Google’s technological achievement was the so-called Google File System Linden Lab’s technological advance was the grid with dynamically streamed content, since we all know that this technology was “invented” by Philip himself over a decade ago.Both companies have a strange way to deal with the status quo they simply refuse to work the way you expect companies to work. They come from an Internet generation where a good idea could give a start-up a really good kick forwards.Both also use the same approach: instead of buying supercomputers of billions of dollars in hardware, software, and, most important, maintenance costs — they created their own “grid computers” instead, using slim, relatively cheap Intel-based PCs, and running Linux on top of them. They are really not much spread in time: Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in 1998, Philip Rosedale started Linden Lab in 1999. Both companies have a similar origin: they started with visionaries who had access to a certain technology (available, but not being used). But as always with these types of industry moves, time will be the judge.JPS Moves Forward on 12 Bond Construction Program Projects Frustration Mounts Among Healthcare Providers as COVID-19 Numbers Rise Again It Was a Real Game.This news shouldn’t come as a surprise to most of us.All of these strangely for free. Google launched Google Talk using Jabber (with Apple following suit) instead of creating their own IM protocol. Microsoft’s never fully deployed “Terra project” (now replaced) was superseded by the incredibly successful “Google Earth” — superior in all aspects. When Microsoft’s Hotmail was announcing “10 MBytes” of mailboxes, Google Mail was launched with a Gigabyte.People are still fighting about what “land” in Second Life means. It has free access all the content is created by the users Linden Lab invented the concept of becoming the first 3D content hosting provider (or at least the first to successfully implement it). Google seemed not to care.Second Life is also highly irregular.
Philip repeatedly assured us that he wouldn’t do that.So, why Google? Well, the content giant has a wholly different concept. It would become a Disneyland, PG-rated MMOG, something like a direct competitor to There.com or The Sims Online. They would swallow it up and spit it out as a completely different product. Cd player only no radioYou develop content there, but you cannot index it properly, and it’s hard to find it. Still, Second Life does not feature a good search engine. It seems that Google wants to index and search the whole world.Linden Lab got funding from the “pillars” of the Internet as we know it: eBay Amazon Mozilla Foundation. They started with web pages, then images, then newsgroups, then mailing lists… and then it was videos… then, the whole Earth… and also social networking (Orkut). No, for 3D content hosting to succeed, it must reach the hundreds of millions, and very fast.Sadly, Second Life could not go “the easy way out”: selling the technology to the military, and thus get the required funding to grow There.com has beaten Linden Lab to that. The goal to reach a million is very clear on Linden Lab’s roadmap but even a million might not be enough. 170,000 users are simply not interesting enough. Linden Lab Homes How To Handle GrowthGoogle was the fastest search engine in 1998 with a few dozens of thousands of users it still is the fastest one in 2007, with hundreds of millions of users, and an Internet that is perhaps 100 times bigger. They certainly know how to handle growth, and not only deal with that successfully, but efficiently. For some miracle, two software engineers back in 1998 amazed the world with a technology that indexes the whole world and is able to have half of the global market share of search engines. Smartphone tycoon 2 pc downloadStill, they wish to do more I think that the notion of the “Desktop Google” has been tossed around very often, but there was nothing “new” with it — still 2D, still looking too much like a browser or a common application, no matter how cool AJAX is. Google has some experience dealing with 3D worlds, as we can observe at their attempts with Google Earth. This is the kind of technology Linden Lab needs.Why would Google “need” Second Life? Well, the Google guys have been online often (don’t ask me for their avatar names I won’t reveal the RL data!) and have seen what Second Life is able to do. Google, by contrast, may be a specialist in indexing text (although they’re quite good at indexing images and videos these days…), but they have a team of a thousand software engineering experts (yes, a thousand…) who are at the forefront of overcoming technical hurdles of dealing effortlessly and efficiently with projects of huge size. Linden Lab is too small for such an ambitious goal. However, this “credibility” given by Google will allow Linden Lab, at this stage, to bring what we desperately need to Second Life: good searching and indexing for content. Part of the larger “Google family”, but its identity and culture will remain intact. What I’ve understood is that Linden Lab will just be an “affiliate” — i.e. Google Talk is just a step away to be replaced by Google Second Life if you wish to have the full experience of IMing in chat rooms, do it the 3D way — go into Google’s virtual world. Well, I think it’s now obvious. Imagine what that will mean — not in 2020 or 2030 or 2050… but very likely before 2010!I was always a bit confused why Google, on their Google Talk software, had so few features — just a “bare-bones” messenger, while competing products add all sorts of niceties, talking 2D cartoonish avatars, VoIP, etc. And perhaps now our close friends in RL who have shunned us while we invested our time and effort in building this virtual world will now understand why we do it every day.After all, if Page & Brin got the message, I guess most of our friends and family will now understand us, too. In another 4 or 5 years, they will be forgotten (who still remembers — or uses, since it’s still online — AltaVista?).2006 will definitely be the year to celebrate what encourages me at this stage is that now Linden Lab will have ample breathing space to grow.
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