Prompt Criticality

Nothing New in the World

So, of course, a resident got there first.  SL Stats is a much better version of my little script.  Cool stuff, although they're clearly only scratching the surface of what you could do.  The advantages of stuffing the data into del.icio.us are that there are more ways to remix it, but perhaps SL Stats will open up their data with an API.

My First Mashup and Another Billion Dollar Idea


string delicious_username = ""; // add in your del.icio.us username -- I'm using CoryLindenTracking
string delicious_password = ""; // add in your del.icio.us password -- I wouldn't use a secure password here.

string user = "Cory Linden";

integer lastx = 0;
integer lasty = 0;
integer lastz = 0;

integer placetimer = 0;
float   checktime = 10.f;

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llSetTimerEvent(checktime);       
    }

    timer()
    {
        string simname = llEscapeURL(llGetRegionName());
        vector pos = llGetRootPosition();
        integer x = 10*llRound(pos.x/10.f);
        integer y = 10*llRound(pos.y/10.f);
        integer z = 10*llRound(pos.z/10.f);
       
        if (  (x == lastx)
            &&(y == lasty)
            &&(z == lastz))
        {
            placetimer += (integer)checktime;
        }
        else
        {
            placetimer = 0;
            lastx = x;
            lasty = y;
            lastz = z;
        }
       
        string sx = (string)(x);
        string sy = (string)(y);
        string sz = (string)(z);
       
        string timestamp = llGetTimestamp();
       
        string apibase = "https://" + delicious_username + ":" + delicious_password + "@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/add?";
        string url = "url=http://slurl.com/secondlife/";
               url += simname;
               url += "/" + sx + "/" + sy + "/" + sz + "/;";
        string description = "description=" + llEscapeURL(user + " here for " + (string)placetimer + " seconds") + ";";
        string dt = "dt=" + timestamp + ";";
        string tags = "tags=slurltrack+secondlife:region:" + simname + ";";
        string api = apibase + url + description + dt + tags;
        llHTTPRequest(api,[HTTP_METHOD,"POST"],"");
    }

    // for debugging -- it's generating a 415 error right now, but creates the tags
    // I'm sure someone can fix whatever the dumb mistake is
    http_response(key request_id, integer status, list metadata, string body)
    {
//        llSay(0, "status: " + (string)status);
//        llSay(0, "body: " + body);
    }
}

So, I'm intentionally keeping off the slurl and slurlmarker tags for now, because I didn't want to pollute their tag space, choosing "slurltrack" instead.  So what is this?  It's a way to always know where I've been in SL.  If enough people start using this (or similar) scripts, they could generate some really interesting metadata about traffic flow in SL.  This version isn't anonymized, of course, but someone could easily modify this to simply aggregate the data.

So, what's the billion dollar idea that riffs off of this?

I was stuck in traffic in a Hertz rental car the other day.  I had the snazzy GPS navigation system in the car which offered "Fastest", "Most Highway", and "Least Highway" routes.  Of course, the "Fastest" was a joke, because it didn't leverage real time data.  It would be trivial for Hertz cars to report their average speed as they are driven around, which would allow Hertz to rent way more cars with their navigation system, since it would actually be able to offer you fastest routes that really were the fastest.  Yes, you would have to be a little careful in building a system that was both truly anonymous and spoof resistant, but over drinks at Cory and Alice's going away party it was pretty easy to solve or minimize those risks.  Once Hertz had the data, how much would local drivers pay to rent a GPS unit that also had the data?  This would increase both the market to sell into as well as the data source.  Plus, just like opentable.com, no driver would buy more than one of these systems, so whoever gets there first has an incredible opportunity to own the market.

What's so interesting for Second Life is that SL is a great place to test the algorithms and security you'd use without having to deal with the problems that come with real-world implementations.  My 15 minute del.icio.us mashup is halfway there already.  Plus, once you had the real-world data, you could use a SL mirror-world space to visualize, market, and sell the data.

A Random Walk Down the Long Tails of Innovation

Last week I participated in a very interesting conference focused on innovation.  In particular, attention was given to what drives innovation and what policy decisions could be made to maximize it.  As is clear to anyone who lives in the Bay Area, innovations cluster geographically and all sorts of correlations can be made in a post hoc way.    Note, however, that opportunities for correlation/causation errors abound.  For example, patent lawyers cluster around areas of high innovation but few would assert that patent lawyers cause innovation -- Ed Felten made the observation that it would be like asserting that ants cause picnics.  Potentially, if you buy into Wisdom of Crowds there might be an argument that monitoring the flow of patent attorneys might be a useful leading indicator -- that collectively the set of patent attorneys are aggregating knowledge about where the clusters are emerging -- but that is a topic for a different post.  I want to talk about innovation, specifically two aspects of innovation where Second Life enjoys significant advantages relative to the real world.  Both of them are Long Tails.

