General

It seems the Vista support of Second Life is nearly ready and well. Well, quite a good thing for all the people out there who are using that operating system.

Oh, and while we are talking about Vista: the CEO of Acer, Gianfranci Lanci, is disappointed with Vista. He’s telling that the expectations they had with the launch of Vista have not met at all. On the contrary, many customers of Acer are asking for Windows XP instead, especially in the business field. One of the main problems according to Lanci has been that Vista was still not 100% stable at its launch and he doesn’t expect that to change in the rest of 2007 at all.

Sponto rides again, this time about religion and relationships. She’s stating that virtual polygamy is no problem for many peope.

I can only agree on that. I know many avatars, male and female, that are happily married in real life (at least they say so) and are having relationships or at least casual relationships with other avatars, that also very often involve sex. Plain and simpe.

Many of them don’t have a problem with that, but some of them must hide there hobby from their RL partner, because if (s)he finds out, they are going for big trouble and they know it. Others are letting their partners know and (s)he has no problem with it whatsoever.

I guess, it’s depending on the relationship and on the trust, other’s are saying: it’s better only happening in the virtual world than ruining my real life with a real affaire. But of course, when emotions are running to deep, even SL can break up a RL relationship. People just like to betray themselves, they always do.

The “new” continent in the East has been named Nautilus. Quite a silly name for a continent, if you ask me, but even better the new, yet to come continent with around who knows sims is going to be named Corsica. Yes, right, Corsica, like the island in the Mediterrenean Sea.

In reality Corsica belongs to France, but the inhabitants of it are not happy with that and still many consider the French people as occupants. So now I wonder if the now defunct SLAA and its followers are going to put their headquarters there and are trying to battle LL from there, then. This would be quite ironic.

Another interesting profile, sums up the persistant problems:

Please LL fix SL so I can:
teleport without having butt fur
Rez without thinking I live in the land of gray
And Give me just 1 L for every crash report so I can be rich

Found in someones profile:

IF YOU ARE READING MY PROFILE, YOU HAVE ENTERED THE NO DRAMA ZONE!  I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR DRAMA WITH YOU OR YOUR SL BABY’S MAMA. LOL

and on the 1st life tab:

I HAVE NOT HAD A REAL LIFE SINCE I JOINED SECOND  LIFE.

SO, I WILL NOT ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT MY REAL LIFE!

Focus Online, one of the biggest German magazines, ran an interview with Philip Rosedale yesterday. The main focus, of course, has been Second Life, not real much chat about child pornography, whatsoever.

Some of his points and views are:

• from a creative point of view he’s a god. He has been creating a virtual world, which is undergoing its own evolution right now. Humans are building things, communities, are making things better. He beliefs that humans are good and that therefore SL is a good world.
• LL is going to work with local governments, if needed, in legal cases. The best police though is the cleaning force of the community itself.
• No news about age verification, just that’s it still on the cooker.
• Many companies are having wrong assumptions about SL and therefore no success. Even if only 10% of all registered residents are playing regularly, that’s still a great number, because that’s the number big companies like eBay started with.
• Second Life is often economically overrated.
• Why should companies still go into SL? Because it is a big marketing testfield for them.
• If someone wants to have economic success in world, he should use the multimedia features of the world and provide a valuable service for the community.
• Voice is coming, it’s done, when it’s done. The user interface is being worked on, too.
• The big vision behind SL is some kind of standardized 3d internet.

Well, that’s about it, not really new points in it, anyway. The question for me is, if Second Life is really some kind of community or not.

There’s an interesting piece of transcript at Prokofy Neva’s blog. The last inworld office hours of Philip Linden caught his attention, so he went there and spoke some words with him. A quite interesting read, though it seems to me that Phil Linden most times evaded Prok Neva’s questions, whatever, must be my imagination.

Today was the planned 4th birthday event with Philip Linden as key note speaker at a new made sim named SL4B. The event was supposed to start at 12:30 pm SLT with the sim going public for arrivals at around 12.00 pm SLT.

Well, guess what happened? It turned out into a big disaster. The event did not happen at all. From all four adjacent sims avatars tried to enter the main sim - makes you wonder why they didn’t make a design like Pooley stage and used repeaters. The supplied video stream was often not working because of not enough listener slots in the video server. There have been several griefer attacks at the main sim SL4B, mostly poofs, too.

And the best of all - Philip Linden was not able to enter the sim at all, so after around two hours of desperate tries they scratched the keynote and event at all of the agenda. Makes me wonder if they are now going to learn about it and going to implement some kind of bandwidth allocation for entering a sim in kind of a VIP list, meaning: if you got a 40 avatar sim you can say: 35 normal avatars are able to enter the sim and 5 predefined VIPs. When 35 normal avatars are in the sim, it’s full for all normal avatars of us, but the VIPs can still enter the sim. This would be handy…

Second Life has now over 7 million residents. Again, no fanfare, big press release or whatever, seems they want to keep their balls low at the moment.

“In Britain, any degree of success is met with envy and resentment.” - Sir Christopher Lee. Well, not only in Great Britain…

With IRC around for nearly two decades now, which is real time text based only communication at its best, you should mean that Second Life has learned from it and that groupchat in Second Life si reliable und useable.

This is often not the case. Why? Because compared to IRC Second Life has many pitfalls and annoying things, which IRC has already mastered. Some of those annoying things are:

• Sending messages to a big group is still unreliable. You normally need several tries while the discussion moves on and on, so it is very hard to contribute to a real discussion at all.
• It is not possible to moderate a group or close the group chat at all for the public. This means, only some people with a certain flag can speak, the rest can try to type something in but it will not be shown at the channel at all. IRC has such a thing, it’s the +m (moderated) flag for a channel in addition to the +o (operator) or +v (voice) flag for certain users.
• It is still not possible to mute channels. When you want to be in the channel for announcements and notices of the creator but don’t want to hear the chatter of the crowd in it, you’ve got two choices only at the moment: take it and try not to get too annoyed or leave the group in the long run. Of course, when the group is important to you, you get annoyed more and more easier over the time.
• Since always people without good knowledge join groups and use the chats to say “hi” and so on, which most regard as spam, often short conversations happen at times when you cannot handle it or need it, popping up and annoying you to hell. Ignoring this would be the best case, but no, there are always some who make the conversation longer telling how bad this behaviour is on the group chat, calling it spam, whatever, fueling the discussion even more.
• IRC clients work channel based, meaning you get only the messages of channels which you’ve joined before. If you haven’t joined a channel, you don’t get the messages at all. Second Life works also channel based, but you’ll get the message as soon as someone sent it to the whole group.

To sum it up: public channels, especially big ones, in Second Life are pretty useless and often annoying as hell. If you really want to reach your broad audience, better switch to other means of communications. Second Life has some design differences to IRC. IRC itself is a proven and reliable way to communicate with masses, the biggest nets like Quakenet have got over 180000 users at peak using it every day. And those counts are not decreasing despite the other means of communications.