NYCPHP Meetup

[Billy Reisinger]

Second Life is cool, but comparing it to teh interweb is not very  
enlightening.   Second life is maintained by a private company, and  
you need their client on your computer to connect to their world.   
They are in control.  With the web, nobody is really in control.   
Sure, new standards seem to take ages to be adopted by a majority of  
browsers (SVG? UML? CSS3?),  but at least we are free to use whatever  
browser to access the web.
ANother thing that the web has over a virtual world like second life  
is that it is (at the moment) much more practical for purposes like  
online shopping, searching, downloading documents, images, movies,  
etc.  Everybody touts the economy of second life as pretty cool, and  
it is a cool thing - but it pales in comparison to the $$ spent on  
the web as a whole.
RIght now, most major sites rely on some type of server farm to  
balance loads, so when they get like 10,000,000 hits in one hour,  
they can handle it ok.  Second Life, OOTO, can't handle 60 avatars on  
the same sim. It really, really hurts performance.
As far as having a virtual world instead of a flat, http world to  
browse, well hell, I would use that for sure.  That is, if my 5 year  
old G4 could handle that sort of crap (which it can't).






On Oct 18, 2006, at 4:39 PM, Jeffrey Knight wrote:

>
>
> Check out the American Apparel store in second life.  You can buy  
> shirts for your avatar and American Apparel gives you a discount to  
> buy the same item in real life.  They also link items from their  
> second life to their website.   You can already IM in second life  
> (I'm told it's being reworked to run over jabber), and listen to  
> music in second life.  It has an economy.  People give talks and  
> perform Shakespeare plays.  And, yes, there's the porn.
>
> Once you can email, purchase products, browse the wikipedia  
> library, and ask google questions, what do you need the silly old  
> http internet for?
>
> Granted, SecondLife may not be the final answer (it has its issues,  
> to be sure), but something like SecondLife will be the http killer,  
> probably sooner than we think. (I'd like to think of it as a  
> version of SecondLife where my data isn't all on someone else's  
> server.)
>
> See also: http://www.libsecondlife.org/
>
> -Jef
>
>
> Jeffrey Knight
> Root Silver Technology Consulting, New York NY
> Ecommerce & Web Development
> (aim) jefight | (msn) jefight at hotmail.com | (gtalk)  
> jeffrey.knight at gmail.com
> (c) 646 236 3051
>
>
>> Maybe we just have very strong blinders on.  :-)
>>
>> HTTP was designed for a certain flavor of application, the kind that
>> involves discrete requests for content-bearing resources on remote
>> servers.
>>
>> It turns out you can build a helluva lot of useful stuff with it,
>> especially if you add a session mechanism and start
>> automating/scripting the requests.
>>
>> But just because you _can_ build an application by cobbling together
>> all these technologies, doesn't mean you _should_.
>>
>> I think the SecondLife example is a good one. Cyberspace made real.
>>
>> I also think that virtualization has made it a snap to create
>> application "kiosks" where you use a VNC client rather than a web
>> browser to connect to and interact with a system, even if (especially
>> if!) that system is running on your own workstation.
>>
>>
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