Simple: it is a big laboratory for trying out new approaches, getting new experiences that can be transferred to other, future projects, too. Though Second Life is not perfect, it is still going to be thrilling in the future and that is why it matters.
These are not only my words, but for example also the words of Sponto and Pham Neutra agrees with him (both articles in German).
There is a new search tool available as beta for Second Life, being developed of the Electric Sheep Company at the moment and open for public now since a few days ago.
What’s this thing and how does it work? Well, the searching part of it is a bot named Grid Sheperd, that runs from sim to sim, scans the objects of a sim and connects them with avatar names. The part available on the world wide web at the moment is a search interface, that enables everybody to lookup the items owned by the avatar. It is only showing the items of the avatar though that are tagged as “for sale”. So the Sheeps are telling us: it’s adding value to all of use, since it’s automated and it’s opt-out, if you don’t want those infos available at all. They’re very excited, announced the availability of this service here, described the options and doings of this search bot in this FAQ and an progress update in this blog entry. Important: opt-outs are now taking effect immideately!
[Mehr]In the Avastar #14 there’s a comment of Gwyneth Llewelyn about the scaling of Second Life on page 6. She’s claming that one possible move to relieve the grid of stress would be to store the texture data, which seems to go into the hundred of Terabytes (wonder where she got this number from, I thought all data is around 34 terabytes at the moment according to this article, so I stuck with this number, so hundred of terabytes is wrong on a great scale), from outside the grid, perhaps even allowing users to store them on their own servers. While I don’t see the textures stored on the own servers, because of possible protests, she continues.
She’s stating that if that move occurs the 2000 servers of SL would be able to hold 20 million simultaneous users and this could be achieved within a month with the work of one developer!
[Mehr]Over at Sleeds.org is an interesting movie how they made a building, the process started with PDF, exporting it with Adobe Illustrator into SVG, this was processed by a script to get LSL snippets posted into a notecard and then got finally rezzed in SL.
This looks much like e.g. blender to prim, but it’s impressive, none the less, though I guess if you really want to build good things you need so stuck up with the client. Period.
Torley Linden has a nice entry about a series of photographs of the Lindens! Go ahead and take a look at it, it’s nice to see them, especially since some are complaining they’re more or less invisible nowadays on the main grid.
A few days ago I visited Mercedes-Benz Island to take another look at their in world presence. Well, there was not much happening, anyway and there was also no employee of the company present at this time. They are around there, normally, at some time.
They’ve got not very tight settings on security there, either. This means - just pushing is forbidden, all else works - user scripts, flying around and placing objects is available for every visitor. This means: very bad settings in concerns of security and an open invitation to griefers. I guess, autoreturn is in action, though, but placing objects allows the use of weapons.
And guess what? There were some bored griefers, who came into the island and wrecked havoc upon it. They were somewhat harmless, though, since they did not cage or orbit people. This would have been possible for them, too, without big effort at all.
[Mehr]If you ever want to live somewhere in SL or make business, better choose a region with a tight covenant on it. While standard “anything goes”-attitude on most parts of the mainland first sounds like real fun, it can for sure fast enough turn otherwise.
And now I’ve got a very good example for the necessity on a good, tight covenant. A friend of mine lives on the new continent in the east of the old mainland in the mature rated region Carrion that’s without covenant at all. They’re having a business there, but she lives there, too. It’s been mostly a nice, quiet sim. Until some days ago a new neighbor showed up in the region. This new neighbor’s business was making signs, he had a big enough parcel to upset the whole sim.
First he made his building very high compared to the other building, second he put some animated signs on his building and third he put some naked penises at display, too. This caused him an abuse report, the building is not there anymore, so this time it went good for the other parcel owners in the sim. But if he would have been a little bit more clever, his building would still be there.
[Mehr]Today is the 1st of April and that means: time for April jokes! I’ve found the first SL related today already in the Second Life Herald. To quote it:
In a cross-border caper organized in the wee hours of Saturday morning by otakup0pe Neumann of libsecondlife, notorious griefer Plastic Duck and infamous blogger antagost Prokofy Neva were married at a brief ceremony on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.
[…]
Asked why Plastic Duck, whose RL name is Patrick Sapinski, suddenly switched from griefing and stalking and poking a stick at Prokofy, who has furiously exposed his antics in lenghty blog blasts, to wooing the 50-year-old single mother of two, Duck said, “I’ve never had a mother’s love.”
BWAHAHAHA!
While stilll doing business with IBM (haha!) I’ve stumbled upon this somewhat older article about the formation of IBM’s Second Life business group. What the goals of IBM are, what they’re planning to do and have already done. Quite interesting read!
The well known sim Amsterdam has been sold for about 50.000 US$!
Well, the price for sure is real enough when you take in account the work needed to build such a big sim and calculate the prize you would need to pay if you order it at some agency.
But what’s to say about it… while the sim itself is nice and well done, I don’t like the crowd that’s normally populating it so much, I wouldn’t have paid so much for it nor felt the need to buy it myself. I wonder in which kind of direction it is going to develop, now, since it’s been sold. This has been for sure a good deal for its previous owner.