I have noticed this for quite a while now. From the internet to youtube, from MMORPG to Second life. While each of them seem to be very different from one another but the fact is, they are prety much the same concept to me.
If you noticed, the creator of the internet browser system that lets you serve the web and go to web address are mainly responsible in making it possible. The creator of the internet are not the guys who created those beautiful webpage. They are not the guys who created google, or yahoo search engine. In fact, they are not even the guys who created the thosands or even million of webpage that are out there in the world wide web!! They are not the one who did it. You did. What they do is to make an enviroment for us to create our creation and to showcase to the world.
The same goes for youtube. Those guys who created youtube only make it possible that we can upload our video to their created enviroment. They are not the one who created the contents of youtube, they are not the one who make youtube so interesting, what they did was only to make it all possible for us to create our creation and to showcase to the world.
What about MMORPG and Second life?
Linden Labs are not the guys who created the mighty castle you see somewhere in some God forsaken islands. Neither are they the ones who make those beautiful clothes that you might be wearing now. What they did was merely to create an enviroment possible for us to bring our creation to light and to showcase to the whole world.
So, did you noticed the link?
These successful people are not even resposible for the contents of their work. What they did is to maintain the enviroment, fixed any bugs that it might have and to introuduce new feature so that people can have more toys to play with and added into their own creation.
But does this always work? I have no idea...but I do know that the world have an endless supply of enthusaistic people that are willing to spend their time and effort in showing their own creation. You might say that SL resident do it for money while most of them do it for fun. What about blogging then?
The creators of blogger, do they even write any blog entry?
And so, any thing or product that encourage the mass to participate in will surprisingly be successful after all. Nowadays, people are getting tired of playing with NPC or AI in games. They want more closer contacts with the people from around the world. Just like Msn that can bring people closer together but Secondlife can bring people even close as you can even play with them instead of just tallking.
As you see, in these changing world. Something just never seem to change. While games are getting better nowadays and we are getting closer to one another in every new creation and invention, this formula will never seem to change.
So look out for the next big thing, maybe bigger than second life and you will once again see this same formula. The concept is the same, what is different is only the added feature and stuff that we can never do before. Msn can only talk and play, while SL can do lots of other things as well...so what could be next?
Such is the nightmare of Linden labs and could jolly well be the reason of their contiuing adding of new feature instead of stabilisng the system. Who knows? Maybe the sky will fall on their head tommorow when suddenly, somewhere out there came a next big things called " Third Life "
