Is SecondLife Evolving The Human Race?

In SecondLife (also called SL) the Sun rises and sets every 4 hours. Which means at times it can feel like time lapse photography. It also means a day in SecondLife is 6 days in terms of in-world experiences. Not only are the days faster, travel is instantaneous and effortless. Other than the occasional crash and relog, all of these activities are completely safe to your virtual well-being.

With no fear of actual physical harm and your true identity disintermediated, relationships are accelerated. Things you would never consider doing in real life are easily considered because it's safe. If you are using a free account you can even reinvent yourself if the experiment goes wrong and create a whole new you.

Unlike the streets of New York where people are reluctant to take on other people's problems, it is rare to find a situation where some avatar won't stop and take the time to help someone in trouble or learning the game, often even giving them Linden (the currency of SecondLife).

This faster paced life combined with the freedom to experiment with new things eventually means that the resident of SL will experience a spectrum of feelings that are often stronger and deeper than their real life counter part. Because nothing you can do in SL will cause you to die, you must learn to effectively deal with these new feelings. Some people do so by leaving SecondLife (I suspect many of them come back and start over as a whole new person). The feelings have still been felt and must be dealt with. The same safety and anonymity that gives you freedom also gives some people the freedom to be crueler or meaner than they would ever consider being in real life. I hope so anyway.

There is a line in the movie Fried Green Tomatoes that goes "that which doesn't kill us only makes us stronger." In the virtual world of SecondlLife nothing kills you, so if it doesn't drive you away, it ultimately makes you stronger. You learn to deal with feelings that are foreign yet strong. You gain a lot of "experience" in a very short time. You can lead a somewhat sheltered life in SecondLife but I believe most do so after having at least tasted some of the wilder parts of the metaverse.

In SecondLife, I am constantly around people from all over the globe. I find that they are much more like me than they are different from me. I think I had been in SL about a year when I stopped referring to myself as an American and started calling myself an "Earthling." I have sincerely come to believe that war is the product of governments or those who would govern and not the effort of the average person.

SecondLife also gives you the ability to be and do things you could not ever consider. I can sit on a mountaintop in a Japanese Zen Garden and play the flute while I meditate. It's a matter of just wishing I was at the Zen Gardens of Achemon or Yorokeikoku Teien. I honestly believe that, after nearly 3 years of play, my mind accepts the SecondLife experience of meditating on a mountaintop as being very nearly real. Especially if I put on Logitech Headsetthat disconnects me from my current reality and use by big immersive Apple Cinema Display.

So what?

In SecondLife I have also experienced some of the kindest and wisest people I have ever known. I have even evolved I believe. I am reminded of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. I think Wikipedia sums it up brilliantly...

" Experience is the aggregate of conscious events experienced by a human in life – it connotes participation, learning and perhaps knowledge. Understanding is comprehension and internalization. In Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, experience is shown as the best way to approach understanding of reality and attain enlightenment – Hesse’s crafting of Siddhartha’s journey shows that understanding is attained not through scholastic, mind-dependent methods, nor through immersing oneself in the carnal pleasures of the world and the accompanying pain of samsara; however, it is the totality of these experiences that allow Siddhartha to attain understanding.

Thus, the individual events are meaningless when considered by themselves—Siddhartha’s stay with the samanas and his immersion in the worlds of love and business do not lead to nirvana, yet they cannot be considered distractions, for every action and event that is undertaken and happens to Siddhartha helps him to achieve understanding. The sum of these events is thus experience." - Siddhartha entry on Wikipedia.

Ultimately Siddhartha finds peace. I think those who play SecondLife long enough and do not approach it as a passive entertainment media where you bash system generated monsters or bad guys, ultimately find at least the desire for something more than just the baser activities of life. If you stay long enough, you will eventually find the classes, the discussions, the people who are trying to grow.

I think even SecondLife is feeling that pull, as they try to deal with the more overtly sexual aspects of the game. I think the reason they feel that pull is that SecondLife and it's residents are evolving faster than their real life counterparts.

Eckhart Tolle talks of "A New Earth ," I would be more prone to call it the original earth, but I think the widespread acceptance of his book points to a desire to have a deeper understanding of ourselves and our relationship to this life. Like Siddhartha, we glean that knowledge from our experiences. With much experience, the ones who are manipulative or delusional fall away and we find that there can be joy in just being what we are. What we are in SecondLife is our design. We can use the tool to remake ourselves again and again, throwing away what is inconsistent with our essence and accentuating what we really are as the sum of our experiences in SL helps us learn what that is. When you take away the option to kill or destroy, you begin to evolve more toward a life of harmony and peace. I sincerely believe such a life has one result - contentment.

