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metaXLR8 streaming media and game server

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I like Second Life a lot but always thought that its 2D social backend (friends, groups etc.) is rather poor and certainly no match for modern 2D social networks like Facebook. I think instead of redeveloping the wheel inside Second Life, it would make much more sense to develop a tight integration with Facebook and other social networks. Perhaps this idea could be included in the open source OpenSim development roadmap.

In a very interesting article on the importance of integration, an IBMer involved in Second Life notes that Second Life may be beginning to suffer from its lack of integration with other platforms: “a migration away from Second Life because of a lack of integration”. I think in order to be really useful as a 3D Internet, SL and other VR worlds should join the modern open interoperability trend and begin integrating modules based on external platforms. For example Second Life should integrate a full in-world Web browser, document management and collaborative editing options and, of course, the possibility to upload 3D models developed with standard 3D modeling tools and backing up 3D content on the local drive. All these features are already available in more advanced systems such as Qwaq Forums, the business oriented VR platform based on Open Croquet.

Since social networks are a very important part of the online life of SL users, SL should open up to the social web in order to offer its users a better experience. I am on Linkedin, Xing, Viadeo, Plaxo and several networks based on Ning, but recently I have been using Facebook as primary online social space, because it just works better and faster than other platforms. By the way, this is my Facebook profile, this is my doggy’s Facebook Fan Club, this is the Facebook group for a movie that my daughter is doing, and this is the Facebook profile of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a science policy think tank I am associated with. Using Facebook as primary online social space has also the very positive consequence, in my opinion, of blurring the artificial line between personal and professional identities.

Recently I contributed to the creation of a new group in Second Life, and of course we also created an associated Facebook group. All current members of the SL group are also in the FB group, and new SL members will be encouraged to join FB if they have not joined it already. Same for another new group that is not open yet at this moment. Actually I would prefer doing without the native SL contacts and groups management features, poor and unstable, and just using FB to manage the “2D” part of the VR world. Many SL users think the same (at least in my network).

There is a very interesting service called Second Life Link that establishes a bridge between SL and FB. Second Life Link is a Facebook application that permits associating a SL avatar to a FB profile and establishing a loose link between SL and FB contact networks. On the FB side, the application has been developed by using the powerful Facebook Platform API, and is well integrated with the rest of FB. But its SL-side component has been developed by using the poor interoperability features of SL, and in fact the application doesn’t do much on the SL side (just validating an avatar chosen on the FB side and little else).

This depends of course on Second Life having poor interoperability features and closed server code. And since the Second Life system is a proprietary walled garden that belongs uniquely to Linden Lab (and I wish to say that they have done a great job by making the metaverse available to the masses), there is not much that can be done. But the OpenSim project is progressing fast, and I think in the second half of 2008 it will approach the maturity of SL server technology. This will open the market of metaverse hosting based on open source SL-like technology, and some service providers are already occupying this niche (see for example Central Grid and watch this blog for our own service announcement). Since OpenSim is an open system that belongs to its developers and users (and every user with time and suitable skills can become a developer), there will be the possibility to develop server-side features to facilitate the integration with Facebook (and why not also with other social network interoperability standards such as Google’s OpenSocial, adopted by nearly all other major social networks). This would permit focusing the OpenSim development effort only on the unique VR features, while offering better social networking features to OpenSim users.