Second-Life

There’s a 3rd party statistical tool available for free called SLStats over at SLBuzz.com. It works like that: you visit their in world store, get a sensor - one per avatar only is their policy. You need to get an account over there to make it work. Then you should place it at the main telehub of your place/sim and let it do its magic.

It’s submitting the statistics on a regular base and you can take a look at your statistics then on a login protected webpage. A sample report is visible here. It looks quite good and reasonable, well, more like a logfile analyzer for a web server like Apache than the normal traffic counts. But, of course, the weakness of all such external solutions is - it has no impact on the in world search, if not all major sims are using it to report their traffic, it’s still useful for the place/sim owner, but you cannot count really on the traffic comparison lists if there are major places still missing.

There’s now a 3rd party web based SL client called AjexLife in development and available. So far it has more or less the same feature set as Slink, meaning it’s good for logging into the grid, chatting, sending instant messages, getting notifications, viewing the map and teleporting around. Of course - no graphics. The main focus is on for the main client underpowered machines and communicating so far.

Since this works with AJAX, it should be possible that it even works through most company firewalls - I guess the server makes the connection to the grid, not the webbrowser per se. I wonder under which license this work is going to be put under…

Sponto rides again, this time about religion and relationships. She’s stating that virtual polygamy is no problem for many peope.

I can only agree on that. I know many avatars, male and female, that are happily married in real life (at least they say so) and are having relationships or at least casual relationships with other avatars, that also very often involve sex. Plain and simpe.

Many of them don’t have a problem with that, but some of them must hide there hobby from their RL partner, because if (s)he finds out, they are going for big trouble and they know it. Others are letting their partners know and (s)he has no problem with it whatsoever.

I guess, it’s depending on the relationship and on the trust, other’s are saying: it’s better only happening in the virtual world than ruining my real life with a real affaire. But of course, when emotions are running to deep, even SL can break up a RL relationship. People just like to betray themselves, they always do.

This link points to a cartoon of the German computer magazine c’t - many know the Heise newsticker, perhaps. It’s showing a devil and his wife, the devil playing a game on his computer and his wife saying: “Tell me, isn’t this game finally getting boring for you? You’ve been already playing that silly game Second Hell for over 4.5 billion years now.”

The “new” continent in the East has been named Nautilus. Quite a silly name for a continent, if you ask me, but even better the new, yet to come continent with around who knows sims is going to be named Corsica. Yes, right, Corsica, like the island in the Mediterrenean Sea.

In reality Corsica belongs to France, but the inhabitants of it are not happy with that and still many consider the French people as occupants. So now I wonder if the now defunct SLAA and its followers are going to put their headquarters there and are trying to battle LL from there, then. This would be quite ironic.

Another interesting profile, sums up the persistant problems:

Please LL fix SL so I can:
teleport without having butt fur
Rez without thinking I live in the land of gray
And Give me just 1 L for every crash report so I can be rich

Found in someones profile:

IF YOU ARE READING MY PROFILE, YOU HAVE ENTERED THE NO DRAMA ZONE!  I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR DRAMA WITH YOU OR YOUR SL BABY’S MAMA. LOL

and on the 1st life tab:

I HAVE NOT HAD A REAL LIFE SINCE I JOINED SECOND  LIFE.

SO, I WILL NOT ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT MY REAL LIFE!

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:

• from a creative point of view he’s a god. He has been creating a virtual world, which is undergoing its own evolution right now. Humans are building things, communities, are making things better. He beliefs that humans are good and that therefore SL is a good world.
• LL is going to work with local governments, if needed, in legal cases. The best police though is the cleaning force of the community itself.
• No news about age verification, just that’s it still on the cooker.
• Many companies are having wrong assumptions about SL and therefore no success. Even if only 10% of all registered residents are playing regularly, that’s still a great number, because that’s the number big companies like eBay started with.
• Second Life is often economically overrated.
• Why should companies still go into SL? Because it is a big marketing testfield for them.
• If someone wants to have economic success in world, he should use the multimedia features of the world and provide a valuable service for the community.
• Voice is coming, it’s done, when it’s done. The user interface is being worked on, too.
• The big vision behind SL is some kind of standardized 3d internet.

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.

There’s an interesting piece of transcript at Prokofy Neva’s blog. The last inworld office hours of Philip Linden caught his attention, so he went there and spoke some words with him. A quite interesting read, though it seems to me that Phil Linden most times evaded Prok Neva’s questions, whatever, must be my imagination.