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? :) 

….

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.

…. 

1 comment

This started as a comment in response to a blog post by Robert Scoble titled 'On not getting Second Life'

Some people think Second Life is a geek thing. A techie paradise with no real purpose beyond being a cool toy. The truth is, many many people don't get Second Life because it's still very much in development. I can't say that it will become the new Internet. I can say without a doubt it will not replace the flat web.

So, who is not getting Second Life?

The average person doesn't seem to get Second Life. Is it a game? It's got to be a game, just look at it. It's in 3D, and it has little people in it who you move around. Some people don't like games, so they dismiss it. The rest think, "Oh yeah, I like games," and then they look for the objective. When they find none, they decides it's a very bad game, and they dismiss it. The ones that get past that find something that does interest them. It's still kind-of like a game, but

Most geeks don't even get Second Life because they look at it in say the themselves, "Is this my concept of the metaverse? No, it's not there yet." and then they dismiss it. It's not there yet, but it is coming.

For most users or residents, as Linden Lab likes to call them, of Second Life it is a game; a socializing game where they get to buy the latest flash and show off to their friends. The fact is, most of what you will see in Second Life is the Myspace or AOLer crowd gone 3D. It's easy to buy some flashing particles and a trashy outfit and congregate somewhere.

Why should you pay attention to Second Life?

The more important stuff that goes on in Second Life is not quite so flashy. BlogHUD and similar products are the exception to that. Those are the end user applications of the evolving technology. The less flashy development is what is going on with the back-end at Linden Lab and with external projects like libsecondlife .

libsecondlife provides an open source client networking layer that mimics the official Second Life client, which provides third party applications access to in-world resources. Things in development include Instant Messenger applications for various platforms such as Palm and cellphones, account management tools to organize your inventory or transfer funds between accounts, and importing of models from blender using a customized format. Linden Lab has shown great support for the project, though they are unable to share the protocol with developers because Second Life is still closed source.

As for Linden Lab themselves, they are moving towards more consistent protocols, and implementing capabilities through a REST-like interface.

The current system relies on UDP templatized by a message system that changes constantly with each new release as well as XMLRPC. Each change to the message template requires grid downtime for the update. XMLRPC is currently being used for all agent region changes, instant messages, on-line notification, and other  miscellaneous services in Second Life. Linden Lab has questioned the scalability of this system, because the query result cannot be easily cached.

Phoenix Linden says on the Linden Lab Ops blog in his post Second Life IPC,

This lack of easy caching has a price. Today, 20% of the central database CPU load is agent online status queries.

The REST capabilities interface will allow system resources  to be delegated from the simulator to the client over HTTP as well as offer the inherent cachability of the protocol.

Donovan Linden explains the process  this way,

So, how can we apply capabilities to this system? Well, the viewer has a trusted connection to the sim, and the sim has a trusted connection to the data server. This is why in the old system, all the data had to be shuttled through the sim to the viewer, instead of directly from the data server to the viewer. We couldn't allow arbitrary viewers to request arbitrary data directly from the data server. We will use capabilities to delegate authority from the sim to the viewer. 

When a viewer connects to the sim, once the sim has determined that it trusts the viewer, the sim will grant a capability. This process is very simple — the sim simply goes to the capability proxy and says "I would like to allow someone to access a url on the data server". The capability proxy makes a new unguessable url, creates a mapping between this public url and the private url, and returns it to the sim.

It's not just REST. The Mono powered scripting engine has been in development for some time now. This will allow for Linden Scripting Language to compile to CIL which stands for Common Intermediate Language, and even the inclusion of Mono/.Net languages like C#.

What happens in Second Life, stays in Second Life.

Not likely!!! Second Life is busting out of this closed system virtual world mold, and heading for integration. With the development of web-services and  the Mozilla browser in Second Life, the users of Second Life will be spreading themselves onto the 2D web from within Second Life. Streaming makes sense. Second Life streams all 3D content and other assets on demand. Second Life has terabytes of content. More content than you ever want to put on your hard drive. At the moment it's all streamlined primitive objects, but bandwidth and processing power are constantly scaling up. Before long, it will make sense to stream raw vertices.  With updated graphics and a powerful programming language available, developers will be freed to create almost anything at all.

Beyond just adding features to Second Life, there is Linden Lab's vision of Second Life as just another way to access the Internet. Linden Lab envisions millions of Second Life servers in the future. They could never host them all themselves.  It's been said several times over the past several years that Second Life will at some point become open source. If they want to reach a million servers, I think open source will be a requirement. Developing and supporting a technology that is used by millions requires at least one of the following. Open source development, or a huge backer like Microsoft. Linden Lab is not Microsoft, and they don't have a business model that will allow them play on Microsoft's level.

To sum it up, Second Life has access to the 2D web from inside the client. In the near future Second Life will have a REST-like capability interface for webservices, and aplications developed Mono/.Net programming languages in world.  Linden Lab intends to open source the server and client at some point. 

Second Life is not a closed system, and at some point it's going to have an effect on how you view the Internet. In the future, Second Life may become just another interface to the wide open Internet.

2 comments

Imagine a time in the future when fancy tools for creation are not standard. The amount of optional tools in the Second Life library has grown too large to ship along with the client for general use. Most of the advanced tools are available as plugins only.

For the normal user, this is not a problem because they are mostly browsers. They bookmark their favorite areas and have a collection of their favorite objects and programs, but they don’t ever use the advanced plugins available because they don’t have a need for them. Most of the stuff they think they want has already been made, and new stuff shows up every day from hundreds of popular creators.

A user might not have the tools to create a chair, but he had hundreds of available chairs that he could rez at a moment’s notice from his inventory. Some of them are provided in free collections he subscribes to and others he has collected or purchased along the way. The same goes for almost any object he could want. Someone else has already made something at least close to an exact match.

The plugins that he has downloaded and installed are those that help him keep track of the objects he has and find new things that he might not have yet. He also has chat plug-ins that integrate his Yahoo messenger account with Second Life.

This is fine for most users because that’s all they want from Second Life. They’re the same people who are devoted to Myspace and other such sites. Someone else handles the hard part of creation because they just want to hang out with friends and have a bit of fun, share their latest cool gadgets and plan for the next time they will meet up to go out clubbing.

This kind of activity requires thousands of creators working to put out the content people want.
I’ve heard people complaining about how Second Life focuses so much on business and new technology at the expense of the normal user, but you have to think about it from the other way around. The people who Linden Lab is appealing to now are the people who in the future will be building the experiences of every new user who uses Second Life. Linden Lab is not ignoring you when they focus on those people who are doing business in Second Life; they are building up the support structure for the future, when millions of users will be joining up and looking constantly for new content and experiences.

Second Life has to be ready for this influx.

How Many People Will be in Second Life One Year From Today? - Reuben Steiger
The future of VWs over a quarter - Dmitri Williams

1 comment