M Linden, Here's Why...

Reuters reports on SLCC and the reception Philip and M, received:

“Last year when I was here I had the ‘Missing Image’ T-shirt,” Rosedale said, alluding to his apology for bugs at SLCC 2007. “I think we made pretty good progress.”

The Second Life community has its own ideas. New Linden CEO Mark Kingdon followed Rosedale and asked the crowd: “We’re working hard to improve stability. Are you seeing that?” But Kingdon’s question was met with a stony silence from the crowd.

In the last week:
9/4: Logins unavailable to some residents (Duration: ~20 minutes)
9/4: Multiple Regions Offline (Duration: ~2.5 hours)
9/5: 600 Regions Down (Duration: ~2.5 hours)
9/5: Live Chat Temporarily Unavailable (Duration: ~9 hours)
9/5: Network issues (Duration: ~11 hours)
9/6: Network Troubles (Duration: ~1.5 hours)
9/7: Network Issues Again Affecting Inworld Functions (Duration: ~3.5 hours)
9/8: Network Issues Affecting Inworld Services (Duration: ~2.5 hours)
9/8: Issues with Public Issue Tracker and Wiki Access (Duration: ~9 hours)
9/9: Network Issues Affecting Inworld Services (Duration: ?????)
9/10: About 400 to be restarted shortly (Duration: ????)
9/11: Server Crash Affecting Logins (Duration: ~1 hour)

Granted, some of these are more significant than others, and I'm very glad LL actually provides the status blog; it was worse before that.

But everyday for the last week (I was not inclined to go back farther), there has been something happening. It seems like every day or two when I'm in-world, there is a global message, "there is an issues yadda, yadda, yadda please don't spend money or do anything useful."

They ought to be glad that it was only a stony silence that greeted them instead of stones.

This Is Considered Good News Analysis?

Reuters makes some interesting conclusions from Linden Lab's economic statistics. I just happen to think that the analyst didn't think it through enough to give reasonable causes, or rather they preferred to reach conclusions that were sensational and would sell more newspapers rather than boring and reasonable ones that people wouldn't get worked up about.

Here's a relevant excerpt:

Second Life had 88,585 of the subscription-paying accounts at the end of May, down from 89,845 a year earlier.

The overwhelming majority of avatars use basic accounts, which are free. Premium accounts, which cost US$10 a month, come with additional privileges including enhanced support and the right to own virtual property on Second Life’s mainland.

Even as Linden Lab’s base of paying customers shrinks over the past year, the total hours spent by avatars inside Second Life has increased dramatically. In May of 2007 total usage of Linden Lab’s virtual world was about 20.8 million hours. A year later the number spiked to almost 32 million hours, a gain of 54 percent.

With hours up but premium accounts down, the data suggests that while Second Life is failing to attract to new users, existing customers find the virtual world more engaging than ever, spending ever-greater amounts of time there.

The facts of a 50% increase in hours spent in SL and the falling number of premium accounts led the analyst to conclude that the increased number of hours spent in Second Life is due to the old users using it more? Huh?

Did the analyst bother to read their own paragraph talking about the vast majority of users being basic not premium? Linden Lab states there are over 14,000,000 accounts in Second Life and growing at the rate of over 1,000,000 per month. Did the analyst not even bother to think that many of the new sign-ups over the last year actually used the system? Nope, they'd rather conclude that SecondLife is atrophying.

Following that dubious conclusion, Reuters, goes on to talk about OpenSim.

A wild card that Linden’s statistics cannot account for is the rapid development of open-source Second Life variant OpenSim. The zero growth among premium accounts may represent a shift in the most die-hard avatars.

Avatars unable to find a home within Second Life including banking institutions and ageplayers have already migrated to OpenSim.

Doom! Gloom! The sky is falling and I'm selling more newspapers because people want to read about the non-existent rock about to hit their head.

I think a simpler explanation for the drop in premium accounts is that there are few benefits for having a premium account. First land is gone and the stipend no longer covers the cost of the membership. Two big benefits have disappeared.

Mainland/Sim ownership and access to better support are the only benefits left. Could it be that people are realizing they can buy/rent on the non-mainland sims and have parcels that look the way they want instead of being next to ad-farms? As people flee the mainland for the private sims, the benefits of being premium go away and now they can use that US$10 per month to pay the tier on their new parcel.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. I think the dramatic growth in private sim land-size and the current freeze in new mainland (or is that over already), are far better indicators of where people are spending their money. Not that they are going to OpenSim.

