Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse

[Gayngel]

https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/introducing-horizon-workrooms-remote-collaboration-reimagined/

[asteriddle]

well, i can't even look at the SL tag on twitter without seeing NFTFAN123*'s hot take, so my first impression is pretty sour

did see a funny tweet that the idea of the 'metaverse' popular among aforementioned NFT-loving  types is just 'normie''s SL

 

*this is a fake username, if anyone actually uses this it's by coincidence

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

2 hours ago, Gayngel said:

https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/introducing-horizon-workrooms-remote-collaboration-reimagined/

[Waiomao]

Zuck now owns a huge piece of Kauai and has sued his neighbors in order to push his way around. I do my best not to hold ill will against anybody, but Zuck is one of those people for which I would build a time machine in order to travel back and prevent his birth. 

[Adeon Writer]

Anyone who is afraid of Facebook being remotely successful in the metaverse department doesn’t know how clueless Facebook is in what people want out of the Metaverse.

[Evangeline Arcadia]

17 minutes ago, Adeon Writer said:

Anyone who is afraid of Facebook being remotely successful in the metaverse department doesn’t know how clueless Facebook is in what people want out of the Metaverse.

I'd really start worrying if I ever heard Zuckerberg was offering  LL a big fat cheque to buy out Second Life...😟 Anything's possible....

...If that day ever comes I'm outta SL...

[Prokofy Neva]

On 8/2/2021 at 8:18 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

No. Tang was a commercial product used because space water tasted bad. Before it was used by NASA, Tang wasn't popular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_(drink_mix)

https://groovyhistory.com/do-you-remember-tang-the-groovy-drink-mix-of-the-american-astronauts

Source https://web.archive.org/web/20111015014451/http://education.ssc.nasa.gov/fft_halloffame.asp

NASA aren't shy about taking credit for developments that came about due to the space program or from NASA funding.

 

Hi, I was born in 1956. How about you? And remembering the late 1950s and early 1960s well, I know full well that the space program and even Tang itself constantly advertised the space program angle.

If Tang has now changed their advertising copy because the space program is more controversial and less admired now, understood. 

Search strings do not always provide truth, much as techs wish it would. It's not merely about NASA. It's about General Foods itself which certainly didn't front these disclaimers back in the day and in fact was happy to have people think they existed for John Glenn.

There has been a debate for decades perhaps before you were born which always used this meme "even if you got Tang out of the space program". The *literalisms* about this which you fetch up now with search-string 0/1 thinking doesn't undo that. Because the point remains. Tang identified itself fully with the space program and didn't dispel any notion that they "made it for John Glenn". After all this popular astronaut drank it. And ultimately it doesn't matter, and literalisms  you come up with don't matter, because it's a meme, a placeholder for a concept: that along the way, the space program, or science writ large, develops things that are then supposed to "help humankind" and then are invoked for a reason to keep those government programs funded, even if they are destructive of nature.

[Prokofy Neva]

26 minutes ago, Adeon Writer said:

Anyone who is afraid of Facebook being remotely successful in the metaverse department doesn’t know how clueless Facebook is in what people want out of the Metaverse.

I guess you don't watch the news.

This last week Facebook rolled out something called Horizons (I guess LL isn't the only company that uses a term like that, as LL did for an adult Linden Home area).

All of tech Twitter, all the Tech media, all the TV networks are talking about nothing but this. You now have the spectacle of Cramer opining on the Metaverse, when he must have heard about it like last week.

The tech press is ecstatic, although you find some people making cracks; old East coast print media online is less so.

I make a point of following all the tech media and all the gurus (some very newly minted like Cathy Hackl) and all the companies making AI, VR, etc. and the scholars that follow this and they are all agog about Facebook. 

They are all, "Wow, Metaverse!" -- as if they didn't know SL had this for 18 years. They think SL is a failure. SL is too hard to just jump in and have meetings, given the ramp-up for making and moving and situating an avatar. (I remember my second try at SL, where I went to a town hall the very first hour, and couldn't figure out how to sit on a bench for the longest time.)

So now you understand Ebbe's keenness  to get Sansar up and running when all the cool kids were going to only care about goggle-worlds and that would become "the Metaverse' regardless of what anyone else thought or said or did about it.

Any of us looking at it would be simply perplexed why these avatars have no legs. They are just like little hovercraft with nothing below the belt. Saves on the sex problem, eh?

How can you not have legs??? Well, various devs who have answered my question on Twitter explain how hard it is to make those animations without having the feet look "janky". When I show them ballets in SL, they point out that those are mouse-driven avatars, whereas Horizons is run on the VR concept, which means people have to put on goggles, which now cost "only" $300 -- and BTW that seems to include sensors for hand and leg motion, or at least some other more expensive rigs do.

