Cloud Party, We Barely Knew You

Location: Prognosticator's Chair

I never spent much time in Cloud Party, though Cyn Skyberg did reach out for a phone interview about the potential of the virtual world for education.

I was my usual glum self about the future of user-generated virtual worlds: I told Cyn that if CP didn't run on mobile devices well, my students would roll their eyes and say "oh please. More busy work." If they could, however, explore the richness of a virtual world between texts and status updates (he says with a smirk) they might not savage me in class evaluations.

Despite my glumness, I still think the technology has a future, and Cloud Party impressed me. Now Yahoo has bought the company and will shut it down.

My glumness about virtual worlds also has a note of regret: I liked Cloud Party's browser-based world and freedom, as in Second Life, for normal humans without skills with Maya or Blender to make content.

What Yahoo does with the Cloud Party team remains to be seen. Yahoo is trying to survive in a hostile environment dominated by Facebook, Google, and Twitter as places where users spend lots of time finding or sharing content.  Perhaps Yahoo will launch games through its portal as Facebook has done well (including Cloud Party).

What an interesting week in the otherwise moribund world of user-generated virtual worlds. With Rod Humble leaving Linden Lab as CEO and Cloud Party running down the curtain, we'll see what comes next. Philip Rosedale has not, apparently, given up on the technology. His High Fidelity project looks like a reboot of SL's utopian promise.

So accuse me of wanting to believe. I don't need virtual worlds to socialize, but they rock for building simulations and DIY roleplaying. Here's to someone getting it right and making it a popular way to spend time!

Big Visions, Little Visions, Second Life's Failure

Location: Hollering, at the Rebel Yell

I've written, at the VWER site, a long analysis of Second Life's failure to become the sort of disruptive technology that Philip Rosedale envisioned.  I'm thinking of Tim Wu's term for technologies that create entire new industries building a system to replace older forms of communication.

Other than a smug image of my avatar and a Philip-Rosedale parody-bot at the Burn 2.0 arts event, I think--think--I kept my snark in check.

I hope my claims about SL are not mere sour grapes over the end of Richmond Island in SL and the departure of so many educators from that technology.  It's premature to say we victors write the histories, because educators are still using SL and will, while OpenSim is very much a pioneer's environment. Moreover, Linden Lab might still recapture a niche market they are losing now and make their metaverse the standard-bearer.

That I doubt. Read the article and I'll explain why.

Why Linden Lab Screwed Us: Three Possibilities

Location: Linden Lab Blogs

Over at the Lab, the torrent of reactions continue. I replied at length to one poster, and I'll share it here:

Marielle asked,

Phil Linden repeatedly stated he's "interim" CEO. Now i was looking at LL's job offerings. . . .Is Phil planning to stay devoted to us :-) ? ...and if not, did LL miss to post the CEO position or has it already been decided behind the scenes ?

No. He's a businessman. His devotion is to the bottom line and perhaps the company he made. That's not evil; it's just the way the system works.

Rosedale buttered educators up at SLCC and let this increase move forward. I have lost faith in a man whose vision I respected. As "Interim" CEO, he's come back to either save the company or, it seems more and more likely, to arrange to sell it to someone else.

In the end, I've reached the conclusion that either:

1) Linden Lab does not want the good will and marketing power of having so many educational institutions and nonprofits associated with its product. This seems far-fetched, but that would make eliminating the discount actually a reasonable decision.

OR

2) Linden Lab is so desperate for an income stream that they'll boost prices in hopes that educators have long-term investments in SL and will need to stay for a bit longer.

OR

3) As others have said in this stream and elsewhere, Linden Lab has decided it needs to jettison colleges and universities as soon as their contracts end. That way, they'll avoid breach-of-contract cases by a host of well-funded and talented legal teams in US higher ed. My own school's amiable lawyers are a scary bunch when they go into action.

If it's #2 or #3, look out other users. Don't think for a second that LL won't sell you out the second they can get a buyer. And most of you won't be able to muster a legal challenge to what they do.

I don't know why another company would want the database or our user base, given the stigma of the adult content--a fact, not a value judgment by me because I don't care what you do with your avatars.

Will another company need us, except to exploit our information for marketing purposes? They might want some of the core technologies and staff from Linden Lab.

As for the fate of your virtual goods and invented "lives" in SL? Just read the TOS: it is not exactly "all your IP belong to us" but you've no recourse if they dump the database after a buy-out offer.

