Second-Life

In business, like almost everywhere else, it’s either riding the wave or getting lost when it waves above you. Making a revolution or suffering a revolution.

Lindenlab for long has been riding the wave. Now, that the hype has somewhat gone, it needs to establish Second Life as a more stable platform than it is today, because the competition like OpenSim is catching up and up more and getting stronger. It still has its advantages above other platforms, but needs to communicate those more.

In her latest long essay long running citizen Gwyneth Llewelyn asks about if bad communication practice is the root of all evil, let’s just say for short, she’s got some valid points. Communication has flown to other kind of meanings, it’s still there, but needs to be polished up.

Another main problem she’s raising is Lindenlab’s missing to produce a roadmap and their inability to work out and work on timelines. That’s quite serious stuff.

This is how recently my rich, genuine Second Life experience has been:

Cleaning your cache and relogging might help then.

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

Nichlaz Beresford, a resident well known for his own sat of patches for the official browser, quitted some days ago very frustrated providing them.

Many residents mourn about the loss of this talented programmer and his browser, because for many people his browser gave far more better gaming experience, meaning mostly stability and speed, to Second Life than the official does for them. His work has been well appreciated in the community which used his browsers.

The reasons listed by him for quitting making a better browser are mainly:

• he wanted to create his own vision of browser, but has been unable to do so since he was mainly busy ironing out bug after bug after bug,
• the Lindens don’t really care for bug fixes coming from third parties any more, most times they just plainly ignore them and
• considering the bad state the browser and platform is in now he would have start all over again.

So, the community loses a quite talented programmer who probably would have been a very good bug hunter and much, much more. That’s sad.

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.

I’ve had enough! Since I joined SL back in 2006 the service only went down, down, down the hill… reliability is laughable, key components (asset server, transactions, teleports) are getting worse and worse from day to day, and they fail to work when you need them most!

I wonder if in my lifetime Lindenlab is going to be able to fix all those annoying bugs or if they are going to go bankrupt. Argh!

I guess in the lights of the well hailed OnRez Viewer Lindenlab was tempted to build a renovated version of the viewer on their own. The result is the Dazzle first look viewer.

Dazzle looks quite blue, when you use it, but aside that it’s still the old Lindenlab viewer, all the same menus and such, nothing new in it. Yet.

That’s the difference with the OnRez Viewer. When it became public available, it had some innovations in it like the in-built webbrowser, the renovated search and others. OnRez itself was innovative, Dazzle on its own is just a new skin for the client, nothing more.

But what the client really needs is a rearrangement and rethinking of some menus, interfaces and much more, which hasn’t happened in Dazzle - yet. So in that point Dazzle is simple disappointing at the moment.

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!

There are still many fields in which Second Life gets new development, a good thing, if you ask me. But since those fields are quite diverse, there are now so many first look and beta viewers around, that it get’s troublesome to test them all out. Don’t believe me? Well, for Windows, there are those viewers beside the official one around:

• the release candidate viewer (version 1.19.0.2),
• the Windlight first look viewer,
• the Dazzle first look viewer and finally
• the beta test grid viewer.

Each viewer is spurting another feature the other one has not or is going to make it sometime into the official line of viewers. So we got now a quite fragmented field of beta viewers. Wouldn’t it just be better to roll up all those beta features into one beta line and hand this one out to people feeling adventurous? I strongly believe so.

Just a conversation I heared in open chat somewhere:

[8:28] XW: scroll
[8:28] sM: scroll down yer cock?
[8:28] sM: is the cum german?
[8:28] XW: yea
[8:29] sM: oh fucking hitler then
[8:29] XW: yea
[8:29] sM: good
[8:29] sM: then i have to kick yer ass a bit
[8:29] sM: not too much to kick tho

Nice, isn’t it???