Believe me, tkrochko, with people investing thousands of US$ and making a comfortable living in SL (several thousands of US$ per month by selling content), some people have left the (currently mostly unprofitable) world of doing 2D web pages as freelancers and setting up their own business as 3D content providers (in insanely huge demand). From one month to the other, they evolved from being worthless, unemployed web designers, to become masterclass 3D content producers living comfortably. And yes, once they did that, they started buying homes, mortgaging them, and going on with their real lives as a suddenly profitable opportunity came into their lives...
Nobody is saying that these people are "making money fast". They aren't. They're talented; they have expertise; they know all sort of graphical designer tools. They just didn't have an opportunity as web designers in the oversaturated market where everybody knows how to put a site up with a Frontpage template (or not even that). Instead, they move onwards to the next generation of graphical design -- doing it in 3D. Their set of skills will be exactly the ones needed to have success selling content i Second Life. And if you're good enough, with proper "networking" and promotion, it means you'll be able to survive on that.
Now, remember that all this is only possible because your work is being sold in a market with 12 million users using micropayments. The micropayments system is tied to US dollars, of course, and so far, people trusted it fairly enough.
But if rumours of scams, transactions being reverted, and the whole micropayment system being undermined by crackers and phishers start to be widespread, people will lose confidence in the micropayment system. Put into other words: they will buy less content. Freelancers will find it hard to get more customers willing to buy content from them. So this definitely leads to some people losing their mortgages. Not millions, certainly. But possibly thousands...
Joe Hacker sets up a phishing site, and captures Clueless Newbie's password. He now sets up a "Linden dollar exchange" randomly on a wide farm of worm-hacked servers around the world, claiming to be selling Linden dollars well below the current market average as established by Linden Lab's own LindeX and the other major legitimate currency exchanges (ie. about L$270 per US$). Utter Fool registers on that site, uses his PayPal data to buy some L$ for the advertised price. Now Joe Hacker gets the money from Utter Fool (and ver likely a new PayPal account...), logs in as Clueless Newbie, buys the required L$ on the legitimate LindeX, and sends it to Utter Fool. Utter Fool is happy -- she just got a whole lot of L$ way below market place, and happily spends it at Legitimate Vendor's fabulous shop, buys some land from Honest Landbaron, and goes to tell all her friends how great this new currency exchange is, and, more important than that, how it actually works and is no scam.
All works wonderfully for about a month -- Utter Fool's friends all log in to Joe Hacker's fake site (foolishly providing him with more PayPal account information through their avatar logins). At the end of the month, Clueless Newbie suddenly finds out a huge tab on his credit card. He promptly tells his bank about a huge fraud perpetuated by Linden Lab -- since he did never meant to buy any Linden dollars. Linden Lab presents as a counterclaim the registry of all transactions, which have legitimately come from the user identified as Clueless Newbie. The credit card company flags this as fraud, though, and Linden Lab reverts the transactions. But... the L$ have already disappeared from Clueless' own L$ account! It's spread all over Second Life's economy. Linden Lab informs all vendors, merchants and service providers that they'll have to revert all transactions -- L$ disappear from all their accounts, and the objects are deleted from inventory all of a sudden, with emails explaining about the major fraud.
Everybody gets unhappy, but the "money trail" points to Joe Hacker's website. Except... that it doesn't exist any more. It has switched to somewhere else, impossible to track. Joe Hacker's account is closed down and he gets banned from Second Life. No problem at all. The next month, Joe creates a new account, Joe2 Hacker, and now he has a whole month of logins and passwords to try out, so he launches fifty new websites, somewhere else in the world, and starts from scratch. After the second month he already has 2500 logins and passwords, and Linden Lab continues to track down the "money trail" and reverting all transactions, manually, one by one. It just gets worse, so long as there are enough people willing to fall for the scam (which they will -- it simply works, since people do get the Linden dollars as promised, and they can buy things with it... until the next user finds out that his account was phished, which takes time). Joe (under his several incarnations) is always making money during all this time.
How can this be stopped? Well, at some point in time, some law enforcement agency will have collected enough evidence (supplied by Linden Lab's transaction logs using IP addresses and hardware tags [like CPU serial numbers and Ethernet addresses]) and are able to track him down and arrest him. But that can take months, and the truly professional phishers will not be so stupid as to use their computers at home, but just use public ones from libraries and cybercafes. So it can be months until they can be arrested, and some never will, as they might just be somewhere in an island in Indonesia or the Caribean or Bolivia or any other far-fetched country... or, if they're not physically there, they're using all sort of proxying software to appear that they're logged elsewhere. They might even be using a modified version of the Second Life client that does not send any hardware-related identification (or completely fake hardware ID).
What's the alternative? Education. Explaining people how these scams work and how to make sure you don't fall for them. That's what Linden Lab is doing right now on their official blog...
Danathar, I tend to agree with you on the primary interest of Linden Lab. Bezos (Amazon), and Omidyar (eBay), or even Kapor (Mozilla), early supporters of Linden Lab, have a completely different approach to Internet-based businesses: they're willing to wait a decade and grow hugely, well before they start to make serious profits.
Second Life may have close to 6 million accounts these days, but that's still "small". Sure, by the end of 2007, Second Life, completely disregarded by popular MMOG sites just two years ago, will have more valid accounts than the mega-monster World of Warcraft, always a reference in popularity. By the end of 2008, it'll have more users than most states in the US or countries in Europe. By the end of 2009 it will reach that comfortable plateaux that all Internet start-ups dream about: the "magic" 150-million-user-mark, something that MySpace, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, or YouTube all have, and that gives everybody the notion that they will be around forever (how many users does Slashdot have, btw?). So that's the goal for Second Life, and Linden Lab (and others!) will try all strategies that can further that goal. Until then, no, there won't be IPOs or selling out -- Linden Lab's investors don't "need" money, but they most certainly "want" to have a huge stake in defining the platform that will run the Metaverse.
