Once upon a time There had water but only the best computers could render it so they dropped it.

Now with the MTV hosted Virtual Laguna Beach starting, they decided to bring it back. The ground under the water is no longer blue, but sandy and the texture of the water is similar to water used in the hot tubs. More interestingly the water subtlely moves up and down giving a weak impression of waves against the shore.

One of the cool effects of glass blue oceans in There though is the buggy effect. On water in There, TUV’s reach speeds of 280 kmh without turbo.

Unfortunately, my experiments in VLB show that the TUV has a cruising speed of 180 kmh on the new water. To do the experiments I hacked in a copy of the GPS compass of there as it has a decent speedometer.

Here is hoping this speed change does not happen when water reaches There (and accourding to the head of There Inc. it soon will), as it will peeve a lot of people off including myself. Slamming buggys into the shoreline while going top speed is a hilariously fun activity in There.

Virtual Society virtualmtv

With Microsoft making huge deals with Facebook and Sony buying Grouper, there is apparently a lot of money in Web 2.0 right now. So I am creating my own Web 2.0 site.

Infeeshare: social auctions via api mashups

Splog is an aggregate noun. It’s all about community. Dynamic inline updating with yellow fades! Feeds. The words aren’t what they were. You need someone who gets it. News clouds. We are on the brink of a new age. The new is old. Label what defies categorization. Out of the box. Single. Word. Sentences! Always be launching. Roll your own roll-your-own. We’re about what Web 2.0 is about. We shall transcend borders. With one click. This is newer media. This will change everything. Clear that. It’s the wave of tomorrow. Give the users what they want. Faster. Faster! Podcasts. 2.0 is the new New. Cry out, blogosphere! It’s all changing. The buzz is loud and clear. Social is the new push. Float this. Hack it. 2.0! Taggable folksonomies. On-demand streams. Clustering. An AJAX-driven GUI. MSM just doesn’t get it.

With the latest proprietary technology we can:

• integrate authentic tagclouds
• post rich-client mashups
• create embedded weblogs
• harness semantic networks

(Of course this is all bullshit)

Metaverse News social networks, web 2.0

Recently Friendster won a patent for social networking sites and a lot of people are curious how they will enforce the patent, as the social networks are growing quite numerous.

I have been trying a few out and most all of them have huge weaknesses in one way or another.

The most famous is of course MySpace, the teen leaning social network famous for lots of new music and videos and pedofiles. Congress wants to ban this site in libraries for some reason, though most library computers dont come with sound cards and speakers. Obviously there are no Congressmen on MySpace.

MySpace provides a great service, they allow customization of member profile pages without providing any tools to work with. The result is lots of teens learning to hack HTML and CSS code so they can do weird shit on their page.

Contrast this with CyWorld, the Asian import where you can only customize stuff inside a little square using the decorations they provide that you have to pay for. Yes, this really points out the differece between America and Asia doesn’t it?

Meez is on one hand a more advanced version of cyworld as far as avatars go, but the social networking side feels like it has been thrown together haphazardly. At least they do not include yet another blog.

And whats up with every social network having a blog? Do I have to write stuff for every social network I am in? Or let me write something then go to 6 different websites to publish it so all my friends can read how my cat threw up and my efforts to clean it up.

So far IMVU is the only one that gets it right, and their social network is just an afterthought as well. All social networks should give you a choice of blogging or RSS feed. What I am writing right now will show up in both my blog and my IMVU page. If I had the ability, it would show up on my CyWorld, MySpace, Gather, Yahooray, Utherverse, and any other network I decide to join, too. Which is probably why none of my profiles on those sites have much content.

Lately the trend seems to be specialty social networks everywhere. Families can go to Famster, students to campusbug. You got Flickr to show off your photography skills, YouTube to show off your videos. Renderosity to show off your computer artwork, Songramp to show off your musical talents, XPeeps for sharing naked pictures of yourself. There is a new one each week it seems.

Me, I’m a lurker on almost all those sites. I dont try to get a lot of friends or post much, I just like looking around.

New Today http://www.twango.com/, http://www.zimbio.com/

Virtual Society social networks

Well my Second Life account got charged $72 today. Luckily I sold enough L$ that I had that amount in my account.

I have been playing Second Life on and off since 2003, but did not get a premium account until 2005, and today is my 1 year anniversary as a paying customer. I go for the $72 a year because $6 a month is nothing.

It is especially nothing because my discount animation business easily pays for everything I need. I already have enough Lindens right now to pay for year 3.

My philosophy in playing SL is to go cheap. I make practically everything I own, except hair styles. I also stick with the low tier 512m land. I tried upgrading, only to lose money in land deals so I stick with what I got: beach front property on a low lag server.

I know I only have 117 prims, but that is enough. Come by my lot and see that I usually have around 60 prims available. How do I get by with so few? Partly because I don’t need a house, and partly because I am a scripter who can rez in and out objects quickly. I have a 4 prim dock, a 4 prim waterfall, a 6 prim store, and sometimes a school of 8 fish, all one prim each. Way above my lot I have a sky box lab that instantly turns into a house, a garden, a pool, and if I ever finish it — a nightclub.

