a few comments (out of order) – i don't think sl needs to lower their fees and i look at network solutions, the ICANN peeps, as an example. i have used them since 1999 and they have always been $35 per year. back then, they were about the only game in town and you had to use them

but then Go Daddy got big (started in 1997) and is now bigger than netsol and charges way less. netsol still gets $35 and is still important. so that's one way sl could be

now you know we have 12 sims isl and 4 sims on our own grid with Reaction Grid and the price diff is HUGE as you pointed out (about 7% the cost actually) and we LOVE reaction grid. omg, they are so wonderful and soooo helpful (they actually care and i truly believe that LL does not care at all about me – waaaah) =p

i think sl will be the big player for casual people in the long run because it is so easy. there is a def cold-water-in-the-face moment with OpenSim. for me anyway, i was overwhelmed at the lack of stuff i had. i do lots of building with subQuark, even multi-sim campus development, but i freaked out that i would have to start all over again with textures and the like (i am mixed on using second inventory and have used meerkat to grab some of my bigger builds)

BUT that very same "oh crap" moment is also a blessing that you alluded to. since i can't just pop over to Corn Furniture and buy an office chair for 50 cents, i end up making it. and that has proved very rewarding

and, one last "but", when e-commerce gets introduced into opensim, well, that will be a game changer – then LL will need to really worry

thanks for letting me blab all over the place =)

The AOL comparison is apt, but not for the reason you outline. AOL's problem wasn't centered on a kind of "tear down that paywall Mr. Case" issue so much as it was just a lousy product that drove the prime user demographics away. The software was buggier than a Florida swamp, it was full of 13 year olds griefing chat rooms with reams of racist and mean spirited nonsense that AOL did very little about, and their customer service was unresponsive (in fact, trying to cancel their service was often as difficult as trying to to leave the Mafia) or just plain dumb. SL users will find all this very familiar.

So what Second Life must do to succeed is to first deal with immediate defects such as increasing lag, hardware requirements that are more and more outstripping what most computer users have, stop annoying content creators and come up with a viable way to protect their copyrights and be honest and open with its users rather than just resorting to the corporate default of inane and intellectually dishonest p.r. speak and do a better job of policing griefers. If they don't do that, their song and dance with OpenSim and anyone else will be like the Titanic trying to prevent sinking by polishing the brass rails in a quixotic attempt that would believe that looking shiny will prevent the inevitable demise.

Second life has been around long enough now that it should be getting at least a million users a day. That it struggles mightily to attain 70,000 at anyone time is a huge red flag flapping vigorously in the wind that Mark Kingdon and crew apparently can't hear or see. And that is a pity.

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"Digital content needs to be consumed — and as it is being consumed by our ears, or our eyeballs, then it can be copied. This is nothing new. Humans have been copying content since content was invented. It would be foolish to assume that virtual worlds will be able to achieve what no one else has."

Your understanding of the economics of virtual worlds is probably going to be borne out in practice – Second Life will have to lower land prices and improve service once standards are in place to to allow movement of avatars and assets between grids.

My personal take is that SL will not do what it takes to open its grid up in time to remain a force in the 3D Internet. I do think that, like AOL, SL's attempts to keep a closed system will eventually fail as competitors line up outside its walls. What a shame, as I find it to be a high-quality platform with many interesting people.

Things have bogged down lately – work on the Linden Lab inspired VWRAP (the next attempt at laying down standards) is slow. Though the VWRAP group is open to anyone, my suspicion is that if they're really looking to engage OpenSim, they're going to have to bring some of the ideas to on our mailing lists as well as on the VWRAP ones. This isn't from a position of any snobbishness – it's just that I think it's difficult for the core developers of OpenSim to track what's going on in so many different places.

One thing that would really help, in my opinion, is if Linden Lab published documentation for the client – region simulator protocol. Admittedly, much of this has been clean room reverse-engineered by libopenmetaverse but some explicit documentation by Linden Lab would make certain things much clearer. And this would need to continue for future changes – at OpenSim we're still in the position where unannounced changes in the behaviour of the Linden Lab viewer can stop it working with OpenSim until people make their usual heroic effort to fix it.

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This whole publication is a giant ad for OpenSim! No, seriously, we definite "hypergrid" to be the total space of worlds accessible through the Second Life and OpenSim browsers that could (potentially) be connected to one another via hypergrid teleporation links. We believe that this is the future of virtual worlds, and write extensively about the various companies and groups offering OpenSim deployments — Adam Frisby runs one such company, and there's ReactionGrid and OSGrid, and dozens of others.

Adam Frisby is listed under "About" because he has contributed an opinion column to this blog (found in the "Columns" section).

You can see his contributions here: http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/author/adam-fris…

We are always looking for columnists with an interesting — and informative — point of view about the use of virtual worlds technologies for business.

– Maria Korolov

Editor, Hypergrid Business

I wonder how Adam Frisby, the main guy behind the OpenSim efforts, came to be listed as the second person on the "About Us" page for this blog.

You are absolutely right — I meant "trademarks" there. I'll update the posts. Copyright normally lasts for a set amount of years beyond the death of the creator (varies by country). Trademarks are granted by individual governments and have to be actively protected to keep from being lost. With branded goods its is the brand identity — the trademark — that is most important.

Copyright applies to things like text, photographs, music, and art, and doesn't require any registration. You make something, you automatically own the copyright until you formally assign the copyright to someone else. A trademark holder can sell licenses to other to use their trademarks. A copyright holder sells reprint rights to their work.

– Maria

This post was mentioned on Twitter by ImmortalDux: Reading: “Why #Second Life needs OpenSim – Hypergrid Business” (http://twitthis.com/5jcnqa)…

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