Google Shutting Down Lively

I've been absent in this space for several months; I've spent any available blogging time in my general educational technology blog: Edtechatouille. However, a few developments within my institution will likely bring me back to this space on a regular basis in the coming months - more on that later.

I did see an interesting announcement in the last several days I thought worth mentioning here. Google will be shutting Lively down at the end of the year:

That's why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.

I think the "virtual experience" - an augmented chat room more than a virtual world - has a great deal to do with Lively's demise; it clearly never really "took off" with users. Plus, I was never really clear how Lively fit within Google's larger mission to make everything searchable.

Linden Lab Post- OpenSim & Interoperability?

A bonus and rare two-post day here at MUVE Forward. The news of Linden Labs' & IBM's cooperative effort to teleport from the Second Life preview grid to a location on an OpenSim space has created excitement and raised more than a few questions. Brett Bjornson (RL: Brett Bixler, Penn State) asked several questions in a recent post that made a few thoughts gel.

Last week, Erir Reuters interviewed Linden VP Joe Miller (SL: Zero Linden) - Linden prepares for an OpenSim Future - to explore what Linden Lab's strategy might be for the long term. After all, Linden's current profit model is almost entirely dependent upon land sales and management; if they are actively pursuing interoperability and the increase of OpenSim within the market,

"Linden is banking on OpenSim to bolster its strong position in the virtual worlds industry."

How will Linden maintain profitability?

Naturally, Miller provided vague answers at best, but according to Reuters, he suggested that Linden intends to provide search and economic and trading services, particularly if the $L can be maintained as the "gold standard" of virtual world currency. Plus, Linden Lab could assume administration responsibilities within the virtual worlds standards naming and communication protocols in a manner similar to VeriSign's role in managing top-level internet domains.

I think the "very specific plans" Miller mentioned during the interview will be much grander and different than economic and trading services. I believe Linden Lab's future profit model will include:

• Trust Certificates for OpenSim operators/owners. As noted by my previous post - OpenSim, SecondLife & Interoperability - the transfer of assets from Second Life to an OpenSim space will require a trust relationship between the two grids to ensure that content creators' rights and control over their products are preserved. Based upon a 2005 blog post by Gwyneth Llewelyn which I discovered via a more recent post by Danton Sideways, I specifically asked Tess Linden (during Zero's office hours on Tue, July 8) if it would be logical for Linden Lab to offer fee-based "trust certificates" to OpenSim owners; she indicated that it's possible. I think it's obvious.
  
• Establishing secure, enterprise virtual worlds for corporations. I perceived this to be a viable profit model for Linden Lab when it was announced in April that IBM and Linden Lab had established a private Second Life server behind IBM's firewall. In my post A New Hype Curve for SL: Private, Secure Sims & Open Source, I described how I think this may occur, why it's viable and what it would allow Linden to accomplish - specifically, open sourcing the server code.
  
• Providing business data integration services for Second Life and OpenSim servers. In addition to being ideally suited to support businesses as they engage virtual worlds, Linden is also uniquely positioned to integrate OpenSim/Second Life backend data streams and institutional business data. Services and products that help connect OpenSim to Active Directory or other data structures makes sense.
  
• Custom virtual world solutions. Out of the box isn't always the best solution, and there's plenty of room for consultants to offer services which customize OpenSim server code to meet specific business needs - perhaps beyond the integration of business data. Linden Lab's experience in building Second Life in the first place places them at the top of this list as well.
  

What does this mean for education? I believe this answers questions regarding the long term viability of Second Life - perhaps not as a unique platform but as a type of virtual environment; the revenue streams I'm suggesting allow Linden Lab to actively pursue interoperability between the main grid and OpenSims, as I suggested back in April and as they are currently doing with IBM. For me, all of that suggests that the Second Life type platform - either Second Life proper or the reverse engineered OpenSim version - will continue to exist and expand. It makes educational ventures into Second Life more viable over the short term with some level of confidence that work done now may realistically be transferred to an institutionally owned OpenSim server that potentially integrates with other business systems.

OpenSim, Second Life & Interoperability

Last week, I noticed - like everyone else - the news regarding the successful interoperability venture by Linden Labs and IBM to teleport from the Second Life preview grid to a location in "another" virtual world running on an OpenSim server. More than a few thoughts have been swirling around since then.

The same afternoon as the announcement (Tue, July 8), I attended Zero Linden's office hours hosted by Tess Linden (Zero on vacation). There were two key issues discussed by the group that remain key issues which must be resolved for interoperability to be logistically possible; my non-technical understanding of those issue follows.

