Second Life: 4D World Wide Web
A common criticism of Second Life tends to focus on the fact that the experience of being in Second Life is not game-like. Comparing Second Life to World of Warcraft is like comparing an entire city to a movie theater. Sure, the theater is a good place to have fun and see lots of high-quality graphics, but it's only a part of what you can find in a city. In fact, large parts of a city are incredibly boring, especially when you're looking for fun.
So Second Lifers have taken to countering the "it's a boring game" criticism with the thought "it's like the Web, only 3D." This makes a lot of sense, of course, because Second Life is a 3D environment entirely designed by its users. There are really beautiful web sites and there are really ugly ones. Same goes for Second Life. And if you're looking for fun, you have to skip past a whole bunch of boring web sites and go directly to the fun ones. Same goes for Second Life. It's just that the Web is more mature in its links, making it much easier to find things than in Second Life. One can only hope Second Life continues to get better, much like the searching the Web did between 1993 (NCSA Mosaic "What's New") and 1998 (Yahoo).
But in a sense, I think the "3D Web" position is missing something incredibly important: the time dimension. This makes it four-dimensional, not three. In Second Life, when you visit a place, you are often interacting with other people visiting it. Depending on the time of day, there may be a lot of people there, or very few. Of course, the same thing is true with the Web, but it's generally invisible. In Second Life, you can't help but notice the other people there with you. Sometimes they even bump into you.
Like the Web, things change over time, but unlike the Web, a large part of the Second Life experience revolves around scheduled events. In Second Life, the time dimension is incredibly important, because the real-time social dimension is incredibly important. Whereas most of the Web is designed for asynchronous interaction (post a message, wait for a reply, come back later to check), Second Life pretty much depends upon synchronous interaction. This makes the time dimension that much more visible, which is why I think we're really talking about a 4D version of the World Wide Web.
Sure, you could argue the relative merits of Web-based social interaction (generally asynchronous) versus Second Life-based interaction (generally synchronous), but the truth is there is probably a time and place for each. (No pun intended.)
Even parts of the web that include real-time chat are only adding one dimension to a typically flat (2D) environment. Not quite 4D.
Therefore, I'm predicting that the real future of Second Life will be seen to be the first four-dimensional version of the World Wide Web. The 4D Web adds a very visible sense of "place" and sense of "time" to our online experience, while accommodating the diversity of communication needs. It's not a 3D game. It's not a flat web page. It's something that combines the best attributes of both, in a way we can naturally relate to.
Comments
I was doing some research on this idea recently and came across Ed Hall's theory of the "Polychronic", in which many things are happening simultaneously. Some people have the ability to attend to multiple events simultaneously, as opposed to "monochronic" individuals and cultures who tend to handle events sequentially, and thus the reason I think SL may be geared more towards those who can virtually walk and talk at the same time versus the rest of the monochronic world that reads one website page at a time.
Polychrons are also synchronous as monochrons are asynchronous.
I think you're dead on with this.
Some people don't want to go into SL because if they admit that time spent in virtuality is real they might see that a lot of what passes for RL is virtual. So many things will get Second Lifeized in the next 10 years that the edges will wear off and it won't feel so awkward anymore.