And why on earth would the bankers go to OpenSim? There aren't very many people on it to make banking a viable business.

As usual, simple use of logic shows that most "news" is actually "hype" designed to sell more "news".

A Bimbo's Guide To Retrieving Lost Inventory

One thing that I've found useful is to clear your disk cache and relog. That forces the client to download all of the inventory information from the server again. Often, inventory loss is just a matter of the client forgetting about what's in your inventory for various reasons.

I had this happen to me the other day when I was copying a few hundred animations and scripts from my inventory into a prim. It eventually timed out with an error message after only copying some of the animations and scripts, there was a lot of lag in a laggy sim so the copy took forever. Unfortunately, my inventory window showed that all of the "no copy" items were not in my inventory and checking the prim, they were not in the prim.

Like any good user, I panicked and cursed Linden Labs as my first step.

Then, I realized that my client had told the server to do all of the copying, but did not handle the error of "only some of the stuff successfully copied" that the server returned. Probably because of laggy communications or other load related issues. Since the server had not actually copied the inventory, I hoped that refreshing my client's cache of the inventory would work.

It did.

For more extensive inventory loss, over on the Huddles site, there is a post on how to retrieve lost inventory, one of the comments provides nice step by step instructions on how to do it.

Ok, finally retrieved both my huddles… here’s what you have to do:

1) sign up as a premium member - you can’t do the below without it…
2) go to the support page
3) go to live chat
4) tell the operator everything that happened to the best of your ability and request: I need an inventory repair. Be as specific as you can. It will take sometime, approx 30 minutes. Be patient.
5) they will come back and say check your inventory. It likely won’t be in there… you need to REBOOT SL. When you come back in it will say Repairing Inventory Folders.
6) check to make sure it’s there - report this back to the operator.
7) If this doesn’t work, the last resort is to submit a ticket — good luck getting it heard.

GOOD LUCK! I hope it works for you as it did me, I’ve spent most of the day trying to get this back together!

Xanthia Lisle

I Will Not Have My Voice Stilled

A number of prominent blogs are "going on strike" against the new policies Linden Labs has made about use of their trademarked material. This is the post I made to the blogger's community. Edit: Woo Hoo! Someone else thinks the same as I do about not being silent.

I won't stop posting, depriving the world of me for three days would be a crime worse than anything Linden Labs has done.

But seriously, I plan to continue to post - the more we rabble rouse and actually post using terms, names, and icons that Linden Labs has stated they will not tolerate - the faster we will force them to take action. The faster they take action, the better - it will cause *something* to happen, which is better than a silent stalemate.

If both sides are silent, Linden and us, that isn't helpful. People don't notice voids, they notice activity. In real world strikes, the strikers picket and make noise. They stand around and force the world to take notice of the inequities of the situation. In the virtual world, silence is the *opposite* of what picketing and participating in a strike in the real world is like - it's like all of the workers went home and stayed in bed, it's more like a "sick out" than a strike. No one would notice because no attention was being drawn to the situation. The only ones hurt are those who actually go out and picket and have no support.

We should raise our voices in a cacophony of violations against their new terms, forcing them to speak up or risk losing their ability to enforce their new terms. Imagine if they started to send out Cease and Desist letters - and we ignored them. Then they would be forced to act on their own policies and suspend people.

Imagine the press that suspending well known and popular avatars would bring to this. It would bring more attention to this than being silent ever could. However, being silent incurs no risk.

If we don't force them to act and act decisively, they can be quiet about it and enforce it whenever they feel like it or hold it over our heads. This situation does not call for inaction, it calls for *more* action.

I plan to continue to stick my virtual neck out and continue to post. If the rest of you want to do what LL wants, which is to obey their new terms and not use "infringing" material, go ahead and don't post.

But then, I'm a rabble rouser who tends to be mouthy towards authorities.

Your Abuse Report Has Been Added To The Queue

A number of bloggers are talking about the new Linden Lab policies regarding logos, naming, use of trademarks, etc.

My simple reply to Linden Labs is, "Your Abuse Report has been added to the queue, I am currently dealing with lots of copyright infringement cases that have currently gone unhandled by Linden Labs, when those are resolved, I will be able to handle your request."

