[sldev] [META] There are multiple infospheres (Was: From Browser Wars to Virtual World Interoperability)

[Argent Stonecutter]

Should have meta-tagged that, Dzo. :)

Of course the SL client is a browser. So's Windows Explorer and  
Finder and Acrobat and your TV set and Visual Studio and any other  
system that's designed to let you look at little bits of a big thing.  
It's also an editor, like Finder and Windows Explorer and Visual  
Studio and Word and Photoshop and any other system that's designed to  
let you change what you're looking at. It's lots of other things as  
well.

But just because it's a browser, that doesn't mean AL's like the web.  
There's lots of ways to organize a shared environment. The web's been  
a really effective one, but that effectiveness has made people think  
that's what a universal shared environment has to be. SL isn't like  
the web. It's a different kind of thing.

The thing about the web is that it's all one place. The web is right  
here, everything in the web is just as close as everything else.  
That's what the web is all about, being all in the same place. That's  
what old Memex and Xanadu were all about too, bringing the world to  
your fingertips. You're "on the web". You don't "go to Livejournal",  
and anything else on the web you want to put in one click from  
Livejournal you can do that. When someone doesn't let you, when you  
can't deep-link to them, that sucks. When they sue people for deep  
linking, you boggle. That's nuts. Because that's balkanising the web,  
breaking it up into pieces that aren't all in one place. This all-on- 
one-place-ness is central to the web.

Second life isn't like that. It's spacial. It's always going to be  
spacial: point to point teleporting doesn't change that, and portals  
or llTeleportAgent or anything else of that nature won't change that.  
What makes it spacial is that your avatar is in one place at a time,  
AND you can see everything else in that place. If the web was like  
that, you'd "go to Livejournal" and when you were there other people  
could see you there, and you wouldn't be anywhere else. And if SL was  
like the web you wouldn't have a single viewpoint, you'd be able to  
open up another window and look out of there, and you wouldn't even  
show up anywhere unless you wanted to. And an open grid, even one  
that's got magical avatar transfer technology that lets you take your  
SL avatar to Habbo Hotel or Sony Home or Warcraft, is still going to  
be spacial.

So I don't really think it matters what ECMAscript 3 or 4 does, as  
far as SL is concerned. I don't think that there's enough similarity  
between "the web" and "virtual worlds" to try and use one as a model  
for another, or bring one into the other. You can have the same  
information presented both places, and do business both places...  
I've got a store in SL and products in SLExchange too... but they're  
fundamentally different kinds of infospheres.