There’s still nothing more content creators in Second Life are fearing than the well known copybot. So still many vendors are using protection mechanisms, that worked with former versions of copybot by telling "!quit" in open chat, but those are not working anymore since aeons.
But still many vendors don’t seem to know or want to know and are getting on the nerves of their customers with that unnecessary noise…
There’ve been some new developments in SL lately which are worth mentioning:
And also something funny I’ve found in another blog: "Entering chat range: Prokofy Neva." Quite a funny chat transcript about how to call things in Second Life and more…
When I started going online back in 1994 the world was quite small. There were some local BBS around, I had my analogue modem with fast 14.400 bit/s, that needed to run over my phone line, and that was it. There’ve been services around, which were like bigger BBSes, like Compuserve or AOL, which ruled most of the market.
Then out of nowhere the Internet emerged. Compuserve, AOL and others were proprietary systems only, and the established companies needed to decide what to do. Well, they even didn’t notive the Internet and its potential first. Open standards, decentralized, not ruled by only one entity. This was something new and it wrecked their business models great lenghts. When the Internet started to became more and more important, the content of proprietary standards in AOL and Compuserve became less and less important and newsworthy since all this content drained into the Internet.
So what’s the lesson of it? A proprietary system is like an island. It might be nice for a while, but when something better becomes available, most of its content will shift definitely there, ruining your old business modell, forcing you to adapt. That’s why in my opinion Linden Lab is working at an open standard at the moment, because they don’t want to be the next Netscape. They still want to be in business in the next five years and this is definitely a way to achieve it.
Technorati : business, development, second life
Gentle reader,
today I want to talk a little about the realXtend project which came upon my radar recently and impressed me great lengths. Their goal is, put in simple terms, to develop the InterGrid about which Gwyneth Llewellyn spoke recently in one of her own blog posts. Well, she even mentions the project in her post.
The InterGrid, put in simple terms again, is the ability to make your own region/regions/grid and take your avatar on grid A, B or C and also take the inventory of it with you. This means your avatar becomes quite more flexible, it can travel around the different grids if done correctly, but also there’s quite much work to do until that goal is going to be achieved. This project is using OpenSim as their platform for serving regions, they’ve already enhanced it with quite much advanced and sophisticated features and also forked the Second Life viewer into an own thing, although this can still connect to the Second Life grid in a compatibility mode.
The realXtend project is backed up by two Finnish companies and around 20 people working on it, programmers, content creators and graphic designers, so a good size but still small compared to the staff of Linden Lab.
Contrary to the culture of Linden Lab, though, they’ve got a roadmap, and since they’re contributing to OpenSim, parts of it overlap with the roadmap of that project, too. Having a roadmap never hurts, on the contrary, it is always nice to have and a good thing for all participating people.
In a recent interview one of the driving forces behind realXtend, the CEO of one of the companies backing it up named Tony Manninen, gave us a very interesting peace of his mind and his over all vision for the project:
Me: And how will the work you have done on the avatar server alleviate this problem unless SL, WoW and other cooperate on interoperability?
Tony: Think of it more like the 3d web. realXtend/OpenSim is like the Apache of virtual worlds, rexViewer is the Mozilla or Firefox of whatever. When "surfing" the web, you are not constantly required to prove and change your identity when loading different pages.
And this line is quite interesting for all of us. Apache is today the work horse of most web servers on the planet, its market share is around 51% in April 2008. But what many people don’t know is how Apache started and how it became the king of the hill. In former times, when Apache was non existant, there’s been another 800 pound gorilla of webserving software called NCSA httpd. This was back then the leading webserver under an opensource license. Apache just started as a patchset (Apache was just the nickname for "a patch" first only or more precise "a patchy server") way back then for NCSA httpd, adding features many people wanted but the maintainers of NCSA httpd were unable or unwilling to include. So over the time the patch set became more and more important, popular and turned into an own piece of software, winning big grounds against its father until NCSA httpd became obsolete and went into insignificance.
So, what does that mean when talking about Second Life? Simply: realXtend could be the nail into the coffin of Second Life.
So, what’s in realXtend viewer and OpenSim already, that would be nice to have in Second Life, but isn’t there (yet)? Among already implemented features those biggies:
but those are the real biggies. If you also take into account that it just took realXtend to implement those features around four (!) months of time you’ll really have to wonder why Linden Lab hasn’t done that themselfes already!
Among the roadmapped features you’ll find those things:
So what we’ll have here is a real ambitious project to build the InterGrid with nice goals, but they’re not only having a roadmap, seems they’ve already been able so far to deliver their planned features and are going to be in the future, too, in many parts they’re already ahead of Second Life quite much.
