O Blog do Gustavo Felisberto

Sometimes a problem has a complex solution. Others the smart solution is just around the corner.

For some days now Skype has released a new public release that has video support. Since day 0 the Gentoo users that were running the testing version could have an upgrade. A few more weeks and if no strange bugs pop up it will be marked as stable software.

So if you are still running the old skype and want to use the new one:

All in all there's something to give,
All in all there's something to do,
All in all there's something to live,
With you ...

14-06-2008

Paula Simões did a reply on the previous post about second life. Go read it as it is quite good and them come back for my re-replys.

Paula: You fail to point a single source of real revenue, the one that is capable of generating more revenue. You are counting on universities to keep pouring cash into the system? That is the worst Business Model ever.
And even believing that Universities would continue giving SL money because it saves them elsewhere:

One of the best advantages of SL is simulation. There are many examples, taken from several Universities: Law students practicing in a court room; medicine students practicing with virtual patients; students creating architecture models; etc.

I can barely agree with the first one, but the others? Architecture models? Medicine students practicing on a model? SL is a poor excuse for a simulated 3D world. The 3rd person perspective kills any lessons one might learn for architecture purposes. Just try to design a real house in SL and you end up walking over every peace of furniture there. And practicing a delicate surgery in a virtual model? Maybe practicing the theoretical steps would be possible but more than that?

Why would a company want to be on SL? That is the real issue. Find a BM that is capable of generating real revenue and maybe we can find a common ground. Until them, for me, it is just a souped up academic experiment.

A few weeks ago I attended some presentations about social 3d worlds. Two of the four presentations were about what can be done on Second Life and how to do it, another was about E-Learning and Virtual Worlds and the last one (actually it was the third) was by Marcos Marado and was a very nice retrospective about virtual worlds dating back to 1968. His presentation showed that many of these virtual worlds was eventually taken over my something newer. Surely many are still used today, but the user base dropped to a shadow of what was before.

My feeling is that the same will happen to second life. And why will that happen? Today I see two classes of problems with second life that need addressing:
Technical Problems
It is a very slow engine! It is open source code so the community should be able to fix it right? Wrong!! The problem is at a level that I do not believe a fix can be produced by changing the client code. As I saw last Saturday most of the performance issues come from the fact that the engine was designed to parse user produced content.

Economical Problems
Second Life is not a game. It does not aim to be a game. It aims to be a simulation of the real world, and it wants to be as perfect as possible. So good a simulation that money inside the virtual world is bought with real €€ and can be converted back.

Second life is an emerging platform for content production and distribution, just like the web was in 95. The main difference is the cost involved in a web presence versus a second life presence. Also back in 95/96 it was easy to imagine why should company A or B be in the web. With second life it is not that easy.