Third Life -- But Whose?

You thought Third Life was when the Good Lord force-ported you home to Heaven, and your prims got returned by your relatives or estate handlers.

But it turns out Third Life is some kind of new world/platform/thingie made out of Open Sim or something that is now opening up a fund-raising campaign on Indiegogo -- which is also my platform of choice for kick-starting since Kick-Starter is so damn elitist and picky that it isn't really open to the public. I didn't raise much on Indiegogo but I have to say, I didn't try. I had plans to try at first -- mailings, phone calls, lists, etc. which you really need to fund-raise (the Internet cannot magically fund-raise for you) and I even found an organization to accept donations for tax deduction, but overseas travel recently kept me from developing my plans. Even so, I think it's cool.

Now, Third Life. It's advertising itself as something that is free-thinking and free-market. That already sounds like a big plus because it's the technocommunism/technolibertarian ideological strait jacket of Second Life and Linden Lab that makes it so much harder than it has to be.

But then I worry that it might be libertarian as in loony, and might even be Intlibber Brautigan behind it, and I definitely don't want anything to do with him. He couldn't even get elected dog-catcher in real life and fled from Second Life one step ahead of the Linden island repo men and debt-collectors from what I hear and also ran up bills in real life.

Somehow, it doesn't seem to show his fingerprints, and I don't think he'd send me a mailing about it if it were him, but here's the problem: we don't know who it is. There is no name except "3L" and no biography or anything. Nothing.

Now, why would you pour money into a strange unidentified place on the Internet? Well, in a way, you sort of do that in Second Life when you buy things from people or even rent land, but Linden Lab is a solid real company with names, a board, an address, fiscal responsibility, a history of meeting is obligations, etc. So to spend even $10 or $50 on Third Life sight unseen, especially when you can spend that much and go buy Inwordlz land or some other open sim type clone that is more established and has some reputation now -- well, does it make sense?

And if they have to raise money on Indiegogo and have set only $25,000 as their goal, how serious an operation could it be? You need half a million or more just to get an engine and a world developed and started, don't you?

Or is this fund-raiser about something else? About having people feel stake in the world? There are levels of buy-in that give you perks like a statue in the town square, the ability to make a character, admission into the closed beta, or even sharing talks with the devs. And I have to say I think it's a good thing to have access to the devs a buyable thing. It's crass, but at least it's open, unlike the fake egalitarian open source cult crap of Second Life. Some people rant and rave about buying politicians and the need to get money out of politics, but I think it's all protected First Amendment speech and people should stop myopically only looking at one set of funders (the Koch brothers) and ignoring the others (Soros) on the left.

I have to say that I wonder about the ability and the capacity of these folks when I see their simplistic font like it was generated on Paint or something. Indiegogo does not vouch for these projects as such, buyer beware, but you will have to present at least a full name and address and at least a PayPal account to start a project.

The features all sound interesting, there's a big emphasis on pets, and they claim to be "grief-proof". But grief-proof isn't believable for me, because to me, the more important factor isn't the ability to ban people from my home or make a white list of only those people who can come in; to me what's important is to have open groups, open sims, but the ability to ban (and ideally the ability to maintain an open group but ban some people from the group who grief it). I don't want closed groups or closed land. I think it's better to have open groups and open land. That's preciously what the Woodbury/The Wrong Hands griefers keep trying to destroy because they hate our freedom. They want to force people in Second Life to lock down and hide behind security orbs so that they are not open. They take advantage of the inadvertent affordances of open groups, and then add even exploits to that, so that they can kill people's trust and friendliness and get them to suspect everyone -- and then it becomes a society easier to take over, ironically, when everyone is living in a security state.

In any event, there it is. Take it or leave it or wait and see.

I may contribute, I'm thinking about it. There's a window for the next month when all the perks are available, and then it closes, they say. Will it work? I sense that regardless of whether they raise this $25,000, they will open, just because they describe a very robust world.

On the other hand, it might be an elaborate scam that people like us might eagerly fall for.

Public release is in the fall of 2013 -- closed beta is in Q2. Hmmm....

There are several things out there that have used the name or term "Third Life" that seem unrelated to this project.

I found this strange entry in Google search results that didn't go anywhere:

Internet Evolution - Virtual World 'Third Life' Launches, Grabs $15M

test.internetevolution.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid...

The next big leap forward in the history of the Internet is happening now: Internet Evolution (www.internetevolution.com) is a Web 2.0 online publication ...

But hunting around, I found this article on Internet Evolution from 2008. Oh, it's dated April 1...

Anybody got anything more on this?

 

 

Comments

[c3]

ill look around... ive know most 3d dead bodies on the net..

i think these "kickstarters" need some looking into... had a long circle jerk about this on g+

scams will swell under web2.0 memes.

3L.? hmm.
c3

[c3]

geez...
been to indiegogo..

no info other than text hyperbole... a 40 second text only video clip...-sesame street hyperbole.
and a "brand name" sure to invite litigation...

enjoy the joke.