To put it short: what we’ve got here is a major competitor emerging for Second Life and even more so on a very rapid speed! Linden Lab is still ahead of its competition somewhat, but realXtend is gaining ground and its gaining it quickly so that Linden Lab should really be make up its mind now what they’re planning with the platform in the future, otherwise it is quite possible that they are going to face the same fate as NCSA httpd or Netscape: the technic will remain, but innovations are coming from other sources and the people behind the initial project are loosing the grip on it.
Technorati : business, development, programming, realxtend, second life
Del.icio.us : business, development, programming, realxtend, second life
Today has been a rough day for Dreamland. Four long running Dreamland Angels have announced on the group „Dreamland citizens“ that they are going to quite their jobs soon.
Sahirah Hauptmann wrote:
Dear Dreamland Citizens,
It has been my pleasure working for you the past 2 years helping you all to the best of my abilities, but I’m sad to say that will no longer be the case. I’ve chosen to tender my resgination I’ll be leaving the company on April 30th.
I wish you all the best.
Sincerely,
Sahirah Hauptmann
Former Dreamland Angel
MadMarkus Miles wrote:
following a few of my colleagues I herewith need to inform you, that today has been my last day as Dreamland Angel.
PLease enjoy your second life and many many thanks for your patience, your kindness and your love, given to me.
Best regards,
MadMarkus Miles
Sal Salubrius wrote:
I have only been here a short time I know, but I have grown to love you all. There are irreconcilable differences between me and the management and I feel that I need to move on. I am still available to tie up any loose ends for you all in any way I can untill the end of the month.
Regards, Sal Salubrius
At least one another popular angel, Master Quatro, has been rumored to leaving, too. So at least three angels told that they left or are going to leave on one day. This leaves us to the question: what’s in the bush?
Seems they are going to charge their customers in the future money for things that are right now still available for free, like restarting a sim, according to MadMarkus Miles. Also planned is that you get a tier rebate after a buy first in the next month, not in the actual month and for sure there are more things in the pipeline.
What does that mean? Since you cannot make a living on selling land alone anymore big landowners are now going to install other schemes of making money in world, that’s it and it seems not all angels agreed on this plan of action and this is why they left. Quite simple actually.
Technorati : business, dreamland, second life
Founder Philip Rosedale has announced today that after about one month the search for a new CEO is over – it is going to be Mark Kingdon, in world name M Linden.
He’s going to start May 15th, has a background in arts, business and economics and has been working at bigger companies. His main focus? Better in world stability, user experience and reliability. He’s also got quite much experience in international companies, which might help Lindenlab too, since they have an international audience.
Sounds like very good news to me, seems it’s easier for Lindenlab to find a new CEO than a new CTO, though, but perhaps since this one is settled a new CTO will follow shortly…
A more in depth portrait of Mark Kingdon can be found here.
Technorati : business, development, second life
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.
On the last case, though, one comment from Second Aimee made it through, before they closed it. She encouraged the people to comment on her blog instead, which the people are now gladly doing.
So this is quite a good chance again to get an unfiltered picture about what are people thinking about Second Life, opinions, which aren’t really showing up on the corporate blog anymore.
One asks for example:
Why is SL always screwed up on Weekends Grrrr
Simple – because weekends mean usage peeks and the most stress for the system, which it is unable to handle.
Another one just finds interesting prim objects in real life:
WHAT IS THAT 1 PRIM OBJECT IN THE CORNER OF MY ROOM AND HOW DO i SCRIPT
IT?? SOMEBODY CALLED IT A TELEVISION ONCE. THINK ILL TURN IT ON..
But most are just plainly annoyed right now and venting off some steam, like:
yeah UP YOURS Linden Labs!!! I have over 200,000 dollars(Lindens)
invested in my freakin inventory alone,and that isnt including what I
spent on my Avi, like are u freaking kiddin me? All I get back is a
bald head, a freakin boot up my ass that wont even come out even if i
click detach and now I cant log in to pull the boot out of my ass and
find my hair??? WHAT did I do to you besides spend real cash for this
crap?? Thanks!!
So… the typical collection of comments on such a matter. New CTO, anyone? /me sighs.
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 next logical thing for you? To abandon or sell your land – don’t think you can sell it with profit, by the way, good buyers take a look at the sim before buying it – and move to a private living sim.
So what should Lindenlab do about this kind of behaviour? Simple: they should make the tier traffic based in such a case. Why should I for myself finance the sim when some kind of business maker is only paying also a small share, but makes it unusable for the rest of us?
Bartholomew Gallacher