One of the most annoying and persistant bugs at the moment is the broken friends list. This is a very critical feature since many rely on it working properly. Here is the bug for this in JIRA, the open issue tracker of LL, quite an interesting read about it. It goes back into March, quite a bad thing, if you ask me…
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:
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.
If so, generating value out of the community can be a difficult kind of beast, because often what the community wants is not always what the company wants or is allowed to do by law. For example, the success of Youtube is founded on massive copyright violations, because that’s what the community wants, easy access to video clips.
If Google for example really is starting to make Youtube lawful, the community just would find a new service to get their thing and leave Youtube behind. That’s the problem with communities.
And some of the steps that LL is going to do in the next time have the potential to alienate great parts of the community, if there is such one thing. And if the alienation is big enough, we could expect to see a big player migration to some other places. That’s why opening up their server could still make sense to them, because then people could just host their own thing and LL would not be liable for it, anymore, as it is in some countries still at the moment, and the community would like that step, too.
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…
Today I got my hands on the latest and greatest addition of Second
Life, Windlight. Lindenlabs bought the company behind it – good to see
that LL has some money – and there’s already a Firstlook viewer
available to get the first impressions of how it might look like.
It’s
available for all platforms unlike voice and you can play around with
it. Of course you need a somewhat decent graphics card to see the
effects in action, seems it is programmed with vertex shaders, which
means that most of the stuff actually runs on the hardware of the
graphics card itself.
So, if you’ve got decent enough hardware and you play around with it, you might make pictures in game like this:
This shows a typical, default sunset at the sea. Note that this is no mockup picture, but taken in world, click on it for the larger version. Well, and here is another picture.
This is the default setting "midday". Looks also interesting, the clouds are rendered in real time and you can see them wandering around. Last picture for the moment is this:
Never looked a night more darker in Second Life than on this picture. Well, it still needs polishing, of course, the animation goes way too fast – it’s more actually screaming "Hey, I am here!" at the moment to all of us, but when it is finished, this is for sure going to be a very good addition to the whole gameplay, even if the guys at the Second Life Herald disagree with me.
While most of the Lindens have office hours on a regular base and you can look them up on the web, it is of course some kind of different matter, when you want to meet the CEO of Lindenlabs, Philip Rosedale better known as Philip Linden in world.
Yes, he’s got office hours, too, but normally on short notice. You won’t find them on the schedule, you’ve got to lookup his profile and take a closer look at the tab "1st life" – that’s the place to look for this information. Today there were indeed scheduled office hours at 9 AM SLT at his office in Waterhead.
So, since I still remembered the masses of avatars attending the technical town hall meeting, I was one hour before there. Well, nothing happened at all, I just sat there and talked with my friend via messages. I wondered if he really is going to show up or not, but around perhaps 9:03 AM SLT he showed up and sat down, rezzed some chairs for other guests to sit down, if they come by, and was ready to talk.
I talked a little bit with him for over 5 minutes, no other guest showed up at all, so he put his office hours in the motto of the day of the Second Life login and other avatars began to show up, too. Well, the office hour lastet about one hour, it was nice to chat with him and in the end there were perhaps 10 avatars at all. You should expect really more when the CEO of Lindenlabs moves in world and is at his office, but what the heck, it was far nicer that way.
So here’s a little picture from the first minutes of the office hours, when I was still alone with him (just click on the thumbnail): 
The talk was nice, he wanted to know different things, for example where Lindenlabs does right, where it does wrong, which features we’d like to see in upcoming versions and so on, but the whole bunch of us talked not only about Second Life.
Some points being discussed and insights were:
and much more things. It was really interesting to get in touch with him and discuss Second Life with the founder of the whole show, and it seems he really wants to know the unfiltered opinion of the community and what is going well and what they should make better. That’s a good policy to run a company in my opinion.
The Second Life Herald is running an article named "Blame Europe" about the "virtual child pornography" by Carl Metropolitan (who dislikes it clearly) reported by German reporters.
