas and organizations in Second Life. The piece is part of a larger project with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) to explore how computer and video game technologies can be applied to environmental issues.
This video is about 14 minutes long and highlights several different sims and programs currently active in SL oriented around ecology conservation. In particular, the National and Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) has an excellent collection of sims that show how oil spills are cleaned up and how tidal waves are formed and destroy the land when they come ashore, among other projects. My other favorite project is the Green Islands project. Essentially, this project lets sim owners buy carbon credits from a real-world organization called the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to offset the carbon produced by powering their sims.
I am very proud to have worked with such an esteemed organization as the Woodrow Wilson Institute on this project.
Flash version: http://mannea.blip.tv/file/667667/
SD version: http://blip.tv/file/get/Mannea-SecondLifeEcoTour463.mp4
HD version: http://blip.tv/fileA/get/Mannea-SecondLifeEcoTour674.mp4
Link to Wilson Center Institute blog about the Second Life Eco-Tour: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.item&news_id=393493
The website still looks bad. I am gradually banging it into shape. I would have preferred to have it completely wrapped up design wise before publishing stuff, but other projects and the holidays have completely thrown me off on that.
Anyway, apparently Metaversed.com is closing those doors and moving to something called CleverZebra.com. Nick Wilson, aka 57 Miles in Second Life, sent a notification out with a link to an intro Youtube video, here. Metaversed has been a very successful business blog and information service for information about businesses in virtual worlds. They have been running, and apparently will continue to, a series of talks/podcasts called Metanomics which are usually rather interesting.
From what I can tell, 45 minutes into watching, reading, and writing, is that CleverZebra is an idea to provide pre-packaged fully modifiable “open source” buildings to new businesses trying to get started in Second Life. Well, this sent my head spinning and I wrote a lengthy post in the freshly decanted forums expressing my dismay that they would be giving up Metaversed to give out free, utterly useless buildings. The last thing I want to say about that itself, is that I suspect Nick and gang have much deeper plans in mind than just free buildings. However, that is what comes across from the material they’ve put out so far.
Anyway, so one of the arguments I was making in that forum post is about investing in businesses based in Second Life, and more broadly, other virtual worlds. With venture capitalists throwing millions of dollars at fraking Facebook applications, why aren’t there VC firms and angel investors doing micro investments in virtual worlds? Not funding virtual worlds themselves, I’m talking about providing the same kinds of business loans to people running legitimate businesses in SL that they do to the clueless MBA that has a Web 2.0-social networking-pictures of cats sniffing glue-proposal for a business.
I am a successful business owner in Second Life. A good friend of mine makes quite a bit of money at hers, enough that the other day she let me in on the fact that she’s making more money doing her SL business than any other job she’s ever had.
There are roughly 50,000 people making more money in SL than they put in. This is a very sizable market of business owners, ranging from the fully self-sufficient to the extra bill money people like me. In many ways, we are not that dissimilar to eBay. Both eBay and Second Life provide a platform across which goods and services can be traded. Because of the open, democratic nature of who can use the platforms, it has primarily been small-business people who initially adopted their perspective platforms and were the first people to build entire businesses and careers around the transactions that take place there.
How many of us do we need before people will start looking at us as an opportunity, versus trying to bring in more external companies to fail and fail again at colonizing this early little sandbar of the metaverse we call Second Life?
Do most people really understand what’s happening? A homeless man says to me yesterday, “Wow, where did the last 8 years go?”
Where did those years go? My first response is to think its mainly about getting older, now into my late 20s. My mom and other respected elders frequently proclaim how fast the years go by. “Kids grow up so fast” and all that.
I fall back on that most of the time, but sometimes what’s really happening hits me. Things are speeding up. The easy markers are traditionally Moore’s Law. Yeah, computers are getting faster. We all share information at an increasing rate. But the problem is, these are just single facets that people trumpet out as examples. But they don’t really understand what it means.
We’re already moving into the singularity. How many phone numbers can you remember without looking at your cell phone? Is it easier for you to look on Google for a bit of information you need than to ask someone you think might know the answer? When you lose your phone or switch out for a new one, can’t you feel that vacancy of your contact list being gone? Doesn’t it feel like you left your wallet or purse in the house when you went out the door in the morning, with that nagging feeling like you left something important behind but you can’t immediately place what it is? Is it easier to bring up your computer’s calculator than to try and do simple multiplication in your head?
Our minds are already moving outside of our wetware.
The reason our brains work so well is that they are always re-wiring connections. Our brains are largely neural maps of our various body parts. Let me bring up people who have lost limbs and have phantom pains. The pains have nothing to do with the location of the lost limb. Its all in the brain. Its cause is rather interesting. When you lose a limb, a corresponding section of the brain that was devoted to handling sensory input is suddenly left without any activity. Other surrounding areas of the brain then begin “invading” and connecting into the non-active area, cross-connecting normally separate neurons into an area of the brain they aren’t supposed to be in. So, you might have activity for your left upper thigh stimulating neurons that are mapped to your left hand that you lost. The mapping is still there, except now sensations from your thigh are sending information to the wrong part of your brain. Your brain’s map of the lost hand interprets it as pain. The way to fix this is several weeks of therapy with a mirror. Put a mirror in front of you that bisects your body, so that an image of your right hand and arm are reflected onto the left side where you lost your hand. You fool the brain into thinking it has a left hand again. You then proceed to walk through physical therapy excerises for a few weeks, and the pain goes away. What you are doing is re-wiring your brain so that it correctly remaps that part of the brain to the new physical state of the person. Good story about this over at ITConversations.
So, if you lose your contact list and you feel that vacant spot, that is probably very similar to what happens with the accident victim. Your brain has created special neural maps for the use of your cell phone in the same way it maps for your body parts. Take that away, and your brain feels its absence.
So to go back to what I was saying before, our minds are moving outside of our wetware. Our brains are adapting themselves automatically to use information technology as an integrated part of the functioning of our consciousness. Hollywood has gotten stuck on this idea that we have to use brain implants to get this effect. In reality, its already happening a few decades before direct neural interfaces become common.
So when you next stop and feel the passage of time and ask, “Where did the last 8 years go?”, realize something very important. You are subjectively experiencing the singularity. Its not a far off sci-fi dream. We’re already in it, and its just getting started.