I hope that by now everyone is familiar with Chris Anderson's concept of the "Long Tail."  If not, go over and read his blog and preorder his book.  Chris' famous graph is more properly thought of as "Long Tail Consumption," namely that the total value of goods and services of below average popularity bought by consumers is a meaningful percentage of the total value of the popular items.  Like most great ideas, this shouldn't be a surprise since we know from Clay Shirky that choice drives power law creation and that more choice creates steeper power laws.  These power laws have the non-intuitive properties that most of the items fall below the average value and in the examples that Chris sites -- books, music, and movies -- there are huge numbers of choices.  Thus when Wal-Mart decides to only stock the "most popular" music, for example, they are ignoring a huge chunk of the market Rhapsody or iTunes are then able to capture.

I want to look at two additional Long Tails that factor into innovation: Long Tail Communities and Long Tail Innovation. Communities first.  As anyone who has used Second Life can tell you, one of its strengths is the ability for relatively small communities -- stroke survivors, for example -- to find each other online.  In this way, it is somewhat like the web where the online experience mitigates the geographic clustering that can make it hard for communities to find each other.  In cities we find diverse communities but we don't find them in the countryside because population densities are lower.  The web allows those communities to bypass geography.  However, Second Life has the ability to look more like a city then the web, because those disparate groups still interact with each other.  These are Long Tail Communities -- small population communities that exist within a framework that allows interactions between them.

When Dreams/Shockproof began building Dreams Island for stroke survivors, they were able to reach out to an amazingly broad degree of groups within Second Life for help.  Members of those other groups came to Dreams and met, talked, and interacted.  These interactions, these bridges built between diverse sets of knowledge, experience, and culture, form the basis of Long Tail Innovation.  The rate of innovation, as North suggested, is most strongly influenced by the cost of learning.  Throwing money at the problem can change the direction of innovation, but the cost of learning -- of acquiring new knowledge as diverse groups and individuals interact -- drives the rate.  Thus, maximal innovation requires maximal learning between as much diversity as possible.  Where Second Life excels, and certainly will exceed the real world, is both in the breadth of diversity and the cost of learning.  Breadth of diversity because Second Life embraces not only individual diversity, but allows those individuals to reside in multiple Long Tail Communities.  Cost of learning because bits will always be easier to manipulate than atoms.

A different way to think about these advantages is to think of innovation as an initially random walk of design space.  Somewhere in design space an innovation exists that will change the design space itself, as well as all subsequent searches into that space.  While it is tempting to liken this to Darwinian evolution, be careful because innovators -- unlike genes -- are able to observe the fitness landscape and to move off of local maxima during their search.  Moreover, extensive communication between innovators -- remember that cost of learning -- also changes optimization strategies.  However, Darwinian or not, innovation is still a search of design space, and if it is even mostly true that it is initially a random walk, maximizing agents, communications, and variety of search strategies are all good heuristics.

So, whether you think about innovation's Long Tails or random walks, Second Life residents bring huge advantages.  I can't wait to see what they do next.

First There Was the Grid

3pointD linked to an interesting article on Ogle Earth entitled "Metaverse 2.0" which talks about the fact that Google Earth and Second Life are modeled on the real Earth and a flat Earth, respectively. It argues that SL in particular suffers from a failure of imagination in mapping its world onto a boring, 2D grid and offers both hexagonal, hyperlinked topology and a hyperbolic space as solutions. It is a pretty nice piece and covers a lot of territory that we considered early in SL's history -- back in the "Linden World" days of early 2001 -- so I thought that I'd talk a bit of history as to how we ended up with the 2D grid. Also, I find it interesting that it is completely possible to create the desired world within SL, despite the underlying topological choice.

Media Frenzy in SL

OK, I spoke too soon about mixed reality events in SL. First I attended an X-Men 3 red carpet event on Avalon. Then I read on 3pointD about an album release in SL! We are living in interesting times.

NASA Needs You!

NASA has recently announced that they are seeking offers for educational programs "for creating and managing innovative activities, events, products, services, or other types of formal or informal education methods for the purpose of disseminating information nationally about NASA’s projects and programs."

While the synposis clearly is targetting large companies, given some of the work I've seen in SL this year on space science and education, I bet that someone in SL could pwn this.

Koster v. Neva

Given how often the amateur versus expert issue raises itself in relation to Second Life -- whether in terms of content creation, medical research, game creation, etc -- it seems somehow appropriate to watch Raph and Prokofy slug it out over on Raph's blog. In the blue corner we have Raph Koster, till recently SOE's Chief Creative Office and Big Thinker (tm) on Virtual Worlds. In the red corner, Prokofy Neva, undisputed heavywieght champion of extended posts, big thoughts on Second Life, and continuous challenges to authority. Go read it -- it's interesting.

