Second Life’s Revamp

It appears that Linden Labs is planning an architectural revamp of it’s virtual world Second Life. This following the move to open-source, comes at a time when the company is struggling with various growth challenges and examining new methods of revenue generation.

This new architecture will incorporate standard communication protocols such as XML (Extensible Markup Language) to enable messaging via HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), which is used to transmit web pages in a move to shift Second Life away from it’s present architecture, which consists of proprietary communication protocols that were originally developed by Linden Labs. This will enable Second life to employ a broad range of technologies that are already designed around current Web standards.

The immediate benefit provided by this architectural shift will enable Linden Labs to update a few servers at a time, instead of the current model that requires the entire grid to be shut down and force an update of all of the clients in order to incorporate any update to the virtual world. This will bring immediate benefit to the residents by allowing them to update their client software at their own pace. This alone will reduce the amount of headaches that residents now experience.

A major benefit that will arise from the architectural shift will be the ability to create and execute much more sophisticated programs and scripts. These resident created scripts will now execute much faster then currently possible under Linden Labs current approach, because they will now be executed using Novell’s Mono platform, which is an open-source implementation of Microsoft’s .Net project.

Just imagine having the ability to create scripts or to develop highly sophisticated applications that provide a smooth natural interactivity or that can respond to a wide array of stimuli. You could create artificial intelligence objects like vendors, stores, tour guides, educational or training systems, or anything that your mind can conceive. But despite Linden’s expectations, this of course is relevant to the lag experienced by a sim. Will this new architecture reduce the level of lag?

Linden Labs Chief Technology Officer Cory Ondrejka says that he expects that people will start to develop software that can fetch information directly from Second Life without the use of the Second Life client. Cory stated: “We expect to see more ways to peer into Second Life or extract data from Second Life” in an interview with C|Net News.com staff writer Stephen Shankland.

Though the recent moves by Linden Labs appear to good and will not only benefit the residents, but enhance the further development of the virtual realm. However, the last comment of Cory Ondrejka sort of sounds to me like Linden Labs may be making provisions for people to access mine resident data. Perhaps this is one of the new methods of revenue generation that they are looking into. What do you think?