So I’ve issued a Challenge to the brilliant residents of Second Life to create plays that they can perform live at the the New Globe Theatre on August 24th.

Here’s the back story. When we created our company, the New Globe was our first project. We chose it because we loved the project for its own merits and also because it represented such a powerful metaphor for what virtual worlds are all about: the ability to try on different identities with groups of other people.

Then we ran into a problem. We wanted to perform a play there, so we started looking into it and realized it was several orders of magnitude harder than we expected. We wanted to use classically trained actors for the voice parts and sync those to animations, but soon discovered that the delay from “live” voice was about 30 seconds. This made the coordination of action and voice really tricky. And this was just the start.

It would have died on the vine, till we realized that “doing it ourselves” was the wrong call — the right move was to let people smarter and more talented give it a shot and collectively endeavor to do this thing. And why? Because it’s hard. And cool.

So here’s the deal. We’d rather people tried to create really great live performance instead of getting bogged down in technical difficulties. Therefore, there will be very few “rules” for submissions, but here they are in no particular order:

1. Plays must be less than 5 minutes long.

2. Plays can be any material you like (not just Shakespeare)

2. There will be 3 Prizes, each worth $L42300 (We chose this number because William Shakespeare was born AND died on 4/23. We thought it was an appropriate number to commemorate his re-birth in Second Life). Prizes will be given for each of the following categories.
BEST DRAMA

BEST COMEDY

AUDIENCE CHOICE

In addition, winners will receive a Golden Prim Virtual Trophy to put on the mantle and show the grandkids.

We will also be filming the event and will produce a polished video which will be distributed to the news media and uploaded to Youtube.com

Email your questions/comments to reuben@millionsofus.com

See you on the 24th!

Back in March, Cory Ondrejka, CTO of Linden Lab bet Dmitri Williams a quarter that within 2 years, Second Life would have more North American subscribers than World of Warcraft.

Since then, the debate raged and raged.

I managed to add fuel to the flames by doing the math and calculating what would happen if the current growth figures for Second Life continue.

Recently, Cory pointed out the inherent silliness of the WOW vs. SL grudgematch:

“To compare SL’s growth curve to any existing MMORPG is a little silly. WoW launched with approximately $10 trillion in advertising (I may be off by a factor of 2 one way or the other), like all other MMORPGs, and is primarily driven by retail sales. SL launched with approximately $0 in marketing and is completely based on viral, referral growth.”

Amen. It’s really interesting to watch this debate unfold but ultimately frustating because its almost intrinsically doomed because of the the apples to oranges problem. Although Second Life looks like an MMORPG and uses much of the same tech, the similarities sort of end there. Both in terms of adoption and usage patterns, Second Life’s growth has been much more like that of the Internet than like a single game title.

My prediction and hope is that it will continue to do so (grow like the Net). In fact, one could argue that the accelerating success of SL is the result of a series of conscious anti-MMORPG-model decisons. Listed briefly these would be user created content, user ownership of their own content, the allowing of free trade in virtual items and finally the move to a free model where the majority of free users support the paying minority and allow them to pay much larger monthly fees.

For SL to continue to move toward an Internet-like model, it will require sustained vision and counterintuitive decision making on the part of Linden Lab. Specifically, to accomodate the scope of their vision, they will need to continue to sacrifice control and/or ownership of slices of the software stack, placing those in the hands of users or 3rd Party companies.

To me the question isn’t will SL catch WOW, it’s when. And while it’s fine for us to spend our time arguing over definitions of users or time spent in world, the truth is that SL and WOW are radically different beasts. WOW is arguably the most polished example of MMORPG the world has seen to date — this type of highly orchestrated and refined content is something that distributed content creation will never (IMHO) threaten. I’d love to be proven wrong and will be overjoyed to sit enthralled in the audience watching a movie like Titanic that was made by thousands of loosely connected prosumers, but I highly doubt it’ll happen. And hence, there’ll always be room for WOW and it’s sucessors.

SL is something radically different and ultimately much larger. What I’d love to see is a shift in focus, away from the “Who’s Bigger and Badder?” debate. Instead, why don’t we start puzzling out the really tough problem of how Second Life (and ultimately others like it) should handle the radically difficult problems and great responsiblity that come with creating a true 3-D internet.

Well, we’ve officially thrown down the gauntlet. Copied below is a transcript of my opening remarks last night at the Book Signing and Discussion for Julian Dibbell.

“Hello everyone and Welcome to the New Globe Theatre in Second Life.

This is the first event we’ve held here since the fabulous Aimee Weber worked her magic and created it. To learn more about the real New Globe project, please visit http://www.newglobe.org

So we’re all here tonight for an evening with Julian Dibbell — he’ll be discussing his new book “Play Money” with Hamlet Au. “Play Money” is a book that describes Julian’s adventures at the frontier of the virtual world and virtual currency explosion, but I’d like to discuss another sort of Play Money.

Tonight we’d like to announce that Millions of Us will be sponsoring a Play Competition. We’re throwing open a challenge to the residents of Second Life to perform the first play in the metaverse right here in the New Globe Theatre.