I haven't felt the need to post, but one sequence caught my eye. Raph posted the following:

I personally believe this is a mistaken take on things. I’ll be bold and say:
- no, it’s demonstrably less fun, to the vast majority of people, in SL than in most any of the gameworlds
- the gameworlds have historically been what has driven adoption in virtual spaces
- the gameworlds have historically been what has driven lasting innovation
- the future of the metaverse is going to come from gameworlds, not freeform social worlds

and:

I don’t want to overstate this, but in short, I’d issue a plea to folks like Prokofy, Jerry, and others, to let go of social world exceptionalism

To which the only reply, of course, is:
Would you be willing to give up on online game exceptionalism? :-)

Since entering into the argument at this point would be silly, I'll simply pour gasoline all over the place by asking a couple of questions:
- How many people use the web versus gameworlds? (Being generous to the games, it's 20 to 1)
- Raph is quick to dismiss Second Life as "just a MUSH" -- and leaving aside the separate 3D versus text debate that I've sometimes ventured into -- I still find the claim that innovation is happening in gameworlds somewhat challenging. Given the number of announced gameworlds trying to pivot onto Second Life innovations -- user creation, collaborative creation, user markets, content markets, pay-to-play, no subscription, digital delivery, single shard, streaming content delivery -- what are the innovations in the gameworld space?

As to the question of fun or usage, debating it does seem a little silly. Second Life has show gentle exponential growth since it launched. Either that trend will continue or it will not. If it does, exponential growth combined with the fact that we address a much larger market than games means that we will dwarf gameworlds. If not, we won't.

So, do you want to bet on Linden Lab's employees plus Anshe, Perkofy, Walker, and the hundreds of thousands of other SL residents? Or do you bet on Blizzard, Raph, Daniel and the hundreds of other really smart folks making online games?

Hopefully, you won't have to make the choice, because if we do our job right, many of them will ultimately be building games within Second Life.

Mixed Reality Madness

It seems like we're reaching some sort of critical mass for mixed-reality events. Within one week there are/have been:
USC's Center for Public Diplomacy's Awards Ceremony, which was attended by more folks in Second Life than in the real world. 3 out of the 4 finalists were created within SL. The very polished Peacemaker won, but Hydro Hijinks made it a tough decision.
The Berkman Center's Beyond Broadcast conference is happening right now. Focused on the future of public media, it has been very interesting watching virtual worlds recognized as legitimate option.
This weekend will see BBC Radio 1's One Big Weekend within SL. Two days of free, great music and now you don't have to get to Dundee to enjoy it!

Of course, the real questions all resolve around how valuable these mixed reality events are when compared to a web cast. The mixed reality event allows remote participants to also connect with each other but at the cost of more technical requirements and bandwidth. The ultimate success of these events will be determined by whether that tradeoff is worth it. I was smiling during the USC event because there were a ton of side discussions going on in the SL audience. It reminded me of being in the back row of a session and making comments or jokes with other folks sitting nearby. Audience chatter can become loud enough to constitute real-world griefing yet it can be among the most important and enjoyable parts of attending. I've had more than one long-term friendship instigated by a joke or flippant remark made during a talk. I suspect that the same will become true in mixed reality events, where it's the unplanned interactions of the audience that lead to new social connections and fun.

Free Billion $ Idea of the Day

Virtual memorials in Second Life. Think about it . . .

I was chatting with some smart people at the Berkman Center last week and talk somehow blundered into personal memorials and it hit me that Second Life would be the perfect place for this. A little web searching revealed that a thousand people are trying this on the web, but they're missing the point. Memorials, both as part of the grieving process and family history, are meant to be experienced with people. With family, friends, loved ones. Going to a website to see pictures of a grandparent is not the same as being able to stroll through a recreation of their garden, to watch a home movie on the television from a copy of their living room, or to do a family gathering on their birthday with relatives from all over the world to spend an evening sharing memories. Maybe even a regular update to the memorial to blend in the lives of their children.

I suspect that this might be best done in Europe first -- given a somewhat more pragmatic approach to end-of-life care and decisions -- but with a graying world population, data indicating that Second Life is more appealing the older you are, and an increasingly tech savvy elderly population, why not spend the next several years working with your parents to make a place to remember them? Why not let people help create the places that will define their memory?

ChucK!!

Last week I had the opportunity to talk about Second Life with some of Ed Felten's students at Princeton.  A year ago, a friend at Microsoft Research had explained that their favorite school to recruit from was Princeton.  I hadn't really believed this, since with Linden Lab's development team heavily seeded with Berkeley grads, I'm fairly biased.  However, after meeting a string of incredibly intelligent professors and students, I came away very impressed.

However, nothing blew me away as much as Ge Wang's demo of ChucK, their very cool music scripting language.  ChucK is a per channel language with an excellent time and concurrency model that allows you to do all sorts of great synthesis on the card.  The magic is the management of time across all of the threads that takes away a lot of the headaches.  I immediately thought about how cool it would be to have the ChucK VM built into the SL client which would allow LSL to generate ChucK script (like using PHP or Ruby to generate Javascript) in order to create real-time audio on client machines.  Finally, you could create audio in as collaborative a way as you currently build.

Moreover, the really crazy thought was that if ChucK's performance was sufficient -- and they had some help to beat on the security issues -- was that a time-focused scripting language would work really well as a UI scripting language on the client.  So, go download ChucK and start playing with it.  Then get on the developer mailing list and help make it better!