Back To The Future

Slideshow Transcript

1. Slide 1: “Back To The Future” Gwyneth Llewelyn Innovation Week ’08 Orange Island, September 29, 2008
2. Slide 2: What innovations changed Second Life® completely? • Clues to find them: “Disruptive innovation”: suddenly a host of new things start to become common, when they were unthinkable before • Fads that never go out of ‘fashion’
3. Slide 3: Since we just have one hour.... • ... we’ll focus on the kinds of innovations that unforeseenly changed the way we think about Second Life® Often Linden Lab introduced them with completely different goals • Residents, however, transformed them and created something new
4. Slide 4: The Economy • Second Life started... without the L$! Allowed residents to exchange goods and services using a micropayment currency • Things like the LindeX (after the Gaming Open Market exchange) were unplanned and unexpected!
5. Slide 5: Lessig’s IP-on-a-prim • Intended to allow deeper-grained control in collaborative building • Instead: it made SL an one-of-a-kind virtual world, the single one featuring only user-generated content!
6. Slide 6: Animations • Introduced in June 2004 Linden Lab thought about “emotes” (inside gestures) • But... it was used by the dance industry • ... and made the whole sex industry go through a Renaissance!
7. Slide 7: Flexible prims (flexies) • A nice addition to tortured prims allowing new types of building elements (e.g. flags, awnings...) Totally used by the fashion industry! • The same applies, of course, to sculpties
8. Slide 8: Web connectivity • June 2004: XML-RPC allows webservers to communicate with in- world objects (before that: email) Planned to allow simple interactions with remote databases • ... but we got web-based shops, market exchanges, social site mashups...
9. Slide 9: Voice • Planned to “keep up with the competition” who used voice for gaming purposes But we got business conferences, seminars, live music, even talk shows... • LL is the world’s second largest VoIP operator after Skype (in just one year!)
10. Slide 10: Streaming media • Perhaps thought to allow people to tell their friends what they were listening to... • Generated a huge music economy, where DJs and live musicians now work full time, and radios and in-world TV stations offer regular features
11. Slide 11: Resident innovations! • Mostly they addressed SL’s limitations by clever tweaking of certain features, exploiting bugs, or thinking out-of-the- box • Some have become so popular and universal that residents think it was “planned this way”!
12. Slide 12: The Ugly Avatar • Newer generations will never remember Ruth any more, but... we all have prim hair, shoes, and skirts • animation overriders & dance bracelets • avatar radars • skins
13. Slide 13: Extending Second Life If Linden Lab were any other company (think Kaneva!), these would be part of their services: • Snapzilla • The online webshops • SL Profiles • LindeX is just LL’s clone of the GOM
14. Slide 14: libOpenMV • Formerly known as libsecondlife, this is a re-engeneering solution to talk to SL without using a 3D viewer It brought us CopyBot and LandBots... but also all sorts of new ways of get rid of LL’s imposed limits on LSL • Statistics, metrics, mapping, invites...
15. Slide 15: The future?... As we will see later, new technologies might become the next ‘disruptive technology’
16. Slide 16: Thanks for your time! Feel free to IM me or email me at gwyneth.llewelyn@gwynethllewelyn.net