Chris Car

The metaverse is a term used in the book Snow Crash, written by Neal Stephenson (1992). So, for example Second Life is one example - or the first popular example - of an implementation of the metaverse. And today I came accross a blog post which gives a funny forecast of the metaverses. Check it out here
(”Blizzard will release a World of Warcraft operating system, Joi Ito is named CEO”).

And there is also a quite interesting podcast with Joi Ito talking about the future of the metaverse. Load it here.

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I just read here that Second Life starts to cash money for inhabitants who want to use their real name within Second Life. At the moment you have to choose a fixed second name from a drop down box (like my Second Life name: “Noh”). The first name can be chosen freely at the moment (mine is “Ioobe Noh”).

But I don’t like to pay for using my real name in Second Life. I already pay for the land which I own. That’s fair enough.

I guess if Second Life - or Linden Lab, the company behind - will invent more ways to cache the people, it will get less interesting for many inhabitants. It could be that one day, people start build their own virtual world software and everyone can create an island by just installing a server software or just a client software, and they are there, without paying an additional fee. I don’t pay to use the Apache web server, why not having a free and open source virtual world server, connected to the other million servers of other inhabitants?

Link

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I am currently building the meidia meeting room… I will keep you informed. Visit us at Nereid (24/207/29)

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Telus got its office in Second Life a while ago. Now Vodafone is planning to open its island in Second Life later this year. They even plan to connect mobile services with Second Life. They hired the agency Rivers Run Red to build their presence.

Interesting that mobile network operators are one of the first corporations which head into the virtual world.

Link

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Just found an interesting interview with Philip Rosedale, who is the founder and CEO of Second Life. His job is - as he said - to explain what Second Life actually is:

Ask yourself this: if I came to you and I told you I had a product to sell you, and this product was this magical non-technological thing where every day you could go into a quiet room in your house and you could close your eyes and open them again, finding yourself in the body of another person. A person who lives somewhere else, a totally different person. You can walk around in that person’s life and do whatever you like. Make money, get married, start a business. How much would you pay for that? Is that compelling? Even if I told you that you couldn’t choose who you were going to be? You’d still want to do it. That’s interesting, our desires to be and become someone else. I find that fascinating.

He mentioned some interesting numbers about Second Life: in 2006 there are 9,000 landowners, 80 sq miles, about as big as Amsterdam, 20 million objects, 20 terabytes of user created content, 13 teraflops of simulation. Wow. And Second Life is built of about 3,000 servers. Sorry, I am a tech freak sometimes, this sounds so impressive to me!

The type of person using Second Life is almost gender balanced, early adopters but not necessarily a programmer or technologists. 44% is female usage… 36% of signups are women, but when you look at usage hours, women use Second Life so much more than men do, to the degree that 44% of the usage hours are by women.

Interesting. Are men not good at expressing themselves visually, in a 3D envirionment? Or do most of men think that Second Life is more like a “female thing”?

Link (via WMMNA)

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