driving in dallas

my mom just forwarded this one to me as part of an explanation for why the rest of the family is frightened by her driving... her excuse: "i learned to drive in dallas." i tried figuring out who wrote this, but no luck. if it's yours, please ping me so i can give proper attribution.

First you must learn to pronounce the city name. It is DAL-LUS, or DAA-LIS depending on if you live inside or outside LBJ Freeway.

Next, if your Mapsco is more than a few weeks old, throw it out and buy a new one. If in Denton County and your Mapsco is one-day-old, then it is already obsolete. Forget the traffic rules you learned elsewhere. (Frisco has screwed everything up.)

Dallas has its own version of traffic rules... "Hold on and pray."

There is no such thing as a dangerous high-speed chase in Dallas . We all drive like that.

All directions start with, "Get on Beltline," which has no beginning and no end. (It REALLY DOESN'T!!!)

The morning rush hour is from 6 to 10. The evening rush hour is from 3 to 7. Friday's rush hour starts Thursday morning.

If you actually stop at a yellow light, you will be rear-ended, cussed out and possibly shot. When you are the first one on the starting line, count to five when the light turns green before going to avoid crashing with all the drivers running the red light in cross-traffic.

Construction on Central Expressway is a way of life and a permanent form of entertainment. We had sooo much fun with that, we have added George Bush Freeway and the High Five to the mix.

All unexplained sights are explained by the phrase, "Oh, we're in Fort Worth !"

If someone actually has his or her turn signal on, it is probably a factory defect. Car horns are actually "Road Rage" indicators - and remember, it's legal to be armed in Texas ..

All old ladies with blue hair in a Mercedes have the right of way. Period. And remember, it's legal to be armed in Texas ..

Inwood Road, Plano Road, NW Highway, East Grand, Garland Road, Marsh Lane, Josey Lane, 15th Street, Preston Road all mysteriously change names as you cross intersections (these are only a FEW examples). The perfect example is what is MOSTLY known as Plano Road . On the south end, it is known as Lake Highlands Drive, cross Northwest Highway and it becomes Plano Road, go about 8 miles and it is briefly Greenville Ave, Ave K, and Highway 5. It ends in Sherman ...

The North Dallas Tollway is our daily version of NASCAR. The minimum acceptable speed on the Dallas North Toll Road is 85 mph. Anything less is considered downright sissy. It also ends in Sherman .

If asking directions in Irving or SE Dallas , you must have knowledge of Spanish. If in central Richardson or on Harry Hines, Mandarin Chinese will be your best bet. If you stop to ask directions on Gaston or Live Oak, you better be armed... and remember, it's legal to be armed in Texas

The wrought iron on windows near Oak Cliff and Fair Park is not ornamental!!

A trip across town east to west will take a minimum of four hours, although many north/south freeways have unposted minimum speeds of 75.

It is possible to be driving WEST in the NORTH-bound lane of EAST NORTHWEST Highway . Don't let this confuse you.

LBJ is called "The Death Trap" for two reasons: "death" and "trap."

If it's 100 degrees, Thanksgiving must be next weekend. If it's 10 degrees and sleeting/snowing, the Fort Worth Stock Show is going on. If it has rained 6 inches in the last hour, the Byron Nelson Golf Classic is in the second round (if it's Spring) - and it is the Texas State Fair if it's Fall.

If you go to the Fair, pay the $8.00 to park INSIDE Fair Park . Parking elsewhere could cost up to $2500 for damages, towing fees, parking tickets, and possibly a gunshot wound. If some guy with a flag tries to get you to park in his yard, run over him.

Any amusement parks, stadiums, arenas, racetracks, airports, etc., are conveniently located as far away from EVERYTHING as possible so as to allow for ample parking on grassy areas.

Final Warning: Don't Mess With Texas Drivers ... remember, it's legal to Be armed in Texas

on the benefit of open mobile devices

in which the lack of an open hardware ecosystem for hobbyists and experimenters is described and bemoaned; radical ideas espous'd; and a solution to the world's mobile woes is consider'd.

in a different life i was the co-instigator for the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club. it was great fun, and i got to work with some insanely brilliant people, notably Adrian Cocroft and Craig Hughes (formerly of GumStix.) our objective was to support people who were building their own mobile phones, the same way the famous Homebrew Computer Club had supported early innovators in what grew into the PC industry.

