Monat: März 2007

Fun with crashes

It’s nowadays not funny anymore to do business or events in Second Life. The rule of the thumb is: the more people are online the same time, the more instable and slower the grid becomes. We had an event yesterday in the garden, the sim is able to hold 40-42 people at the same time. The owner even requested a reset of the sim one hour before the whole thing started.

And what happened: About 30 minutes after the event started, the sim was full, the whole sim crashed. We were lucky it crashed only one time, though, other sims have been reported to crash several times on Saturday while being full, e.g. for a wedding.

So, what are the consequences you should make? Well, it’s obvious, though SL is an excellent platform, that it has got major scaling problems at the moment. So, if you really want to do events in it or make serious business or teaching, better find dates where not so much people are online, to get a better experience of the grid. It’s probable that when there are many people online that the grid is going to behave strange and has hiccups, again, and this is getting worse day by day at the moment.

Another critical article about SL

Mario Sixtus, a well known German freelancing journalist, wrote a very critical article about Second Life and the hype around it in his blog. Translated it’s called somewhat like „My ultimately last words about Second Life“.

His message is basically this: modern web platforms have reached today an abstract level, that constantly refuses to be compared with RL equivalencies. Journalists actually have to learn something new if they want to write about those services.

On the other side there’s Second Life: nice, colorful pictures, you can actually show nice movies of the world in your articles, no need anymore to show boring sequences with someone just hacking onto his keyboard, and, oh, look, how convenient, it’s all about sex, so let’s write about it! Ah, a millionaire already? Let’s write about it!

It’s also no wonder, according to Sixtus, that the industry is hailing SL as it’s saviour, since old strategies did not work very well in the WWW and you actually have to learn something new.

In Second Life it’s just like in the good old times[tm]: making ads, opening branches, having nice launches and so on and on… and even better, this time you’ve got the press on YOUR side! Amazing!

Sixtus‘ conclusion is: Second Life is not the internet, it’s a biotop, a bubble for people who fear the future.  So it’s target group is for people who still think in terms of the old century; it’s basically the past, but not the future.

It’s nice to have dreams…

…like the CTO of Lindenlabs who dreams of an infrastructure that can support 10 millions of concurrent logins or like the CEO of Lindenlabs who dreams of 1.5 billion people online in Second Life or virtual worlds (the statement is in the current Avastar) but at the moment I and most other people would be very glad already when SL would scale better when more than 30.000 people are online at the same time.

This seems to be the magic number at the moment after which SL goes haywire.