In effect, and further substanciating Danathar's claims, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that Linden Lab's venture capitalists are pretty cool-headed about the way they want to make money out of it. Squeezing out every possible cent out of Linden Lab right now to get a handful of million dollars, for people who have a few billions (directly owned or indirectly), is really a bad, bad business move. They're much smarter than that. The "competition" that may or may not appear will have to "fight" not only on the technology level (easier) but on the whole mentality and corporate approach. They have to be very long runners and not "hit-and-run" investors. Remember the lesson of Google: they survived the Internet bubble with very-long-term thinking. The bubble came and go, and Google started earnestly to grow like crazy after the bubble burst -- while the competition (Altavista?) was left behind, trying to figure out what went wrong with their business models.
So we'll need to look at what LL's investors are really after. Philip Rosedale, obviously, is after the fame and glamour -- he doesn't care about the money, it's really something he doesn't need -- he has plenty of it and is not greedy. After all, he could still be in the streaming business (having invented the technology) and launch, say, a profitable YouTube competitor, instead of risking everything on something that nobody knew, back in 1999 when he started, if there was already a "market" for it. Now it's easy to see there is one, but we also know that from the almost 6 million users, less than 100 thousand pay anything for using the service, and Linden Lab has to be a very small and lean operation to survive on just that. In fact, the overall investment in Linden Lab is trivially low, when compared to, say, a low-end game developed by an independent company. They're barely above the red line, and will continue to do so, by exploring different ways of achieving the same goal -- outsourcing technical support, outsourcing most of the grid, open sourcing software, establishing agreements with third parties to manage bits of their infrastructure while focusing mostly on their technology. All that to keep growing exponentially and hit the mystical 150-million-users mark before anyone else does, and hopefully in a couple of years.
Once they reach that plateaux -- without IPOs, without additional funding, without selling out to Microsoft or Google -- they will be in a position to dictate the rules, unquestionably. They already have strong ties to corporations like IBM to support their vision of the Metaverse. Yes, it's very likely that the "next" grid will be r
Google's most excellent customer support promptly answered to my request for information:
Hello Gwyneth,
Thank you for your email.
At this time, only merchants with a United States address and bank account
can integrate and process transactions through Google Checkout. We look
forward to making the service more widely available in the near future.
Sincerely,
The Google Checkout Merchant Support Team
So that's it. Waiting time for us non-US residents.
Hmm, actually, Google AdSense can use bank accounts as well to pay for money earned from your ads (yes, and it works on non-US banks perfectly as well). So if they have this technology to interface with banking systems, they might add it to Google Checkout as well.
Actually, I used the "bank interfacing" first with Google AdSense, only to find later that it was available on PayPal as well:-D
Is Google Checkout available on any country but the US? I live in Portugal, and Google Checkout seems to insist that any valid address I type is set to "United States" (a fixed field which is impossible to change). Also, at the first step of the registration, valid US business IDs are necessary. The terms of service also seem to preclude anything but an US-registered company.
With 70% of Internet commerce being outside the US, is this move by Google so clever? I would assume that most people living far away from PayPal's HQ in the US, who never receive a reply from their customer support just because they're not US customers, would flood the gates to get a valid Google Checkout account...
MattGWU, I've just checked with one of the guys from the Electric Sheep Company, the Sheep island is still "closed", and will be open only to the ones that join the group "The Happening", and available to visit during Saturday.
Mind you, this thread has been interesting -- it reminded me of the days people on BBSes were discussing why they should download a "graphic Web browser" for connecting to the Web, which had, at that time, only a tiny fraction of the content (and the interest!) of BBSes...
I still find it amusing to watch how difficult this concept is when explained to people who are at the forefront of the technology (slashdotters) and who have been reading Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Tad Williams, and similar SF authors for the past decades, and most definitely have seen the Matrix and all its sequels.
Maybe it's hard to understand that all those concepts are now "true" -- people can live and work in virtual realities these days, they have companies for doing work with virtual realities, they do mixed meetings (half of the attendance is physically present on the conference room, the other half attends virtually from the comfort of their homes and with a computer in front of them). Ok, so, it sounds like science fiction. So what? In 1980, if you'd tell your friends that one day, the whole western population would have a cheap (US$ 25) cellular phone in their pockets to talk to anybody at any time, without wires, people would laugh at you or even try to get you into an asylum...
Current virtual realities are not photorealistic, neither do they require goggles or bodysuits, and the neural interface, while on the works (yes, really!) is still too clumsy to be taken seriously. So what? Things have to start somewhere. So the best you can do these days is 30-40 fps on a 2000x1500 screen, and not yet ray tracing for photorealism? Hooray! It's a first step! Tomorrow, it'll be bigger; in ten years, you'll have ray-tracing chips on your Pentium VII @ 1 THz and 20 TByte RAM, for perhaps US$1000 (complete with goggles). Or perhaps it'll be in twenty years -- who knows? The point is, current virtual realities still feel like the BBSes from the 1980s -- but they're here, they're working, they have hundreds of thousands users online who understand what you can do with them... you have to start somewhere!
Imagine Marc Andreesen in front of a 1980s BBS and dreaming about a graphical browser. Imagine that he had given up and said "it's hopeless, all we have now to chat is a text-based interface, computers/networks will never evolve fast enough to give us nice graphics on a browser". What would the world look like?
To go towards the ultimate goal -- virtual realities as commonplace as cellular phones -- you have to start somewhere. Events like "The Happening" are a stepping stone towards that goal. Yes, you can now attend conferences/meetings using virtual realities and two-way, in-world video. 10 years ago we cheered having people doing conferences on IRC! Look at how far we have gone -- now our "IRC" includes a 3D world, avatars, and video/audio streaming, all at the same time! Still, it looks and feels IRCish. But that's fine! We "accused" IRC to look BBSquish as well...