The main thesis is this:
Sexual "ageplay" in Second Life–as repulsive as it is–would almost
certainly be legal under current US law. In the United States, only
virtual child pornography that is "indistinguishable from" real child
pornography is illegal. [1] However, many European jurisdictions are
far more restrictive. In Germany–source of the recent ARD "Report
Mainz" news reports–laws against "virtual child pornography" are even
stricter, [2] making little distinction between real and virtual child
pornography.[…]
The First Amendment has led to United States having some of the least
restrictive laws on freedom of speech in the world. But as Second
Life’s real life users become less and less American, and its servers
cease to be wholly US-based, Linden Lab will inevitably be forced into
more limits on what it can and cannot allow its users to do.
No, I disagree. This is not about enforcing laws here in the first line, or the constitution of whatever country at all. The main reason why Lindenlabs reacted promptly is: this could hurt their image great lengths and decrease their income great lenghts.
Face it, corporate plays a more and more important role in Second Life, it is making big bucks with Lindenlabs and is a thriving force and income for profit. But when Second Life’s image becomes equal in the public as some kind of wonderland, where child pornography is being tolerated by the company running it, then the first part to leave SL quickly is going to be the companies, because this broken image could hurt themself, too. Later also many residents would leave Second Life, too.
So it is either satisfying the needs of Lindenlabs to grow more or tolerating this behaviour of a small part of the community, which is illegal in many countries of the world and for sure would hurt the business great lengths, but not where the HQ of LL is situated.
Either way there would be complaints, but since a company wants and needs to make profit and tolerating this behaviour would hurt profit great lengths, the solution of it is without no doubt: making Second Life cleaner for all (age verficiation) and making it very clear, that they don’t tolerate such behaviour at all, even if it complies with the US law.
And while some are now complaining (what for?), I welcome this necessary step towards a cleaner Second Life and since it enables Lindenlabs the opportunity to stay much longer in business.
We all are members of more or less big groups, some are really spammy in the time being. I’d like to be able to mute all or certain groups e.g. during a meeting, so that I am not disturbed by them at all. When the meeting is over, I want to be able to unmute them, so that I can hear again, what’s happening on it and attend them, too. So, deal?
If you ever wanted to use the bugtracking system JIRA, but were afraid or confused about it, then fear no more, here is a nice introductional tutorial about how to use it.
A few things to come in the future in my opinion, sooner or later:
About one week ago there has been a report that aired on German television about the depiction of child pornography in Second Life. It sent out massive waves through the whole community, the Lindens even wrote an article about the whole case on their own blog.
The whole case broke down into this parts:
The first case is not illegal in all countries; for example in the USA some could just say "heck, those are virtual things and just adults playing behind the whole scene, no real child has been harmed at all while doing this, and it is not illegal, either, so what’s the ruckus?" The final decision on it has to be made by a judge.
But Second Life has people coming from all over the world, and in many countries the depiction of such acts – virtual childs or not – at all is already against the law, so already the first case is against German law. But of course this doesn’t mean this act has been conducted by Germans, that’s something for the Lindens to find out.
Even more serious is the second part – the real life pictures. Law is here more or less the same in all developed countries, posession of such things is against the law and therefore a case for the prosecutor.
The names of the avatars were shown in the report, by the way. If they haven’t been banned already, they would be so dead by now, since million of people watched it and the word spread out, you cannot have an idea about that!
Anyway, the investigations have been showed to Robin Linden and she looked really shocked in the report. Ok, she looked not too good at all in the interview, but we all know who medias can make you look bad if they just want you to, by using the wrong light etc.
At last the Lindens have reacted at lightning speed to this issue. Why? Because this is a real, real big threat to their business. At the moment many companies are rushing into the still hip Second Life. If Lindenlabs would have not reacted at all, it would have a big image problem by now, not only being considered as "virtual sex world", but as "home of virtual pedophiles" or something like that.
And it is hard to convince your CEO to invest into such a thing, this would drive many potential customers away, so they had to react and with force, being open about it and telling all and that’s exactly what they did.
Even if some consider the first part just "role play", I personally find that kind of "role play" disgusting, but like always, it is not going away, it is now moving more in the underground since the first case of such a thing has been made public to a big audience.
Bartholomew Gallacher