Business

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.

Technorati : business, downtime, reliability, second life

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.

In case you wonder about a nice way to decrease your traffic once it’s been to high? Well, I’ve got a suggestion for you: just move around your club to another sim every two to three weeks or so and traffic will go down, down, down… even if you got a black heart, it will go down!

Consider yourself living on a nice, new sim of the mainland. You’re happy with your small parcel, nice seaview, perhaps, good neighbors and then happening this: a new club is opening its gates.

Worse, this club has many camping spots, to fake traffic and also quite some visitors with the result that its eating up all possible traffic alone for the whole sim.

The result? You’re busted. You cannot use your property anymore, because teleporting and even logging into your home becomes a new kind of adventure. “Is the sim already full or is at least one slot left for me to enter?”

So what can you do about it? Of course, you could tell the club owner to leave. “I am soo sorry, but I want to stay here, I like it and beside, I just own 4096 sqms of land and don’t have the money for a private sim.” Bummer. So he’s eating up the whole traffic of the sim and making it unusable with just his teeny, weeny piece of it.

The pilot is leaving.

Cory Ondrejka aka Cory Linden, one of the longest running employees of Lindenlab and its chief technician (CTO) is leaving. Why? The reasons remain mysterious. Some speculate that he had different visions for the future of SL than Philip Rosedale has. What does this mean for LL? Well, many think that the company is in for a tough ride now and it’s going to be very hard to fill the gap Cory Ondrejka leaves, since he’s one of the few people who can still understand the big picture as it seems. So - we’re going to see.

The land prices have been going down, down, down over the last few months. Anyone who’s got a free parcel, either it is free for rent or sale, has quite some problems to find a new owner for it.

Also big players like Dreamland have lowered their prices to get new tenants or sell it. In addition the in world sales of virtual goods are not as quite good at the moment as they used to be, many people in this field are complaining about the lack of sales.

So how does it come? Well, the big hype over SL is over in most countries at the moment, it’s not so unusual anymore, now SL needs to show its value as a tool for whichever need. But end of the hype means also that the stream of newbies flowing into SL has ebbed down great scale.

The next copyright lawsuit about in world theft has started. Virtually Blind has an interesting article about it.

What really baffles me is this quote:

“We originally tried to go through [Second Life Provider] Linden Lab,” said Alderman. “Everybody filed DMCA [takedown] notices. We filed support tickets and abuse reports. We even sent a letter to Robin [Harper, Linden Lab’s Vice President of Marketing & Community Development] and copied Philip [Rosedale, Linden Lab’s CEO]. We got nothing.”

Doesn’t sound like a good customer service, does it? And those are not your mommas designers from the backyard, but some of the leading in world designers and builders. Well, we’re going to see where this lawsuit is going to end.

Phat Cat’s has been closed for public last weekend for around two days. The reason why? Because the wanted to rebuild it from scratch. Not a bad idea at all if you’re unhappy with your sim or want to improve it. Given the fact, that there’s always traffic at any time there also the only way to do it if you want to be able to work quickly and undisturbed at all.

So, now since it’s open again for around one week, what to say about the rebuild Phat Cat’s? The good part is: it is for sure a visual improvement compared to the old spot, all the good things are still there, meaning dance floor, classy ambiente, also the big mall.

The bad thing about it? Well, Phat Cat’s is now way too heavy graphics wise. Meaning: there’s way too much on heavy graphics in it, it was always laggy of course, since it’s almost always full, but the new arrangement of prims and stuff adds way much to an even more worse lag now, too.

If you take a look at the recent ban of gambling, you may wonder what’s coming up next to be banned or limited. If Lindenlab would be consistent with their intentions, one things really pops up mighty in my mind: prostitution.

Sex and, yes, prostitution, though most people prefer to call themself in an euphemistic kind of way escort and not prostitute, is one of the big driving motions behind Second Life at all. And, yes, like gambling it’s prohibited in many countries Second Life is available.

So if Lindenlab is really consistent about establishing a somewhat “cleaner” Second Life this must be next on their agenda: the containment or even shutting down of most prostitution happening in Second Life.

Either that, or as another consequence building up a new strictly, clean, separate corporation grid without this kind of business at all, like the Teen Grid is today. But then again, this would hurt their land sales, since it would depend on how many residents of course would like to visit this clean grid and you got more possible visitors on the main grid than on an own corporation grid. But for strict in house usage such a grid would be a heavy, good asset for Lindenlab to have.

When you take a look at the recent development of Second Life, then there are some things different compared to earlier developments:

• There are still no key metrics available for August 2007. Those tend to get published later and later over the months.

• The exchange of Linden dollars has reached a peak in the 1st quarter of 2007; since then it has been slowly decreasing, so Q1 is its peak (take a look at the last graph here).

• Premium residents have reached their peak in June, there have already been less again in July.

• The number of new residents entering the game has slowed down.

• Business people are complaining in world about a lack of sales, meaning those are going down at the moment. There is for example being rumored that 70% of the Plush sims are unused right now.

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