I won't go so far as to say SecondLife could save the world. There's no reason to. I do sincerely wonder if the accelerated pace and the opportunity to grow and remake yourself does not create a better person. A better person who will return to reality (hopefully) and make it better too. I think today there are only a few of those people inworld, but I see lots of signs that that population is growing, while the others are becoming stagnant as the long term population grows "wiser" about the game and maybe even evolving as people.

Is SecondLife evolving the human race? I guess we shall have to wait and see.

Could Google Help Solve the Unemployment Problem?

It seems that with so many people unemployed and looking for work there is a real need for an effective and simple training program to turn displaced workers into competent virtual assistants and stop the flow of those jobs to other countries. If anything the displaced workers could be viewed as a resource for new needs and not a problem. The implementation of this has been greatly reduced by the "Do no evil" folks at Google.

Where 4 years ago such a task would have been a large scale undertaking with lots of software licensing issues - Google's suite of zero-footprint apps makes deployment a non-issue. All that is needed to start is an Internet connection and a web browser (use Firefox please). With Google adding Voice to their suite of services they complete an environment that would allow any reasonably competent typist to become an effective virtual assistant.

Google offers:

• Voice - GoogleVoice
• IM/Virtual Calling/Webcam - GoogleTalk
• Word Processing/Spreadsheets - GoogleDocs
• Calendaring - GoogleCalendar
• Web presence/Domains - GoogleApps
• Public Relations - Blogger
• Research - Google and Google Maps

Using these tools (Voice is yet to be released to the public), someone could rather quickly become an effective admin person to a highly mobile worker such as a sales person.

Right now the freelance market is rich with web designers and people who can do HTML pages. The American mindshare of where Virtual Assistants are is India, with American VAs being an expensive proposition. An effective training package could help bring that to a middle ground making it more affordable for more people to use America's unemployed.

Let me say in closing, that I am an Earthling and I think ultimately we should be approaching problems on a planetary scale and NOT providing this idea as an "America First Idea." My thinking here is prompted by something more basic. I have many friends who have lost their jobs in the past few months, so I am thinking more of them than blind loyalty to an arbitrary division of a planet.

Ultimately, I still believe in the viability of SecondLife to even disintermediate even travel but I need the Lindens to catch up with my vision and what they are trying to create is no small task, often limited by the available bandwidth and the power of desktop computers.

The idea of training American Virtual Assistants in the Google Way needs a big push. My experience is American Institutions are slow to adopt and implement. Perhaps, a new venture exists here. Workbook?

Plus with the feature rich Google Voice creating an opportunity to forward your phone to your virtual VA, maybe we should write Google and encourage them to hurry up.

Please comment and let me know what you think.

Is Apple About To Do It Again?

There is no question that Apple upset the Apple Cart (pun intended) when they released the iPhone. While Microsoft pretends to insist it's a numbers game, i.e. more units shipped - the reality is they got spanked. It's not just that the iPhone took a huge chunk of market share - it's that the iPhone is without question one of the most useful pieces of personal tech ever invented. My iPhone is my swiss army knife. I use it to check the temperature outside, check the market, find places I'm going to, buy stuff from Amazon, listen to AC/DC's new album (yeah I had to rip it in iTunes), and -oh yeah- call my Mom. It is the best piece of tech I've bought to date. I base that statement mostly on how beaten up the blue plastic case is.

Now rumors are a-flying that Apple is going to get into the netbook market. But are they? They are ordering Netbook parts according to the gadget sites but what if they are NOT going to make a netbook? One of the reported components is a touch screen. What if instead of making a tiny laptop they are going to make an oversized iPhone? Apple is announcing a new iPhone OS on March 17th. What if that OS is also going to run on the new Apple iPad? Now one final speculation, what if they are going to competively price it?

It could be another massive upset to the apple cart. Especially if they make it as sturdy as the iPhone. My mother can barely work her Windows laptop - it's bewildering to her. I know she could work an iPhone even though she's too cheap to buy one. The iPhone applications are straightforward and easy to use. It's an icon/list based environment that is free of the clutter and constant popups covering the stuff you are trying to work on. It's not overly helpful and very simple and intuitive.