Preferrably, I'd like to see Phil do one of the naked ads protesting copyright infringement...

The Governor Is Dead! Long Live The Governor!

I didn't do it, I swear.

Because you are used to coming to the site for hard-hitting news that is up to date, (hah!), let me tell you that Phil is stepping down as CEO of Linden Labs.

I've complained about the issues in Second Life before and made amusing references to the death of the Governor, but this comes as a surprise to me.

I think one comment sums it up well:

I guess at this point - until I've had more chance to think about the implications - it could be summed up as "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst".

I think there's a pretty good chance that this will light a fire under the asses of those responsible for stability and user retention, but I also think that it's just as likely - if not more so - that it will end up evolving into a Second Life where so-called "non professional" content creators like myself are even less valued in favor of attracting the "big players".

I hope the nice, Libertarian bent of Second Life stays with an emphasis on grass roots growth of content. We saw how the emphasis on big corporations worked out for the Lindens.

This may be the beginning of the big push for a broader appeal like what happened on the Internet during the late 90s. It appears Phil will still be at the center of the "vision" of Linden Labs, which may be what keeps the focus on allowing hobbyists to thrive.

I Come To Bury Caesar

Linden Labs is inviting all of their Concierge customers to a big "Ides of March" toga party, ostensibly for "Instead of celebrating the Ides of March by killing Caesar, come and hang out with the Concierge team and other concierge customers."

I don't think they read my campaign speech for governor where I reworked, Shakespeare's famous Julius Caesar speech, otherwise they wouldn't let me near Phil with a dagger hidden in my toga.

Friends, Lindens, avatars, lend me your IMs;
I come to skewer Phil, not to praise him.
The bugs that SL inflicts affect us all;
The fixes are oft broken in the updates;
So let it be with Phil. The noble media
Hath told you Phil was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Phil answer'd it.

...

When I do log in, I pledge to you;
Fair avatars and furries all:
My governorship will be beneficent,
The lag and bugs will disappear,
Lindens once again shall fill all hands,
And snoops and puritans shall not peer in
On anything consenting adults will do.
But not while Phil rules the grid.

The Bimbo Award Goes To Linden Labs

The Bimbo Award is given for public announcements that inspire the exact opposite response in the reader than the speaker intended. It comes from an incident in US during the 80s when a young woman had a tryst with a well-known, evangelical minister and when it became public, she exclaimed, "I am not a bimbo!"

I am giving a Bimbo Award to Linden Labs for the fateful pronouncement:

[Resolved 5:20 PM PST] We’ve fixed this issue.

Mere sentences after this:

[UPDATE 3:16 PM PST] Our service provider has confirmed something was overlooked in their first attempt to fix the problem

In short, the last time they "fixed" it, they missed something. But this time they are certain they didn't make that mistake again.

I believe them, don't you? And the issue? Nothing major, just massive object loss. Considering their past track record of not losing things and being able to fix those issues, I'm certain they have it all under control now.

Sieg Heil Mein Fuhrer Philip

There is a hilarious video making the rounds of SL blogs. In it Hitler throws a tantrum and the provided sub-titles are written as if it was Philip Rosedale from Linden Labs. Hitler/Philip raves about the 'invasion' of the Open Source pirates who have nearly achieved teleporting on their OpenSim project and who already have SexGen beds.

It's nice to know that the OpenSim people have their priorities straight - sex before teleporting.

Some choice quotes:
"[why can't we go] ... back to the days where you could shit in box and sell it!! Before people was smart!!"
"At least we still have Orientation Island... WITH AN 80% DROP-OUT RATE!! WHOS IDEA WAS TO MAKE IT SO STUPID!! I tried to go there last night... to reassure myself... I like it still, I rode the Segway... BUT I COULD NOT FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET OFF IT!! THEN I GOT STUCK IN THE GROUND!!11"



"All I ever wanted to do... ...was make a virtual utopia where people could own fake land."

I love that quote - it pretty much sums up Second Life :)

I saw the first link to it from Vint's blog where an interesting thing came up in the comments. People in Germany and France seem unable to watch the video. I believe it is illegal to display the swastika and other symbols of Nazi Germany in those two countries and I believe that YouTube is blocking anything tagged with 'Hitler', etc from viewing by people from those countries.

It makes me glad I live in a country where I can watch parodies of "mass-murdering fuck-heads" without the government thinking I must be a Nazi sympathizer or that it would corrupt me.