we were active for about 2 years between 2006 and 2008, and were, in fact, able to make a home-brew system that could place and receive phone calls and text messages. at least 90% of the credit should go to Craig Hughes and Gordon Kruberg at gumstix. while i was busy getting divorced, Craig, Gordon and Adrian were doing real work.

after demoing our hardware at the Maker Faire 2007, we more or less moved on to other interesting projects. mostly 'cause the iPhone, Android G1 and FIC / OpenMoko Neo 1973 seemed to be doing a MUCH better job at opening up the potential for mobile applications.

i think a lot of us felt we had accomplished our task. we demonstrated what could be done with off the shelf hardware and software and (i hope) we tweaked the "big guys" into realizing there was a huge ecosystem in end-user selectable apps for mobile devices. remember, this was before the iPhone or Droid; the most successful application phone s'til then were the Palm Treo and various WinCE devices. realistically, we were a small amount of gasoline on an already growing fire.

but after a couple years, i'm still mildly disappointed. sure, we have some GREAT application platforms: iPhone, WP7, Android. heck, even BlackBerry looks good.

there's enough competition between the major mobile OSes that we're bound to get an increasing number of cool software features. but mobile hardware is still dominated by a small handful of companies: Apple, HTC, LG and (for the moment) Nokia.

this is an understandable situation. most people buying mobile phones use it to talk and text. whomever can deliver that simple feature set the cheapest will win large markets. an increasing number of people are experimenting with smartphones (iPhone, Droid, etc.) but it's still reasonably small compared to the number of people who just want to gab and text. and sure, as full feature smart phones get cheaper and cheaper, you'll see a lot more people adopting them.

but this isn't the market i'm talking about.

i'm talking about people who want to try out new things with mobile devices. like integrating RFID / near field communication with mobile devices. or adding a DECT radio module to a phone. or experimenting with eInk displays. or stuffing a mobile phone into a small wearable pin shaped like a star-fleet insignia.

and then i read this article: "Meshnets, Freedom Phones and the People's Internet." if you wanted, you could interpret the article as "yet another utopian pipe-dream by a young anarchosyndicalist," and maybe you would be right. but i think there are some pretty important social and business ramifications in this article.

i think what i realized after reading chris' article is that gilmore's quote about the internet applies to mobile phone companies as well. the internet does interpret censorship as damage and does route around it. we learned this in egypt. so my corollary to gilmore's quote would be something like this: "local economies interpret market domination by remote actors as damage and innovate around them."

"local" in this sense can be either geographically local or "local" to a vertical market or local to a concept.

throughout the middle-east right now, we see grass roots movements resisting and toppling repressive and allegedly corrupt regimes. the mubarak government did a reasonably bad job of cutting off the country from the outside completely, but they did cause some turmoil amongst opposition organizers "on the ground."

in about a year, we are told, we'll see a multi-party democracy holding elections. informed opinion is there'll be no one group holding majority power. in this environment, i believe it will be politically difficult for the emergent government to maintain a regulatory regime restrictive enough to include an "internet off switch." my suspicion is the fear of other political actors in the new egypt will trump fears of a second grass roots movement that can take down the new government.

i'm enough of a techno-anarcho-syndicalist to think that's a good thing.

but i wonder, is there an equivalent situation in the mobile marketplace? will the desire to shake off the yoke of Apple's oppressive app review regime lead to an iPhone uprising? will the info-proletariat revolt if/when Google eventually starts being evil and tracking mobile devices to deliver you targeted ads?

okay... maybe i'm overstating it a bit.

but right now we have a mobile infrastructure that's top-down. you want 4G? great. you have to wait for verizon to think your market is important enough. you want to add an RFID reader to mobile device. it sure as hell won't EVER happen on a Verizon phone, so you'll have to wait for T-Mobile to notice your market, add some limited support, then realize there's not enough cash there and abandon you.

for the past year i've been toying with the idea of trying to setup a company to provide LTE or WiMAX support in the San Lorenzo Valley. There's waaay too little ROI to justify this as a commercial entity, but there are enough geeks in the valley that a co-op might be doable. The cost of the equipment is falling rapidly, thanks to Huawei kicking the collective asses of the entrenched players (Ericsson, Nokia-Siemens, etc.)

i think i could convince a few peeps to sign up for VoIP over LTE if there were an off the shelf handset that would support it. but none of the majors will make such a handset if there's a market of less than a million phones.

and this gets me back to thinking about mobile handsets. wouldn't it be fun if there was a "handset kit" you could buy for a couple hundred bucks. think if it like LEGO for mobile phones. you want GSM? fine, you add the GSM brick. you want an OLED display? fine, you add the OLED brick. you can sort of already do this if you're handy with a soldering iron. (just go to sparkfun.com and search for cellular devices.)

