There've been some new developments in SL lately which are worth mentioning:
When I started going online back in 1994 the world was quite small. There were some local BBS around, I had my analogue modem with fast 14.400 bit/s, that needed to run over my phone line, and that was it. There've been services around, which were like bigger BBSes, like Compuserve or AOL, which ruled most of the market.
Then out of nowhere the Internet emerged. Compuserve, AOL and others were proprietary systems only, and the established companies needed to decide what to do. Well, they even didn't notive the Internet and its potential first. Open standards, decentralized, not ruled by only one entity. This was something new and it wrecked their business models great lenghts. When the Internet started to became more and more important, the content of proprietary standards in AOL and Compuserve became less and less important and newsworthy since all this content drained into the Internet.
So what's the lesson of it? A proprietary system is like an island. It might be nice for a while, but when something better becomes available, most of its content will shift definitely there, ruining your old business modell, forcing you to adapt. That's why in my opinion Linden Lab is working at an open standard at the moment, because they don't want to be the next Netscape. They still want to be in business in the next five years and this is definitely a way to achieve it.
This here seems to be the newest trend: since the standard avatar mesh looks just plain right ugly at the feet some shoe designers started now building shoes with builtin, more naturally looking toes. This looks like this here then:
Quite an improvement, if you're asking me. I wonder if those are going to sell very well... a very nice idea.
German magazine Focus Online has been running an interview with Mark Kingdon, new CEO of Linden Lab, about his goals with the company.
Seems M Linden is running around in a tux with headphones on his head. Why that? Because he feels that he's like a conductor of a big orchestra but he also wants harmony like a music mixer.
About his role Kingdon says, that Philip Rosedale brought innovations to the company and that he wants to bring business to the company.
One point on his agenda is to smoothen down the learning curve for newbies. The first hours should be made considerable easier and it should be easier to register for a new character. He also wants to establish in world tutors which are going to help the newbies during their first steps and this is going to happen this year.
He wants those also based on his own experience, because his first login in Second Life was quite challenging to him, way too much overstrained. He didn't know how to find his way around, how to move his avatar or how to dress it. It took him hours to understand the basic principles, but after that the WOW-effect took place and he began to be fascinated of this big world.
Kingdon also states that Linden Lab is making profit, even if many people are still not believing this. The main business area of the company is renting land at the moment, but he sees a shift from that to the trade of goods for the avatar. This is in Kingdon's opinion the financial base for the future.
Asked that one of the bigger investors plans to sell Linden Lab, Kingdon denies a comment on that (who wouldn't...), but tells that he wants to make a booming company out of Linden Lab and also going IPO might be an option for the future.
But first he thinks they need to work at the technic itself as foundation for their succes, meaning: not only should it become way easier to use Second Life at all, but it also needs to become more stable and reliable in the future as well.
He thinks that Second Life is still at the beginning if you take the number of users and their activities into account, but also a quite complex platform.
Kingdon also criticizes the media somewhat - he thinks Linden Lab is a pioneer with a very big thing going on. This project has been overhyped in the media world, leading to many people entering the world with expectations that Linden Lab was never be able to meet. He adds that even if it was not the intention of the media they somewhat damaged Linden Lab with it. Later he adds, that Linden Lab was also profiting of media coverage quite much, but the hype was too much for them and they were not able tho handle it, he calls it bad timing.
Being asked if he could recommend companies at the moment to use Second Life for their business he says: not really at the moment, better wait for the near future when things have turned out for the better. He's not telling them to stay away at all though, if they want to try out things and such, like IBM does or universities.
Being asked about how is it possible to bring commercial and private interests of users under one hat, he says they're thinking about it, there's no universal platform for all and everyone in his opinion. He thinks, that in the future Second Life is going to have to entrypoints/logins for users: one for private users and one for business people.
My opinion on this interview is: he's trying to be honest and I hope he's going to be able to achieve his goals of getting a lower learning curve at the beginning, easier usage and of a more stable platform after all. Those are quite important points to have if you want more users.