And there will be real suicides among those who call SL "home" and have complicated social relationships here. That saddens me.

Update 10/6: Tateru Nino shares Jack Linden's justification for the increase. it's contemptible, but then Jack can take it. He has been known for a while as "the most hated Linden." Tateru also shares her own thoughts about why LL may be selling the company.

I've also replied to Lalo's suggestion about the image I used (from the time when I was a LL mentor, before they gutted that gesture of goodwill, too).

Philip Rosedale at Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable

Location: Running late

image courtesy of Olivia Hotshot's Flickr Photostream

It speaks volumes that he came to AJ Kelton's meeting at SLCC 2010. Philip Rosedale has that Rock-Star thing going, and he didn't have to come see us. I'll thank him personally if I ever see him at a live event in either world.

I'm really encouraged by this. After months of feeling that the educators working hard in SL were getting repeated kicks in the teeth from the company Rosedale started, this felt very nice.

AJ, it seems Mr. Rosedale caught you speechless, at least in this photo. I'll run the transcript of our group's Q&A soon.

Of course, RL me was out running errands (Orientation Week begins!) so Iggy the avatar only caught the last bit of Rosedale's encouraging talk. Aside from closing the Teen Grid, something many secondary-school educators will lament, the talk seems very positive.

Yet, cynical Iggy the avatar reminds his maker, talk's cheap, even from someone whose vision I greatly admire. Now, of course, it's time to see Linden Lab walk the walk with us.

AJ Brooks on Education in Virtual Worlds

Location: Virtual Office

I talk to AJ Brooks more than anyone else in SL, with Viv Trafalgar running a close second. Yet while Viv and I often prognosticate about the future of virtual worlds, AJ is usually engaged in moderating the weekly Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable, so our chats tend to be on the topic of that day.

Using as my point of departure AJ's article "Virtual Worlds? Outlook Good," from the September/October 2008 issue of EDUCAUSE Review, I asked AJ to visit my office on Richmond Island and revisit his topic. A great deal has occurred since then.

When I asked AJ what had changed the most since he published the article, he noted that "the virtual world gird is beginning to become more distributed."

For Linden Lab, AJ is not optimistic about the future of their virutal world. "I think SL's future is in their own hands right now," he said. "They can continue to be an island unto them selves, and miss out on being part of a larger grid effort - truly putting them into the 'AOL' type position I've been talking about for a while now....OR they can work with those pioneers who are designing the true metaverse, one that is not proprietary. My guess is that they will NOT do the latter."

While Brooks is "cautiously hopeful" about the return of Philip Rosedale to the CEO's chair, "I think this ship is headed in a direction, and Rosedale is probably not inclined to change that direction."

Brooks detects a gradual departure of educators leaving SL for OpenSim-based worlds, since "educators are pioneers, and they've seen their community attacked over and over again."

AJ's answer to my question about one thing he'd change in SL, if he could: "I'd build in a creative commons type permissions structure so we would not have this issue with content creations and ownership issues (or at least not as dire)."

That's my #1 wish as well, since it would free up content for out-of-world backups, something I'll easily be able to do in OpenSim.

The entire text of our interview can be found here.

What Educators Would Tell Philip Rosedale

Location: Virtual Worlds Roundtable

Two weeks ago, the Roundtable membership held a rather boisterous meeting, its topic " 'Dear Philip': what educators would tell Philip Linden, were he present."

Here are a few highlights.

• Louise Later noted that SL is still not accessible to many with disabilities, and this should be addressed
• AJ Brooks claimed that community has been weakened in recent years
• Several participants felt that the firings of the Linden Lab staff working on educational projects and treatment of Jokay Wollengong sent a negative message about how the Lab values educational institutions and content
• Others felt that the lack of out-of-world backup hinders growth because institutions expect redundancy for projects and many educators must provide backups to granting agencies
• The consensus was that the number of educational institutions in SL cannot be determined. At the same time, several participants sensed a decline in the presence and interest of higher education in SL.

The meeting had a humorous end. A few participants noted that stability seemed improved in the time that Mark Kingdon served as CEO. Then we all got stuck on the sim at the end of the event and could not leave. This provided a Kafkaesque twist to our situation as educators in SL.

Readers with an interest can surf the entire transcript, including my top blowing into orbit over some remarks about educators and "the American way." It's worth a laugh, in any case, to see me lose my temper.

