It’s been a while since I felt things were steady enough for predictions. The last lot did pretty well. It’s the last day of December for me, so now is as good a time as any for predictions. This time, I’ll have just three, rather than a dozen or so.
1. Legal tangles
More tussles over intellectual property and ownership, terms of service, government regulations and so forth. It feels like the legal landscape is moving towards some sort of crescendo.
2. Official viewer for the iPhone
Expect Linden Lab to produce at least one unannounced software product this year, chief among which would be an iPhone app. Whether that will gain significant traction in the face of existing applications for the device is anyone’s guess.
3. No Teen Grid Merge
Although it might actually shut. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Teen Grid was shut down, given the state of it as reported by people who go there, but there doesn’t seem to be any plausible evidence to suggest that a merger is in the offing.
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If content creators want to protect their intellectual property they will have to start registering each item with the copyright office. But along with that, I think personally it won’t be very much longer before the IRS starts regulating in digital realms, starting with Second Life, and collecting taxes from vendors for sales.
Also, I think all of the vendors who take images from the Web and sell them in-world will find themselves in hot water sooner than later (case in point, all of the Frank Frazetta and Boris art that is sold in Gorean areas). Disney stuff too. Etc.
I half-agree with No. 2. A new form of the viewer might arise, but I’d expect an in-browser plugin solution or something along that line.
An iPhone viewer app sounds to me like it’d be pretty bandwidth excessive, which violates clause 3.3.15 of the iPhone SDK. It’s pretty common as is for iPhone apps to get rejected for exceeding so many megabytes every so many minutes. Nevermind how music streams, voice chat, mature content and so on would separately violate conditions. They’d kind of have to create a new, tightly controlled region just for iPhone. Doesn’t seem worth it.
One thing I thought would happen -long- ago but hasn’t is acquisition. I imagine the Lindens have no reason to seek it, ‘lest a competitor becomes more legitimate a threat and acquired themselves, such as Avatar Reality doing well and being scooped up by a Sun, Google or Microsoft.
Or maybe the Lindens acquire something themselves. Not sure what, xstreet was obvious…but there’s nothing that obvious still out there.
Maybe just a partnership or two. There’s really been nothing since the IBM experiments last year. I suppose SnowGlobe and other interactions with the open source community was important this year in terms of ‘partnering’ as well.
All and all I hope for a more visibly productive year for the Lindens.
@Ashur:
I almost put an acquisition on the list, but not of the Lab, but by the Lab.
There’s already more than one unofficial viewer app for the iPhone, so I imagine that the bandwidth isn’t so much of a problem.
@Caliburn: Well, the US Tax Code already applies to virtual goods/services/currencies, as the IRS pointed out at the beginning of the year. I don’t expect much of a move unless compliance seems to be very low. I’m already paying my taxes on it all.
Oh, while I remember:
@Caliburn: Copyright rights commence as soon as a work is created. Under US Law, there’s little difference between a registered copyright and an unregistered copyright, except that you must register a copyright before an infringement case on it can be heard in court. That’s usually the first thing you’d do after filing an infringement lawsuit against someone.
There’s no requirement for a creator to register a copyright any earlier than that, except in cases where you want to collect damages for accidental infringement.
It seems you meant an iPhone app that would fall short of actually graphically rendering agents, objects and whole regions then. Ones like Touch Life do chat, group and inventory management. The most bandwidth intensive thing it does is probably open textures one at a time. Actually being in the three-dimensional Second Life world though is a different story.
I’m definitely not expecting the Lab to produce a viewer with 3D rendering, except in the most rudimentary ways, if at all.
[...] on a Prim (some damn funny ones here!) All Virtual (focused on virtual events) Second Sins (NSFW) Tateru Nino AKPC_IDS += "2444,";Popularity: 1% [?]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Virtual worlds predictions for [...]
hey Tat, how about squeezing some funny brain juices, warming up your snapshot fingers and making some humorous illustrations to accompany your predictions?