Posts

I finally took the time to let take new pictures from me for my profile by a photographer. Without further adago here they are:

I’ve placed the colored picture in my profile. Those nice pictures were made at the Serenite Gardens, a very nice setting there. The photographer was Melodious Source, I can recommend her without doubt. A great artist and wonderful personna!

I’ve stumbled right now about an article by Pham Neutra from the 9th February. It again shows that the saying in the topic is absolutely right. BMW shows in world their clean energy technology only so far right now.

And Mercedes-Benz? Well, according to a press notice from the 15th of February (seems to be published too early, why should Pham Neutra know already otherwise?) they are entering Second Life officially on the 20th February 2007.

They are not only entering it with one island only, like BMW has right now; no, they’ve got nine islands to their hands, which are not opened at the moment.

It seems that they are actually taking a different approach on their presence in SL than BMW does; there are already some pictures in the blog entry from Pham Neutra showing the Mercedes Sprinter, although not from the region itself, since the region is still inaccessible. They are going to celebrate the opening with a live concert and there is also a blog, too, about it, although still not working at the moment.

After not posting entries for some days, I’ve got to dequeue my queued posts now. So, with no further delay here they are:

• SL had terrible problems yesterday. They bunch varied from not being able to login to problems with teleporting up to problems with the assets. So it was unsafe to use the inventory at all. This reminds us: when you really want to do business in SL, the platform tends to be fairly unstable. Count that always in. The whole drama lasted over 10 hours. Hopefully it is over now.

• Zee Linden posted an Excel spreadsheet about the key measures of SL. Very interesting read, you should give it a read. There are some big differences from SL’s statistics to other games, and it shows. For example:

  • The time of hours spent online per month seems to grow exponential at the moment.

    [Mehr]

Today there was a group notice for all members of Sinner’s paradise. It was closed at 09:00 am SLT by the owner, Hunter Tempura. She said, she thought about it over one month, but she came to the decision.

The reasons? You could only speculate about them. Perhaps too much griefers attacking the sim again and again and/or the much too large entrance area. Well, it’s sad, that the sim is not available anymore, since it stood out in terms of landscaping and quality!

Yesterday there was a very good written article about “The “New” New Economy in Second Life” in the German web magazine Telepolis written by Karin Wehn (English: Google).

It is a very good written article about the economy - or the lack of - in Second Life, what SL is, why Lindenlabs did not herald the 3rd million resident and so on, the stability of the grid, how some land barons got rich and so on and on. Also has some very interesting pointers to other sides or articles.

Well worth a read. Very important is perhaps this link to the official economic statistics from SL: http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php. Just about 229 users had in December 2006 an in world income from 1000-2000 US-$, 140 from 2000-5000 US-$ and 90 greater than 5000 US-$.

You should always keep those statistics in mind when you think you can get there rich very fast and live off it. Mostly not happening for you, until you work really hard and are really good, so better scratch it.

Arg! Newbies are coming around in masses again at all places recently. I’ve got no problem with this. But some of them are just getting too much annoying!

I’ve noticed quite a change in the last few weeks about the newbies behaviour; some of them are still good mannered, though they are the minority, it seems. Others are just thinking “money makes the world go round” and looking for the perfect job, though they are still newbies and inexperienced.

And guess what? They are bothering many people on many places with questions like “Where can I get a good job?”, “Are here jobs available?” and so on… d’oh!

Get a life! You don’t need a job at all in SL. You can play for months, still have some money and have much fun without having any job at all! And if, I repeat, if, you are really in need of money - first learn to calculate!

I’ve stumbled about an interview with Mitch Kapor through a blog entry of Prokofy Neva about a possible happening decrease in land prices. Seems the interview has been edited since then, but the lines Neva cites where there. Definitely.

So… Mr. Neva is upset about the possible opening of the server side. Well, I can understand him (and needs to write an article of biblical propotions again, just to say: “This is nuts”, like always…), but it is the only way to take it on the next level.

How Lindenlabs can generate money after opening up? Well, for example perhaps like this:

• You want your own server connected to the maingrid? Well, you can, but you will have to pay a monthly fee to LL for it.
• You want access to the central login- and asset-manager of LL? No problem, also available for a fee.
• Need to backup your database? Yes, do it with LL.
• You want to be able to buy and sell L$ on your own server? Sure thing, again availabe for a monthly fee…

and so on and on…  I would not be surprised if some of those ideas are going to manifest in the future.

It seems that after opening up the client code some people just cannot await the arrive of the server code under an Opensource license any longer and took matters in their own hands right now.

Enter: Opensim. This is first project that I know of trying to reimplement the server side parts of SL, written in C#, using libsecondlife. So far they claim that you can login, object creation, movement, object updates and chat are working. It started at the end of January and is considered pre alpha.

But - who cares. It has started and now I am curious to see where this project goes and how far it is going to evolve.

So, if LL never opens up the server, people could aid this project and well - who cares, then, if they make it right and get it going.

Today Lindenlabs dropped the bomb: there is going to be a new continent in the east! Not only that, they are adding the new regions at a higher speed than earlier (which was 4 regions per day) and putting up some mechanisms to avoid the buying of the parcels through bots.

This sounds like a nice move. Ok, the people seeing land as an investment are going to cry if the prices drops significantly, but in the end it’s better that way, because so more people are able again to get new land and for Lindenlabs to generate more income, of course.

If LL would not have taken this step, it could have been that many people were leaving the game or just not buying land anymore, so that LL would have been on quite a stock of unused land sooner or later. Now, there is a new force in the land business, a new motion and I am thrilled to observe in which direction this might leed us!

Darius Lehane did it, again. This time he wrote an article about the land bubble in Second Life. Quite an interesting read and he got some critical points absolutely right.

He’s right: land prices are out of control, taking off to unseen heights and are prone to crash sooner or later. Why? Well, what are you buying actually? Not really. Actually the partition of computation time of one server. One server normally hosts two sims and consists of a dual-core CPU. And servers can get added day by day, a fact unseen in the real world. So you theoretically can add as much land to the grid as you like.

Why is it going to burst? Because sooner or later the point of no return will be reached when most people are unwilling and/or unable to pay the prices. That’s why, and the fes are eating up he owners.