What will happen to Second Life in 2008?

I generally speaking suck at predictions, but there are some for Second Life that it will be interesting to see what comes through. I'm going to divide them into the technical, the social, competition and the external "big users" categories, basically because that is how they occurred to me.

This is obviously going to be quite long, so read on under the fold.

Technical changes:

1. Linden Lab will upgrade the JIRA to make it more user friendly. It might even upgrade the ability of normal users to report issues. (Of course this is in part true already! But more improvements to come.)

2. Maximum concurrency will continue to increase, reaching over 100,000 routinely by the end of the year.

3. HTML on a prim will be along, in a number of steps. Of course this is a pretty easy one, since it was due before Christmas.

4. Another easy one, the UI programme will come through and we will be (relatively easily at least) able to skin our clients how we choose.

Social changes:

1. Age verification in its current form will fall flat on its ugly face. Two things will happen in response:

• A different system will evolve which will place control where it belongs - on the users that claim to be 18

• We will see the mainland change shape as we move to a mature continent (or continents) and PG continent or continents. This will pave the way towards a unified grid as the drive to allow families to spend time together in Second Life increases.

Second Life users will become increasingly balkanised, but with people moving between groups still - just like RL people tend to use Facebook OR MySpace, not both. Competition:

Second Life will get a significant competitor. This could be the translation of HiPiHi into English, although I suspect political controls will prevent this. It could be Google's new project, or something else. To count it will have to be fairly globally accessible, social, content creation, the chance to make a real-life living will be there.

Big External Users:

1. At least three new companies will "get Second Life" at least in their own terms. I would say it's hard to deny IBM have, Coca Cola say they have succeeded by their own standards.

2. Educational use will continue to grow. Pressure from high-school users will add to the pressure for a unified grid rather than a teen and an adult grid so they can teach 17 and 18 year olds in the same class and space.

3. The quantity of peer reviewed papers highlighting the impact of virtual worlds will increase markedly. Some of the rest of the world will start to think about Second Life as an educational platform on the back of these papers.