I fail to understand, under that model, how do you expect Linden Lab's employees to get paid...:)
Remember, we had the Mosaic browser because it was sponsored by the NCSA; actually, we had the Internet because it was sponsored by the NCSA (and similar foundations in other countries...). So "taxpayers paid for it". The Web's genesis was a pretty unusual one: from academia to students/researchers first. People with lot of free time, lots of information to pass among themselves, lots of free access to resources they didn't pay for. Also, when finally the companies started to use the Web actively (ie promoting services and offering services for sale online), things like micro-payments never worked well, globally -- just on isolated cases. With some exceptions, the concept that you pay for content, or for ads, did not last beyond the Internet Bubble Bursting. The biggest exception being, of course, Google Adsense... and local ads on the major portal sites.
Do you suggest that the same visionary thinking of having governments and investing taxpayers' money should also apply to Linden Lab/the Metaverse/virtual realities? Perhaps people should then start to put some pressure on their respective governments and demand them to push forward the effort towards virtual realities now? I guess that's a very interesting idea. My personal experience so far with the government of my country is that they're a bit "burned" with virtual realities, after spending some hunderds of thousands of Euros on isolated (ie. not interconnected) projects which were abandoned few months after completion. They're now looking towards things that are cheap, require no investment, are easy to deploy, and can be re-used even after the projects are finished. Thus, Second Life fits in nicely. The major issues with the platform are technological ones, overcoming major issues like the lack of in-world HTML, an un-integrated IM system, etc. All these are being addressed -- although very, very, very slowly. The lack of better integration with existing application servers (ie. through web services that work or APIs for plug-ins, either client-side or server-side (?) has also been mentioned as not being addressed "fast enough".
Speaking for myself, I'd be willing to try to put that "pressure" on them:) So far, the lack of acceptance by the current local state universities has been not too encouraging; they prefer to "invest" in having students using proven technology that is low (or no) cost these days, instead of developing their own from scratch. They seem to be wiser now.
Mind you, Second Life will be open source one day, that is not the issue; Linden Lab's CEO has repeatedly said so. The difficulty, at the moment, is to make all those critical issues working. And do it fast enough before someone else does it, is able to go open source, and focus on developing added value services to sponsor the costs. So far, I've seen just a few groups on the "race": the ultimate vapourware OpenCroquet and the yet-to-be-deployed Multiverse. On the "paid", licensed, side of things there is stil lActiveWorlds and tiny things like Virtual Universes -- all available for a fee. Beyond that... you've got literally dozens of half-finished products on Sourceforge and the like. All incompatible, all different, all with people working on them sporadically and without talking to each other. But many with some good ideas here and there. Still, they see themselves more like "software for developing your own MMOG", not really a platform for things like deployment of creative content, virtual economy, and socializing/networking.
I certainly agree that bandwidth is an issue today, but it won't be in 10 years (unless you wish photorealism by then:) ). But well, one shouldn't minimize the need for implementing things like protecting intellectual property. "Get a lawyer" is not easy to do when you're a
Reapy, yours is a very interesting comment -- but honestly, can a company release a piece of a software application, mantain a grid with 2000+ servers, give technical support as well as community support, do the promotion of the environment, and do nothing else besides that (meaning: no added value services on top of the infrastructure and software), and still give it away for free?
I think you have it the other way round when comparing Second Life with VRML. VRML is a protocol, released publicly; what a group of people said was: "here is this amazing protocol that allows you to embed 3D images inside Web pages. Go build your things with it". And some did. Some sold kits for producing VRML code. Some created plug-ins (and sold these) for web browsers. Some produced content in VRML, and put it on Web pages -- sometimes for free (like demos), sometimes on a per-request basis, which usually was paid for. The problem with VRML (like HTML) is that it's just a protocol, nothing else -- either people use it or not, and, when using it, they might promote services on top of it.
On the other hand, Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, are an application and hosting provider. Their only source of income is running an extensive grid of servers to host your 3D content, and provide a 3D browser/viewer for you to access that content. Their core business is not providing content (or else, they could capitalize on that); they just have a handful of designers, and perhaps around 0.1% of all content in Second Life was actually created by Linden Lab (and you have free access to that).
As you can see, this is not "just a nice thingy" that someone thought it would be cool to have and to post somewhere on Sourceforge (there are enough semi-abandoned virtual reality projects there already). This is a new area of business: 3D content hosting, and that's what LL does. But they do not provide the content by themselves, just the infrastructure needed for that content to have a persistent storage.
So, their business model works like this: you wish to have persistent 3D content storage (read: you wish that your created objects are on display for everyone else to see, permanently, even when you're offline), well, you pay a tiny fee monthly for Linden Lab to host it on their servers. If, instead, you just wish to look/use/enjoy other user's content (and rest assured, that's exactly what around 80% of all users of Second Life wish to do), you can do that for absolutely free.
I hope this explains why Linden Lab charges for hosting 3D web content -- servers, bandwidth, maintenance and backups, technical support (24h/7, in different languages, on timezones around the globe), and community support take time, require professional expertise, and there must be "someone" to cover all those costs. Linden Lab is still a tiny company, and 3D content hosting is their only source of income.
You could argue that Linden Lab could enter the content development business and make their money from there. Sure, they could -- but can their handful of content creators compete with a team of 140,000 very creative and talented people? There is not really going to happen:)
What you argue for is something different: a loosely-knit structure of people having their own servers at home for others to connect to, so, in a sense, each user would, at their own expense, provide 3D content hosting for free.
