Over on a mailing list of educators in Second Life, there is a raging discussion about the pros and cons of ‘web on a prim’. A prim is a basic building block of Second Life and people worry about all kinds of horrible things that could happen is Linden Labs enabled some sort of Web on a Prim technology. Obviously, there are all kinds of issues that could come up with griefers messing around with web-enabled prims. Yet the bigger issue is what this would do to Second Life as a space for innovation. People would be lazy and simply embed webpages into their Second Life spaces. Second Life would simply become your next browser.

Actually, I kind of like that idea. I hate clicking on a link in Second Life and having Firefox pop up as an external unconnected window. I would like Second Life to be my browser. I would love to see the next iteration of the web be three dimensional, immersive, real time and with a viable microcurrency.

Already, we use both Second Life and traditional browsers to view pictures and movies. The advantage is that in Second Life, we can do this as part of a community. One of the things that is appealing about microblogging on sites like Twitter, as well as updating our statuses in Facebook or our away messages in instant messenger programs is the aspect of constant partial attention, which in part is about being maintaining our relationship to our communities. Second Life gives us a more immersive way of maintaining our relationship to our communities.

The aspect of three dimensional graphics is part of what makes this so compelling, part of what causes us to become much more immersed in the environment. Others suggest that efforts to have a three dimensional browser have been tried in the past, and have failed. How many people do you know that have every accessed sites with Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) embedded in them, let alone ever tried to create VRML?

I don’t think this criticism holds up for a lot of reasons. First, the VRML of years gone by was pretty limited. They weren’t collaborative and synchronous the way Second Life is. More importantly, the computing power that people have at home now, along with the available bandwidth provides much greater opportunities than years ago.

As to the complaint that embedding websites into prims would stifle creativity, there is some of that. Yet it would also bring more people in and encourage people to become more creative. Let’s look back at the history of various Internet technologies. When Tim Berners-Lee pieced together the World Wide Web, they included the ability to connect with other protocols besides HTTP. You could use FTP, Gopher, WAIS, anything you could come up with. Many people hobbled together their portions of the web using existing protocols.

On top of that, as PDF files became more popular, they would often simply through up the PDF without trying to reformat it to look good in HTML. I remember an old coworker of mine talking about this as ‘Paper on Glass’, and that it was a necessary first step for many people to move their information online.

Likewise, in the old days your email system didn’t talk with other email systems. Slowly, people set up gateways and learned the black arts of connecting UUCP to Arpa to X.400 and private networks like ATTmail, Sprintnet, Compuserve and so on. Eventually, things settled into being predominantly connected via SMTP so everyone has an at-sign in their email address. We are starting to see similar convergence between instant messaging systems and I hope to see gateways between all of the IM systems and my Second Life client.

With the client now open source, we have the potential to see people create interesting new clients. I’ve heard discussions about Second Life clients for the blind as well as Second Life clients that run on gaming consoles.

Yet what really drives the adoption of a technology is often the money that can be made off of it. I think this was part of what the folks behind WAIS understood years ago, but didn’t manage to capitalize on. The Linden Dollar is an important microcurrency making financial transactions possible online that wouldn’t be possible with other systems. It will be interesting to see what happens with the Linden Dollar as other grids emerge. Will there be intergrid trading? Will the Linden Dollar connect with other payment systems such as I talked about in my article about filling out surveys online? These are some issues that need to be explored.

As to what is holding back creativity in Second Life, I don’t think web enabled prims are going to be the problem. Instead, Second Life is still a little too two dimensional to me. Sure, we can fly, but most people are weighed down by gravity. Even their model for buying space is two dimension. People buy land, they don’t buy and sell air rights, at least not yet as far as I know. Likewise, everything is built on a human scale. We need Ms. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus showing us what can happen when we step outside of our current time human scale existence. Why don’t biology classes take place inside of a human body? Why don’t astronomy classes take place in a far distant nebula? Why doesn’t IBM have meetings inside of one of their latest chips? Perhaps things like these are happening and I don’t know about it, but it isn’t web based prims that are preventing it.