Having noticed a bit of Twitter buzz about Kitely, the latest Second Life spin-off, I decided to investigate. Unlike the other spin-off worlds, Kitely targets Facebook users by letting anyone with a Facebook account create a single-region, SL-based virtual world. My impression is that if you want more than that, you’ll need to start buying up their virtual currency to pay for it.
Arriving at their site, I clicked the link to “log in using Facebook”, which is essentially adds Kitely as a Facebook app with full permission to access all of your Facebook account. If you’re at all concerned about privacy or identity theft, this is a point of concern already. Any app to which you hand over the keys to your personal info can essentially mine your data or post on your behalf. However, since my Facebook account is largely free of info that I need to hide, I went ahead and agreed.
The next problematic step, after creating the world and naming it (in my case, it’s named “Terra”), is that to enter the world, you need two things:
- A Second Life client installed on your computer.
- A “Kitely plugin”, which is an installer that you download and run.
That you need a Second Life client isn’t a problem for anyone already in Second Life, but that’s a big step for a lot of casual Facebook users. Also, there isn’t an obvious link for users to download the SL client, but maybe I just missed that.
The Kitely plugin is an installer for a small program that launches the SL client to connect to a particular Kitely world. Now, if you’ve ever connected to a grid other than the default Second Life grid (“Aditi”), you know that you can do this manually at the SL login screen, so the “plugin” is simply a convenience to users who are less technically inclined.
I did have strong reservations about installing this plugin, but mainly that’s a trust issue. As in, do I trust Kitely enough that I’m certain there’s no malware in the plugin, for example. I installed it despite my concern, because there are no instructions on how to connect to a Kitely world without the plugin.
Once in my new world, Terra, it was perfectly familiar. I had an avatar, a male one, though I hadn’t been presented with any choices there, and a tiny round island in a vast ocean. It looked like my world was ready to be terraformed and filled with goodies.
The first thing I tried, of course, wasn’t the inventory, but the physics. I rezzed a cube, turned on physics, and dropped the cube from a height. The result: not good. It rubberbanded a few times while falling and bouncing, and oddly ended up in the exact spot where I rezzed it. At a guess, that kind of physics time dilation is a sign that they’re hosting way too many sims per server, and the physics engine is simply overloaded.
Next test: I put a simple airplane flight script into the cube. I encountered a couple of odd bugs in the script editor, where it wouldn’t let me paste overtop of existing text, but I worked around that and compiled successfully. Great… time to fly. I sat on the cube, which gave a status message, as my script should, so that meant the script was running. So far so good.
Touching the throttle, though, led to my avatar being mashed into the sim corner underwater with the camera flailing all over. Standing didn’t work, and teleport home resulted in an error message. So that was my first encounter with Kitely. Technically speaking, the performance falls well short of where it should be to be a usable SL-based VW.
But beyond the technical issues, I have to question the purpose of Kitely. What advantage does Kitely offer a user over Second Life? Certainly, Facebook users can log into Kitely with an existing user ID, but is that really much of a convenience? The Second Life sign-up process is easy and free. Where Kitely seems to suggest that you will eventually have to buy Kitely currency to use their service, you never need to drop a cent in Second Life unless you want to buy land or content.
And this brings up another question. Where does the content come from? Second Life’s user-created content is rich, vast, and arguably matured. While it is possible to upload an entire region based on an OAR file (an entire region ripped from an SL-based VW and saved to a file), the vast majority of Facebook users will arrive to their new virtual world with nothing but the virtual clothes on their back. In this area, Second Life seems to have the clear advantage.
Privacy might be an area in which Kitely offers an advantage, in that you can control who comes in, but Second Life offers that ability as well, albeit only to estate owners.
In the end, I’m unconvinced that Kitely is a viable product. It technically falls well short of Second Life itself, but in fairness, maybe the performance issue will be rectified with more money for hardware, and if it’s used for purely social reasons, like standing around chatting, I’m sure it would be perfectly adequate. And bugs can be worked out, given time. The key issue is that it fails to address any specific user need that Second Life doesn’t already provide or exceed. And for that reason, I think that Kitely just won’t fly.
I think if you don’t have an SL compatible client you are prompted to download Imprudence automatically. World makers are likely experienced and want a whole sim to work on for very little money. Visitors to a sim just need a link to a world from the owner to login via Facebook and then are prompted to get plugin and client. They don’t interact with the client login screen at all after clicking Enter World if it works as intended.
You spend a lot of time here discussing the known shortfalls of OpenSim vs. Second Life which are woeful indeed–there’s no doubt that SL performs better for development.
Also, you make great points about the viewer issue. While more and more users are accustomed to installing tiny viewer plugins (or applications like Kitely’s), it’s tougher to get people to install SL.
As for the Facebook issues, these are part of a much larger debate/discussion about Facebook privacy and the idea of anonymity online. The fact is that most of the “real world” is not interested in SL-style anonymity and assumed identities–and we’re talking 400 million active Facebook users. Most of what there is to say about Facebook connect has already been said, and the tiny niche of SL residents who bemoan FB are on the wrong side of history indeed.
I think that once Kitely solves the viewer issues that you described, TOS, and a host of others that have been brought up here and elsewhere, they have a really good chance of taking off big time.
It’s always dangerous to make these predictions, but my sense is that not only are they are on the right track, but they are already a game-changer. We’re witnessing the start of a true revolution for VWs.
These are good points, and I see the value in approaching Facebook users. But at the same time, Facebook users have a very low tolerance for techy stuff, and I think asking them to install not one, but two things, may raise the bar too high. For Kitely to really take off, they need a browser-based client so that it can compete with other FB gaming apps.
LL has demo’d their browser-based client, and it was extremely impressive. I suspect, however, that it’s very costly on the server side, since it’s a thin-client arrangement with the server doing all the heavy lifting with regards to rendering.
If Kitely pulled off a browser-based client, THEN they would be revolutionary. Without that, it’s just another SL spin-off.
The revolution has already started, no OpenSim world has gone this viral this quickly, so it’s not a hypothetical.
They’d certainly be wise to consider what you say about browser-based access. But they’ve already pulled off a breakthrough feat, there’s no doubt about it. VWs will never be the same again.
On the physics bit, since they are likely using ODE, I wouldn’t expect vehicle scripts or other physics dependent scripts to behave at all the same as in SL, which is Havok. When I set up my opensim regions a while back, one of the first things I did was also physics muckery. I created a sphere, dropped Philip’s beach ball script into it, and it did nothing at all expected. They’re just different balls of wax, and while eventually they might get it to the point where they behave similarly or identically, that’s a long way off.
Content will be a big problem. If they are reaching out to the uninitiated Facebook crowd, most of those folks are not going to have the capability to create (or otherwise source) and upload textures, and build content from scratch on their brand new grassy hump of land. They will have to solve that by providing a rich library of pre-made content for people to use, including textures and the typical arsenal of structures and gadgets.
Opensim is very, very promising, and has come a long way in the last couple years. I have 9 regions running on OSGrid, and that is where I spend most of my creative energy. It’s then very trivial to export the content to xml, and import into Second Life. The process isn’t without imperfections, but it does work, and for creation minded SL users who lack the finances to lease a region from Linden Lab, it is a god-send.
On a personal note to Steve, if you could shoot me an email when you have a moment, I have a question about one of your pics taken in-world. It seems you are a difficult person to contact.
Cheers,
Tim