Now, at the current state of the art, this has a few limitations. While the technology used in Second Life is arguably not the best implementation, it currently supports a bit over 10 TBytes of content for 140,000 users. This means that each of the servers, on average, just to support 40-100 avatars, need 10-20 Mbps of upstreaming bandwidth on average. While 16 Mbps ADSL links are already available, they're not bi-directional; you can consider lucky if you have over 512 Kbps upstream bandwidth -- barely enough for 4-5 people. 10-20 Mbps of upstream bandwid
In the 1980s, people who considered themselves 'futurists', 'avant-gardists', and the 'chlidren of the dawn of the new (information) age', chatted around on BBSs. If you're not old enough to need to consult the Wikipedia for this, you won't understand how weird it is to see history repeating itself again and again, every time a new paradigm shift threatens the online world.
In the late 1980s, a new "paradigm" was around: the Internet, quickly maturing and spreading around, touting itself as an alternative to bulletin boards by introducing Usenet News, and replacing chatrooms with IRC. At that time, old-time BBS veterans scorned the bright, goggle-eyed 'utopians' and 'dreamers' that looked to the Internet as the future of communication, socialization, creative expression, and even (God forbids!) business. They were scorned and laughed upon; BBSes already provided all those things and were much better at doing so than the clumsy 'Internetters' could with their old-fashioned and cumbersome tools. And the media covering the BBS labeled the nerds connecting to them as interested only in sex and games.
As a matter of fact, a whole generation of die-hard BBSers, highly skilled veterans in promoting their services using a well-proven technology, simply were reluctant to relinquish their status quo and embrace the Brave New World of the Internet.
In the 1990s, with BBSes "absorbed" by the Internet (by tying them together using the Internet as a medium, and propagating discussions, chatrooms, and early MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs to the Internet), people fought among themselves what was the best form of propagating information and providing remote access to it. Telnet-based servers competed with gopher servers which in turn competed with proprietary protocols for chatrooms and MUD/MUSHes/MOOs. There was no clear 'winner' (gopher seemed to be the best bet at the time) until an obscure scientist at CERN developed yet another model of remote access to information: the Web was born, and it was text-based. Still, gopherers and promoters of other tools scorned the 'arrivists' -- they simply wouldn't leave "their" proprietary tools in order to clumsily embrace "hypertext", which was so limited in scope and hardly used by anyone except a few freaks and outcasts on a very limited basis.
When the first graphical browser came out, the veterans of the text-based Internet frowned upon Mosaic and their ilk. People simply didn't have the required bandwidth to show 'nice graphics'; a text-based model had been in place for ages (at this time, MIME-encoded attachments for email was still a 'novelty'), it worked well and fast, and used little bandwidth. Why would people need a 'graphical browser'? The answer, of course, was clear if we read the media's coverage of the Web in the mid-1990s: it's all about sex and games.
Starting around 1995/6, something seemed to click in place, and suddenly the Internet was not only 'sex and games'. Through the Web, people could also communicate, socialize, exchange information, get access to databases -- and do business. The media was intrigued; corporations started to publish information online through the World-Wide Web; Linux and the major open source tools started to get disseminated through the Web as well. The Web, indeed, absorbed previous technologies and replaced it with new and better paradigms: chatrooms, blogs, forums replaced earlier technologies, but they're basically driven by the same needs: distributing information, content, chatting, socializing, doing business. And, of course, also sex and games. But in the 'enlighted' year of 2006, while we live with 'sex and games', almost all of us would agree that the Internet (or, better said, the World-Wide Web) is not about sex and games; they're part of it, but there is so much more than that.
People now fight to define what the "Web 2.0" is going to be, but the "new Web" is nothing new, just applying new tools to a decade-old technology; yes, w
Back in 1993, people nicknamed a server running HTTP, serving out pages formatted in HTML, a "web site".
Although it was not a "site" at all (in the pre-WWW days, a "site" was mostly used in the context of construction or archeology) - it was just a bunch of bytes in a server, lying somewhere in the world, on a place you usually didn't have any physical access.
Since then, "Web sites" became a common designation. You pay money for using a "service" which allows you to set up a "virtual server". The New Economy came and went using this paradigm; people still think that things like Yahoo, Google or even Slashdot have "real value" these days - and eventually buy and sell related concepts, like "domain names", on eBay - another virtual thingy.
This is not "strange" to us, as proud 2005 dwellers. Some of you will remember the days of skepticism when people claimed "paying for virtual Web sites? Why should I commit money/time to a thing that doesn't really exist?" We now laugh at those days since we've learned the value of "virtual web hosting". We know its possibilities, good and bad.
Enter "virtual land". Like "web sites", "virtual land" is just a metaphor, an analogy. You cannot "claim" that because the name "land" was picked to describe "remote 3D content storage", it has an analogue to "real estate", and use it at a base for an argument. It's just a name, nothing more. It doesn't have intrinsic value - just like a "Web site" is not more or less valuable than a construction site or an archaelogical site.
It's just a metaphor.
Now, we can agree or disagree if "remote 3D content storage" is or not a business, or if Linden Lab - the company behind the Second Life platform - is or not promoting this business successfully. If you like, compare it to Akamai. Like Akamai (whose Web site runs on Linux/Apache 1.3.33), Linden Lab has a large grid of servers (running Linux and mostly open source software) which host Gigabytes of content, and stream it over the net. Akamai does mostly video and sound, Linden Lab does 3D content. Akamai demands a special setup for you to include your videos and music into your pages, which is proprietary software, but which they give away for their customers (although the streaming uses standard protocols). Linden Lab demands you to use a special 3D browser, free to download for their customers, to be able to visualize the 3D content. Akamai has probably a set of tools to help you out to set up your video/audio streaming (I haven't used them recently); Linden Lab, inside the free 3D browser, has included a fully-featured 3D modelling tool, relying upon collaborative work (ie. many people can model the same object at the same time, and all see the results in real time), targeted towards amateurs and not professional 3D designers. Akamai does not provide its own content; people store their own intellectual property on their network of servers, Akamai is just the remote repository for that intellectual property. Similarly, Linden Lab does not provide content, just storage, technical support, and a staff to help you out to manage your content. Akamai has a world-wide network that tries to stream your content efficiently; Linden Lab has only now started to do the same (ie. several separate co-location facilities where 3D content is stored and streamed appropriately). Akamai probably does off-site backups of your data, in case of disruption, they can put it on another server; Linden Lab most definitely has precisely the same service (and yes, they have used those off-site backups at least once in he past year).