For even more on this topic, I highly recommend Prad Prathivi's "Business versus Fun: How Rosedale's Return Splits Second Life." This post generated many comments, including this final one (and one of the best): "We can experience malfunctioning grids elsewhere, for 1/4 the price."

Perhaps Philip Rosedale and the next CEO hired under his leadership will recognize this. Given the consensus I saw at the VWER meeting, for educators that prospect seems doubtful.

Balancing Act: Philip's Back

Location: "Capricious" Build at SL7B Celebration

I really want there to be an 8th birthday party worth attending. With Philip Rosedale's return to the throne as "interim" CEO, will the magic I felt in 2007 return? I'm no "oldbie" but one of the "midbies" who came into SL during the "hype" years. I don't know that I want those sorts of expectations back, at least until the world can scale up to host hundreds of thousands concurrently. I want Rosedale to pull off the sort of balancing act needed to make SL vital again, to fix its problems. It will be a hard balance to maintain in economic times like ours.

With those thoughts in mind, I went to the celebration just to see what is up.

Here are a few standouts I saw on my random wanderings. SLURL links follow. It was a fun event for me, but it had more of a county-fair feeling, perhaps mandated by the closeness of many contrasting builds, than Burning Life's expansive Playa.

1) "Capricious" by windyy Lane, shown at the top of this post. This would be a build worthy of Burning Life. I think the metaphor is very apt for these times in Second Life.



2) Philip Linden's Keyboard and the animated Philip Linden made by dileoo Kirax. I'd just read about the keyboard being one of the older objects in SL, via Lalo Telling's blog. I sure hope the love Philip Rosedale is feeling from SL residents does not cause his head to swell up as big as the one here.



3) Primtionary. This was just pure old fun. As the host, Hotten Haller (I'd kill for that name) said in chat: " Primtionary is a game in which I (your host) secretly IM a word to the builder on stage. The builder has 10 minutes to build this word by illustrating it's meaning or its sound! The rest of you say your one-word guesses and try to be first to get the word!"



4) I like to end a visit to a fair with something quiet, even wistful. Thus I stopped at "Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts." To quote from Linden Lab's page, "This exhibit from Sand Castle Studios demonstrates how the different communities in SL are not just amazing on their own, but are improved and enhanced by existing within the Second Life metaverse."

How true. I want our hosts to keep this maxim in mind as we move forward. Here's to the chance of there being a Burning Life in 2010!

Addiction To Second Life?

Location: Mixed Reality Event

Last night, I had the chance to listen as Wagner James Au moderated a panel with Philip Rosedale, Cyn Linden, and Jason Springarn-Koff, director of the documentary Life 2.0. The film screened at Sundance this year, and I'm looking forward to seeing it.

The topic was addiction. My own definition goes as follows.

Over the 3+ years I've been in SL, I have met individuals--never educators, I'd add--who spent enough time in-world to begin degrading their real-life jobs and relationships. That's not a definition from the DSM, but it seemed addictive behavior.

If the individual were making money or creating art, however, I'd make an exception. One of my neighbors draws for hours on end and is beginning to get noticed in the East Coast art scene. He's following his bliss and hearing a muse's call, something that, as a writer, I appreciate.

But I'd be curious to know what other experienced SLers consider the marks of addiction to the virtual world. We joked last night about being addicted to breathing, since we do it so much.

At a certain point, however, many other activities cause harm. What then are the harmful side effects of spending too much time in SL? And how much is too much?

Opinions?

Philip Rosedale's AI Project: Academic Musings

Location: Between Fear and Wonder
image from Collosus, The Forbin Project

I've always feared The Singularity, a.k.a. "The Rapture of the Nerds," when human consciousness could finally merge with that of a machine...the final upload, if you will. I fear it because of my ecological bent and training in speculative literature. We humans worry about AIs replacing us, but what of the creatures who have known this planet for millions of years? To AIs, would biology become merely raw material? To badly appropriate Philip K. Dick, "do algorithms dream of Shenandoah National Park?"

Such questions may seem alarmist, for my humanist readers who are not in Second Life or reading literary Science Fiction (shame on you), but The Singularity is not new or confined to the pages of paperbacks. The Singularity has been the dream of Ray Kurzweil and others like him for some time. I'm met a number of SLers who would gladly become their avatars, 24/7, even at the current cartoon level of embodiment.

