Second Lives
Linden Lab is releasing the source code for Second Life under the GNU GPL. Shunning modesty, they equate this with the release of Mosaic and the growth of the World Wide Web.
A lot of the Second Life development work currently in progress is focused on building the Second Life Grid — a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups.
And, well, maybe this is as big as the open source release of Mosaic. What if organizations, private citizens, libraries started hosting their own Second Life grids? I think that would be pretty swell–assuming computers that can easily handle SL access become very affordable, or people start hosting SL grids that are more friendly to “low-tech” computers.
January 8th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
OK, I admit it - I simply cannot get into Second Life. I don’t get it. I think perhaps it’s a good thing I don’t get it - like I need one more online activity to suck up all my time…
Does this make me a bad geek?
January 8th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
No, I pretty much feel the same way. I think the overall experience (a 3-D avatar in a 3-D environment) is amazing, and the fact that you can make yourself look like almost anything and fly around is great. But after you get over that, it seems like I was just wandering around and occasionally chatting with people, which I can do on the reg’lar ol’ 2-D internet.
But then, the World Wide Web in 1994 wasn’t all that exciting either (unless you were a devoted follower of Kibo or hot for Star Trek fan sites). I think there’s some potential in SL. If people take the source code and start doing weird and wacky things with it…well, that excites me.
I think of it this way: 1994–GeoCities, 2006–WordPress; 2006–Second Life, 2018–?