Alex Barnett blog : secondlife

CopyBot and Napsterization of Matter

alexbarnett — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 19:28:00 GMT

Last year I wrote up a post called 'Napsterization of Matter - A Thought Exercise'. The point was to consider the social and economic impact of a technology could allow real world objects to be copied and rendered by anyone without restraint.

It seems that this scenario is being played out the Second Life virtual world. 'CopyBot' is the culprit:

"CopyBot allows the user to create a replication of an object, including textures, that is fully permissive. Needless to say this product has caused tremendous worry among content creators who want to understand how its use may possibly affect their business. In particular, they are concerned about theft of their creations, and the potential for unscrupulous people to undercut their prices and essentially take away their business."

The discussion goes on regarding the impact to the Second Life ecomony and the analogies to the real world. Ralph Koster' take is interesting (via TechMeme). In fact, this paragraph sounds an awful lot like the advice one might have provided traditional software vendors and content businesses a few years ago given the advent of the internet (i.e. build Software and Content as a Service):

"Microtransactions for digital assets and virtual goods is a rising, potentially multibillion dollar industry. To succeed, entrepreneurs who are building networked systems based on user content (be they citizens of Second Life or the makers of virtual worlds themselves) must realize that anything displayable is copyable; the value lies instead in service and in server-side functionality. Content is like songs around a campfire: destined to be enjoyed for free. Those who build businesses around hosting campfires would be wise to focus on making the campfire experience great, rather than charging listeners by the song."

Those unreal tube taxes

alexbarnett — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 19:32:00 GMT

Looks like governments are going to look into them tubes again...the virtual commerce sort this time.

I wonder how Ted Stevens is going to try and explain what Second Life commerce is all about...

"...so, them tubes see, pass little coins through them...not really coins see, and not real tubes either, but unreal coins that go through those unreal tubes. At one end is an unreal ATM tube socket, and at the other end are unreal people who get those unreal tube-coins out of them unreal tubes into their tube pocket sockets that are un-unreal. We're missing out on all those tubular unreal commerce!"

Virtual evangelism

alexbarnett — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:49:00 GMT

Amazon's web services evangelist Jeff Barr is innovating once more...

"Last night I did my second-ever Amazon Web Services presentation from within Second Life. There are some good pictures here and reviews here and here."

Virtual social software

admin — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 03:57:00 GMT

I've heard a lot about Second Life, but I admit to being one of the uncool as I've not emersed myself in the virtual world to date.

The latest post by Jeff Barr has piqued my interest though:

"A bunch of people in the Second Life community have been interested in having what they call “HTML on a Prim.” The ubrowser has apparently been used to create a prototype of this feature but to date it has not emerged in a production release of the Second Life client."

In a nut shell, what Jeff has done is into integrate ubrowser into the Second Life environment. Now, *all* this does is allow thumbnails of webpages to render in the virtual world. But, what Jeff has planned next sounds very interesting:

"So what’s next? I am planning to get some decent land and to start selling Text and Web prims sometime soon. I still need to figure out how to embed self-updating scripts in the objects, design real APIs, and all sorts of fun things."

If understand Jeff correctly, he wants to build a system that will to allow dynamic pages to be rendered as interactive sites, allowing virtual browsing / full user interaction with those sites inside the virtual world.

If this is what Jeff means (is this what you mean Jeff?) then the implications for the Second Life world are potentially profound (and if that's not what he meant, someone should do it). Random / crazy thoughts come to mind:

What if you could fully interact with sites and services in that kind of environment, an environment where there are others 'there' with you?
What kind of collaboration scenario opportunities would that present?
What new kinds of social software would emerge given that kind of context? Co-blogging? Co-tagging? Too easy...what else?
What kinds of APIs would be built to allow Second Life 'outsiders' to play and interact with those inside?

The mind boggles....