predictions for 2011 : second life, virtual worlds and farmville

offering predictions is en vogue for tech bloggers these days; who am i to buck a trend? my area of interest is the technology and business of virtual worlds in general and second life in particular. so here's what i see when i peer into the crystal ball. let's come back in a year and judge the quality of my predictive powers.

i'm going to start with a few easy predictions. these are not so much predictions as observations of existing trends. in other words, here are some trends that will continue.

drama will continue amongst second life residents. it may sound like i'm saying our resident community as being overly sensitive or dramatic. well, yes, i am. but i don't mean it in a bad way. second life attracts drama for the simple reason that people attract drama. saying that there's drama in virtual worlds is to say that there's a critical mass of people who treat the virtual world as an extension (or alternative) to the "real" world. you don't get a high level of emotional involvement with hotmail or google docs. live journal, twitter and facebook get a little more emotional immersion, but it's nowhere near what you get with virtual worlds.

when done right, virtual worlds saturate the senses and engage the "whole person." where you find people, you find drama. and that's a good thing.

InWorlds, ReactionGrid, SpotOn and OSGrid will continue to lure the "old guard" away. let's face it, linden has ticked off several people in the content creation community. the "old guard" lindens are now mostly all swept away; along with them was lost the engagement with the community and the sense we're all pulling in the same direction. despite his faults, philip rosedale was great at communicating second life's vision and making it's residents feel the love.

later in philip's reign and throughout mark kingdon's tenure, the lab found it difficult to communicate effectively to SL residents. after the lab's "adult supervision" left the building, linden management seemed "spooked" by resident's passion. rod humble, the lab's new leader, has a good pedigree, but it'll take months (if not years) for the lab to rebuild credibility with the resident's they've alienated.

there's still plenty of "old folks" left in second life, but the OpenSim based grids can offer features and pricing you won't find in second life. but... while OpenSim based economies will grow, they will still be dwarfed by second life's "linden ecomony."

now let's talk a little about second life and linden lab. the last year's been pretty chaotic for linden what with lay-offs, project cancellations, direction changes and executive shuffles. my prediction for the lab in 2011 is you won't see as much "weirdness" in the lab as you did in 2010. it'll take a few months (at least) for mr. humble to really start to make changes at the lab. towards the end of the summer of 2011, i predict there'll be a few small hornets' nests kicked over, but nothing like the bizarre events of 2010.

i also predict that mark kingdon's focus on facebook or facebook-style games like farmville will get mild lip-service, but eventually fade away. why? farmville, mafia wars and other "casual games" are the polar opposites of second life. people poke at farmville a couple times a day and get on with their lives. second life users log in and stay for a while. and i think rod humble's background allows him to fully understand this concept.

this is not to say the various social media initiatives the lab has will be completely abandoned, but the AU purchase and subsequent shuttering must have really stung, so if the lab releases something socialesque, i think they'll release something small, well thought out, and supported unanimously by executive management. due to the lab's internal processes, i predict it will be a small project implemented by one engineer and two project / product managers within a 6 month period.

talking about technology, we shouldn't forget the web-based initiatives we saw beta tested this last year. i have a bold prediction: we won't see anything like this (web based viewer) from the lab this year. why? the whole "leveraging external technology" sounds like something that would come out of joe miller's technology integration group. four of the five members of this group left the lab in the last year.

plus, the technology is still a little rough. WebGL is out there slowly chugging along, and at the end of the year, we may see a lot of people with web browsers that can effectively communicate with GPUs. google's chrome viewer with it's v8 javascript engine may be able to keep up with the kind of data throughput numbers you'll need to support, but i still think it'll be a couple years before the browser makers create something that can handle the amount of data a typical second life session throws at a client.

so these are my main predictions. 2011 will be an especially boring year compared to 2010 for second life and linden lab. OpenSim based worlds will continue to gain in popularity and second life will not get turned into farmville.