Ecosystem?
Ecosystem = parts working together to the benefit of each.
A while back I offered some comments about the ecology of Second Life:
- Future of SL is beyond e-tech. Now on to s-tech
- Future of SL Beyond e-tech (continued)
- How durable is that network effect?
Summary: the ecology of Second Life is about S-tech, the social sciences: economics, sociology. The story is about the interaction of people in community networks. Here I will point out a couple of ways that Google Wave will fit into the story.
(BTW, I don’t have invitations to Google Wave. They did give me eight, but those went out to people I expect to work closely with. If Google ever gives me more invitations, I will probably distribute them the same way.)
Use case: Jane the Journalist
I get requests for interviews about Hobo Junction group, activities on Cookie, the RU Community Gateway, and other projects I am involved in. Imagine Jane the Journalist. She asks for an interview because she is learning journalism or writing for web publication. I will give Jane an interview because I am glad to get increased visibility for the people and projects I am working with. That is the same story as happens in the outworld, but easier on Jane because she can teleport to the meeting in 30 seconds.
Neither of us would want to spend time on this if we did not have an audience to read the product. And the readers read the interviews (we hope) for their own purposes. So this little part of the ecological system in Second Life works because of the networked parts doing their own thing. And thereby, they create an environment that supports the other parts.
Actually, I took this idea from Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”
How does Google Wave fit into this ecology? I am using it now to collect the references I will give people for background to an interview about the Hobo Junction group. At this time, that is no big benefit because I will have to copy the text to a notecard to give it to Jane. But when Jane also has Wave, I will be able to give her access to the wave where I keep the Hobo Junction links. One quick link via notecard and we move the conversation about Hobo Junction out of Second life and into Google.
Wave becomes my online database with web-linked entries. And shared (networked) with Jane and other journalists. I can update it and Jane can follow. Jane can give me information (via links on an entry in my wave). She can ask me new questions if she wants to follow up the previous article.
But wait! There’s more! I will have several of my friends on that wave. They are there because I think they are interested in the topic. They, too, will see Jane’s entries. If they want, they can use the Hobo Junction wave to contact her. They can give her other information about Hobo Junction activities. And they, too, are networked with all the journalists who are connected to my Hobo Junction wave.
Or Jane can do a more comprehensive story in which she interviews several people, finding all of them on my wave. My wave becomes, in network terminology, a node: A point with multiple network connections of different kinds. I now serve that node function myself (at a cost in my time). I make connections between people. In the future, I hope to turn over a lot of that work to Google Wave
BTW, I want to call attention to a small, but valuable, feature of Google Chrome. I often work with at least two web pages at the same time. Initially those pages will be opened in the same browser (of course). To work with both of them, I will want them both open at the same time. With Google Chrome, I simply drag a page tab out of the current browser and it comes out on my screen as a web page in a separate browser. No big deal, but easily big enough to move me to Chrome.
Another result of Google Wave
I have started a new blog, Virtual Outworlding, to provide a schedule of selected upcoming Second Life events in my network.
I will post a weekly and daily schedule of events that I recommend. This becomes practical with Google Wave because people who produce events can post them on my Virtual Outworlding wave. I only need to move the information to my blog.
Useful Links for Google Wave
These links were all provided to me by Butch Dae (George Kurtz) via Google Wave. George is team leader for the VIT World Group, an effort to stimulate development and promote collaboration within an integrated platform, which includes such environments as email, wikis, websites, social networks, blogs, virtual worlds, mind maps etc
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