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Actually - and for some of my readers maybe surprisingly - I think that Linden Lab has a strategy for the coming years and Second Life's place in the Metaverse.

In parallel, it is interesting to see, that Linden Lab created a "Department of Public Works" earlier this year, which is responsible for "beautifying Second Life" - after a long long time, where the company just flooded the market with more and more "land" (servers) which quickly were converted into huge trailer parks.

I believe, that they are all part of a unified strategy to position Second Life as a standard tool for creating and accessing the future Web 3D as well as to position Linden Lab as one - but not the only - important service provider.

The problem for Linden Lab is, that they target so many dfferent audiences. And it is impossible, to offer all of these audiences ONE single product, a product that will make all of them happy.

ut, comparing SL to "The West" (as Mitch Kapor did it in his birthday speech), please consider: not all of the important groups and personalities in the American West of the 1840s or so would be well respected citizens in the California of 2008

a second important audience, Linden Lab is targeting, too, is the corporate audience, the educational institutions, etc. Despite Linden Lab's propaganda, this is a very small market today (the majority of earnings comes from consumers) but it is growing. This audience needs more "control & security". If Linden Lab wants to succeed in these markets, they have to provide that - not only on seperate estates, because the vast society of Second Life CAN be an interesting aspect for some of these projects, too :) Not all of them work best in a walled garden.

For those who want a walled garden, I am sure, that Linden Lab will soon offer some options which go well beyond what is possible on private estates. It will be possible to host closed sub-grids in Linden Lab's data centers in 2009. I am very certain of that.

Linden Lab will offer one. Others will do that, too. There will be "adult grids" (they are already being built). There will be grids for many, many sub-cultures and those will certainly not have the same set of rules like Linden Labs SL has (now or then). And there will be corporate "Intraworlds", educational and marketing grids, tightly controlled and partly or fully closed off to the public.

Then again, it looked like most of the crowd was complaining about the excruciatingly painful lag.

Combine that with a confusing little interface and it was clearly anything but a “fun” experience. And remember that we were all cheating. Everybody on the “Linden Lab” room at that time was a veteran Second Life resident; we’re not exactly newbies with virtual worlds. We have tried several, and in some cases, use different VWs regularly and every day. We’re used to lag, to semi-functional software, to application crashes (several people crashed during the few hours I was online), to things not loading, to silly mistakes that everybody does. We’re also used to the insanely complex (but virtually rich) interface of Second Life, and use computers and their complex applications to accomplish tasks every day. And, of course, we all are very open minded and eager to try new things out.

Lively was anything but Lively — except for the fact that you were in a visually unappealing chatroom with a lot of friends or at least acquaintances from one’s journey across the Metaverse. Like I usually say, most virtual worlds I’ve tried only capture my attention for about 15 minutes, and it’s up to the developers to make sure that I enjoy the first 15 minutes

The “cartoonish” look (which is so great for rendering things quickly) is also something that baffles me. I can’t believe that Google is targeting the teen population.

After all, Mike Elgan from ComputerWorld claims: What that means is that companies will be able to re-create their office and meeting space, and events companies can create or re-create entire conferencing facilities. Your avatar can wander around, see the “booths,” check out the conferences or interface with other “attendees” — all in virtual space.  Really, Mike?… They might do that, but definitely not on Lively.

Even a MoU representative (who, as said, did create a room for a client in Lively already) considers that opinion an “interesting hypothesis”. Put into other words, not even MoU seriously believes that article, and it’s just one of a series — which, if I didn’t know the reputation of the magazines writing them, I’d just believe they were infodumps straight out of Google’s marketing department. The claims are just ludicrous.

If Google has more plans for Lively, they’re not telling — and instead are offering a terrible product, way below their usual offerings.

So why are people so enthusiastic about Google Lively? I have only one explanation: it has the brand “Google” behind it.

As a 3D-chatroom-embedded-on-the-web, it falls behind almost every other product and application I have tried in the past 4 years, no matter where you wish to find something good. The animations are goofy and cartoonish, to the point of extreme irritability.

The interface is not obvious, but then again, SL suffers from the same problem, and it’s just a question of getting used to it.

There is no content creation at all; no way to integrate it with anything; no programming/scripting; no chat tools (even GTalk, known to have the least features just after SL’s chat system, has far more!).

And, more important: no support, a terrible forum system (I can’t answer on half the threads), no helpful people around… if you bump into a Google Developer, they’re very likely very friendly (or so everybody who met them claims), but that’s all you get.

Google’s webpage for Lively is even more minimalistic than anything else they’ve launched before

And there is nothing on the Google developers’ sites either.

Searching for the “most popular” rooms leads to the inevitable: the most rated one was a dance club (since you can stream music) and on the top ten list you had a lot of sex-related rooms as well.

This was a terrible disappointment. I admit to being very naive. I was expecting something with at least the quality of Vivaty which at least has pretty decent avatars

but using SketchUp to import at least crude models. Even importing plywood cubes would be nice! Instead, we have to rely on the “Catalog”, created by a limited group of Google developers.

Some SL residents managed to talk to the Google Developers, and these said that there was a 3D Max plugin to allow the creation of content into Lively. The plugin works 90% of the time but it can only improve. There is no idea or plan or announcement on if that plugin will be released to the public.