I have heard the term "Metaverse" bandied about this week more time than I have in the last 10 years, and remember, I went to meetings about it 18 years ago in the early SL days, and in 2006-2007 when there were numerous conferences on the theme -- until they began to be called "Virtual World Winter" etc. and died out, and all those gurus and tech talk folks moved on to cell phones and social media as topics.

[Adeon Writer]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I guess you don't watch the news.

This last week Facebook rolled out something called Horizons (I guess LL isn't the only company that uses a term like that, as LL did for an adult Linden Home area).

All of tech Twitter, all the Tech media, all the TV networks are talking about nothing but this.

Oh trust me, I'm well aware of it. I couldn't possibly not know about it, because it's the latest laughing stock of the internet. Horizons is what was on my mind when I made that statement: Facebook has no idea what people want a virtual world for, and their reveal proved that to all of social media.

 

Have you looked into Facebook's Horizons? As in, images of what it actually looks like? Do it: And tell me you think anyone will have any interest in it. I trust your judgement.

Edited August 22, 2021 by Adeon Writer

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Hi, I was born in 1956. How about you? And remembering the late 1950s and early 1960s well, I know full well that the space program and even Tang itself constantly advertised the space program angle.

NASA, Tang, and everyone involved have been very clear. Tang was popularized by the space program. Nothing more. I'd cite more sources, but it's a waste of time, you wont even look at them.

Advertisements lie to you ? On purpose .. yay capitalism ?

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Adeon Writer said:

Oh trust me, I'm well aware of it. I couldn't possibly not know about it, because it's the latest laughing stock of the internet. Horizons is what was on my mind when I made that statement: Facebook has no idea what people want a virtual world for, and their reveal proved that to all of social media.

 

Have you looked into Facebook's Horizons? As in, images of what it actually looks like? Do it: And tell me you think anyone will have any interest in it. I trust your judgement.

It doesn't matter what I think, and I'm not going to buy goggles for $299 to form an opinion. There are plenty of videos up. What matters is how many businesses, enterprise, tech media, tech gurus etc are now flogging this. They aren't laughing. And they set the tone. It doesn't matter of Zuckerberg "has no idea" -- we can't expect he will have consulted his own head of mobile, Cory Ondrejka, formerly CTO of LL. It's a big place. What matters is that many companies will get on this bandwagon as they did a long time ago even for SL. And they will make it better because they are big and are flush with funds from the pandemic.

As Cramer put it very well, all these companies that are social media, IT, search etc have seen PHENOMENAL returns from the pandemic. 57% for Google, etc. FB made $86 billion dollars last year. And why? Cramer explains at the end:

THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU MAKE THE CONTENT FOR THEM!

Genius, really.

And it's not the laughing stock of the Internet. It's the laughingstock of your little corner of the Internet with your little friends. And you always wish to be contrarian from this little corner and I get that, and it's not interesting.

If you zoom out, literally, you can see Zoom already has something called "Immersive Rooms". All of this will take off, have its stumbles but be that much better positioned for the next thing. I don't think it will put LL out of business, but they have to be a little nervous. I mean, look at this Twitter convo.

People in SL who think that because they delete FB, or hate on FB, that they reflect anything like any significant portion of popular opinion need to go back and look at the $86 billion. They don't. Even if people don't like aspects of FB, they use it to keep in touch with friends, family, and co-workers and get news. And some portion of them will get into Horizons and it will dwarf SL's concurrency. That's all there is to it.

 

 

[Prokofy Neva]

29 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

NASA, Tang, and everyone involved have been very clear. Tang was popularized by the space program. Nothing more. I'd cite more sources, but it's a waste of time, you wont even look at them.

Advertisements lie to you ? On purpose .. yay capitalism ?

Well, cite away. You can also read articles actually analyzing what happened instead of just looking for search-strings.

My mother was happy to give us Tang because it was cheaper than fresh orange juice and we were poor. How about your mom? 

Also, the original point was basically: NASA (science) claims that we get all this great technology from what they do (and if you want to edge-case and Fisk on Tang, great, but there's memory foam and everyone else) -- yet what they do can be destructive, and not offset by their consumer-friendly inventions.

Edited August 22, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Akane Nacht]

3 hours ago, Evangeline Arcadia said:

I'd really start worrying if I ever heard Zuckerberg was offering  LL a big fat cheque to buy out Second Life...😟 Anything's possible....

...If that day ever comes I'm outta SL...