Maybe we should all go around chanting 'Seig Heil' ('Hail Victory' for the Germanically challenged) like the Germans did as their country died. Nicely ironic. Perhaps the Second Life equivalent is 'having sex in SexGen beds as the Grid crashes around us.'

Hmmm, perhaps all those freebie penises doing the 'Nazi Salute' have been telling us something all along...

Bait Shops, Cement Plants, And Dogfood

Over on Girl Meets Second Life, Caterin spent an afternoon at an SL Cement Plant. A cement works in SL? Is it part of an urban role-playing game? Evidently, the cement works is from FLSmidth, ‘FLSmidth is a Danish world-leading manufacturer of cement and minerals plants’. It's like a cement plant theme park. What do they expect out of SL?

This reminds me a lot of the early pioneering days of the Internet. Back then, everyone was jumping on the bandwagon - they didn't know where it was going or what it meant, but everyone was talking about it, so they had to be there.

The Internet was a heady, confusing, eclectic, mixture of sites back then. There were new forms of money, dog food was being shipped at exorbitant rates, and everything was free. How do cement companies figure into this? Well, small business was trying to get on the Internet or the Information Superhighway as the press was hyping it back then.

Small companies, who had no other desire or need to get on the Internet except that their CIO read about it in a magazine, were trying to make websites. Most of these failed.

Friends of mine who, at the time, worked building websites for companies tell me about small businesses coming to them and asking for websites. When asked what did they want it for, what purpose did it serve, and fundamentally, what did they expect, had no idea other than, "we need a website, if we don't have one, we'll be left behind."

"Left behind" of what, they had no idea about, but everyone was raving about it, so like greedy little kids, they wanted one and they wanted people to go to it. They thought it would drive real world sales. Website builders kept telling these small companies that you needed to "be different", to make the site like "a game" or to "give something away for free." The common logic was that you had to provide something that consumers wanted so that they would come see your real world products and then go buy them. I don't know about you, but I didn't sit around going to big name brand web sites playing cruddy games and then thinking, "I want a Big Mac."

To this day, some companies still think like that, have you ever been to Pepsi's website? Me neither. I've heard they run contests and they used to provide games to play, or something like that, maybe that was Coke's website or was that any of a number of other big, real world brands.

I've been watching Second Life since I came to it over a year ago and it bears much resemblance to the early days of the Internet. The graphics sucked, really, a child with crayons made better icons than what passed for cutting edge on the old websites and the first things in Second Life also look like anyone could make it. The ease of writing a simple web page and throwing together some graphics so that nearly everyone did it is very similar to how the simple prim and texture objects that we build with in Second Life are right now. Do you see many of those types of websites floating around on anything other than hobbyist pages? I didn't think so. You either spend lots of money to have an IT department to have a site or you use an internet application like Blogger or eBay Stores. If you are really fancy you use a "website in a box" on a rented server, like WordPress.

If we look at Second Life to determine what it will look like ten years from now, we will see that big corporate sites like Pepsi are only useful for finding the phone number so you can call to complain about their real world products and not much else. I think that Playboy and other sims are going to end like this. The real winners are sites that allow you to find what you are looking for or to buy those hard to find things. But, perhaps the most successful will be like the unforeseen winners of today. Perhaps, there will even be a new revolution in user content, like what you are reading right now, a blog.

The big counter-point to the "all websites are professional" is that most of what we do on the Internet outside of shopping is social networking, blogging, and watching videos and it's created by amateurs for consumption by amateurs. That is remarkably like Second Life. Is Second Life a YouTube, for person to person interaction, or is Second Life, like Linden Labs would lead you to believe, a platform like the Internet? I think it really is a platform and you are going to see more "Bill Joe Jim Bob's Bait Shop" style sims until both big and little business figures out what it's doing.

Eventually the real selling will arise and we will be using Second Life to buy furniture and clothes online because now we can actually "see and touch" them. You wait, open registration is only the beginning, Linden is probably thinking about registration-less Second Life, so that Ikea can point its website to a sim in Second Life with models of all of their furniture where you can see how it looks next to all of your other furniture and then purchase it. Or enter your measurements, an avatar is created and now you can see what an outfit will look like on you. Some sites are already doing something like this with your picture and trying out new hair-cuts before you go to a salon.

