This network flourished, had its cenith in 1991, and slowly faded and dissappeared.

Ultimately, its fading was not due to the fact that it was using a propietary protocol (IBM NJE), or to scalability problems. It dissappeared because it was _centrally administered_.

Hub nodes in europe had to install huge routing tables, customized to their nodes by a central administration located in Heildelberg, Germany. Many admins were lazy or ignorant, and forgot to install the routing tables. The result was that new nodes were inaccessible, traffic was lost, etc.

Internet won because it has no central authority, and it autoconfigures.

Second Life is the BITNET of virtual worlds. In the long term, it will not survive — not because of problems of scaling, or because or protocol standards: It will not survive because people want freedom.

Nowadays, the idea of a single macro web site where all the pages in the world would be accomodated seems ridiculous.

But that’s LL’s model of one-world-fits-all. It simply will not work.

And oh yes, 1994 was a great year for me, when I was pretty much touring my small country telling everybody how the whole world would start buying books and CDs and software from the Internet, and that this would come rather quickly and was not a far-fetched illusion from a science-fiction book :) Gosh, the blank stares and laughs I got from the audience by then… of course, not even 5 years later, they were actually buying books and CDs and doing homebanking and academic research out of the information posted on the Web… but, alas, spreading out the word was, indeed, very very hard back then.

But so exciting!

15 years later, I’m pretty much touring the same places (often even in the same audience rooms), explaining them about the change that virtual worlds will, indeed, bring to us. It’s true I might use the word “Second Life” more than OpenSim, but when the inevitable question comes: “what if I wish to run my own grid?” or “what happens if this single-vendor solution is not available because LL goes bakrupt?” now I have my answer quite ready :)

Still, I get the same blank stares — and even more laughs and shaking of heads from the audience :)

I sometimes wonder what I’ll be telling people in 15 years…