but wouldn't it be fun if we had something "for the rest of us," who wanted to mix and match features of our mobile devices, but didn't want to design a new PCB every other week?

if we had something like that, we could experiment with all sorts of crazy "last mile" wireless concepts up here in my valley. protesters in repressive regimes could easily change from a centrally managed SMS/GSM system to... heck... use your imagination here... twitter over wi-fi to iridium uplinks to the interwebs.

the point here is, in terms of technology, protesters in egypt have the same interest in affordable tech experiments as 4G customers in the mountains. the centralized "powers that be" will not offer what we need either for economic or political reasons. maybe it's time to think about a "post-carrier" world?

why? 'cause every time Verizon and T-Mobile tell me they can't do something, it makes me start looking for a way to route around them.

experiments with social media

so i've been curious about second life people's twitter behavior and thought it might be fun to do a few experiments. no no, not talking about evil torturous experiments on defenseless digital animals. and i'm not scraping my social network, getting ready to sell them out to advertisers. i'm just genuinely curious about people's behavior with respect to tweeting and re-tweeting.

the following tests won't be held up by the APA as exemplars of rigorous experimental design. but i hope they'll satisfy some curiosity. also, i should point out that i'm not hiding my intentions by claiming some great reward or a chance to win a bazillion dollars that aren't there. no. i'm offering a few, inexpensive rewards. i'm also paying things in Linden Dollars (L$'s.) this is the game script for second life; it's a lot easier to pay people directly in-world than to mail out checks or deal with PayPal.

experiment 1 : re-tweet this please

my first experiment was this simple tweet:

social experiment. what happens when i ask people to retweet retweet requests in the guise of a social experiment? - please RT!

so i'm basically just asking people to please re-tweet a message. i'm offering no incentives to do so, only the pure joy of participating in my personal experiment. after about eight hours, only two people had re-tweeted this message.

experiment 2 : minor financial reward for re-tweeting

the second experiment was this tweet:

okay. social media experiment 2 : i'll give 50 lindens (each) to the first 10 people who retweet this message.

so i'm changing things up here and providing an incentive. if you re-tweet that message, i'll give you L$ 50. before you get too excited, you should probably note that 50 lindens equates to something around 20 US cents (or US$ 0.20 .) so it's not a really big reward.

i doubt this will be a great shock, but more people re-tweeted this message; after about 4 hours, about 5 people re-tweeted the message. so, it turns out that, at least in my social network, more people will re-tweet a message if there's a personal reward.

another interesting factoid: there was at least one person who re-tweeted this message who i can't see. i believe this means they're protecting their tweets and i'm not following them. people who want to try to get more "twitter buzz" by offering a reward should probably remind folk that if you can't see them, you can't reward them.

experiment 3 : rewarding someone else (a non-profit)

here's my third tweet:

social experiment: if 10 people retweet this message in the next 4 hours, i'll donate L$500 to Bridges for Women, http://sl8.us/gAPHcs4_E

in this case, i'm telling people they'll get no direct reward, but their actions can help out a non-profit. what i didn't really tell people is i planned to donate L$ 500 to Bridges for Women's Second Life presence whether i got the requisite re-tweets or not; it seems like we would be teasing them if we didn't. Also, L$ 500 is about US $2.00, so it's not like we're talking about a huge pile of cash. Still, L$ 500 could be useful if they wanted to spruce up their second life presence a bit with a few inexpensive knick-knacks.

this tweet proved way more popular than the previous two. it took about 2 hours for me to get 10 re-tweets. it's possible, however, this may be because there are just a lot more of my twitter peeps looking at twitter in the early afternoon (pacific time) than in the morning. or it's just that people are more motivated by altruism. or maybe small linden rewards just don't register with people.

experiment 4 : follow me and re-tweet and i'll give you some lindens

with my fourth tweet, i'm getting back to appealing to people's self interest:

social experiment : L$50 to the next 10 new followers who retweet this message. (follow me, then tweet your #secondlife avatar name)

but we're not talking about a lot of cash; remember, L$50 is about US$ 0.20 (20 cents.) also note that i'm telling people to publicly associate their second life and twitter identities. some people may not want to do that. sounds pretty straight-forward, right? yes and no. remember, this is for NEW followers. existing followers, in the immortal words of willy-wonka, "get nothing."