I doubt there would be much left of the SL we know if he did buy it. 

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

4 hours ago, Akane Nacht said:

I doubt there would be much left of the SL we know if he did buy it. 

I'd delete SL if he bought it. I had someone in my bar show me on his phone "check this out, you can make living avatars on Freakbook now!" I said SL been around forever and even showed him on the computer that's in the DJ booth. He said FB was better since he could do it on his phone.

[Drayke Newall]

6 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

This is the sort of tongue and cheek Linden Lab should use for advertising. The metaverse is a hot topic at the moment and Softs post hits the marketing nail on the head and how LL should hitch a ride on Facebook's popularity by using facebook's advertising against them.

[Coffee Pancake]

11 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Well, cite away. You can also read articles actually analyzing what happened instead of just looking for search-strings.

Did you even read that? That article makes it very clear Tang was created prior to it's association with the space program and that it's marketing heavily leveraged that sometimes tenuous connection.

 

5 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

This is the sort of tongue and cheek Linden Lab should use for advertising. The metaverse is a hot topic at the moment and Softs post hits the marketing nail on the head and how LL should hitch a ride on Facebook's popularity by using facebook's advertising against them.

We have to be seen as relevant in the metaverse space for that to work, and so far we're barely getting passing references.

There is either a blanket policy to ignore Second Life, Linden Lab and their offshoots, or we're so irrelevant we might as well not exist.

Either way. There needs to be some serious reorganization of LL's marketing team and priorities. To be in this position after 18 years is damming. 

[Drayke Newall]

56 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

We have to be seen as relevant in the metaverse space for that to work, and so far we're barely getting passing references.

There is either a blanket policy to ignore Second Life, Linden Lab and their offshoots, or we're so irrelevant we might as well not exist.

Either way. There needs to be some serious reorganization of LL's marketing team and priorities. To be in this position after 18 years is damming. 

Fully agree however they can still show some relevance and getting the word out through smart marketing. I.e. "like what horizons is doing, try Second Life the oldest, largest and most current metaverse in existence with users earning a collective $80 million last year".

Obviously that can only go so far and would require LL to update systems etc as well as like you say show relevance by for example attending functions in relation to the current metaverse talks.

The trouble is it won't happen and it is that lack of innovation and activeness which they possessed at the start that has brought LL to the position of SL being treated as no longer relevant.

[Prokofy Neva]

6 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Did you even read that? That article makes it very clear Tang was created prior to it's association with the space program and that it's marketing heavily leveraged that sometimes tenuous connection.

 

 

I'll try one last time, but keep in mind this is about conceptual thinking and reasoning by analogy, not search-string 0/9 thinking:

Also, the original point was basically: NASA (science) claims that we get all this great technology from what they do (and if you want to edge-case and Fisk on Tang, great, but there's memory foam and everyone else) -- yet what they do can be destructive, and not offset by their consumer-friendly inventions.

[Mollymews]

On 8/22/2021 at 12:36 PM, Evangeline Arcadia said:

I'd really start worrying if I ever heard Zuckerberg was offering  LL a big fat cheque to buy out Second Life...😟 Anything's possible....

...If that day ever comes I'm outta SL...

i am not sure that this is ever going to happen.  Facebook hired Cory Ondrejka when it first got into looking at the 'metaverse' and they soon parted ways

i think Facebook is kinda a bit deluded if they think avatar based workrooms are going to be better for business than things like Microsoft Office Teams which allow business people to discuss and collaborate on creating documents together in real time

[Akane Nacht]

18 hours ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

He said FB was better since he could do it on his phone.

Was he a youngster? As I get older I have trouble even seeing stuff on my phone 😁

Even without that little drawback, I can't see how a small screen would be that immersive an experience. 

[Solar Legion]

3 minutes ago, Akane Nacht said:

Was he a youngster? As I get older I have trouble even seeing stuff on my phone 😁

Even without that little drawback, I can't see how a small screen would be that immersive an experience. 

Such individuals aren't looking for an immersive experience.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

2 minutes ago, Akane Nacht said:

Was he a youngster? As I get older I have trouble even seeing stuff on my phone 😁

Even without that little drawback, I can't see how a small screen would be that immersive an experience. 

Yep. In my case I only have a flip phone --- but soon I'll have to find another one as 3G in our area is getting PKed in the middle of next year.

[Gayngel]

https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10114026953010521

[Gayngel]

https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/1898414763675286/?notif_id=1635440492255451&notif_t=live_video&ref=notif

[Lucia Nightfire]

Don't make people connect to FB...

Sum it up in a few words, heh.