Second-Life

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:

• IBM tested a transport of an avatar from the Second Life grid to their own grid, meaning it is now technically possible to teleport to an Opensim. Sounds quite good, but at the moment it’s just moving an ruthed Avatar, since assets are not shared at all between those and are unlikely to be ever shared at all. Otherwise expect a revolt of content builders in Second Life, but we’re getting closer to the Intergrid.
• Second Life is growing bigger and bigger. This is of course good for the company and stabilizes their economic model. There’s been a shift from premium users to land sales. If you don’t really want to own land on the mainland (and who does that really…) has no need to get a premium account at all! Seems also that in world economy is now recovering slowly of the gambling ban. Well, the prices for many stuff are quite high now, higher than they used to be in about one year for example, looking good in Second Life becomes more and more expensive…

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.

This here seems to be the newest trend: since the standard avatar mesh looks just plain right ugly at the feet some shoe designers started now building shoes with builtin, more naturally looking toes. This looks like this here then:

Quite an improvement, if you’re asking me. I wonder if those are going to sell very well… a very nice idea.

German magazine Focus Online has been running an interview with Mark Kingdon, new CEO of Linden Lab, about his goals with the company.

Seems M Linden is running around in a tux with headphones on his head. Why that? Because he feels that he’s like a conductor of a big orchestra but he also wants harmony like a music mixer.

About his role Kingdon says, that Philip Rosedale brought innovations to the company and that he wants to bring business to the company.

One point on his agenda is to smoothen down the learning curve for newbies. The first hours should be made considerable easier and it should be easier to register for a new character. He also wants to establish in world tutors which are going to help the newbies during their first steps and this is going to happen this year.

Well, it’s the mid of May, and if I remember the old posts correctly, M Linden should have started to work now. I wonder how he is going to shape Linden Lab in the future and which kind of impulses he is going to bring to the platform. We should wish him all best, of course…

The only things I’ve seen so far in the last weeks before him are some redesigns of the homepage, the grid status blog moved to another dedicated URL without any comments at all and the web site backend got translated into some more languages. Not bad, but also not really breathtaking either.

Seems the next thing in the pipeline, of course, it going to be the release of the 1.20-line of the viewer and after that the rolling out of Mono and Havok 4 on the grid.

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.

Since the opensourcing of the client side of Second Life there have been some more or less interesting projects going on in forking the browser or developing it into something better/more.

Some projects especially are worth mentioning there:

• ShoopedLife. This is basically a viewer that people use who are concerned about their anonimity (haha!). Well, the original client sends some kind of information about your hardware (seems to be the MAC-address of your network interface and the primary partition ID of your first hard disk drive) to the LL server to identify your computer regardless of your login, so that they can permban you if necessary. ShoopedLife circumvents this by sending just some random address instead, so that you can still login even if banned. Griefers love this client very much because it allows them to still login in such a case. Of course, you cannot login with the old account but are then able to make just a new account with trash mail address since Linden Lab will be unable to identify your computer.
• realXtend viewer. The target audience of this project is much broader than ShoopedLife. realXtend is a fork of Second Life, so to speak, it has a Second Life compatibility mode builtin but also can connect to much more in graphic terms advanced OpenSim- grids, which is it real use for now. At the moment it’s only available under Windows, Linux and Macintosh are going to follow later. Although still in the beginning, this project already shows much promise and is for sure going to be a real competitor for Second Life.
• RestrainedLife viewer. That’s for the BDSM-lovers under the players. It let’s the master control certain aspects of the subs viewer, e.g. attachments cannot be taken off anymore, communication can be blocked of the subs and other aspects can be controlled by the master, too. So - not everybody’s kind of viewer, but for sure subs are going to love it to be in control of their master, if they bought the right in world tools for it, that is. This viewer is for sure not for the normal audience of Second Life.

Technorati : development, open source, programming, second life, viewers

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,

[Mehr]

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