Bye Bye Wora’uld

With the acquisition of Avatars United and the release of the Secondlife 2.0 viewer, we clearly see Linden Lab relegating The Grid All Hail The Central Grid to, at best, a side feature of their decentralized social platform. Profiles in 2.0 will be replaced by web content from AU as the interface becomes more Facebookish.  Inworld interaction will be steadily supplanted by features, such as working group chat, that are hosted on external services not connected to, or flowing through, The Grid, but that the clients connect to directly.

Having a little window that looks into a customized, interactive 3D environment will just be one of several social components of the package. Linden Lab is targeting audiences that might just as soon turn off that overtaxing video aspect and work just with text, pictures and sound. In addition to the general howling we hear, people are expressing concern that mesh import is close to being implemented and that prim-based content will become unwanted by the masses.

That may be true of the dyed-in-the-wool Ancients of Second Life. However, the new waves of users will only see the world we know as a cute little avatar feature that they can customize a bit and use to interact with people they don’t know in an interactive 3D space. The fact that it’s connected to a wide grid of spaces is likely not going to attract or keep their attention with a constant stream of chat et al scrolling through what they will consider the important windows.

My thinking is that older, inexpensive, prim-based, content will suit them just fine. Anything they have to pay notable money for, or that drags their performance down, will not be considered necessary for so minor a part of their activity.  I find it interesting that LL are working so hard to introduce content-oriented features, such as web-on-a-prim and mesh import, at the same time their working hard to obscure the idea of being in a world with the idea of having a 3D chat feature as one in a collection of interactive windows.

Second Life 2.0 Interface