An article in The Economist points out that walled gardens get to the stage where walls need to come tumbling down. Drawing parallels between the mid nineties and the internet boom and services such as Second Life and Facebook they point to how proprietary services such as AOL and Compuserve were swept aside.
If Second Life is going to dream the impossible dream then there’s no doubt about it, those walls are going to have to come tumbling down. Unlike World of Warcraft and Age Of Conan (please be good) Second Life aims to be all things to all men (and women Sarah). This isn’t just a hack and slash world. This is the ruthless cutting edge of future business transactions for generations to come, boldly going where no man has ever gone before …..ok that’s a bit extreme but you get the picture.
Second Life is trying to trailblaze its way to being a standard for virtual worlds, but you can’t do that with huge walls and guards at the city gates. When Robert Scoble was kicked off (and quickly reinstated because he’s Robert Scoble) Facebook for running a data portability tool people were quick to quote the TOS, privacy breaches and such like. However whereas Scoble was wrong to break the TOS, he was in some ways right to point out that data portability is a feature users need.
I can take my contacts from Yahoo mail, to outlook express, to gmail and nobody bats an eyelid. Try and take my building from Second Life to somewhere else, well not only is it not possible, I’m breaking the TOS as I’m only licensed to use said items within Second Life. My items I should add, created with the aid of Mr Rosedale’s vision, but still, my items.
What I need to do, in my utopia, is to be able to up and move everything from Second Life, to the people’s republic of Europe and live my days out on a sunny island, smoking cuban cigars and gambling to my heart’s content without any problems from the UIGEA. In other words, I need to be able to bypass Linden Lab at some point, or this whole deck of cards crashes.
I should be able to go from world to world, taking snapshots, sending postcards to Nobody Fugazi from a hedonistic resort where I spend money in a different currency. That reminds me, is hard alley still open?
Ah I hear you cry, Open sourcing the server code. Yet will that alone create the standards that people crave? Will I be able to take my Linden Lab created items with me? Or will I have to let someone else have my stuff?
However it’s not just a case of grids and worlds, it’s interoperability with existing standards and new standards? Is Silverlight going to have a place here?
This reminds me in many ways of the text adventure. I remember once when I was more active on Livejournal that the legendary (in those circles) Joey Michaels took us on a text adventure where we ended up in the anus of a giant beast. His world, his imagination. However in many ways this walled garden world is very much like a text adventure.
“Go North”
You can’t go North, it’s dark.
“Light Torch”
You can see a dark tunnel with no obvious way out.
“Go East”
You can’t go East.
“Look around”
You see a walled garden to the west
Go west, life is peaceful there.
Go west, lots of open air.
Go west to begin life new.
Go west, this is what we’ll do.
This reminds me, are there any MUD’s here?