Then will come the "new media", similar to blogs or YouTube, what will we be trading around? 3D models, animations, toys and gadgets? Maybe. All I know is that for Second Life to realize its potential as a new "platform" it will have to become more open, not less. Less like a pay-per-month game like Warcraft and more like a browser - always there. Will Linden Lab go the way of Netscape, giving us a browser and a server for free, then dying? I don't think so, the asset server, lindens, and a few other things prevents that.

Anyway, enough pontificating and conjecturing, now I really do want to go find small businesses like the cement one and get any freebies they are giving away. I missed out on the "big freebie giveaways" of the mid to late 90s. Give me my free loot!

What Age Are You? No, Really?

This has to take the cake. After Linden Lab said it was going to age and identify verify people, the catterwaling began. From end to end of the Second Life blogo-sphere, many posts were written and much vitriol spewed. None the less, Linden Lab persisted in it's desire to make identify verification part of Second Life.

So, what happens when someone is accused of being under-aged? "Oh, look at that, they used the verification system chosen by Linden Lab." You'd think that would be the end of it. Well, not so fast.

From over on Grid Grind (via Massively), they are reporting one of their alts was suspended and they were told to fax a copy of a picture ID for verification!

With not a second look at their own verification system, Linden Lab is demanding picture proof of your identity in cases where there has been a complaint against you. Their own carefully selected system doesn't stand up to meet their own burden of proof.

A comment on Massively answers the charge that it's supposedly only a beta program:

Bee Mizser said...

So they are not trusting a system in BETA....

God you are getting worse than the Herald.

Age Verification is undergoing testing, it has not gone fully live, so quite rightly they are not depending on it right now.

Reply
2 hearts vote downvote upReport
Tateru Nino9

Dec 24th 2007 @ 5:54AM
Tateru Nino said...

As far as we know, and from everything we've heard, the 'beta' aspect is to deal with people *not* being able to verify. Once people *are* verified, as far as we know, they'll stay that way at the end of beta - therefore, if you trust the data then, you trust it now, no?

IF IT'S NOT USEFUL, WHY THE FUCK DO WE HAVE IT?!?!?!?!?!?!

Sorry about that, I just had to scream at the world about something so blindingly stupid.

This Is Either Bad Or Good

Cory Lindon is leaving Linden Lab, in his own words, it appears to be over creative differences. Some people think this is a bad thing, that he is the guy that "made it work". I love the following quote from Cory:

Creating a programming language that now had 2.5 billion lines of code written in it – note to self, next time spend more than one night designing language.

That brings back memories of bad architectural decisions in my life as well.

Now, I'm going to preface all of the following, with, I haven't met Cory, have any inside information about this in anyway, or have any personal axes to grind.

I think this could be a very good thing. Send any flames my way you want, but I don't believe anyone's perfect.

Cory built a platform that I've dedicated lot's of time to and certainly a fair amount of money. Anything I spend that much time with, I have an opinion on. He made this crazy concept a working system. It has many flaws that are keeping it from being truly great and continuing the breakneck growth it showed earlier.

There are crashes, bugs, outages, inventory loss,and numerous other things that mar the Second Life experience. Cory could be a very good software engineer, very creative, very innovative, but he may not make a good CTO. The skills that are good at starting a project and getting it to the "first stage" are not the skills that get you to the "next stage." They are not mutually exclusive, but they are not the same.

Unlike others, I like that Cory made the client open source. I like that he supported libsecondlife. I drank the Kool-Aid a long time ago about open source and how fundamentally right it is.

All of that does not make him good at managing the architecture of a system, to stabilize it, to hunker down and do the boring things that need to be done on the platform. Some people are comparing him to Wozniak and drawing similarities to what happened at Apple. I think Wozniak leaving was ultimately good for Apple.

I read an excerpt from Michael Dell's book in which he talked about having to ask for the resignations of many of his close friends that helped him build Dell once the company grew really big. His comments went something like, "It was incredibly hard to do, they were good $100 million dollar managers, but they weren't $1 billion dollar managers." The skill set for running organizations and making them work at different sizes and different scales changes. Some can continue to reinvent themselves and change, others cannot or will not.

In the end Linden Lab is a business and businesses that grow and are pushing to grow big will go through certain stages. We've hit the "boring corporate retrenchment" stage. I just hope that Cory isn't replaced by someone from the "big corporate" stage, who doesn't know how to shepherd a growing company through the middle phases.