Your2ndPlace

I didn't make it to the Life 2.0 presentations yesterday, but Wade Roush posted about his presentation. Within it, he writes:

I mainly repeated the argument from my article that anyone who has spent time in both Google Earth (the most popular map world or “geobrowser”) and Second Life (the leading social virtual world, created and operated by San Francisco-based Linden Lab) should appreciate how powerful it would be to mash up the two technologies, or at least the driving ideas behind them. Wandering around Second Life demonstrates how natural it can be to build and explore 3-D structures and environments through the medium of a human-shaped, human-acting avatar. Browsing Google Earth demonstrates what a sense of freedom and mastery comes from having tip-of-your-fingers access to an entire globe’s worth of geographical data at multiple levels of resolution.

A year ago, I might have agreed with this. Now I am pretty sure that I don't, and the image at the top left demonstrates why... granted, I may be overlooking something (and I would love feedback on that!) - but I don't see Google Earth and Second Life combined as being anything but fluff. Why? Because Second Life resides on the internet; the 'land' of Second Life is really 3D Web Hosting and travelling in Second Life across sim boundaries is still... inefficient, and it probably always will be because of the nature of the network being used. Moving one's presence to another simulator which resides on a different server is not graceful; there is a reason that when one teleports one gets a progress screen. When one crosses a sim border onto another sim on a separate server, you're basically teleporting to the spot at the new area.

'You Are Here' is already well enacted on the Second Life map inworld; I don't know how much else one would want. I honestly don't see any value in that... and since, apparently, other people do...

By all means, let me know in the comments below. I'd love to hear how this could be useful. As it stands right now, it seems like the extension of a failed metaphor. Sure, it looks 3D but it really isn't - there are many more dimensions, and when you factor in how people move from point to point... it just boggles me that this could be useful.

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