It’s a slim messenger, that’s all, baby

The new rumored thing about Second Life just turns out to be a another messenger. It mixes instant messages and the usage of voice, so you can remain online and reachable for all of your friends while not logged in using the normal, big fat client.

This has been a logical step in my opinion if you want to play in the field of big business and be reachable. There have been alternatives around, for quite some time, which play in the thin client business, like Ajaxlife or Slinked, but this is now the first one coming directly from Linden Lab and the only one which uses the voice capabilites of Second Life, too.

Well… how is this thing going to be adopted? I guess, it’s use will be not going to be so widespread, since if people really wanted to have something like that, they could have already used existing thingies like Skype for a long time and they have done that.

So the audience of this is going to be people who want to stay in touch with Second Life while being at work or whereever and who are afraid to give out other contact possibilities. That’s all.

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Scaling issues – again

Second Life is growing again, which is a good thing. The concurrency level of logged in users is reaching new heights, so no one really knows why at the moment, and if it is going on like this we are going to have around 70K users logged in in two or three weeks. Nice.

What’s bad about is, is that the underlying architecture of the grid is still the same and while it’s been able to handle the normal loads now, it yesterday started to stutter badly, again. This hasn’t happened in such drastic manner for quite some time, now. I guess it’s really time that the new architecture, which is designed to scale more nicely, should be implemented and rolled out as soon as possible.

Some new stuff and such

Well, what’s new anyway in the meantime in SL? 

  • Mono has been deployed to the whole grid. This means, that all LSL scripts now might run on this new engine, which makes computation of scripts up to 200 times faster than the former one. As a side effect, every script has now 64 KB of memory for data instead of 16 KB. But it seems that if you want to run Mono, you have to recompile the script for yourself. Old scripts are not going to be recompiled automatically, a thing, that perhaps might happen in the future, though, since it’s for sure not going to happen that both engines are going to be supported parallel for long, meaning the old LSL engine is going to fade out slowly. If you want to compile your scripts on Mono, you need a viewer of the 1.21-series at least. 
  • The Lindens have a new communication policy for their blog, it is undergoing a big relaunch at the moment in the background. While some are happy, that now Torley Linden cannot put up his "pink-green neon glowing junk of happiness" on the homepage anymore, others wonder what happened there in general. They are planning to change their ways of communication, again, well so far we have to see what is going to happen in October. For the meantime we have to live with it like it is.
  • People are wondering which kind of product SLim is going to be and when it is going to be launched. So far, there are only rumors around despite the fact that Linden Lab recently applied for that trademark. Most agree, though, according to the application it is going to be some kind of messenger. This is exciting, because a new product is really something that might come in handy for Linden Lab to stand out against the less complex competition for an audience, for which Second Life is too complex, power hungry, whatever, in general not appealing enough. A first preview is expected though within the next couple of weeks. Makes me wonder… is this a project which has been initiated by Mark Kingdon aka M Linden or did the foundation for it already happen under Philip Rosedale’s reign as CEO still?
  • The next big thing in the background might be the standarization of the protocol to build the intergrid, the thing at which they are working together with IBM.
  • Copybot is supposed to get support for cloning prim attachments of avatars. I wonder, if this is ever going to really happen.
  • Land prices still stay quite low. This is bad for land barons, who need to make money on sales, but good for the inhabitants and other content creators, too.
  • Oldtimer Gwyneth Llwellyn ran an essay named "No more limits", outlining some ways in which Second Life might develop in the future, for example more prims per sim (again), bigger or smaller sims than 256×256 meters, allowance of megaprims and getting rid of the limitations of LSL. Some of those might really happen sooner or later in the future.

Some things die hard… or not at all

The old fashioned votebox made by Alberto Linden

Some things in Second Life just die hard or not at all, even if they don’t serve any purpose anymore. For example, this vote box to the left was in former days quite a common sight in Second Life.

It is a scripted device, made by Alberto Linden, and consists of 13 prims. It was used in times before traffic (aka as dwell) was invented to measure the popularity of a parcel. People just voted for it, all boxes where polled once a day and that’s how they got their measures in former times. Parcel owners got some stipends out of it, if it was a popular place (or something/somehow like that). You could just take of a station standing somewhere a copy, so it was really easy to get one.

At least it had a task its existence. But when traffic was introduced, the old mechanism of getting traffic was disabled. So those voting stations don’t serve any real purpose anymore, besided doing some nice sound effects when you touch them and eating away your prims.

Newbies still tend to believe those stations are useful; they are wrong. There are, though, some newer objects around, which mimic the design and look of the old station to a certain degree, but just act as counters, telling the owner which avatar voted for them at which time and date and that’s it, then. But since old habits die hard I expect to see them still for quite long on the grid in many clubs, belonging to owners, which don’t know better or are fond of them.