Akamai is a multi-billion, successfull company engaged in providing quality streaming video/audio around the world. Linden Lab is a tiny Californian company focusing on streaming 3D content.
I'm not claiming that Linden Lab is Akamai, just that they have similar business setups, up to a point. The major difference, of course, is on the type of content hosted remotely. 3D content is handled very differently t
Slashdot Mirror
Curiously, Linden Lab even posted a blog entry on their Official Blog about this issue. Notice how the word "criminal" is used there to describe the phishers and scammers.
Nobody is saying that these people are "making money fast". They aren't. They're talented; they have expertise; they know all sort of graphical designer tools. They just didn't have an opportunity as web designers in the oversaturated market where everybody knows how to put a site up with a Frontpage template (or not even that). Instead, they move onwards to the next generation of graphical design -- doing it in 3D. Their set of skills will be exactly the ones needed to have success selling content i Second Life. And if you're good enough, with proper "networking" and promotion, it means you'll be able to survive on that.
Now, remember that all this is only possible because your work is being sold in a market with 12 million users using micropayments. The micropayments system is tied to US dollars, of course, and so far, people trusted it fairly enough.
But if rumours of scams, transactions being reverted, and the whole micropayment system being undermined by crackers and phishers start to be widespread, people will lose confidence in the micropayment system. Put into other words: they will buy less content. Freelancers will find it hard to get more customers willing to buy content from them. So this definitely leads to some people losing their mortgages. Not millions, certainly. But possibly thousands...
I mean, if they deserved that money, they'd be strong enough to still have it, right?
If the smart should be allowed to scam the stupid, why shouldn't the strong be allowed to steal from the the weak? Because of ethics and morals?...
Joe Hacker sets up a phishing site, and captures Clueless Newbie's password. He now sets up a "Linden dollar exchange" randomly on a wide farm of worm-hacked servers around the world, claiming to be selling Linden dollars well below the current market average as established by Linden Lab's own LindeX and the other major legitimate currency exchanges (ie. about L$270 per US$). Utter Fool registers on that site, uses his PayPal data to buy some L$ for the advertised price. Now Joe Hacker gets the money from Utter Fool (and ver likely a new PayPal account...), logs in as Clueless Newbie, buys the required L$ on the legitimate LindeX, and sends it to Utter Fool. Utter Fool is happy -- she just got a whole lot of L$ way below market place, and happily spends it at Legitimate Vendor's fabulous shop, buys some land from Honest Landbaron, and goes to tell all her friends how great this new currency exchange is, and, more important than that, how it actually works and is no scam.
All works wonderfully for about a month -- Utter Fool's friends all log in to Joe Hacker's fake site (foolishly providing him with more PayPal account information through their avatar logins). At the end of the month, Clueless Newbie suddenly finds out a huge tab on his credit card. He promptly tells his bank about a huge fraud perpetuated by Linden Lab -- since he did never meant to buy any Linden dollars. Linden Lab presents as a counterclaim the registry of all transactions, which have legitimately come from the user identified as Clueless Newbie. The credit card company flags this as fraud, though, and Linden Lab reverts the transactions. But... the L$ have already disappeared from Clueless' own L$ account! It's spread all over Second Life's economy. Linden Lab informs all vendors, merchants and service providers that they'll have to revert all transactions -- L$ disappear from all their accounts, and the objects are deleted from inventory all of a sudden, with emails explaining about the major fraud.
Everybody gets unhappy, but the "money trail" points to Joe Hacker's website. Except... that it doesn't exist any more. It has switched to somewhere else, impossible to track. Joe Hacker's account is closed down and he gets banned from Second Life. No problem at all. The next month, Joe creates a new account, Joe2 Hacker, and now he has a whole month of logins and passwords to try out, so he launches fifty new websites, somewhere else in the world, and starts from scratch. After the second month he already has 2500 logins and passwords, and Linden Lab continues to track down the "money trail" and reverting all transactions, manually, one by one. It just gets worse, so long as there are enough people willing to fall for the scam (which they will -- it simply works, since people do get the Linden dollars as promised, and they can buy things with it... until the next user finds out that his account was phished, which takes time). Joe (under his several incarnations) is always making money during all this time.
How can this be stopped? Well, at some point in time, some law enforcement agency will have collected enough evidence (supplied by Linden Lab's transaction logs using IP addresses and hardware tags [like CPU serial numbers and Ethernet addresses]) and are able to track him down and arrest him. But that can take months, and the truly professional phishers will not be so stupid as to use their computers at home, but just use public ones from libraries and cybercafes. So it can be months until they can be arrested, and some never will, as they might just be somewhere in an island in Indonesia or the Caribean or Bolivia or any other far-fetched country... or, if they're not physically there, they're using all sort of proxying software to appear that they're logged elsewhere. They might even be using a modified version of the Second Life client that does not send any hardware-related identification (or completely fake hardware ID).
What's the alternative? Education. Explaining people how these scams work and how to make sure you don't fall for them. That's what Linden Lab is doing right now on their official blog...