He's also holding the hopes down for business at the moment, knowing that a bad experience might lead to business leaving quite fast, so better first stabilize it and then take on other things again. Wise choice.
In terms of making more profit, well, we are going to see how those ideas might work or not. At the moment it is just land sales, quite simple. And beside that, I guess, we are going to see a balkanization in the platform in the near future, like we already have with the Teen grid: we are going to have an Adult grid for all the nice, nitty, gritty stuff, but for business there's also going to be an own Business grid in the near future with no mature content at all. If he really wants to target companies more again this is something that might help the growth of Second Life big lengths and not necesarrily a bad thing.
Well, we all know griefers way too good in Second Life, especially their flying objects, like penises and such. Now in real life a flying penis was around when Garry Kasparov was holding a speech in Moscow. Take a look at the video:
Well, it's the mid of May, and if I remember the old posts correctly, M Linden should have started to work now. I wonder how he is going to shape Linden Lab in the future and which kind of impulses he is going to bring to the platform. We should wish him all best, of course...
The only things I've seen so far in the last weeks before him are some redesigns of the homepage, the grid status blog moved to another dedicated URL without any comments at all and the web site backend got translated into some more languages. Not bad, but also not really breathtaking either.
Seems the next thing in the pipeline, of course, it going to be the release of the 1.20-line of the viewer and after that the rolling out of Mono and Havok 4 on the grid.
Gentle reader,
today I want to talk a little about the realXtend project which came upon my radar recently and impressed me great lengths. Their goal is, put in simple terms, to develop the InterGrid about which Gwyneth Llewellyn spoke recently in one of her own blog posts. Well, she even mentions the project in her post.
The InterGrid, put in simple terms again, is the ability to make your own region/regions/grid and take your avatar on grid A, B or C and also take the inventory of it with you. This means your avatar becomes quite more flexible, it can travel around the different grids if done correctly, but also there's quite much work to do until that goal is going to be achieved. This project is using OpenSim as their platform for serving regions, they've already enhanced it with quite much advanced and sophisticated features and also forked the Second Life viewer into an own thing, although this can still connect to the Second Life grid in a compatibility mode.
The realXtend project is backed up by two Finnish companies and around 20 people working on it, programmers, content creators and graphic designers, so a good size but still small compared to the staff of Linden Lab.
Contrary to the culture of Linden Lab, though, they've got a roadmap, and since they're contributing to OpenSim, parts of it overlap with the roadmap of that project, too. Having a roadmap never hurts, on the contrary, it is always nice to have and a good thing for all participating people.
In a recent interview one of the driving forces behind realXtend, the CEO of one of the companies backing it up named Tony Manninen, gave us a very interesting peace of his mind and his over all vision for the project:
Me: And how will the work you have done on the avatar server alleviate this problem unless SL, WoW and other cooperate on interoperability?
Tony: Think of it more like the 3d web. realXtend/OpenSim is like the Apache of virtual worlds, rexViewer is the Mozilla or Firefox of whatever. When "surfing" the web, you are not constantly required to prove and change your identity when loading different pages.
And this line is quite interesting for all of us. Apache is today the work horse of most web servers on the planet, its market share is around 51% in April 2008. But what many people don't know is how Apache started and how it became the king of the hill. In former times, when Apache was non existant, there's been another 800 pound gorilla of webserving software called NCSA httpd. This was back then the leading webserver under an opensource license. Apache just started as a patchset (Apache was just the nickname for "a patch" first only or more precise "a patchy server") way back then for NCSA httpd, adding features many people wanted but the maintainers of NCSA httpd were unable or unwilling to include. So over the time the patch set became more and more important, popular and turned into an own piece of software, winning big grounds against its father until NCSA httpd became obsolete and went into insignificance.
So, what does that mean when talking about Second Life? Simply: realXtend could be the nail into the coffin of Second Life.
