Now you may get a sense of deja vu when you hear that Jessica Lyon is organising a discussion on the future of Second Life event. However fear not, there’s a future of Second Life event from the past and there’s one set for the future, although if you read this post after the date of the future event it will have happened in the past!
Inara Pey also reports on the new event and points out that the discussion is about the future of Second Life, not the future of Linden Lab’s planned new world. Personally I think they will have difficulty avoiding discussion about the new world but it would be better all round if those attending stayed on topic.
The full details of the event are :
A very special Question and Answer meeting is planned for Wednesday July 2nd at 7AM SLT in the Firestorm Auditorium with Oz Linden (Technical Director of Second Life) and possibly Pete Linden (Director of communications at Second Life (AKA Gray of The Lab from San Francisco)).
The discussion will ONLY be about the future of our current beloved platform ‘Second Life’ and will not venture into the new platform currently under development. Lets hear what LL has planned for Second Life as there is plenty of time for questions about the new platform at a later date.
- Seating is limited, come early.
- The event will be recorded and posted here once rendered, as well as transcribed and summarized by Inara Pey.
- The event will be live streamed http://www.livestream.com/metaworld2 Questions will be monitored from the stream.
- If you have questions to ask please leave them in a comment on the Firestorm blog post and Jessica will try to get through as many as she can during the show.
- All questions must be on topic about Second Life and not the new platform.
Location And Time :
Wednesday, July 2nd at 7am SLT
SLURL : http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Phoenix%20Firestorm%20Support/171/128/4002
Obviously a lot of people won’t be able to attend the meeting at that time but that’s an issue no matter what time a meeting is held. However an interesting meeting has already been held on this subject, with Jessica Lyon leading the conversation.
The past event took place as a discussion at SL11B and has been extensively covered by Nalates Urriah, who also looks at the impact of the new Linden Lab virtual world. I’ll embed the youTube video of the event at the end of this blog post. The event was held in voice and involved a discussion largely between Jessica Lyon and Saffia Widdershins of Prim Perfect fame. Now unlike the event planned for Wednesday this event did involve discussion about the new virtual world. Jessica, who was giving her opinion as an individual, rather than a representative of the Firestorm team, repeatedly said that Second Life wasn’t closing. This is a really important point to absorb because this is exactly what Linden Lab have been stating.
Indeed Jessica goes further and suggests Linden Lab very much still have a roadmap for Second Life. However Jessica can’t hide her disappointment regarding the new world not being Open source, at least in the beginning and yet she points out that Second Life wasn’t Open source when it opened either.
Jessica makes a very important point about community engagement. Jessica feels that the reason Firestorm is the most popular viewer for Second Life isn’t because it’s the best viewer, it’s not because it’s the fastest viewer, it’s not because it’s the easiest to use viewer, indeed Jessica suggests that it’s not because of the viewer at all, it’s because there’s a strong community around the viewer and the Firestorm developers listen to and work with their community.
Jessica then makes the point that the lack of community engagement is likely to be the downfall of Linden Lab’s new world, although she wishes them well. I’m not sure about that myself, although if Linden Lab ignore their alpha testers they may be in trouble but the community point Jessica makes regarding Firestorm is one I can agree with. This is also the reason why I don’t share some of the doom and gloom of others regarding the future of Second Life. There are strong communities in Second Life, just because Linden Lab are creating a new virtual world, it doesn’t follow that all Second Life users will jump ship, many are going to be happy to stick where they are now and that is where Second Life’s longevity comes from today and will continue to come from.
Now remember, the event for Wednesday is not about the new virtual world, it’s about Second Life and its future, if you do attend please stick to the topic or the meeting won’t be very constructive.