Zachmann.NET
Get a (Second) Life!
Use and improve your programming and development skills in a virtual context.
Unless you've been living under a rock, you've likely heard about
Second Life
), Philip Rosedale's fantastically successful virtual world inhabited by a growing number of real people. It's not only one of the hottest Web 2.0 (+) social networking sites in the world today, but a serious moneymaking business to boot. No matter how well you know your ones and zeros, your loops, enumerations, objects and interfaces, you're seriously out of touch with what information technology can do if you're not acquainted with Second Life.
Virtual World Develops
Even as a purely social (or even intellectual) phenomenon, you need to put it in your real-world inventory of stuff to know about. But if you really want to see where some key software development is headed over the next decade or two, you need to get a Second Life to find out.
I took a peek at Second Life some time ago but didn't find it very interesting at first. I felt much the same about personal computers in 1976 (I already had more capability available with timesharing systems) or the Internet in 1991 (CompuServe had more useful functionality at the time). How quickly things change!
Second Life's virtual world has been under construction since March 2002, when it started with four residents on 64 (virtual) acres. It opened to the public in 2003. Today it has more than 10 million residents (more than half a million of whom were active in September 2007, spending more than 25 million hours "in world") and currently extends (including the water) over more than 200,000 virtual acres. Residents of this world are represented by customizable 3-D avatars.
As Second Life hit astronomic growth in population (and publicity) over the past year or two, there has been explosive growth in territory and many real-world institutions have built on turf of their own there.
Colleges like Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Princeton have held seminars in Second Life. Companies like IBM and Cisco have built extensive facilities in Second Life. There's even a Microsoft Visual Studio Island! It has a big building with an auditorium (I'm standing in it as I write this) with posters advertising http://defyallchallenges.com in the lobby. Check it out if you haven't already seen it. It's awesome!
Second Language
Rosedale's company (Linden Research Inc., aka Linden Lab) provides the fundamental hardware and software infrastructure, but most of the stuff -- from geography and buildings down to the latest fashion accessories for avatars -- is built by someone else. There are in-world tools to use to customize and clothe your avatar, to build objects and to do many other things as well. There are also external development tools.
The foundation for much of this is the Linden Scripting Language (LSL), officially described as: "An internal, event-driven, C/Java-style language that allows you to control object and avatar behavior, up to and including mini-games and other complex programs." This is where it gets interesting for creative programmers and developers. LSL is sufficiently familiar to anyone who knows C# (or C or C++, or Java). It's also sufficiently different from what most of us already do (unless we're hard-core game developers) to let us explore a very different realm of programming.
Virtual Money
It can be a lot of fun figuring out how to build sophisticated objects or to animate and create behaviors for avatars in Second Life -- and it can even be a means to make a little (or quite a bit of) money.
Just like in the real world, if you build something in Second Life that people want (and people want the strangest things), you can sell stuff and make money doing it. Of course, the money you make directly in Second Life is only virtual money: Linden Dollars ($L). But $L can be exchanged for U.S. dollars. There's a LindeX Currency Exchange in Second Life where $L can be bought or sold for real dollars. The exchange rate is kept relatively stable at about $L266 per U.S. dollar.
While it's not likely that anyone outside of Linden Labs will get rich on Second Life, there were over 800 folks who made more than 1,000 real (U.S.) dollars there in September 2007. More than 150 made the equivalent of $5,000 or more at the current exchange rate. You're not likely to be able to quit your day job selling stuff in Second Life, but you certainly can make a bit of pocket change there if you like.
Mostly, though, it's a fun way to use and improve your programming and development skills in a very interesting context. I know what my Second Life project will be! What's yours?
About the Author
William F. Zachmann, born before the modern digital computer was invented, has lived with them (and made his living off of them) all his life. He was director of research for The Forum Corp. in the mid-'70s and senior vice president of corporate research at International Data Corp. (IDC) in the '80s. He has a copy of Windows 1.0 that Bill Gates signed for him the night it was rolled out at Comdex Fall '85. Zachmann is now director of Canopus Research Inc. He programs in C# using Visual Studio 2005 with a focus on ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005.