Plays can be any work, whether new or repertory and can include voice or simply typing. One month from today, we’ll throw open the curtain and have a night at the Theatre. There will be fabulous prizes. And we’ll give away “Play” Money.

Now on with the show!”

We’ll be raising the curtain for this event at 6PM on Thursday August 24th so start rehearsing! More details to follow. . . . .

As our friends over at Linden Lab apply the finishing touches to the long awaited Mozilla integration into Second Life, folks are beginning to think about how this might change the possibility space.

Last night I spent some time thinking about what we might have to look forward to. First, I took a chance to peek at the recently released Web Services description on Phoenix Linden’s blog
which will be of interest to the more technically-minded among you. It describes the basics of how developers will be able to push past current methods to connect objects in Second Life with external servers. Since most of it is over my head, I was going over it with some colleagues and I realized that it’s just not that clear yet what people are going to use these services for.

It’s clear that once HTML on a prim is available on-world, dynamic data and shared browsing will ignite and the effect will be an extraordinary improvement over the current laborious processes employed to display dynamic information nicely. But it’s easy to overlook how important this is. Whenever we collaborate in Second Life, an enormous amount of time early on is spent on concepting and arriving at a shared “vision” for what something should look like. At Millions of Us, this involves sending link lists of Flickr photos, drafting long functional and creative specs and doing detailed schematics and in-world 3-d sketches of planned builds. Now compare that laborious and asynchronous process with this video of a current deployment of Flickr in Second Life. Now you can brainstorm on the fly — entering tags like ‘kitten” or “Gothic Architecture” and everyone present can see the same picture.

Keep in mind that this video shows a process that’s done without HTML — with a browser it will only be more powerful and nuanced.

In my time at Linden Lab I was always very strident that lowering the barrier between Second Life and the web was key to our success. This began with Snapzilla which gave users a simple way to post pictures from Second Life to the web (and, by location stamping those pictures, gave readers a way to see in real-time what was happening on the grid and teleport DIRECTLY to interesting locations). The release of the Map API allowed any user to embed a near-realtime view of the grid into web pages and created all sorts of mashups and Slurl.com gave users a really easy way to create their own customized maps rapidly and without programming knowledge.

Now it’s really starting to get interesting: Within the past few weeks Mark Barrett released SLStats , a service that requires that you buy and wear a virtual watch which records your actions in Second Life and combines that data with that of other users to provide fascinating activity reports. Another user, Koz Farina, created BlogHud which allows users in world to write posts about in-world events and experience without leaving Second Life — the results are sent to the site and appear as posts associated with the location on the map.

These are exciting times to be sure, but as I think about it, the aspect of all these advances that excites me the most is something that’s not really new at all. As I thought about what all this really meant, I kept coming back to a Second Life invention that predated any of these web mashups Starax’s Magic Wand. This fantastic invention allowed the wearer to speak a word and summon forth fantastic objects. For example, I could say “rain”, and a “raincloud” would appear overhead. The effect was immediate, social, magical and delightful. In some ways it was a 3-d equivalent of the Flickr example; the similar effect being the suggestion of a word and the magical conjuring up of an image for all to see.

As I said, this isn’t new at all. Decades ago, some of the earliest text-based advanture and quest games were referred to as MUSH’es, an acronym for Multi User Shared Hallucinations These environments are defined as “a text-based online social medium to which multiple users are connected at the same time” As the years passed, the medium moved from text to graphics to . . . . .well, to Second Life.

And now Second Life is moving to the web: my point being that the critical piece here is the extent to which tapping into shared resources and shared browsing will heighten our ability to Share Hallucinations. These shared experiences will allow us to think more effectively in larger groups and react more quickly to information that streams into our environment. Or, to put it more simply and practically, to get on the same page.

Charles Arthur had a fascinating article in the Guardian Unlimited yesterday about audience composition in sites that rely on user-created content.

He points to YouTube’s staggering statistics and says “The numbers are revealing: each day there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads. . . . 1,538 downloads per upload - and 20m unique users per month.” In other words, less than .1% of YouTubers are content creators. Similar numbers appear for Wikipedia and a variety of robust, community authored sites like Digg.com.

So what about Second Life? In the early days (3 years ago when there were only a few simulators and very little content), almost everyone was a content creators because there was very little else to do. I can remember that before I joined Linden Lab, there were 14,000 residents and the ratio of creators (which is obviously a hard term to define and measure, but that’s another subject) to consumers was something like 70%/30%. These days, with the advent of the free model, I would expect those numbers are more like 85%/15% and eventually, when Second Life has 3 million users, will look something like those at YouTube.

What do you think?

In the process of pitching Second Life to various clients, I decided to answer just this question. Of course, I don’t have a crystal ball, so instead I resorted to using Excel (I think there’s a marketing slogan in there somewhere: “The next best thing to a crystal ball: Microsoft Excel”.

All jokes aside, I think the results of simply applying a compounded monthly growth rate are surprising (we all know how hard it is to calculate compound interest). What this shows is that if the current rate of 22% monthly growth continues, we’re looking at 3.6 million residents by July 1 2007. If things slow down and SL grows at just 10% monthly, there will be 936K residents.

If we decide to split the difference, we’re still looking at a couple million users a year from now. Pretty mindblowing.