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.

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