First, the transfer of assets from grid to grid presents a significant logistical issue for the protection of content ownership. As Tess noted, "Second lLife does not have copy protection against assets . . . [has] a permissions system that may not be honored by external grids that [SL] doesn't have a trust relationship with." To protect content may then require (a) restricting it to the main grid and not allowing movement between grids, (b) allowing content creators to mark their content as eligible for transfer between grids, or (c) establishing a trust relationship between open sim & Linden servers to ensure that open sims protect content ownership.

Second, maintaining identity from server to server presents particular challenges as well. A very simple level of identity management would be to have one system recognize or know an avatar's unique, different identity on another and simply pass that information between the systems. That would allow for me to "teleport" from Topher Zwiers in Second Life to my Chris Alpha account on an Open Sim; but that's not true interoperability. However, it may not be possible for me to claim Topher Zwiers on every Open Sim platform. In short, true interoperability requires some measure of central idnetity management: agent domain naming protocol or OpenID type system. like system.consistent protocols that amount to For interoperability to work as envisioned For me - and this may only be me - there's two levels of "interoperability" in regards to identity.

With all of that said, I believe OpenSim and the notion of interoperability currently presents the same opportunity for educators that Project Wonderland does. This is the earliest news of interoperability being a reality; like Wonderland, I believe it will take 18 months to two years to truly begin resolving many of these issues - at least to the point where OpenSim with a connection to the main grid may be a worthwhile endeavor for educational institutions using virtual worlds for instructional purposes.

There's a number of issues and questions that have come up since the news of the test; I have a few thoughts in that regard as well, but that's the next post.

Two resources of interest:
Touring the Open Source Grids by Danton Sideways, May 26, 2008
Open Grid @ Second Life wiki

Application Sharing Coming to Second Life?

Interesting comments noted by Technology Review from MIT in an article run today: The Virtual World as Web Browser

The company [Second Life] is also working to make it easy for users to share 2-D data such as Microsoft Word files or PowerPoint presentations with other users inside the virtual world. Miller [Joe Miller, vice president of platform and technology development for Second Life] says that Linden Lab plans to deliver these new technologies by the end of this year, as part of its Web Media Initiative.

That's definitely of interest to any educator's using Second Life along with other tools for formal learning experiences. The article goes on to describe what I'm guessing are several other aspects of the Web Media Initiative that have been a long time coming, in my experience. The first is associating media with prims rather than parcels, as the article describes it:

Web content could then be stored on a portable object that a user's avatar can carry anywhere in the virtual world. "You can take it out and show it to someone without that land having to be yours," Miller says.

There is a short blurb about a collaborative whiteboard feature of sorts, but quickly turns to broadening the flavors of media (read: Flash) that could be imported into Second Life to give users more flexibility. I picked the article up through a Google News search feed I recently added to my reader. That feed, along with others to which I personally tag articles and blog entries that are relevant to Second Life and virtual worlds, may be useful.

• Virtual World news via Google Search
• Topher's General Second Life & Virtual World News
• Topher's Second Life Education News

A recent article tagged in my Second Life Education News comes from Entrepreneur.com via MSNBC. Virtual Success describes two young adults that started businesses as teenagers within Teen Second Life and Entropia. It's worth a read for educators; informally validates the value of the virtual spaces.

Your thoughts? Scene vs. Business vs. Content

I recently wrote about Project Wonderland vs Second Life (July 4) and suggested that virtual worlds appear to be falling into different classes of virtual environments: business class vs. content class.  With the recent launch of Google's Lively and Vivaty, there may be a third class of virtual environments beginning to emerge: to borrow from Vivaty's self-description of their service - a virtual "scene."

I'm interested in the community's thoughts regarding these descriptions of different types of virtual environments:

• Content Class virtual worlds are those which focus more on the content and visual imagery within the virtual world than specific business or communication processes.  Content Class virtual worlds attract users because of what can be designed, created, or built within the space; I believe Second Life, Active Worlds and There are examples of content class virtual worlds.
  
• Business Class virtual worlds are those which focus more on supporting business and communication processes than the content and visual appeal.  Business Class virtual worlds are more attractive to institutions or businesses interested in the platform as a means of supporting virtual meetings, communications and workspaces.  At the moment, I believe Project Wonderland, Qwaq and Croquet are examples of business class virtual worlds.
  
• Scene Class virtual environments are not virtual worlds in the sense that the various virtual spaces are not spatially contiguous; instead, each virtual scene is independent and typically user oriented; however, it is possible for avatars to "jump" from one scene to another.  The emphasis and allure of virtual scenes is the addition of a 3D element to social networks and communication.  Although I need to investigate more closely, I believe Google Lively and Vivaty are examples of virtual scenes.

Your thoughts?