Google is known to be “the company that does no evil”. But looking from my point of view — an enthusiast of the 3D Social Web — I feel cheated. We were doing great in opening the minds to millions of users to look at the Metaverse as Second Life defines it as the next human-machine interface for all our tasks. Granted, we all know it’ll take ages — another decade at least — but we all are here for the long term. Instead, what we get from one of the industry giants is that “3D is bad, embedding cartoons on Web pages is good”. Why? Well, it should be obvious. Google is the market leader in (2D) web search content — both text and images (and soon video). While there is an HTML-based World-Wide Web, Google will be a major player in it — always.

I don’t think there are coincidences. In about 24 hours (not in the same day for the timezone-impaired), Sun’s Wonderland gets slashdotted, Linden Lab announces the massive growth of Second Life and demonstrates the interoperability between their main grid and IBM’s OpenSim-based grid, and Google launches their own virtual world, Lively. July 8th was definitely the Day of the Metaverse!

So, like probably billions of people around the world, I tried to join in to Lively and see what’s all about. Not to be turned down by the lack of Mac support

So, there you have it. Second Life, in my opinion, gains from the fact that it lets the adults play as they choose as well as work as they choose. The fact there's a market for sex toys drives innovation in Second Life, and supports the business and education communities too. Although the press would, at least sometimes, have you believe it's a playground for perverts, so is the atomic world. But I do rather suspect if you remove the sex play entirely, you remove one of the things that, whilst it draws unwelcome attention, drives Second Life to be a success.

Signing up to Second Life is more like taking someone who has basically no computer experience and saying "learn the internet" - there are lots of steps along the way, moments that are critical to whether they will continue or not, but there are lots of skills to go from seeing your first web-page to signing up to a forum, RSSing a blog or two, generating a web-page with HTML, CSS and jquery... and that's the challenge of learning Second Life.

While Reuters thinks that the story has moved on from Second Life, CNN and many others beg to differ. The broadcaster now has an even larger presence in SL. Rather than send in a reporter as a corresponent in-world, CNN relies on SL residents to report their own news as citizen journalists for its iReport site. CNN.com senior producer Lila King said that Second Life iReporters have posted 376 stories since it launched a year ago, but that relatively small number did lead to a number of stories on written by CNN.com producers (including this one about relationships in-world). King Since iReport.com launched in Feb. 2008, Second Life iReporters have posted 376 stories. It's probably worth noting that "in-world" iReporters actually began sending stories when the iReport SL hub launched in November 2007, but we don't have an accurate count of stories submitted before iReport.com launched. King said that SL has been more than just a story-generating tool for CNN's iReport team; it's also helped them learn to nurture an online community. "We've started to see a new benefit of being in Second Life: it gives us a place to polish our skills in community building," King said. "Newsrooms everywhere, ours included, are trying to learn how to foster meaningful, two-way conversations with their audiences. When we hold our virtual news meetings every Tuesday afternoon (2 pm Second Life Time/5 pm ET) with the Second Life iReport community, that's exactly what we're doing: listening and interacting in real-time, offering feedback and courting new ideas along the way."

One thing that has survived the hype is the virtual economy of Second Life and other online worlds and gaming environments, where people sell virtual goods with game-based money that can be converted to real money. BusinessWeek's Hof believes that's a story that has staying power. "The notion of virtual economies is already becoming a solid business model for many game companies, and even social networks like Facebook -- by some accounts up to $2 billion in revenues -- so that seems like a trend that has some legs, and it's one you can credit Second Life with proving as much as anyone," Hof said. "And of course, the idea of user-generated content is huge today on a number of fronts, though Second Life is just one example of that."

"I describe the mistake companies made like this: Imagine you've never been to Manhattan. You cross the George Washington Bridge, and someone hands you a guidebook. The first place you're going is not the Reebok store."

She calmly explained that the previous failures of Second Life were a result of not harnessing the medium appropriately

The Weather Channel, Colgate, and CareerBuilder.com have figured out how to interact with Second Life's virtual denizens in ways that impact real-world attitudes.

Why A-list companies are returning to the virtual world.

a place to engage customers.

West has rewritten the rules of corporate marketing on Second Life.

i3D Tools at English Village Holoteaching™ Virtual holodecks enable teachers to "Holo-teach™." Holoteaching™ is a term we use to describe teaching using a holodeck. Plain and simple. We'd love to do this in the real world, but since real world technology is not yet available we are doing it in SL. Holoteaching™ provides a number of advantages for our teachers. Namely - context.  If you've ever taught a language class to a group of students, you will understand the importance of context.   For example, if a student was, say, going to Italy for a vacation, and wanted to study how to order some food - they could easily pick up a book on Italian language and memorize the necessary phases.  If however, they were actually able to do a trial run - and actually sit down IN an Italian restaurant BEFORE they went on vacation, the likelihood of a good meal would most definitely increase. This is EXACTLY what holoteaching provides - an avenue for teachers to immerse students into rich role play scenarios where the walls, floors, and ceilings are textured to match what they are learning! Talk about fun!

Holo-teaching also allows transforms our classrooms into versatile meeting spaces.  If a teacher needs to provide office hours, or meet with the president, or a college across the globe, they can easily transform their classroom into the appropriate space.  Need a meeting room? No problem, click on meeting rooms, and choose from our selection. You can't find a meeting room you like? No problem, build it yourself, and our engineers will program it into the holodeck for you!  Need a library to do research on educational technology? Load our research lab, and have the walls filled with links to real world research portals on the web!  The options are endless!

Interactive White boards English Village also makes use of several interactive white boards in Second Life. This allows our teachers to import Real World content from their PowerPoint presentations.  Once loaded, teachers can flip through each slide easily like they would in a normal class setting.  During conferences, our teachers also have the option to allow their audience, or guests to import and share their own PowerPoint slides during the meeting.