Second Life may have close to 6 million accounts these days, but that's still "small". Sure, by the end of 2007, Second Life, completely disregarded by popular MMOG sites just two years ago, will have more valid accounts than the mega-monster World of Warcraft, always a reference in popularity. By the end of 2008, it'll have more users than most states in the US or countries in Europe. By the end of 2009 it will reach that comfortable plateaux that all Internet start-ups dream about: the "magic" 150-million-user-mark, something that MySpace, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, or YouTube all have, and that gives everybody the notion that they will be around forever (how many users does Slashdot have, btw?). So that's the goal for Second Life, and Linden Lab (and others!) will try all strategies that can further that goal. Until then, no, there won't be IPOs or selling out -- Linden Lab's investors don't "need" money, but they most certainly "want" to have a huge stake in defining the platform that will run the Metaverse.
In effect, and further substanciating Danathar's claims, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that Linden Lab's venture capitalists are pretty cool-headed about the way they want to make money out of it. Squeezing out every possible cent out of Linden Lab right now to get a handful of million dollars, for people who have a few billions (directly owned or indirectly), is really a bad, bad business move. They're much smarter than that. The "competition" that may or may not appear will have to "fight" not only on the technology level (easier) but on the whole mentality and corporate approach. They have to be very long runners and not "hit-and-run" investors. Remember the lesson of Google: they survived the Internet bubble with very-long-term thinking. The bubble came and go, and Google started earnestly to grow like crazy after the bubble burst -- while the competition (Altavista?) was left behind, trying to figure out what went wrong with their business models.
So we'll need to look at what LL's investors are really after. Philip Rosedale, obviously, is after the fame and glamour -- he doesn't care about the money, it's really something he doesn't need -- he has plenty of it and is not greedy. After all, he could still be in the streaming business (having invented the technology) and launch, say, a profitable YouTube competitor, instead of risking everything on something that nobody knew, back in 1999 when he started, if there was already a "market" for it. Now it's easy to see there is one, but we also know that from the almost 6 million users, less than 100 thousand pay anything for using the service, and Linden Lab has to be a very small and lean operation to survive on just that. In fact, the overall investment in Linden Lab is trivially low, when compared to, say, a low-end game developed by an independent company. They're barely above the red line, and will continue to do so, by exploring different ways of achieving the same goal -- outsourcing technical support, outsourcing most of the grid, open sourcing software, establishing agreements with third parties to manage bits of their infrastructure while focusing mostly on their technology. All that to keep growing exponentially and hit the mystical 150-million-users mark before anyone else does, and hopefully in a couple of years.
Once they reach that plateaux -- without IPOs, without additional funding, without selling out to Microsoft or Google -- they will be in a position to dictate the rules, unquestionably. They already have strong ties to corporations like IBM to support their vision of the Metaverse. Yes, it's very likely that the "next" grid will be r
So that's it. Waiting time for us non-US residents.
Hmm, actually, Google AdSense can use bank accounts as well to pay for money earned from your ads (yes, and it works on non-US banks perfectly as well). So if they have this technology to interface with banking systems, they might add it to Google Checkout as well.
:-D
Actually, I used the "bank interfacing" first with Google AdSense, only to find later that it was available on PayPal as well
Is Google Checkout available on any country but the US? I live in Portugal, and Google Checkout seems to insist that any valid address I type is set to "United States" (a fixed field which is impossible to change). Also, at the first step of the registration, valid US business IDs are necessary. The terms of service also seem to preclude anything but an US-registered company.
FYI this blog seems to have reached the same conclusion: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=244
With 70% of Internet commerce being outside the US, is this move by Google so clever? I would assume that most people living far away from PayPal's HQ in the US, who never receive a reply from their customer support just because they're not US customers, would flood the gates to get a valid Google Checkout account...
- Gwyn
Mind you, this thread has been interesting -- it reminded me of the days people on BBSes were discussing why they should download a "graphic Web browser" for connecting to the Web, which had, at that time, only a tiny fraction of the content (and the interest!) of BBSes...
I still find it amusing to watch how difficult this concept is when explained to people who are at the forefront of the technology (slashdotters) and who have been reading Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Tad Williams, and similar SF authors for the past decades, and most definitely have seen the Matrix and all its sequels.
Maybe it's hard to understand that all those concepts are now "true" -- people can live and work in virtual realities these days, they have companies for doing work with virtual realities, they do mixed meetings (half of the attendance is physically present on the conference room, the other half attends virtually from the comfort of their homes and with a computer in front of them). Ok, so, it sounds like science fiction. So what? In 1980, if you'd tell your friends that one day, the whole western population would have a cheap (US$ 25) cellular phone in their pockets to talk to anybody at any time, without wires, people would laugh at you or even try to get you into an asylum...
Current virtual realities are not photorealistic, neither do they require goggles or bodysuits, and the neural interface, while on the works (yes, really!) is still too clumsy to be taken seriously. So what? Things have to start somewhere. So the best you can do these days is 30-40 fps on a 2000x1500 screen, and not yet ray tracing for photorealism? Hooray! It's a first step! Tomorrow, it'll be bigger; in ten years, you'll have ray-tracing chips on your Pentium VII @ 1 THz and 20 TByte RAM, for perhaps US$1000 (complete with goggles). Or perhaps it'll be in twenty years -- who knows? The point is, current virtual realities still feel like the BBSes from the 1980s -- but they're here, they're working, they have hundreds of thousands users online who understand what you can do with them... you have to start somewhere!
Imagine Marc Andreesen in front of a 1980s BBS and dreaming about a graphical browser. Imagine that he had given up and said "it's hopeless, all we have now to chat is a text-based interface, computers/networks will never evolve fast enough to give us nice graphics on a browser". What would the world look like?
To go towards the ultimate goal -- virtual realities as commonplace as cellular phones -- you have to start somewhere. Events like "The Happening" are a stepping stone towards that goal. Yes, you can now attend conferences/meetings using virtual realities and two-way, in-world video. 10 years ago we cheered having people doing conferences on IRC! Look at how far we have gone -- now our "IRC" includes a 3D world, avatars, and video/audio streaming, all at the same time! Still, it looks and feels IRCish. But that's fine! We "accused" IRC to look BBSquish as well...
