YouTube Video Critiques Facebook's Push into the Metaverse

Funky... I just posted a comment to this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFtjwm6cwvQ&lc=UgzDm9tFWfFev...

Copying it here...

Hi. Second Life's former Software Architect here. I have notes.

Mostly... I liked this video. It raised a bunch of valid points I remember people talking about before everyone laid off from Linden Lab went to go work for Facebook. I started at Linden right as Cory Ondrejka left. We had about two and a half good years before the money ran out.

Linden Lab was a weird mix of Games programmers and Enterprise technologists. The Games guys were trying to build things as fast as possible. The Enterprise people were trying to build systems that were easy to extend and maintain. Not surprisingly, there was tension.

But despite what you think about Second Life, it worked EXTREMELY well for conference calls. You didn't need as much bandwidth to transmit the state of avatar's body movements as you did to receive video streams. And SL put green marks over anyone who was speaking so you could always figure out who was talking. It was MUCH better than WebEx.

Charlie Stross came up with a concept in Halting State called CopSpace -- it's worth a read. I think it's more in line with what we were thinking the Metaverse would become... an actual tool that used the illusion of space to provide cognitive clues to "real" applications. IBM started using SL so geographically distributed employees could have meetings and engage the parts of their brains that processed 3d spaces in social settings. It absolutely could have been better... so much technical debt... so hard to extend.

But the interesting bit is we ignored headsets for so long. We were always trying to drive adoption, so a device that makes 10% of your customer base vomit didn't seem like a good idea. I know we experimented with early expensive headsets back in the day, but it was always an experiment. Our primary interface was going to be a large screen.

In early 2010, Linden ran out of cash and laid off about half their employees. By this time Cory was at Facebook and hired quite a few former Lindens. I was offered a role to work on radio devices, but was a little wary of FB at the time.

I think this video is mostly spot on. By the time FB changed to Meta, it seemed they were focused on the "game lobby" market. That's sort of in line with the casual nature of FB, but strapping a headset on your face is anything but a casual experience.

Also, FB/Meta waned a walled garden. One of my projects, VWRAP, was a series of IETF standards meant to "open" the virtual world. At Linden at the time, we convinced management it was a decent idea by suggesting it was "better to be the google of virtual worlds than the AOL of virtual worlds." (Google at the time hadn't gone full-on evil and was still making money while promoting open standards.)

I think there is still potential for a Second Life or Horizon-Like offering, but not with the cartoonish avatars, lack of 3rd party tool support, mandatory headsets and lack of a "casual" experience. Companies like Google and Facebook bank coin by keeping you engaged so they can sell your eyeballs to advertisers. Many "casual" virtual world experiences would be something you could engage with a mobile device for a minute or two at a time, much too little time to justify video ads. AR looked promising there for a while, but everyone I know feared it would grow into an virtual experience festooned with ads, spam and scams. Meta's new glasses (like Google Glass) make a lot of people uncomfortable with cameras. Ditto for Apple's VisionPro, I suspect.

I think Meta reached for the low-hanging-fruit and forgot that the V in MVP means "Viable." Which reminds me... anyone remember Google Lively?