I've remarked more than once that the virtual world of Second Life reminds me of the web circa 1995. With its frontier like feel, marauding griefers, flashing neon spam, spinning logos and easily gamed Search tools it really does feel like stepping back in time many ways. You can add to that corporate confusion and academic head scratching. Hell even Second Life's "newspapers" seem to be straight out of 1988, more akin to ezines being published with desktop publishing software than the conduits of information they could be if the last 7 years of publishing, information and communication innovation hadn't apparently passed them by. For all of it's backwardness though, I firmly believe that it, or something very much like it, is the future of the web. You can count me amongst the believers, albeit with a few reservations.
I've also spent time over the last few months finding out about other virtual world projects, 3D social spaces and many things in between. I've had the priviledge of speaking with people like Trevor Smith of Ogoglio and discovering Raph Koster of Areae and talking to various other open source projects. I've even gone as far as to forsake my beloved Linux box in favor of a Mac so that I can explore even more worlds. Why? Because I'm not certain that Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life, will be the company that ultimately gets us to Gartners predicted 80% virtual world usage.
Neither it seems, is Cisco Systems Christian Renaud, who in one of the most important blog posts we've seen on the subject in months, goes into great details on the state of play in the business of virtual worlds. Where are we now? Right back at the beginning, right back at the BBS.
Christian asserts that the current state of play is one where "successful early entrants will attempt to fortify their position as much as possible against new competitors", which is what we see with Linden and Mindark, makers of Entropia Universe. It's also one in which "underfunded startups and early casualties will start agitating for open standards between worlds", see Ogoglio and Croquet. One thing is for sure, a walled garden approach will not win out long term. He knows it, I know it, you know it and Linden know's it. Despite having repeatedly stated that the server code for Second Life will go open source, that isn't going to happen anytime in the near future. And this, leaves the whole field wide open still.
In fact, we're nowhere even close to what for now remains a utopian dream of an open Metaverse. One in which your Avatar can travel, with belongings and wallet, to virtually any other world, unhindered by proprietary standards, closed systems and incompatible software.
According to Christian, the timeline will pan out something like this:
- Right now we have one major player, few minor
- Entropia's recent China deal could be a game changer
- One year from now, 3 or 4 major players will be competing for customers on many fronts. They will also discover that a large part of their success may rely on how much data from outside of their world they can bring in. Think web services, RSS etc.
- 3-5yrs from now, attrition and consolidation will have boiled the market down to 2 or 3 big players. Customers are demanding standards, and interoperability
- Adoption = 20% Gartner got it wrong.
- 5-7 years from now, there will be a "rich immersive standard" with Avatar portability, but the major players, like Netscape and Microsoft before them, will snipe at eachother with proprietory extensions to those standards at the expense of users for some time to come.
Personally I think 5-7 years before we see a "rich immersive standard" is over optimistic, but hell I'm game, and good on him for being brave enough to post such a detailed prediction of the future of the 3D web.
There'll be a lot of pain before this space matures, but we live in interesting times.
