Kitely has potential but Second Life is still the Daddy

Kitely, an Opensim based virtual world provider, has been talked about by Maria Korolov over at Hypergrid Business and Hamlet Au over at New World Notes. The system, running from Amazon’s cloud services has some interesting concepts and some great potential, it’s also far from ready for prime time and very new.

Interesting points to note are that sims can go to sleep when not in use, rather quickly I’m told, this is an important concept because the billing policy of Kitely is per visitor minute, rather than a flat fee. That’s an interesting way of doing things. Logins are managed via Facebook connect, this for me is an absolute dealbreaker and no amount of saying lots of people use Facebook connect will change my mind, when that’s the only login choice in town, I simply choose not to engage. I’ve currently got Facebook blocked on my firewall, if I have a need to use it I’ll unblock it.

However plenty of folk are happy as Larry to use Facebook connect and therefore, Kitely is worthy of discussion, plus it’s a virtual world and I’m interested in them, and it’s my blog, so neener neener.

I won’t be able to talk about performance in Kitely, because I haven’t tried it! However Maria Korolov has and reports that she was able to get a sim setup within two minutes, which is impressive. However Maria also notes that there’s currently no teleporting, no link with Hypergrid, no voice, no inworld economy and more importantly, no way of paying Kitely for their services!!! As I said earlier, this product is not yet ready for prime time.

However, the proposed billing process, billing for time spent on your sim by avatars, is an interesting one. This would be ideal for people who want private spaces and restricted access, if you manage it properly you’ll only be paying for the time spent on your sim, close off access when you logout so nobody else comes in and the sim goes offline, you’re not billed a flat fee like in Second Life and you can have a lot of space and a lot of sims for a lot less than using Second Life.

However, let’s think this through, for a business the lack of a flat fee option is going to be problematic, it’s hard to budget when you don’t know how many people will be attending and if you want your sim to be available to anyone at anytime, which plenty of business users will want, then this billing model isn’t optimal.

Blue Mars had some interesting features that would appeal to those who wanted privacy, they had instancing, this would be so very useful if it were available in Second Life or worlds of its ilk, you could sit in your sim and be completely oblivious to others who thought they were in your sim, they’d be in a different instance of it so you wouldn’t see them, but in terms of privacy for folk, this would be a great option. However look what happened to Blue Mars!

Whether Linden Lab will adopt any of the features of Kitely remains to be seen, but Second Life remains the daddy of these sort of virtual worlds, Linden Lab has the inworld currency, the numbers, the publicity (although not what it once was), the organisation, the staff (although not once what they once were), the social aspects. Second Life remains King of the Hill, sitting still isn’t an option and despite people’s complaints (many justifiable), Second Life is still very much where it’s at and is still evolving, there are no signs at all that Linden Lab are looking to wind down operations, quite the opposite, last night they announced the new viewer with basic and advanced modes.

Competition is good for Linden Lab, it keeps them on their toes. Opensim type virtual worlds are not as slick as Second Life, although they are undoubtedly improving, Second Life still has quite a large headstart. These other worlds also test ideas and concepts, which is good for virtual worlds as a whole.

Will Kitely be a success? Only time will tell, it’s unfair at this stage to form too much of an opinion, negative or positive, it’s an evolving idea with a long way to go, but it will be interesting to see just how it evolves and whether Linden Lab respond to any of these concepts on billing and cloud services.