The year in SL as a paying customer has mostly been good. There were some annoying times, like the recent incident involving no entry walls that had me completely surrounded as both of my practically never there neighbors made their land restricted.

Second Life is undergoing a growth spurt, partly due to letting everyone join without credit card verification, which has changed the landscape of the game a bit. On the upside, it has opened the door to a lot more people. On the down side it has opened the door to a lot more anonymous griefing.

The problem I see is that Second Life is probably right now at its height. Linden Labs has a lot of cool things sitting on a shelf for SL that have not been implemented because they wont work with stuff already released. They have boxed themselves in a corner on a lot of fronts.

We really need a do-over, an SL 2.0 that disregards backward compatibility.

We need the client layer, the 3D engine layer, and the server layer completely seperate and swappable without creating problems. This will allow SL or even 3rd parties to create much improved UI. The current UI sucks big time.

We need higher resolution avatars, with better joints and more flexibility (i.e. animatable joints in fingers), Poser 6 instead of Poser 2, which means current clothing will be useless. More realistic lighting and atmosphere and physics models. Without having to worry about backward compatibility, they can use lessons learned from SL 1.* and put limits on lag inducing scripts, griefing scripts, and put prim limits on attachments (a high rez bump map costs a lot less resources than 1000 prim rhinestones).

Second Life 2.0 could look like this:

Virtual Society anniversary, secondlife

OK, Future of the internet part two. Sounds like I should write something really cool and insightful with a headline like that.

Let me just point out a few articles, that show where the internet may be headed.

The first is The Semantic Web by Tim Berners-Lee which was written in Scientific American’s special Internet issue in 2001. In a way, the RSS/XML feed technology which is catching on is the beginnings of the semantic web described.

The second is an article about self configuring wireless networks that the military is developing. The idea is to create a self sustaining peer-to peer network of mobile computers where wi-fi hubs are not available. The technology will no doubt spread to civilian use.

A third article that caught my eye is one from C-Net about how in faster and faster broadband services the slowest part of the web can become the DNS. The DNS is the rather elaborate system that translates “yahoo.com” to network reachable 216.109.112.135

If you open a DOS window and type “tracert yahoo.com” there are a bunch of hoops that you go through to translate. Your domain request goes to root servers who provide name servers, and the name servers provide IP addresses, and the IP addresses provide content. If anyone of them is slow, then your internet will seem slow. Your speed is only as fast as the slowest connection.

But DNS speed is not that big of a problem actually. While you are into the DOS window, type “ipconfig /displaydns”. When you visit a site, your computer will store the DNS info of that site temporarily on the computer. If you go back to that site, the jump hoops needed to get there are a lot shorter, because your computer remembers the name server and IP addresses of domains you have recently visited.

On the other hand, here is somethig to think about. The weakness of the WWW currently is that all new requests have to go to one of 13 root servers. If these root servers go down, the internet goes down.

But recently we have developed technology like bitorent, which was originally designed to get around copyright laws, distributes file sharing hosting and indexing tasks over the internet, rather than one central computer. Downloading files via bitorent services is often faster than downloading from central servers. There are other examples of distributed networks doing cool things like searching for really big prime numbers or searching for intelligent life in space that anyone with a computer can participate in.

So why not handle DNS chores using distributed networks? There is just such an operation at http://www.opendns.com/.

If such a system could be developed so that root servers are optional, it would also be possible to make up new top level domains completely out of the control of ICANN. Getting out of ICANN means getting out of potential government interference.

Ah, one can dream.

Metaverse News future, philosophy, web 2.0

What’s the world’s most popular social website? Is it MySpace? or AOL? or Yahoo?

Nope not even close. It is Cyworld. According to CNN, it has 18 million members in Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan, and brings in $300,000 US each day, dwarfing practically every other online game.

The Metaverse Roadmap articles and speeches talked about Cyworld extensively, because of its sheer size as a popular social network.

Well this week Cyworld came to the US, and yes it is free to sign up. I believe that MySpace has pretty much taken over the social network market here in the US, but if Cyworld can squeeze in among the IMVUs, Friendsters, and other second tier social networks, it might get a foot hold.

I assume Cyworld US is trying to stick with the crappy little 2D avatar graphics of its Asian counterpart for a reason, but too bad the makers cant get together with meez.com and do something a little more advanced. This 2D stuff might play with those who think v-zone is cool, but it is time to update.

I put up a page for the heck of it here just so you get the idea.

Virtual Society cyworld, social networks

Everybody needs a break now and then.

I mentioned a few posts before that the metaverse is becoming for many people the new “third place” where you can relax and unwind from home and work. Like the real world, it seems that bars and clubs are often the most popular venues.

So I decided to stop by a few of the virtual bars and clubs and just hang.

The virtual club experience consists of going to an area of the 3D world decorated like a club. You dress up your avatar, do sexy dance animation moves that are physically impossible in the real world, and everybody listens to the same streaming audio. This usually spurs conversation. The drinks are free but virtual.