this experiment was crafted in part to avoid the problem with experiment 2 where you couldn't see (or reward) people who were protecting their tweets. you can setup twitter to send you an email message when someone starts following you (in fact, i think that's the default behavior) so you'll always be able to see new followers.

after about an hour, i had 7 re-tweets (though one was from someone whom i think already followed me.) i'm confident it won't take too long to get the last couple new followers.

experiment 5 : lindens for current followers who recruit new followers

the next tweet tries to overcome this last impediment:

social experiment : L$50 for the first 10 existing followers who convince new people to follow me. get new followers to tweet your name.

like previous tweets, we're not talking about a lot of cash. L$50 is about 20 cents. but i was curious if it would affect the outcome.

i actually want to publish this post before people on the east coast start going to sleep, and i just posted this tweet. i'm going to come back with results later with results.

observations

i should probably lead off by reminding people they can observe some of the results themselves. i don't protect my tweets, so you can click on these links to see the individual tweets. if you're using "new twitter," you should see a list of people who have re-tweeted the tweet in question.

• experiment 1 : re-tweet this please
• experiment 2 : minor financial reward for re-tweeting
• experiment 3 : rewarding someone else (a non-profit)
• experiment 4 : follow me and retweet and i'll give you some lindens
• experiment 5 : lindens for current followers who recruit new followers

the second observation i made is that i'm capable of producing some really gawd-aweful social experiments. if i tried submitting these experiments and "results" to a peer-reviewed journal, i'm pretty sure they would be rejected. if i tried to submit them as part of a class in social experimental design, i would be happy to get a D.

"real" experiments start with hypotheses; i didn't do this. they then describe what the testing methodology is going to be; i kinda-sorta did this, but in a haphazard way. and they usually describe how the hypothesis will be confirmed or refuted BEFORE conducting the experiment. i totally didn't do this.

so... observation 2: i'm not really doing a good job at being a social scientist here. but honestly, it's okay. these are anecdotal observations and i never claimed to be a trained social scientist. i know little of how sociological / anthropological experiments are constructed; just enough to be confident i'm doing it wrong here.

the third observation: i think twitter is caching the HTML of individual tweet pages. i noticed that if i used the twitter web page to see who's been re-tweeting things, it seemed to change considerably less often than if i used the API.

more important observations

maybe more important are the following observations:

1. it seems more of my followers are active in the afternoon. yes. this is a completely unscientific statement. i'm conflating time with message content. had i repeated the same message in the morning and afternoon, we could have an "apples to apples" comparison.
2. my followers seem to be somewhat altruistic. pat yourselves on the back, twitter followers, you seem to be eager to give away my hard-earned lindens to charities. seriously though, it took only a couple minutes to get 5 people re-tweet the message in experiment 3 and we finished the challenge with a couple hours to spare.
3. larger sums seem more interesting to people than small sums. when i offered L$50 rewards, uptake was a little slow. slower than when i offered to donate L$500 to a charity. so maybe larger sums motivate people more than smaller sums.
4. different experiments didn't seem to affect each other. after tweeting the L$500 challenge in experiment 3, i waited to see if there would be more interest in experiment 2. i was thinking we might see a couple people looking at the "big tweet" and then notice the others. but no dice.
5. some of my followers think i'm a rube. perhaps they're not aware of just how high-brow embedding roald dahl references in pseudo-scientific observations is. but at least one follower indicated i was behaving like a dork for running these experiments.
6. way more of my followers use the #NewTwitter re-tweet feature than copy and paste messages into new tweets. this shouldn't be a shocker, it's a lot easier on the twitter web page to hit the "re-tweet" link than it is to copy or paste. however, other twitter clients make "re-tweeting with comments" much easier. still, it looks like most people chose the easy "single click re-tweeting" route.

applying these observations

let me start this section by saying you're crazy to use these results as justification for any particular action. it would be nice to say "aha! evidence PROVES larger sums lead to more followers in twitter!" but i just don't see that being an interesting or particular defensible statement based on this data. that being said, the anecdotal data collected might be used to inform a more rigorous set of experiments.

but the data, anecdotal such that it is, might suggest a few "truths."

