Mitch Kapor on Second Life

During SL's 5th birthday celebration (in the summer), Mitch Kapor  -- personal computer pioneer and founding investor in Linden Research -- gave a keynote in SL.  Audio, video, a transcript and a summary are all available (link).  Interestingly, Kapor noted that the pioneer era of SL is coming to a close.  Now Second Life is transitioning, which may be uncomfortable for some early pioneers.  Quoting the summary:

Pragmatic adoption will be fueled not just by business but by all kinds of other sectors, whether in education, architecture, or not-for-profit. It is simply valuable for these groups to use a virtual world, which will cause a challenge for those who feel that there is less novelty, and in some senses less freedom.

As I read the summary, it occurs to me that we are past the point of experimenting with virtual worlds.  We no longer need to demonstrate their usefulness.  Now we need to decide how to fit them into our work and personal lives.  For some, this will be quite easy.  They can already see how to incorporate SL (or another virutal world) into what they do.  But others may be in organizations or industries that haven't delved into virtual worlds.  And they -- as individuals -- haven't found the need to get involved or may be inhibited by other barriers.  Yet, this is a technology that is becoming widely adopted and everyone will need to become conversant in it.

During your life, you have adopted to may technological changes.  This is just one more...one that could become critically important for you to understand, so take the time and jump in now.

Comments

[Alex Grigg]

Virtual Worlds may be gaining wider use, but Linden's statistics 9http://www.thestandard.com/predictions/second-life-usage-will-not-break-40-million-user-hours-month-end-2008) do not support the idea of SL's continuing growth. The users continue to accumulate because old, inactive users are never deleted and unfortunately this also dilutes the overall number of hours that users spend there per month. If you have 2 million active users who are increasing the amount of time they spend in SL, and inactive users pop in and out without being removed it is hard to tell if overall use is actually increasing or not.

The use of Home in the Playstation 3 along with the avatars on the Wii and Xbox 360 (recently added) do point to wider adoption of virtual world technology and everybody should start to get used to these virtual worlds because coming generations (and maybe some of the current ones) are going to be highly exposed to them. I do not, however, think SL does a great job of illustrating wider acceptance. 2.3 hours per resident in January 2008 and falling from the previous January does not make a good case that SL is the future. Something like it probably will be though.

[Jill Hurst-Wahl]

This morning, I finally listened to Mitch Kapor's talk while commuting to work on the bus (and it was indeed worth listening to). I like the phrase he used - "technical ecosystems." I am not sure that I had heard that before. Interesting that we are recreating in this technical ecosystem (SL) what we have in RL, yet we'll also trying to the the ecosystem for what it is really good at.

Kapor noted that we are beyond the frontier stage in SL and virtual worlds. While I think that is true, there are many people who have not yet "moved west" and likely won't until the frontier is completely tame and settled.