1. free? maybe, but they still force you to provide all your credit card and other details before letting you in.

no thanks.

Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by rose

2. Typical - I only paid the subscription fee yesterday...alas.

I've had some time over the past week to play around with Second Life (or SL, as it's called in-game) and I think it could see some real growth. Many of the people using SL appear to be stay-at-home-moms and students, many of them paying more than $100 per month for land, fees etc. As far as I'm aware, the more land you own in the game, the higher your monthly fees.

Explosive growth? I'm not sure. SL is not really a game - it's a virtual world, and as such it has no aim. And unlike in real life (or RL), your avatar will survive without food or water, so there's no motive to do anything productive. However, SL does have an economy and a few entrepreneurial types have tried to create successful businesses in-world by selling clothes, building houses and buying and selling land. One user famously bought all the land in SL and is in the process of selling it off for a profit. The currency (Linden dollars, or L$) can be converted to USD fairly easily.

Virtual worlds are here to stay, but I think they would be better run as an open-source effort, where users are not under the watchful eye of a commercial organisation like Linden Labs, and don't have to cough up for monthly fees (note: there are no monthly fees if you don't own land). There are a few open-source efforts underway, but they're not at the level of SL yet.

From a personal perspective, I've lost a lot of my earlier enthusiasm for SL, but I continue to use it sporadically. I think the potential to start a business in-world is interesting, but it seems that even the highest earners in SL are really scraping by.

BTW: If anyone needs tips, advice etc on SL, please get in touch. All my contact details (including my SL username) are on my blog. If you join SL, I might be able to spare some time to show you around.

http://www.mashable.com

Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Mashable

3. SL reminds me of World's Inc. During mid-90's many thought that Worlds was going to be the metaverse for 3-D navigation of the internet.

I'm glad to see the emergence of popular virtual environments where hunt/kill is not the primary objective.
I have not used SL much, waiting for open source cross-platform web 3.0 environment to emerge before I spend any serious amount of time in one. I have more fun tweaking my Yahoo chat avatar at the moment. I'm surprised that Yahoo hasn't continued to add animation and actions to their avatars. Mine has been standing up for 9 months now and I can't make it move except for 4 pre-canned facial expressions. Also, where are the consumer branding deals, why can't I pay $3.50 for a t-shirt with my favorite band on the front or a mp3 snipped as my theme song? Think ringtones but in the chat space.

Amy Bruckman's MediaMoo is what got me into MMORPG's, I remember the first time I walked through a teleporter, mind-blowing experience. And then there was VRML, sigh. I spent an enormous amount of time developing VRML worlds for big-name clients and pitching the 3-D web concept. Mostly fell on deaf ears except for a few large tech companies that put a certain amount of resources into any and all new technologies.

3-D is nice with a fully-immersive headmounted display. We used to get them from Jaron Lanier and Sun would provide us with huge machines full of Reality Engines, today my phone can run the same apps. The technology keeps getting better, but the draw for consumers who don't like to throw spells remains untapped.

Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by David Evans

4. i just had to clear a couple things up.

1) payments can now be made with Paypal.. meaning, no, you do NOT have to provide credit card info.
2) many different players buy/sell land, not just one.
3) earned money ranges from nothing to six figure yearly incomes (US$)
4) actually, not needing water/food/etc.. leaves room to be MORE productive.
5) many "SLers" themselves feel that SL should be open source and along the same lines, many are trying to help figure out and suggest avenues that Second Life could take to become the "3D internet" instead of a parallel pocket universe version.

6a) the "45,000" members are not individualistic, that's per account. so, "alts" count towards that number.

6b) the monthly average of how many people are "in-world" daily is a much better gauge of growth, which yes.. it's been steadily climbing.
-

i think virtual worlds aren't even a genre anymore, it's like saying Windows is a genre of Photoshop. SL is more platform than game, but people do make all types of games (from Bingo to RTS to FPS to board games, et al).
there have been a few other attempts, some not so good, some fairly decent and a couple that have been at a competitive level of some sort along the way.
in my experience, SL is the first and currently best experience of this kind available. we're still young yet and have a HUGE amount of growth to go through. (such as a new rendering engine, Havok 2 (someday), SpeedTree, etc..)

come give it a try.. and you don't have to pay for your first Basic account anymore.. or provide CC info either if preferred. ;) (just remember, it usually takes a week or so to get fairly acclimated with this wonderous world)

oh.. and don't forget that there's an in-world 3D building tool (also meaning the world is dynamic, changing constantly and literally right in fornt of your eyes), an in-world scritping language... and we can fly! :)


Until after now,
Cybin Monde

Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Cybin Monde