1. your network may respond better at specific times of the day. i'm going to speculate that for most people, the majority of their human followers are in the same time zone as themselves. tweeting at 3AM is simply going to reach fewer people since fewer people are awake. it might be a cool idea for someone to come up with a tool to see when their twitter followers are most active. actually, i think most twitter analytics packages do this already.
2. if you're going to give money away, people respond better to larger sums. i speculate this is because "more is always better" when it comes to cash. a more interesting way to spin this is that maybe some people just filter out low value commercial tweets. for instance, if someone told me "i'll give you a US$1 gift certificate for amazon" and i happened to be in the middle of an involved task, i may simply choose to ignore it. but if they said, "retweet this within 5 minutes for a US$500 amazon gift certificate," i would probably drop what i was doing and start retweeting. so i'm hypothesizing the existence of a "value point" for each person. rewards below that point are not worth the effort. i would be very interested to see someone come up with a "real" experiment for how to determine where this value point is for users.
3. multiple promotions may have a synergistic effect, but i didn't see that here. i'm going to speculate there are a few people out there who even though they're not interested in a particular promotion, after seeing a it, they'll click on a "more info" or "other promotions" button or look at someone's twitter profile. they may find a promotion or tweet that's more in line with their needs or has a better value proposition for them. i guess what i'm saying is, i hypothesize promotions like the experimental tweets i used here get certain people's attention. while you have their attention, it's easy to convince a few of them to look at other promotions. but i think you have a limited window of opportunity when you have their attention. i spread these tweets out over the course of a full day and had pretty poor luck getting cross-pollenization.

so that's it: my deep thoughts about promotions and twitter. please ping me if you wind up doing "real" research in this field, i'd love to hear about it.

update 1

here's a quick update on the last experiment. so far NO ONE has retweeted the last tweet. this could be due to fatigue (seriously, how long can i keep asking my twitter followers to retweet things.) or it could be because it involves recruiting people to do things. the first four experiments required people simply to press a button. but the last experiment required people to go out, find someone to recruit, and get them to do something.

so maybe we can add one more important observation:

7. you get more responses when tasks are easier to perform. the rewards i'm offering are on the order of L$50 or US$0.20 (not accounting for exchange fees.) maybe it's unreasonable to assume people will (as @shava23 says) "risk reputation for 20 cents." or maybe my followers aren't the recruiting type. or maybe you're not properly motivating existing followers by saying you'll reward new followers. discuss.

why doesn't the second life viewer use a game controller

i've got a few minutes between meetings this morning, so i thought i would just rant. comments are always welcome, of course, but i doubt i'll say anything radical today.

so this is a topic that's bugged me for at least four or five years: why isn't there better support for game controllers and joysticks in second life?

i know.. i know.. the SL viewer has had support for game controllers since days of yore and i'm just whining to suggest it's less than stellar. and before i sound like a complete ass, let me just say, the people that added joystick and game controller support to the SL viewer are ossm, ossm people who did an ossm, ossm job.

but it always seemed to me that game controllers are "second class citizens" in most of the SL viewer domain. if i had my way, you could fire up the SL viewer, and start interacting with the world via a bluetooth (or USB) game controller and microphone.

even with the current support, you still have to interact with the system by way keyboard and mouse far to often to be able to kick back and have a quality "game controller mostly" experience.

the reason i find the game controller + microphone use case compelling is that it's in-line with user expectations about how a virtual world should operate. (i'm saying that, but i really, honestly have no data to back that up. if someone has data one way or another, i'd love to hear about it.)

i demand freedom from the tyranny of the keyboard! but when you look at the second life web viewer beta site, the video they play while setting things up shows avatars typing away.

i guess my point here is, thought second life started as a virtual world where typing was an integral part of the social experience, voice is overtaking (or has overtaken) keyboard use. optimizing for an experience which supports a more naturalized interaction with virtual environments just seems like a good way to attract more users.

okay. i feel better now for having gotten that out. would love to hear what other people think.

boiling the ocean and the profit motive

so VWRAP seems to be heading for the historical trash heap. there's been a little bit of conversation on the VWRAP list about rechartering. morgaine dinova has a wiki where she's working on a replacement intro draft, but after 3 1/2 months she's produced 681 words (the original VWRAP draft was around 9776 words.) at this rate, based solely on word count, we'll have to wait another 50 months. but i'm not hopeful the powers that be at the IETF will leave the working group open for another 4 years waiting on a single draft.

christa lopes posted a hatchet job on metaverse ink denouncing VWRAP as a linden-only club, worthy only of scorn. the article is largely inaccurate, being the memoir of events by a person who actively chose to not be involved. but as max ehrmann reminded us, it's good policy to listen to everyone.