A successful iPad would really rock if it supported a bluetooth keyboard (why doesn't the iPhone?). I can easily see lots of people sitting watching TV and using an iPad to check the TV listings, stay on Facebook, catch up on the news, or read an iBook.

If they make it sturdy enough for educational use, it could be disastrous to competitors. The iPhone is feature complete enough to be an lifelong educational tool but it's too small a form factor for that purpose. Data entry is clunky and no copy and paste. Plus no one knows yet with certainty about the health issues related to cell phone signal (or so the phone companies say).

Apple has a chance to do it again. It's a long shot, in all their years they've only had a few milestones - the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone. They also price their hardware above the rest so if Apple makes a regular form factor Netbook at an $899 price, they'll only sell to their regular die hard customers. The netbook is entrenched at the $375 - $425 price point and that even drops some from time to time. My Acer Aspire One had dropped to $319 at Amazon last time I looked.

An innovative Apple product could dent netbook sales, annhilate the Kindle 2 (which will no doubt run on the iPad), and catch new users at their earliest exposure to tech (kindergarten).

So will they innovate or renovate? We will see.

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SecondLife IS the Social Media

SecondLife (or SL for short) is definitely a love/hate kind of virtual environment. Literally just about anything you can imagine you can find in full 3D glory in SecondLife. That can be something cool like a Kansas wheat field, or the Eiffel Tower or something more on the fringe of society like PonyGirls, or Gor. Many people come to SecondLife for a few days and decide it is a waste of time, blog about it, and completely miss the better parts of the environment.

This is further complicated by the owners at Linden Lab don't seem to really get the utility of their own product. It's utility as a business prototyping environment got tossed because it was positioned as a way to reach a lot of people which is not really accurate because it has scaling issues for number of "agents" (or avatar or resident) They also won't give up the free to play, which keeps the population and resources of the program tied up with folks who bring no buying power to the world . That's not a bad thing in and of itself, the problem comes in when the free account is a "bot" (a humanless avatar) that is there using resource to artificially boost a place's ratings.

The biggest mistake of all that Linden Labs is making is that they did not position SecondLife as social media when social media became the "catch phrase" of Web bloggers elite. There really is no more social Internet program than SecondLife.

In Facebook, you can write on someone's walls. In SecondLife you can take them to a live music concert, buy them a virtual pizza, and then go back to your place for a chat or a voice conversation. On Facebook you can find your existing friends, in SecondLife you can make completely new friends from all over the globe. On Facebook you can make plans to go horseback riding or sailing that requires gasoline powered travel in the real world, while in SecondLife you can instantly teleport to the ocean and hop in the boat and off you go.

Finally, on Facebook if you say something wrong you could upset a real nutjob who has probably enough information to find you and make you miserable. In SecondLife your real identity is disintermediated and you can do and say what you like with a reasonable assurance there will be no real-life downside.

SecondLife has no more of a learning curve than Facebook, and even though it requires the installation of separate viewer - it's simple enough. If you make connections with the right people and show a little respect, you will find lots of folks ready to help you get on your feet inside the world.

The downside of SecondLife is you need to be careful and go slow. The identity disintermediation that frees you to express yourself without repercussions, also allows the less savory folks to engage in predatory behavior. Put simply, the metaverse, just like the universe, has it's share of metajerks. So if you know going it to take everything you hear with a very large grain of salt you should be fine.

So knowing that Linden Labs should have positioned SecondLife as social media and didn't what prescriptive steps could they take?

1. Update the webbased profiles of SL residents to have more Facebookish/MySpacey features like the ability to add friends, comments, notes, and links to Google calendaring.

2. Contact the folks at Flock (the social web browser) and work out a way to include your SecondLife identity in the people section. Many, many residents also use Flickr and Youtube so intersecting them through Flock will give SL broader exposure and communicate some of the depth of the experience.

3. Start calling SecondLife social media. Just like Howard Stern declared himself "the king of all media" and it stuck, SecondLife needs to take the first step and declare itself social media or at least virtual social media.

4. Play to your limits. The fact that there is roughly a 100 avatar limit in sims (shorthand for "simulator" - a plot of virtual land) doesn't have to be a scaling handicap in a social environment. Focus on marketing to smaller groups with a common interest, i.e. a social network.

5. Make the support system more open, allowing residents to read complaints and respond/vote for them. There is an obtuse system now that only the hardcore users understand and it does not include complaints about residents. Make the police blotter more visible so other residents can be more informed and be better armed to deal with the handful of megajerks that are souring the soup.