Remember, we had the Mosaic browser because it was sponsored by the NCSA; actually, we had the Internet because it was sponsored by the NCSA (and similar foundations in other countries...). So "taxpayers paid for it". The Web's genesis was a pretty unusual one: from academia to students/researchers first. People with lot of free time, lots of information to pass among themselves, lots of free access to resources they didn't pay for. Also, when finally the companies started to use the Web actively (ie promoting services and offering services for sale online), things like micro-payments never worked well, globally -- just on isolated cases. With some exceptions, the concept that you pay for content, or for ads, did not last beyond the Internet Bubble Bursting. The biggest exception being, of course, Google Adsense... and local ads on the major portal sites.
Do you suggest that the same visionary thinking of having governments and investing taxpayers' money should also apply to Linden Lab/the Metaverse/virtual realities? Perhaps people should then start to put some pressure on their respective governments and demand them to push forward the effort towards virtual realities now? I guess that's a very interesting idea. My personal experience so far with the government of my country is that they're a bit "burned" with virtual realities, after spending some hunderds of thousands of Euros on isolated (ie. not interconnected) projects which were abandoned few months after completion. They're now looking towards things that are cheap, require no investment, are easy to deploy, and can be re-used even after the projects are finished. Thus, Second Life fits in nicely. The major issues with the platform are technological ones, overcoming major issues like the lack of in-world HTML, an un-integrated IM system, etc. All these are being addressed -- although very, very, very slowly. The lack of better integration with existing application servers (ie. through web services that work or APIs for plug-ins, either client-side or server-side (?) has also been mentioned as not being addressed "fast enough".
Speaking for myself, I'd be willing to try to put that "pressure" on them :) So far, the lack of acceptance by the current local state universities has been not too encouraging; they prefer to "invest" in having students using proven technology that is low (or no) cost these days, instead of developing their own from scratch. They seem to be wiser now.
Mind you, Second Life will be open source one day, that is not the issue; Linden Lab's CEO has repeatedly said so. The difficulty, at the moment, is to make all those critical issues working. And do it fast enough before someone else does it, is able to go open source, and focus on developing added value services to sponsor the costs. So far, I've seen just a few groups on the "race": the ultimate vapourware OpenCroquet and the yet-to-be-deployed Multiverse. On the "paid", licensed, side of things there is stil lActiveWorlds and tiny things like Virtual Universes -- all available for a fee. Beyond that... you've got literally dozens of half-finished products on Sourceforge and the like. All incompatible, all different, all with people working on them sporadically and without talking to each other. But many with some good ideas here and there. Still, they see themselves more like "software for developing your own MMOG", not really a platform for things like deployment of creative content, virtual economy, and socializing/networking.
I certainly agree that bandwidth is an issue today, but it won't be in 10 years (unless you wish photorealism by then :) ). But well, one shouldn't minimize the need for implementing things like protecting intellectual property. "Get a lawyer" is not easy to do when you're a
I think you have it the other way round when comparing Second Life with VRML. VRML is a protocol, released publicly; what a group of people said was: "here is this amazing protocol that allows you to embed 3D images inside Web pages. Go build your things with it". And some did. Some sold kits for producing VRML code. Some created plug-ins (and sold these) for web browsers. Some produced content in VRML, and put it on Web pages -- sometimes for free (like demos), sometimes on a per-request basis, which usually was paid for. The problem with VRML (like HTML) is that it's just a protocol, nothing else -- either people use it or not, and, when using it, they might promote services on top of it.
On the other hand, Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, are an application and hosting provider. Their only source of income is running an extensive grid of servers to host your 3D content, and provide a 3D browser/viewer for you to access that content. Their core business is not providing content (or else, they could capitalize on that); they just have a handful of designers, and perhaps around 0.1% of all content in Second Life was actually created by Linden Lab (and you have free access to that).
As you can see, this is not "just a nice thingy" that someone thought it would be cool to have and to post somewhere on Sourceforge (there are enough semi-abandoned virtual reality projects there already). This is a new area of business: 3D content hosting, and that's what LL does. But they do not provide the content by themselves, just the infrastructure needed for that content to have a persistent storage.
So, their business model works like this: you wish to have persistent 3D content storage (read: you wish that your created objects are on display for everyone else to see, permanently, even when you're offline), well, you pay a tiny fee monthly for Linden Lab to host it on their servers. If, instead, you just wish to look/use/enjoy other user's content (and rest assured, that's exactly what around 80% of all users of Second Life wish to do), you can do that for absolutely free.
I hope this explains why Linden Lab charges for hosting 3D web content -- servers, bandwidth, maintenance and backups, technical support (24h/7, in different languages, on timezones around the globe), and community support take time, require professional expertise, and there must be "someone" to cover all those costs. Linden Lab is still a tiny company, and 3D content hosting is their only source of income.
You could argue that Linden Lab could enter the content development business and make their money from there. Sure, they could -- but can their handful of content creators compete with a team of 140,000 very creative and talented people? There is not really going to happen :)
What you argue for is something different: a loosely-knit structure of people having their own servers at home for others to connect to, so, in a sense, each user would, at their own expense, provide 3D content hosting for free.
Now, at the current state of the art, this has a few limitations. While the technology used in Second Life is arguably not the best implementation, it currently supports a bit over 10 TBytes of content for 140,000 users. This means that each of the servers, on average, just to support 40-100 avatars, need 10-20 Mbps of upstreaming bandwidth on average. While 16 Mbps ADSL links are already available, they're not bi-directional; you can consider lucky if you have over 512 Kbps upstream bandwidth -- barely enough for 4-5 people. 10-20 Mbps of upstream bandwid
In the late 1980s, a new "paradigm" was around: the Internet, quickly maturing and spreading around, touting itself as an alternative to bulletin boards by introducing Usenet News, and replacing chatrooms with IRC. At that time, old-time BBS veterans scorned the bright, goggle-eyed 'utopians' and 'dreamers' that looked to the Internet as the future of communication, socialization, creative expression, and even (God forbids!) business. They were scorned and laughed upon; BBSes already provided all those things and were much better at doing so than the clumsy 'Internetters' could with their old-fashioned and cumbersome tools. And the media covering the BBS labeled the nerds connecting to them as interested only in sex and games.