but before VWRAP passes from people's minds, i wanted to offer a few notes about it's motivation; about why there there was VWRAP. diva and morgaine will tell you it's objective was to enable large scale interoperability between different virtual worlds, and that it failed miserably. nothing could be farther from the truth.

while it's true that VWRAP failed generally, it was never intended to be "all things to all people" in terms of virtual world interop. VWRAP was intended to provide a set of interoperability standards between hosts that implement services that created a "Second Life-Like" experience. you can actually read the group's charter, the OGPX mailing list and the original intro doc. it never says "we're going to provide interop between virtual worlds." it talks a lot about services and how they interact. so while you could use VWRAP to provide interop between worlds, that would be a side effect, not a stated goal.

before the VWRAP working group was chartered, we chartered a pair of "BoF Sessions." these are informal "Birds Of a Feather" meetings where people cuss and discuss the relative merits of forming a working group to work on some particular standardization regime. we started back in early 2009 with the MMOX BoF session.

david levine and i co-chaired the MMOX BoF and proposed a relatively narrow scope: standards for a second life-like world. we invited a LOT of people to participate from a LOT of different online game and virtual worlds companies. many simply said, "we don't think standards in this space are interesting" and didn't come. some said "we think standards are interesting, but don't want to limit the discussion to second life-like worlds."

because people like jon watte (then of forterra) and heiner wolf (of webkins) were generally interested, we put them on the agenda to talk about things they think should be standardized. after a fair amount of discussion on the MMOX list and at the MMOX BoF, we couldn't find consensus. but there's nothing wrong with that -- the world is big enough for multiple, even conflicting, opinions.

lisa dusseault proposed we that the "second life-like" camp go back and propose a second BoF that focused on "second life-like" virtual worlds while MMOX was maintained as a more general VW interop group. because i was more interested in "second life-like" worlds, i went on to propose the OGPX BoF.

the next summer, barry leiba, jon peterson and i co-chaired the OGPX BoF. this meeting was focused solely on OGP and "second life-like" worlds. representatives from IBM, linden and adobe were present while reps from intel participated remotely. the OpenSim core contributers were notable by their absence at this meeting.

following the OGPX BoF, a number of us hashed out the group's focus on the mailing list. in september of 2009 we reached consensus and agreed on a charter. we agreed that the working group would focus on the definition of inter-operable services that collaborate to render a virtual world. we also changed the name to VWRAP 'cause people thought the name "Open Grid Protocol" implied we were working on protocols to control general computing grids or cloud computing environments. we also agreed the space available for the group's charter wasn't large enough to contain all aspects of the group's work, so we also agreed the VWRAP intro would extend and refine the charter.

so people who tell you VWRAP was about "big I" Interoperability are fibbing. interestingly, the people who like to say these things, did not attend any of the meetings.

so why did we take the particular path we did? what makes service-level interop interesting?

i can only speak for myself with any authority, but here's what i gleaned from talking with David Levine and Suzy Deffeyes at IBM and Mic Bowman at Intel. let me apologize up front for any inaccuracies. david, suzy, mic -- let me know if i'm way off base here.

many of us work for technology companies. our work allows us to change people's lives for the better by proper application of technology. the world being an imperfect place, we sometimes have to resort to crass commercialism to feed ourselves. for the most part, we get to make cool products for discerning consumers and the money just happens. but at the end of the day, we must justify our actions to our investors or our directors.

one way we felt we could provide a legitimate service to the community while doing things that might be profitable to our investors was to start building a virtual world economy. it's pretty easy to see where people make money here. intel likes to sell CPUs that run virtual worlds. linden sells virtual land to people who want to inhabit virtual worlds. IBM makes coin by creating cutting edge virtual experiences for their global services customers. what you should note here is that no one company dominates this domain. there's no "apple" of virtual worlds; no one company makes CPUs, hosts online services and provides professional services.

this is likely due to virtual worlds being a somewhat immature and niche market. by niche i mean the market is much smaller than it could be and by immature, i mean we're at the beginning of the mass adoption of virtual experiences (which could be MMORPGs, Virtual Worlds or Augmented Reality experiences.) linden has long professed a believe that open source, open protocols and open interfaces will ultimately make them more profitable and make the industry more mature.

a number of people have pointed out similarities between the structure of the "virtual worlds market" now and that of online service providers in the late 80's / early 90's. like early AOL, Compuserve, The Source, Prodigy, BISON and others, Second Life is largely a walled garden. and everyone remembers what happened to the walled gardens: the ISPs ate their collective lunches.