6. Finally, with increased success, it becomes very important to consider limiting access for the free accounts. Whether this means log time limits, or travel restrictions, the time has come to consider putting restraints on the free accounts especially considering many of them are nothing more than bots - a humanless avatar that is there merely to raise a parcels ratings or collect camping money.

SecondLife like almost everything has the power to be something really realy good or something really really bad but the good that it does I believe as a going on 3 year resident far outweighs the bad. I want to see SecondLife continue to succeed. In that time I have developed deep friendships with people who, though I have never met in flesh and blood, are very "real" to me.

Positioning, or more accurately recognizing, SecondLife as viable social media could be key to regrowing the success that has faded since real world businesses have left SL.

Menu Planning in Heaven

If you are planning to go to heaven and wonder what's on the menu. Here's a clue.

A Simple Idea On Pay

Okay a CEO making a million dollars a year while going to conventions, fancy luncheons, corporate jet rides, not to mention probably having an executive staff to do most of the heavy lifting compared to slapping two pieces of beef between a bun for minimum wage would be an easy choice for anyone as far as future employment goes. The pay descrepancy is a tad mind boggling when you consider the difference. I've only been exposed to a handful of CEOs in my lifetime but they were all clearly in it for themselves and only only one worked hard to get it.

Most of the low paying people I've known had two basic problems. They hadn't had the education and they didn't have the heart (or lack thereof) to be the landsharks you need to be to be a truly megasuccessful CEO.

So how do you resolve the pay problem? Why does being pampered like the royalty of a small country pay so much more than wading through chicken guts? Well partly because the wealthy influence how you think, but also because there is no simple metric you can apply to determine what a job should pay - well at least one that we are using. Until now.

I propose that pay be based on calories burned per hour.

That's right. If you sit on your ass all day in front of a computer you won't make as much as that waitress running back and forth taking crap off of irate customers. If your life is filled with jets and limos and work-paid-for meals - well you could end up owing money because you are taking in MORE calories than you are burning. That's right NO pay for going to the gym AFTER work.

Now you may say this would be nearly impossible to implement but every piece of exercise equipment I've bought and ignored in the past few months has a dohicky you clip on your finger or your ear lobe to tell how many calories you are burning. So this should be cake.

Think about it.

More Musings on the Kindle 2

I got my kindle 2 last week and started using it. While just by the sheer volume of books alone (pun intended) I don't think it will ever replace books - it certainly will eventually "contain" all of them. As the market grows, publishers will be foolish not to offer kindle editions of their books. So today you can't get ALL of your books electronically - some day soon you will.

The kindle 2, especially with the (now optional) leather cover, is just like reading a book - only a little better. For those of you who really really love the smell and feel of a real book (which I can understand?..not really) - do this. Go buy an old smelly book at a garage sale. Cut out the center of the pages and drop your kindle in like smuggling contraband. You'll get the tactile olfactory joys of book reading and the advantage of kindle reading.

I've been reading Stephen King's "UR", the kindle novel. In it, the main character Wesley loves books. He has tons of them. And that brought to mind perhaps one of the most attractive features of the kindle. Moving day. I've moved off to college and back from college and from a couple of cities before. Always the problem was books. They are heavy, take of lots of space, and the more you have the worse off you are. The penalty of being intellectual and a free-spirit. By distilling books down to the essence of the words they are, the kindle saves your back. Now moving day is tossing your kindle along with your netbook into your bag and going.

I find reading to be mentally stimulating in a very different way. Video games, TV, even surfing the web seem more passive and overlystimulating. The last one, web surfing, is like a mine field filled with the temptation to stop and throw coconuts at a monkey. If the web is a Red Bull, then the kindle is a nice chai latte.

One feature that I found I use a lot more than I thought is the dictionary. Being able to look up the meaning of a word without moving is really great.

Amazon has consistently under promised and over delivered in my experience and the kindle 2 is no exception. The kindle experience is as good as the smelly book experience to me, maybe even better. I would like to find a kindle kondom of silicon to make it beach and poolside worthy soon.

One of the most impressive features I found on the kindle was Amazon's non-proprietariness (not a real word I know). You can download content from other websites to your kindle and read it. Amazon seems more interested in providing you with a useful tool to read with than a locked-down ad-slathering add-on-requiring snarky system like other folks have made. It is a really open platform compared to many other digital systems.

The kindle 2 is going to distance Amazon from the other reader makers, while providing a solid platform to grow this market.