Virtual clubs first started in Active Worlds. My first experiences were in The Sims Online where streaming audio didn’t exist so you had to open winamp and go to a URL that the DJ provided. They have become a requirement for any social game. Even the newest, Virtual Laguna Beach, has four of them.

Above is a bar scene in IMVU. Because there are no physical locations or events in IMVU it is tough to fill a bar with people. I’m hoping this changes once they get the bugs in chat cast ironed out.

Basically, The Lounge, consists of one big club. This game still has yet to really find any kind of an audience. Their last update though improved some animations and graphics. The fact that most all the avatars look like young teenagers tells you right away where the target audience is. Probably not my scene.

Red Light Center is a more mature audience, and for me anyways, the ONLY place worth visiting is Club Blu (sorry, I’m not into the porn theaters or sex palace scene). There is usually a small group of players here hanging out and dancing. It’s usually a friendly atmosphere, but the ratio of men to women is very lopsided right now.

I dont play City of Heroes much these days, but here is a file photo of a party on Pocket D. If you want to know what is going on these days here, just imagine the above picture without the people. Sometimes you can find stuff going on in Pocket Zero (the only neutral place where City of Heroes meets City of Villains), but the biggest party atmosphere location in City of Heroes is probably right outside Atlas Hall.

Almost every MMORPG has its places to hang out, and it is usually where the newbies hang out, or in front of some big quest starting place where people try and get on a good team. Every single one of them have dance animations that people like to play when they are just hanging around waiting on the rest of the team.

Back at my old stomping grounds There.com. It has a lot of great club settings: The Inferno, Club Bali, Oro Lounge, The Cannery, Aero Lounge, etc. They are unfortunately rarely used. Best bet here is to go and see when and where events are scheduled. House parties are still a regular activity in There.

Welcome to Bad Girls, the most popular club in Second Life. Always a big crowd, and always a live DJ, 24 hours a day every day. Second life has many popular clubs, and the best ones are the ones on private sims: Bad Girls, The Edge, Hot Licks, Studio 54, Club Vixens. The atmosphere in each is different, and when the crowds get big, they get very laggy.

I guess like real life, sometimes the bar scene is great, sometimes it is just boring and sad. It all depends on your attitude and friends you tag along with.

Virtual Society cityofheroes, IMVU, redlightcenter, secondlife, There, Virtual Society, vside

Meez.com is the latest avatar generator site, but unlike this one, or this one, this one allows you to create one in 3D

Once you pick out your clothes, background, and animation, you can save then export the finished picture to an animated gif like above or a jpg for forum or social network use.

It also has its own social network, but kinda lame, heres my uneventful profile there: http://www.meez.com/arianeb

Currently in beta and damn buggy (it says i’m logged in but cant access my closet). Its good for a laugh, but IMVU does the same thing, only better.

Metaverse News 3D Web, IMVU, meez

In November of 2003, I went to the first live virtual rock concert in There. The band was Steadman, a British band not well known in the states. Server lag ruined the visuals, but we at least could hear the band, and they sounded pretty good. It was a nice “I was there” kind of experience.

Since then, it has been Second Life, not There, which has produced the most live concerts. Many small time but good performers often perform live at their own venues. The way SL handles audio on a lot basis is often superior to There’s jukebox method.

A couple of weeks ago it was announced that a NPR radio show was to be broadcast live in Second Life and that the show would include a live performance of 80’s singer songwriter Suzanne Vega as part of that show. Get more info here.

But now the BBC1 is reporting that 80’s megagroup Duran Duran will be playing in the BBC’s four islands in Second Life, and will be doing regular shows there! How cool is that?

I guess they discovered how popular the Club977 ’80s channel is in Second Life as a lot of ’80s bands (ok two so far) are dropping in.

I suspect their island will look like “Rio” and everyone who goes there will dress like “Wild Boys” or “Girls on Film” or “Hungry Like the Wolf” furbees. Need a TP? call “The Chauffeur”.

When’s there first concert? I wanna know, “Please Please Tell Me Now”!

Virtual Society event, Music, secondlife, There

The makers of There have teamed up with MTV to create a new independent 3D world called Virtual Laguna Beach. http://www.vlb.there.com/ or http://lagunabeach.mtv.com

For all intents and purposes, this is just another incarnation of There, complete with shopping, spas, hoverboards, buggys, chatting, etc. just with a california theme instead of an aztec/hawaiian theme. The avatars have changed a little, but the spas have all the same controls, so you can keep the same look if you want.

One feature VLB has that There does not: Streaming Video. I guess if you are going to partner with MTV, you better have streaming video capabilities.

Currently VLB does not have voice chat, but you know it will be coming soon. The program is in “Alpha” testing right now, though it looks pretty damn finished already.

UPDATE: I tried to be ArianeB, but it said the name was taken, which tells me that you have to use names not taken in There. Actually the rule is that if you were a submitted/accepted designer in There, then you cant use the name in VLA, which makes sense since there can only be one KittenKat or Phedre, etc.

Also VLA is actually based on that Kalifornia island, though you can’t get to it from There. Proof: http://www.so-there.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=1951&d=1154879569

Virtual Society virtualmtv