when i pitched linden execs on the idea of a dedicated team inside linden to work on "open" protocols and interfaces, the refrain was "in five years we'll want to be known as the 'google' of virtual worlds and not the 'Compuserve' of virtual worlds." i have long been smoking from Eric von Hippel's pipe and believe that in the long run, "open" systems will always find ways to survive in business environments where walled gardens fail.

i am still a strong believer in the "make the pie higher" model where linden sacrifices a bit of virtual land revenue in exchange for the right to sell to other people's avatars. linden could, if they wanted to, throw open the gates and allow second life avatars to teleport into hypergrid regions (or vice versa.) linden is burdened somewhat by technologies, processes and a social contract that predates this virtual glastnost, but the problems are not insurmountable.

linden's participation in VWRAP was a gamble based on the belief: opening up one small part of the virtual world at a time would allow second life and its peers to grow together. taking a slow but steady path towards complete openness, concentrating on a small bit of functionality each quarter allows everyone to benefit.

david levine referred to this as "boiling the ocean one thimble at a time." start small with a constrained scope and just keep iterating, making incremental improvements.

some critics like prokofy neva (aka catherine fitzpatrick) argue that "open anything"is one step above godless communism. if i understand her arguments properly, she contends the ultimate goal of the open source and open protocol movement in virtual worlds is to institute global virtual collectivism where the "free culture" bolsheviks enforce global ownership of all virtual goods. (of course, i could be missing some of the finer points.) and she's probably partially right. there are plenty of free culture advocates that would prefer to see the concept of intellectual property consigned to the ash-heap of history.

but we don't have to make that mistake. open source, open protocols and open interfaces can still serve the global imperialist hegemony. or not. the fact of the matter is "open" is orthogonal to "free culture." one of the critical components of VWRAP was the trust model. it was discussed at length at IETF meetings and on the VWRAP mailing list, but sadly, was never documented to my satisfaction.

the trust model allowed individual service owners to decide whom they trusted and for what kinds of activities. for instance, if you ran a commercial asset service and you were worried that assets hosted by your service were in grave danger if they were ever instantiated in simulators run by the pirate party in sweden, then the trust model gave VWRAP implementations the tools to deny access to the pirate bay's servers.

that being said, open source and creative commons licenses serve an insanely useful purpose. to build protocols and systems that does not allow content owners the ability to chose the licenses their products were released with is just plain stupid.

so when people come back in a couple years and try to build another virtual worlds standardization group, just remember the following things about VWRAP:

• we weren't trying to boil the ocean. we weren't trying to ensure interoperability between worlds. we just wanted to define a few services and string them together.
  
  
• we wanted to support different IPR regimes ranging from rabid free-cultureists to DRM fans. we felt it wasn't our place as protocol designers to decide what license people used. we just wanted to deliver the bits and allow the endpoints to decide whether they trusted the person on the other side of a connection request.

thanks for listening.

a platform for a compelling, immersive 3d virtual world

so Tateru Nino's just penned a nice, short blog post: Linden Lab Can't turn Second Life into an Engaging Digital Experience.

go read it now, i'll wait.

okay. back? great! let me add a few notes.

in Second Life's early days, it was pretty clear Linden thought of it's creation as an online service for the creation, display and sale of 3d content. back then, you heard a lot of people at the lab saying things like "Your World, Your Imagination." i've heard people say uncharitable things about Linden's founder Philip Rosedale, but seriously, whatever his faults, he was VERY good at internalizing and communicating Second Life's fundamental message: "This is YOUR playground, Linden is here to make sure the plumbing works."

throughout the early-mid 2000's, the SL community rambled along, doing cool things, showing them off, building an early community. after the hype cycle started kicking in, corporate america showed up and a few of their denizens thought (and i paraphrase here): "oh hey, check it out. it's like WebEX except i can build 3d doo-dads to demonstrate concepts and since it's a 'game' i can get away with looking like something other than a corporate drone."

as IBM and Cisco and other corporate heavy-weights started looking at SL as a tool for business operations (rather than just marketing,) you started to hear a lot of talk about SL as a "platform." up 'til this time people had used the word "platform" synonymously with "service." but now the big guys wanted to run a server or two behind their firewalls so corporate secrets wouldn't have to leave the corporate intranet. there's absolutely nothing wrong with this concept; but it's not what SL was initially built to do.

a couple "one off" solutions were built for various corporate customers, but their features were never integrated into the main-line SL service offerings. Linden management was caught in a dilemma: their casual consumer customer base was exploding in 2006, but corporate users seemed like a great market. Linden's challenge was how to increase stability and capability for consumer users while adding features for corporate customers.

