From 2 years before I was born, until just before I started working on Second Life at Linden Lab, my Dad worked at an innovative technology company with a large consumer photography business: Kodak. From January next year I’ll be working at an innovative technology company with a large consumer photography business: Facebook.

Looking at the march of technology from the perspectives of these companies is amazing. I had a summer job building my first web application for Kodak while I was studying Computer Science in Nottingham and remember one of the researchers there joking that film needed to last a long time as a roll would often have pictures of christmas trees at either end with a summer holiday in the middle. Photography was so expensive that people would only take a few dozen pictures a year. Now we happily take a dozen pictures of our lunch, wouldn’t consider buying a telephone without a built in multi-megapixel camera and people upload hundreds of millions of images to Facebook every day.

While the cost of creating photos has fallen to almost zero, their value hasn’t. Some of my most enjoyable moments recently have been looking at and commenting on the latest pictures of my brand new nephew, Charlie, on Facebook and so it goes for Facebook’s other billion users. Photos that are now so cheap to create that Kodak has filed for chapter 11 protection become social objects that are so valuable that Facebook can host the photos for free and still make a good business from advertising around the conversation.

Working for Facebook might seem like a strange move after a decade working on 3D environments, but virtual worlds like Second Life and EVE are also social spaces, just with virtual nightclubs or space battles as the social objects. While 3D environments allow more immersion than Facebook, the price is a much higher barrier to entry. Although a few people from my family tried Second Life while I worked at Linden Lab: most of my family use Facebook already. My brother could create a gallery of pictures of my nephew in Second Life and we could meet there to talk about them, but then most of my nephew’s other aunts and uncles wouldn’t be able to join us. Ubiquity trumps immersion. Virtual worlds like Second Life still need their iPod moment if they’re going to cross the chasm from niche technology used by gamers, early adopters and academics to become a mainstream communication technology. Even though Second Life is free to use and paid for by the publishers of the 3D content, it’s still too hard to navigate for most people to use almost a decade after its launch.

Facebook is already used by a billion people to keep in touch, while still evolving and developing at an incredible pace. I’m going to help new uncles connect with new nephews around the world while working on new technologies, which I think is going to make Facebook a fun and rewarding place to work.

After that, who knows? My Dad’s working on some pretty amazing stuff these days: if I keep following in his footsteps and change keeps accelerating, the next thing is science fiction now, just as Second Life and Facebook were in 1975.

As usual I headed down to the Metropole on the sea front last week to attend the annual Develop conference in Brighton. Unusually, this time I was attending the Evolve day which shifts the focus from console development to online, mobile and social games, which I had helped create as part of the steering commitee. I was very impressed.

The first talk I attended was not strictly part of the evolve day: I switched over to the Games:Edu track to listen to Alice Taylor talk about her work building games for Channel 4. In a previous era, Channel 4 spent £6 million a year on public service programming for young people which ended up being shown in the mornings when the only young people at home were off sick. In order to reach a wider audience all of that money was switched to online programming and, because 14-19 year olds love them, games. Since then, Alice and Matt Locke have toured the country commisioning small developers to develop games like Sneeze, Routes, 1066 and future games battling STIs in privates and making science fun for girls with Ada Lovelace. It all sounds like loads of fun and a great fit for Second Life (which already has a fair amount of sex and science adventures of its own), but the key here is availability. Alice is going where the kids are. Millions of people play the Channel 4 games using technologies like Flash which are ubiquitous: an order of magnitude more people than use Second Life regularly or used to watch the telly from their sick beds.

Next up was “Browser Based Games Past Present Future” which sounded perfect: which of the competing technologies is going to win the battle for the 3D browser canvas, which should we use to make Second Life more accessible to some of Alice’s teens? Unfortunately the retrospective and predictive parts of the talk were extremely limited and the talk was mostly a plug for Pirate Galaxy: an online Java based Eve. Luckily it looks incredibly well done. In particular the in world economy which allows either time or money to be converted in to energy and from their in to experience and eventually space ships looks very slick: to begin with energy is plentiful and little is needed. Slowly the screw is turned making the urge to invest in energy ever more inticing. There are also limits on the amount of short cutting that can be done by investing money, with game play still required to gain experience which is needed to buy the best ships. It’s all a long step forward from the experiments with economies and mudflation we grappled with at AGC, SIGGRAPH and on Terra Nova.

The highlight of the day for me was the talk by Kristian Segerstrale, CEO and co-founder of Playfish who make some of the most successful games on Facebook, including Pet Society: a game which allows you to collect rainbow poos and is as popular on Facebook as Rhianna and the Simpsons. Kristian talked about how social games are different: no longer focused on creating paths for solitary players to experience fear, horror, wonder and suspense, social games are toolkits for cooperation, competition and expression for friends. Social games have been responsible for most of the growth in the games industry over the last year and while the Wii and Rock Band have let friends gather and play together, games on social networks let friends play together online. Where traditional games spend years and millions in development and then launch with marketing splurges and shelf space negitiated with retailers, social games might intially be developed for 10s of thousands, sit on an infinite shelf and are marketed virally through recommendations from friends. Where traditional games rely on the intuition of a games designer who hopes to get it right, social games rely on feedback. After launch social games are deluged with information. Marketing is driven by numbers, buy buttons are A/B tested with users, designers analyse play, further investment and development desisions are based on usage, the skill is not in intuitively knowing what players will like, but by mining and filtering a slew of data to find out. Kristian’s talk felt a lot like Raph Koster’s dinosaurs talk from a few years back: it even used a similar meteor strike slide, however, this time around the small mammals weren’t micro user generated virtual worlds but pets doing rainbow poos and restaurant sims where you can hire your mum as chef.

It will be interesting to see how the small furry mammals evolve over the coming years.