So, what's in realXtend viewer and OpenSim already, that would be nice to have in Second Life, but isn't there (yet)? Among already implemented features those biggies:
but those are the real biggies. If you also take into account that it just took realXtend to implement those features around four (!) months of time you'll really have to wonder why Linden Lab hasn't done that themselfes already!
Among the roadmapped features you'll find those things:
So what we'll have here is a real ambitious project to build the InterGrid with nice goals, but they're not only having a roadmap, seems they've already been able so far to deliver their planned features and are going to be in the future, too, in many parts they're already ahead of Second Life quite much.
To put it short: what we've got here is a major competitor emerging for Second Life and even more so on a very rapid speed! Linden Lab is still ahead of its competition somewhat, but realXtend is gaining ground and its gaining it quickly so that Linden Lab should really be make up its mind now what they're planning with the platform in the future, otherwise it is quite possible that they are going to face the same fate as NCSA httpd or Netscape: the technic will remain, but innovations are coming from other sources and the people behind the initial project are loosing the grip on it.
Since the opensourcing of the client side of Second Life there have been some more or less interesting projects going on in forking the browser or developing it into something better/more.
Some projects especially are worth mentioning there:
Today has been a rough day for Dreamland. Four long running Dreamland Angels have announced on the group "Dreamland citizens" that they are going to quite their jobs soon.
Sahirah Hauptmann wrote:
Dear Dreamland Citizens,
It has been my pleasure working for you the past 2 years helping you all to the best of my abilities, but I'm sad to say that will no longer be the case. I've chosen to tender my resgination I'll be leaving the company on April 30th.
I wish you all the best.
Sincerely,
Sahirah Hauptmann
Former Dreamland Angel
MadMarkus Miles wrote:
following a few of my colleagues I herewith need to inform you, that today has been my last day as Dreamland Angel.
PLease enjoy your second life and many many thanks for your patience, your kindness and your love, given to me.
Best regards,
MadMarkus Miles
Sal Salubrius wrote:
I have only been here a short time I know, but I have grown to love you all. There are irreconcilable differences between me and the management and I feel that I need to move on. I am still available to tie up any loose ends for you all in any way I can untill the end of the month.
Regards, Sal Salubrius
At least one another popular angel, Master Quatro, has been rumored to leaving, too. So at least three angels told that they left or are going to leave on one day. This leaves us to the question: what's in the bush?
Seems they are going to charge their customers in the future money for things that are right now still available for free, like restarting a sim, according to MadMarkus Miles. Also planned is that you get a tier rebate after a buy first in the next month, not in the actual month and for sure there are more things in the pipeline.
What does that mean? Since you cannot make a living on selling land alone anymore big landowners are now going to install other schemes of making money in world, that's it and it seems not all angels agreed on this plan of action and this is why they left. Quite simple actually.
Founder Philip Rosedale has announced today that after about one month the search for a new CEO is over - it is going to be Mark Kingdon, in world name M Linden.
He's going to start May 15th, has a background in arts, business and economics and has been working at bigger companies. His main focus? Better in world stability, user experience and reliability. He's also got quite much experience in international companies, which might help Lindenlab too, since they have an international audience.
Sounds like very good news to me, seems it's easier for Lindenlab to find a new CEO than a new CTO, though, but perhaps since this one is settled a new CTO will follow shortly...
A more in depth portrait of Mark Kingdon can be found here.
In business, like almost everywhere else, it's either riding the wave or getting lost when it waves above you. Making a revolution or suffering a revolution.
Lindenlab for long has been riding the wave. Now, that the hype has somewhat gone, it needs to establish Second Life as a more stable platform than it is today, because the competition like OpenSim is catching up and up more and getting stronger. It still has its advantages above other platforms, but needs to communicate those more.
