It's been a quiet week on the blog so far because we're all really busy. It's one of those weeks where everyone in the department is either permanently in meetings or chained to their desks trying to get through their work. So this is just a quick post to talk briefly about one or two things.
Identity Society Event 19 February
I attended the first Identity Society event yesterday. It was a real privilege to meet some of the most original and passionate thinkers on issues of identity and identity information. BT had agreed to host the event in the BT Tower in London, a brilliant venue with some great views of the city (shame about the fog!)
The attendees were a mix of people in the communications and IT
industries (BT, Orange, Sun), academics, and business-people. When I
get a chance I'm going to be writing a few things on the blog about
issues that came out on the day.
It's really interesting that a subject - dealing with personal identity information - that was once seen by most as a boring box-ticking compliance issue is emerging as an issue that a lot of people are considering to be very serious.
Second Life - why we haven't made an impact
I read in The Register today about the phony economics of Second Life, the online world that has scooped so much press coverage. The article suggests that the actual "population" of Second Life is much less than Linden Lab (the operators of Second Life) have been making it out to be. In fact, says the writer of the article Shaun Rolph, the active population's about the same as that of Ilkeston, Derbyshire, and Linden Lab is one of the few making any money out of Second Life.
This reminded me of a little venture we at IMPACT were looking into a while ago. We were going to be the first law firm in Second Life. This isn't an original idea - Lexblog discussed the possibility back in November 2006 - but (to my knowledge) no firm has yet done it. After looking into the idea, we opted out of it. Here's the main reasons why we decided to keep it real and avoid "virtual worlds" for the time being:
- Second Life didn't seem very usable. It took forever to do anything in the world. Travelling in bullet time gets tedious after about a minute...
- ... so Second Life broke that tedium by repeatedly crashing and throwing me out of the world after 2 minutes of use. Very annoying!
- Even on my home PC, the graphics were shoddy and slow. I suspect you need a beefed-up super-fast PC with a hardcore graphics card to get Second Life to work properly. My lowly office PC would be in meltdown even trying to install Second Life, let alone run it.
- Like most offices, our PCs are behind a firewall. Second Life won't get access to the internet unless we did lots of fiddling about.
- There didn't seem to be any obvious business opportunities for a law firm. Linden Lab enforce IP rights within the world, taking one of our obvious roles away from us.
- To have an online presence, we'd need to allocate someone to be on Second Life as our representative 9 til 5 Monday to Friday. Without any obvious way to cover the cost of that, it's a very expensive luxury.
When virtual worlds improve and become more populous and viable as business environments, we'll look again but for the next year at least we're going to be keeping our feet on the ground in the real world.
You're pretty right about Second Life, though I'd add a few more thoughts just as grist for the mill.
(BTW, what is "bullet time"? I would have thought that was fast, but I think you're looking for a phrase such as "molasses time").
>> Even on my home PC, the graphics were shoddy and slow. I suspect you need a beefed-up super-fast PC with a hardcore graphics card to get Second Life to work properly. My lowly office PC would be in meltdown even trying to install Second Life, let alone run it.
This was one of my first thoughts in the fall of 2006 about SL, and it's a valid one. They state outright that they don't support Intel graphics cards -- sadly, over 60% of home PCs alone ship with Intel graphic cards, and I suspect the figure for office PCs is even far, far higher. So they have triaged out a huge portion of the potential market.
Things change, however, and along comes Vista. Up until now, us regular users have been able to not think about graphics cards, which has been bliss. I remember in the mid 1990s as a small business person struggling with a $500 ATI graphics card that had been recommended to me, and I was near tears, as for days I could see nothing on the computer and get no work done. So for all the years after that that we didn't have to think about graphics cards, it was bliss. Now with Vista, however, graphics cards once again matter. You won't get the full eye-candy experience (and some argue that Vista is mostly about eye candy) with the graphics cards that have been shipping. So it could be argued that better graphic cards are on their way to becoming a normal part of PCs anyway -- eventually, of course, certainly not this month or this year.
>> There didn't seem to be any obvious business opportunities for a law firm. Linden Lab enforce IP rights within the world, taking one of our obvious roles away from us.
Ah, but it's the grey areas. Someone recently invented a completely new concept in luxury private SIMS to live in (http://www.primesims.com), and then found another person copying their concept holis bolis. While Linden Labs gives you the tools to protect the IP rights on a tree that you have made, what about an entire island that people can see and replicate? Prime Sims did indeed engage the services of a lawyer.
>> To have an online presence, we'd need to allocate someone to be on Second Life as our representative 9 til 5 Monday to Friday.
No one does that in SL I think. You set up an office, put in it a "click here to contact us" thing, and have messages forwarded to your RL (Real Life) email. Then you can triage and deal with them as part of your normal day.
>> the actual "population" of Second Life is much less than Linden Lab (the operators of Second Life) have been making it out to be.
Yep, this is true. They report even people who tried it once 3 years ago for 5 minutes. But I note that the number of people online at any one time has quadrupled since October 2006. It's now peaking around 40,000 (May 2007). But have you noticed how much money those people are spending??? For non-physical goods that you can't touch (like your own services, for instance) Holy jumping. How'd you like even 1% of that a day?
Posted by: Randal Oulton | 10 May 2007 at 05:59 PM