I'd go so far to say that Science Fiction remains our most important genre of literature because, as Bruce Sterling put it in the late 80s, our age is the first to feel like SF. My students, when they hear about Kurzweil's and the Transhumanists' strange dream, mock it because--for now--they are young, trim, have perfect teeth, and use their parents' insurance policies. Yet their generation may be the one to build a working AI, as soon as their hair falls out and wrinkles crack over their skin like ice-feathers on a farm pond.

Now Philip Rosedale, a golden youth who resembles the suburban American Alphas I teach, and the utopian who founded Linden Lab to give us Second Life, wants to come at The Singularity from another direction. According to Hamlet Au's account, "a sentient artificial intelligence which existed in a virtual world" would complete one of Rosedale's ongoing projects, "The Brain. Can 10,000 computers become a person?" See Rosedale's company site, Lovemachine, for more.

I'm actually glad that Rosedale is after this goal, since I imagine that governments lacking his humanitarian streak can lay their hands on 10,000 linked computers and a number of good coders without much forethought. It would just be just another line in some intelligence agency's "black" budget, right after "new stealth first-strike bomber" and "high-res spy sats." I'd rather have Rosedale, with his world-changing goals and good intentions, build the first AI.

Or would I? Rosedale's site includes this mission statement:"LoveMachine is a team of people using disruptive technologies to very rapidly build things that can make money and have a shot at saving the world." Note the "very rapidly" and "shot" here. Unlike Einstein's God, Rosedale seems willing to play dice with the universe. What if The Brain does something different? Isn't that how Skynet emerged in the Terminator films? How the Matrix became self-aware? How Collossus, the prototype for all of these technologies (well, perhaps Forster's "Machine" takes first credit) was born? Well meaning people can still wreck civilization; even without thinking machines, each of us pushes civilization closer to the brink daily with each gallon of gas or pound of coal we burn (and America consumes at least 20 million barrels of oil a day).

Yet someone is going to try to build AIs, and many smart people have already been at it for some time in places like M.I.T. I lack the computer-science skills to begin a technical critique of a "virtual AI" made of 10,000 linked computers, so I'll move ahead to what such a creation might mean, were Rosedale to make The Brain.

The original idea of an "avatar" in C.S. circles was a program that would do things when its owner was otherwise occupied. An AI might be able to not only let me know when Dominion Power's bill has appeared in my online banking account but also advise me of ways to manage power-consumption in my house by roaming its power grid, using sensors to check where, for instance, I missed insulating a corner in our crawl-space last year. Then it could go shop for the best products to fill those gaps, while getting quotes on energy-efficient windows to replace our 60+ year-old panes. Iggy would log on to SL and have a chat with my AI about how to move forward. Through Iggy, I might authorize it to negotiate with window-makers and get quotes on the best products. It would search out some eco-friendly insulation of the sort that I could not find last year. My e-mails to suppliers never got returned, and I went on to other matters, buying fiberglass bats at Home Depot. The AI, not needing to sleep and unable--one hopes--to be bored, could keep at the customer-service desks--or AIs--until answers arrived. Meanwhile, I'd send the AI an order to dispatch nanobots under our house to kill the last Camel-back crickets that have been such a nuisance and have evaded my sticky-traps and chemical bombings. The nanobots would not kill any spiders, since we enjoy their hard work at killing other bugs.

Even my students get a little more excited when you talk about AIs in these terms. We allow other machines, and the hum of constant networked contact, to fill our hours so completely that we lack time to do what I've just described. AIs would take the tedium out of a networked existence as surely as the washing machine took the tedium from what was once called laundry day.

And if only it would stop there. As Ruth Schwartz Cowan so convincingly argued in her book More Work for Mother, the advent of labor-saving household devices had a side effect of ramping up expectations that we'd all complete more tasks in our drudgery-free time. Cell phones unite, but they also enable tiny women in giant GMC Suburbans to be distracted while driving, even as they convey to planned activities the toddlers in the back of the rolling fortresses.

I'm not confident that the time released by our AIs would make us a whit more leisurely or happy. Well, I take that back: they would if we made the machines serve us fully and fought like demons for any free time. I've done this with Internet technologies, taming my habits online and on the phone. I actually get some solitude most days and can enjoy the wonders of the natural world.

And that makes me a Postmodern freak in an ever-connected, scurrying world. I'm not sure AIs won't become just another, particularly powerful, example of Emerson's "things," that hop into "the saddle, and ride mankind."

I just hope Philip puts a kill-code into The Brain, so a human can always turn it off.