In the long and winding why do we never talk about SL thread a question that lurked around is whether SL is the basis for a 3D version of the web and the meta question of whether such a notion makes any sense. Just below this post we are raising the notion of a global metaverse from the point of view of its social implications, but I want to talk about product and market dominance for a moment.
This got me thinking about whether SL has already reached that tipping point. Sure it has an infinitesimally small number of users compared to the web or mobile phones, but every day we see yet another brand setting up office .
If you view is that SL has certainly not attained status of de facto standard as the ‘3D web’ - how are we to know when something has? What characterizes the tipping point when a n other wizzy 3D tech becomes the 3D tech?
I’ve already posited that brand following is a key factor, so how about these others as a starter for 10:
- User population – fine but what levels are we looking at? It the key number one that is relative to web users?
- Devices – I did not used to be able to get the web on my mobile phone, now it’s essential – without google how else are you going to solve arguments in bars?
- Network Effects & Switching costs – I lump these together as I feel that the simple economics of changing technology is a lot lower than the opportunity gain / loss type of switching cost associated with having / not having a presence on one platform or another.
Alternately is this all just buzz word piffle?
Is a monolithic 3D web something that is just not going to happen - as, why would it? 3D serves niche purposes it’s not like text and hyperlinking which is pretty universal. What we will have is what we have now, a set of point applications that just happen to share one characteristic – that they utilize what appears to be a 3D virtual world that can be navigated by various representations of the user. The optimal state is a set of such applications each of which is optimized for its given use; the only monolith that may exist is possibly a middle ware platform on which many of these are built. Supposing other wise is a mistake akin to assuming that because, say, Word and Excel share characteristics their optimal state is to be the very same application.
It’s now I realize I should have read the meta-verse road map materials :)
To give a view, rather than posing homework questions for you good readers, I’m going to go for kind of a middle road, no I just re-wrote this - I’m going to say that a 3D standard will emerge. That this will come out of a leading piece of middle ware that will critically bring about interface standards, the key two being ID management and ‘portals’ (the 3D version of a hyper link). I do see what appears to be a set of discrete 3D spaces that are optimized for given uses but I see the growth of ID management and credential portability, such that ‘porting’ from one virtual space to another and that some sort of cross-world identity starts to pull over richer and richer information. Here I’m not thinking necessarily of the digital identifiers that e-democracy types talk about, in that I don’t think they need to be rooted in any offline identity, but rather a cluster of pseudonymous IDs, plus of course some usable notion of ‘guest’ / ‘public’ in each space. The ID I assume (even in guest mode) would also carry an optional payload of attributes, and here I’m not thinking that if you are a lvl 60 in one place you would be a lvl X somewhere else; but rather you may be in space A and B and your IDs in each share the characteristic that they present the fact of your presence in that other space (yes I’m musing into X.509 and extensible characteristics type stuff but I don’t really want to get too tech about this).
So in a way I’m undercutting my own question in that we may not have a single product but a convergence around standards as we have now with html and different browsers, my assumption being that client standards will advance so this can be so.
If There and SL could make a start by letting me port between y’all with having to re-log, that would be fine and dandy.
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