In her latest long essay long running citizen Gwyneth Llewelyn asks about if bad communication practice is the root of all evil, let's just say for short, she's got some valid points. Communication has flown to other kind of meanings, it's still there, but needs to be polished up.
Another main problem she's raising is Lindenlab's missing to produce a roadmap and their inability to work out and work on timelines. That's quite serious stuff.
One of the main problems with SL today is that it doesn't really scale very well. This problem has already been known about the last two years and shows up everyday more and more when a certain avatar threshold of concurrent logins has been met.
The technic behind Second Life has some bottlenecks and shortcomings. Think about it as an analogy like a Ferrari powered by a lawn mower engine. Looks good and all shiny, but cannot deliver the promised power. Yuck.
What Lindenlab has got to do is to build a new engine, that's hard enough, but also to put it in the car while it's running, and that's quite a hard feature to achieve. We'll see if it ever happens or not.
This is how recently my rich, genuine Second Life experience has been:
Nice, hu? Cleaning your cache and relogging might help then.
Some days ago there's been the news that IBM is going to build their own server farm with the Second Life server side on it.
Well, frankly said, I can understand them. That convoluted mess that Second Life today is is all but a worthwile investment if you're a company. If you want to have a good experience with it, better stay away from the main grid and build your own farm, your own island.
If you're thinking about investing in SL, better do it when the grid has more stabilized. At the moment this would just be a great waste of money in my opinion given the bad performance all inhabitants of Second Life have been experiencing since months now.
Nichlaz Beresford, a resident well known for his own sat of patches for the official browser, quitted some days ago very frustrated providing them.
Many residents mourn about the loss of this talented programmer and his browser, because for many people his browser gave far more better gaming experience, meaning mostly stability and speed, to Second Life than the official does for them. His work has been well appreciated in the community which used his browsers.
The reasons listed by him for quitting making a better browser are mainly:
So, the community loses a quite talented programmer who probably would have been a very good bug hunter and much, much more. That's sad.
By the way, there's still no new CTO at Lindenlab, so it seems. Wonder how they manage to run so long without someone leading the techies.
Since my last post Second Life hasn't been really much better. Lindenlab is still good at producing what's their own speciality - lags over lags over lags and ah bad gaming experience.
Well, to top it even, all logins to Second Life are disabled because the ISP of Lindenlab is having problems with their infrastructure and handling all the traffic, so they tell. Well... might be even right, who knows, stuff like that happens, but good hosting providers have got backup lines just in case for that, redundant connections, they are running if big enough a system called BGP with an autonomous system which even adds more to the reliability of a system.
Well, because Lindenlab quite well knows what they got on their blog when an issue like that opens up again - thousands of angry comments - it became lately their policy to just disable comments for such postings.
On the last case, though, one comment from Second Aimee made it through, before they closed it. She encouraged the people to comment on her blog instead, which the people are now gladly doing.
So this is quite a good chance again to get an unfiltered picture about what are people thinking about Second Life, opinions, which aren't really showing up on the corporate blog anymore.
One asks for example:
Why is SL always screwed up on Weekends Grrrr
Simple - because weekends mean usage peeks and the most stress for the system, which it is unable to handle.
Another one just finds interesting prim objects in real life:
WHAT IS THAT 1 PRIM OBJECT IN THE CORNER OF MY ROOM AND HOW DO i SCRIPT IT?? SOMEBODY CALLED IT A TELEVISION ONCE. THINK ILL TURN IT ON..
But most are just plainly annoyed right now and venting off some steam, like:
yeah UP YOURS Linden Labs!!! I have over 200,000 dollars(Lindens) invested in my freakin inventory alone,and that isnt including what I spent on my Avi, like are u freaking kiddin me? All I get back is a bald head, a freakin boot up my ass that wont even come out even if i click detach and now I cant log in to pull the boot out of my ass and find my hair??? WHAT did I do to you besides spend real cash for this crap?? Thanks!!
So... the typical collection of comments on such a matter. New CTO, anyone? /me sighs.