around 2006 Linden, IBM, Cisco, Intel and a few other corporate heavies started talking about interoperability in virtual worlds. this eventually led to the Virtual World Interoperability Forum. the VWIF was supposed to produce detailed functional descriptions of how virtual worlds work so there was a good chance virtual worlds operated by different companies could talk to each other. the VWIF eventually sputtered, giving rise to the Second-Life focused: Architecture Working Group (AWG), Open Grid Protocol (OGP) and eventually the Virtual Worlds Region Agent Protocol (VWRAP) working group in the IETF.

but please note, when a crowd of network interoperability people use the term "platform," they don't mean the same thing as when second life users (and even most Linden management.) Second Life management had used the term "platform" to mean, "hey, here's a service you can use to do cool stuff." they did not mean "hey, we have a technology platform you can download, extend and deploy."

but throughout the latter 2000's when Linden was working on their "behind the firewall solution" for corporate customers, there was a small kernel of Linden employees that did intend to make a real-life, honest to goodness "technology platform." the idea was to corral linden's server software into an appliance customers could plonk down in the middle of their data center. viola! instant virtual world populated only by corporate users.

for a lot of different reasons, this turned out to be harder than initially suspected. one reason (certainly not the only one) was the difficulty of maintaining two distinct code bases: one for corporate, behind the firewall use and another for the consumer solution. because Second Life was always considered a "service," there were a wide variety of assumptions the code could make about network architecture and peer service availability. and it turns out that some of the assumptions you make for a huge virtual world with 85,000 concurrent users are not the same as the assumptions you make for a couple simuators and a smattering of "behind the firewall" users.

whatever the reasons, the project to convert the Second Life "service" into a behind the firewall "platform" failed. (though it should be noted a lot of very skilled Lindens did a lot of awesome work to shoehorn Second Life into an appliance.)

about the same time Second Life/Enterprise (SL/E) was being discontinued, Linden's official support for an open virtual worlds interoperability protocol evaporated as well. sic transit gloria munde; at least there's still OpenSim.

but what relevance does this have to the modern world?

does it mean there's no market for "behind the firewall" virtual worlds?

does it mean that Second Life as a "platform" is an architectural dead end?

what about content? and the network effect?

let me offer my two cents about these questions.

first off, Second Life is not and nor has it ever been a "technology platform." Second Life is a "service." it was coded by people who made certain assumptions about their environment (like where the asset servers existed, that peer services were "trustworthy" and what features end users demanded.)

so my first assertion is, the failure of Second Life/Enterprise (SL/E) and VWRAP does nothing to refute the existence of a market for a well-developed, well-supported "behind the firewall" virtual world solution. SL/E's failure simply means it's damn hard to cram the Second Life code base into a small number of servers. in fact, it's so hard that the NRE and support costs are waaaay out of line with any income the service could generate.

i also believe that Second Life, as a technology platform, is dead. as a service? sure, it's still cranking; there are a bazillion people (myself included) who log into SL to socialize and play. what's more, i think Linden also thinks SL as a technology platform is dead. recent actions from Linden management make it clear they're putting all their resources into making SL as compelling an online service as possible.

Tateru Nino speculated that a team of crafty engineers could rebuild something like Second Life in about 6 weeks. i'm more inclined to say it would take 18 months before you get something close to SL's performance and concurrency. were i to develop a business plan for a startup doing more or less the same thing Linden's doing, but with a better, cleaner architecture and the ability to deploy as a real technology platform, i would estimate about 15 man years to beta launch. taking a completely arbitrary figure of $200,000 per man year, you wind up with a $3 million price tag.

so this has got to be how the VCs, angels and midnight engineers are looking at it: given Linden's flat subscriber growth, why would someone risk $3x10^6 on a new virtual world platform?

how 'bout something like a "Social Virtual World" that uses identity information from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (or even your own corporate LDAP server) ??? that might be compelling.

or even a "virtual world technology framework" that niche application developers could easily extend. that seems like it would be a good idea.

maybe even a "content framework for 2d and 3d experiences" where you could easily develop some kind of 3d model using blender, maya, etc. and have it automagically uploaded to the cloud where virtual world servers could easily import it. bonus points if you work through the intellectual property issues.

so there are a lot of interesting things a VC or angel could fund and an entrepreneur could build, but rebuilding Second Life? no thanks, i'll pass.

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.