Baba Sucks

Gwneth Llewelyn knows a lot about a lot of things, and I think it would be in your best interest to take the time to read her blog .

And now an excerpt from her latest entry. But, don't read it here. GO READ IT AT HER WEBSITE!

Crowdsourcing in Second Life

Crowdsourcing, a new buzzword introduced by Wired magazine's Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, is a new trend popularised by several modern companies, mostly associated to software houses and Internet-related businesses, although allegedly Procter & Gamble use it as well. It could be described as empowering amateurs — companies delegating tasks to their customers, sympathisers, and enthusiastic users of their technology, instead of hiring professional help.

The trick here is getting all this work for free — effectively trading-off the cost of getting a small, hired, well-paid team to do those tasks in-house (or outsourcing the job to other companies), by exchanging it with a host of enthusiasts who are willing to donate their free time and skills to solve problems without requiring payment.

Naturally enough, companies using this model have different corporate cultures. We moved from a model where everything was done in-house (like in the 1950s — the best example being the corporations in Japan), to an outsourcing model that became more and more predominant after the 1980s. This was the requirement for changing a mindset at the Board level: companies don't need all the know-how to be employed, it can only be managed and controlled, but it can be available outside the company.

Crowdsourcing goes another step, and is very likely the result of the end of the Internet bubble and the so-called "New Economy" and the boom of open-source solutions that popped up after the bubble burst, to replace the failing companies that brought good ideas into the market, but weren't able to capitalise on them (I'm still amazed at how so many people dismiss the "push technology" from the failed PointCast, when as a matter of fact it was seamlessly replaced by a currently wide-spread system — RSS feeds and syndication!).

At some point in time, some companies came to a dilemma: to grow, they need more human resources to develop their technology (or invest in more R&D). Since their customers outnumber their staff by as often as 100,000:1, why shouldn't the customers bear the burden of doing most of the work — for free? :) 

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Opening up the protocol… not the application

Crowdsourcing the technology (the "eye candy") is something slightly different, and everything seems to point towards that. We seem to be at a point where LL is finally opening up the communication protocol, not shyly using the libsecondlife project, but by rewriting it in a way that it can be published. In a sense, Second Life, the platform for creating 3D content hosted in a persistent virtual world, will become Second Life, the open API for integration of applications within the grid.

Right now, the opposite approach is quite possible — calling external applications from Second Life. We have several ways to do that, and have had so for several years now.

The next step is a full integration: having your own applications "remotely control" things inside the virtual world. The first approaches are for the development of NPCs (Non-Playing Characters; "robots" interacting with users and other items, using increasingly complex Artificial Intelligences); integration of SL's IM chat into an universal chat system; and eventually, step by step, replacing the whole SL client interface with your own. Ultimately, this will lead to new and different SL clients, all integrating within the same grid. But you would be able to pick your own — not the one Linden Lab provides.

The beauty of all this is not that Linden Lab is developing all this. By opening up the protocol, Linden Lab is now able to provide the users with the ability of doing the work for them. So, instead of having people ranting and yelling for new features (the vast majority of those are client-side changes), users will be able to deploy them by themselves. They won't need an open source version of the client. All they need is a complete API to the Second Life communication protocol.

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