As a matter of fact, a whole generation of die-hard BBSers, highly skilled veterans in promoting their services using a well-proven technology, simply were reluctant to relinquish their status quo and embrace the Brave New World of the Internet.
In the 1990s, with BBSes "absorbed" by the Internet (by tying them together using the Internet as a medium, and propagating discussions, chatrooms, and early MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs to the Internet), people fought among themselves what was the best form of propagating information and providing remote access to it. Telnet-based servers competed with gopher servers which in turn competed with proprietary protocols for chatrooms and MUD/MUSHes/MOOs. There was no clear 'winner' (gopher seemed to be the best bet at the time) until an obscure scientist at CERN developed yet another model of remote access to information: the Web was born, and it was text-based. Still, gopherers and promoters of other tools scorned the 'arrivists' -- they simply wouldn't leave "their" proprietary tools in order to clumsily embrace "hypertext", which was so limited in scope and hardly used by anyone except a few freaks and outcasts on a very limited basis.
When the first graphical browser came out, the veterans of the text-based Internet frowned upon Mosaic and their ilk. People simply didn't have the required bandwidth to show 'nice graphics'; a text-based model had been in place for ages (at this time, MIME-encoded attachments for email was still a 'novelty'), it worked well and fast, and used little bandwidth. Why would people need a 'graphical browser'? The answer, of course, was clear if we read the media's coverage of the Web in the mid-1990s: it's all about sex and games.
Starting around 1995/6, something seemed to click in place, and suddenly the Internet was not only 'sex and games'. Through the Web, people could also communicate, socialize, exchange information, get access to databases -- and do business. The media was intrigued; corporations started to publish information online through the World-Wide Web; Linux and the major open source tools started to get disseminated through the Web as well. The Web, indeed, absorbed previous technologies and replaced it with new and better paradigms: chatrooms, blogs, forums replaced earlier technologies, but they're basically driven by the same needs: distributing information, content, chatting, socializing, doing business. And, of course, also sex and games. But in the 'enlighted' year of 2006, while we live with 'sex and games', almost all of us would agree that the Internet (or, better said, the World-Wide Web) is not about sex and games; they're part of it, but there is so much more than that.
People now fight to define what the "Web 2.0" is going to be, but the "new Web" is nothing new, just applying new tools to a decade-old technology; yes, w
Although it was not a "site" at all (in the pre-WWW days, a "site" was mostly used in the context of construction or archeology) - it was just a bunch of bytes in a server, lying somewhere in the world, on a place you usually didn't have any physical access.
Since then, "Web sites" became a common designation. You pay money for using a "service" which allows you to set up a "virtual server". The New Economy came and went using this paradigm; people still think that things like Yahoo, Google or even Slashdot have "real value" these days - and eventually buy and sell related concepts, like "domain names", on eBay - another virtual thingy.
This is not "strange" to us, as proud 2005 dwellers. Some of you will remember the days of skepticism when people claimed "paying for virtual Web sites? Why should I commit money/time to a thing that doesn't really exist?" We now laugh at those days since we've learned the value of "virtual web hosting". We know its possibilities, good and bad.
Enter "virtual land". Like "web sites", "virtual land" is just a metaphor, an analogy. You cannot "claim" that because the name "land" was picked to describe "remote 3D content storage", it has an analogue to "real estate", and use it at a base for an argument. It's just a name, nothing more. It doesn't have intrinsic value - just like a "Web site" is not more or less valuable than a construction site or an archaelogical site.
It's just a metaphor.
Now, we can agree or disagree if "remote 3D content storage" is or not a business, or if Linden Lab - the company behind the Second Life platform - is or not promoting this business successfully. If you like, compare it to Akamai. Like Akamai (whose Web site runs on Linux/Apache 1.3.33), Linden Lab has a large grid of servers (running Linux and mostly open source software) which host Gigabytes of content, and stream it over the net. Akamai does mostly video and sound, Linden Lab does 3D content. Akamai demands a special setup for you to include your videos and music into your pages, which is proprietary software, but which they give away for their customers (although the streaming uses standard protocols). Linden Lab demands you to use a special 3D browser, free to download for their customers, to be able to visualize the 3D content. Akamai has probably a set of tools to help you out to set up your video/audio streaming (I haven't used them recently); Linden Lab, inside the free 3D browser, has included a fully-featured 3D modelling tool, relying upon collaborative work (ie. many people can model the same object at the same time, and all see the results in real time), targeted towards amateurs and not professional 3D designers. Akamai does not provide its own content; people store their own intellectual property on their network of servers, Akamai is just the remote repository for that intellectual property. Similarly, Linden Lab does not provide content, just storage, technical support, and a staff to help you out to manage your content. Akamai has a world-wide network that tries to stream your content efficiently; Linden Lab has only now started to do the same (ie. several separate co-location facilities where 3D content is stored and streamed appropriately). Akamai probably does off-site backups of your data, in case of disruption, they can put it on another server; Linden Lab most definitely has precisely the same service (and yes, they have used those off-site backups at least once in he past year).
Akamai is a multi-billion, successfull company engaged in providing quality streaming video/audio around the world. Linden Lab is a tiny Californian company focusing on streaming 3D content.
I'm not claiming that Linden Lab is Akamai, just that they have similar business setups, up to a point. The major difference, of course, is on the type of content hosted remotely. 3D content is handled very differently t