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Identity crisis!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:15:41 +0000

Fun days are ahead of us, as Linden Lab rolls out a much-awaited feature: the ability to change one’s avatar name at will, just like on every other platform, and to decouple the username (which is unique in the system) from the Display Name (which is what other users will see displayed on the screen), as announced by Jack Linden on the Official Second Life Blogs last week. Interestingly enough, the amount of drama it generated was almost as bad as the one surrounding the merger of the Teen Grid with the Main Grid — over a thousand angry comments were made on that article.

And not by the same people, either, so, no, it’s not a resident conspiracy attacking Linden Lab’s latest projects. This time, the biggest complains come mostly from all sorts of content creators. And this is where the issue is: avatar names, so far, have been unique, and that meant for the content creators (remember, live music and performing weddings are content too!) that one’s reputation is closely tied to a name that is unique. Remove that uniqueness, and all of the sudden the avatar name loses value.

To explore this further, we have to see some analogies on other platforms.

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Post tags: copyright, Display Name, identity, nickname, unique name, username

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Kiddie talk

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:50:37 +0000

And so it came to pass, that the Lindens saw that they couldn’t afford to support two grids at the same time, and lo and behold! The Teen Grid was no more, and teens were allowed to enter the Main Grid. And the Lindens saw that it was good.

Well, perhaps. Residents, however, have a slightly different opinion, as can be seen by the more than thousand comments on Terrence Linden’s announcement of the upcoming end of the Teen Grid. After years and years of reinforcing the idea that teens and adults would never mingle, Philip finally had to revert the ‘Lab’s standing policy on the clear separation between adults and teens. For now, after January 1st, 2011, only 16 and 17-year olds will be allowed on the Main Grid, but both Philip and Terrence have promised that they would work a solution to allow the 13 to 15-year olds a way to access the Main Grid as well at a later stage.

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A storm in a glass of water

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:17:52 +0000

The title won’t make any sense for native English speakers, who have the equivalent saying: “tempest in a tea pot”. The meaning is the same: “making a fuss about nothing important”.

But sometimes we fail to see what is important and what is not. I’d like to invite you to view Linden Lab’s formal announcement of Project Snowstorm, which I mentioned on an earlier article:

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Post tags: agile computing, open source, scrum, snowstorm

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Hypergrid 1.5: Building the Metaverse, one grid at a time

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:37:02 +0000

Linden Lab has announced at the SLCC their continuing support of the open source efforts: the launch of Snowstorm, the project for a new viewer (based on the Snowglobe 2.X codebase) which will get Lindens and third-party volunteer developers working much, much closer together to develop what Philip Linden hopes to be the ultimate viewer, or, as he says these days, “to bring Linden Lab back to the lead in innovation and technology”. Tateru Nino has already commented a bit on the change of strategy; I have to humbly confess that I’m not familiar enough with the Scrum methodology to comment if it’s the best way to deal with a fast pace of development that includes a lot of external developers. Still, some things look interesting: for instance, in theory at least, the Emerald team could branch off one fork of the Snowstorm code to implement their spell-checking functions, manage it as if it were their own personal in-house project, release a build for open testing by any resident, and after a few weeks, commit it back to the main code — and this would become an “official” Snowstorm release (which will happen every other week). Sounds reasonable? Well, yes; it’s also a way to get more people to help out Linden Lab to fix bugs, now that they have fired so many developers (but they still have 175 working at LL on 15 different teams, says Philip).

On the other hand, the other major open source project at Linden Lab, intergrid connectivity, seems to have been dropped, possibly indefinitely. This is indeed bad news. Around this time, the IETF should have been able to come up with some relatively final standards for the intergrid protocol VWRAP. But if Linden Lab drops their commitment to it, the future is not very bright. On the other side of the coin, we have the OpenSimulator community with its amazing Hypergrid protocol, currently at its 1.5 incarnation, and which is simply mindboggling in the way it operates.

I had to try it out for myself
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© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2010. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: hypergrid, opensim, opensimulator, teleport

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Linden Lab turns residential; OpenSim embraces business and education

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 01:20:10 +0000

I’ve just read Prokofy Neva’s very insightful post on the official end of Second Life Enterprise — both as a product, as a division of Linden Lab, and, well, as being part of LL’s vision. Prok was very straightforward and asked the question to Philip directly: has SLE been dropped? The answer was “yes”.

So of course we already knew that Linden Lab is turning back to where their core business always was: the residential market. It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that they would not only close down their enterprise division, but also drop all products related to business.

And it’s not only that — shutting down the Teen Grid, closing the Boston offices and firing Pathfinder Linden should also give us a good hint that Linden Lab doesn’t want the educators, either. I know that Philip has repeatedly said that Linden Lab would still support business and educators on Second Life. Nevertheless, I would say that actions speak louder than words…

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Self-entertainment and the end of newbies

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 05:21:37 +0000

Sometimes, discussions after the Thinkers meetings prove to be even more interesting than the meeting itself (sorry, Extie! ) — mostly because the group tends to become very small and we can throw around a few wild ideas to see if they stick

One of those is something that has bothered me for several years. You might remember that one of the major strategies for M Linden was how to deal with the first hour experience. From SL Viewer 2.X to Avatars United (and strangely getting rid of the Mentors because it was impossible for LL to support them…), or even planning Facebook integration, pretty much every approach was attempted to make sure that the 10,000 users that register every day don’t immediately leave. The ideas around the first hour experience have sometimes been wild, sometimes ingenious; some ideas seem to be solid and make good sense (and a few might even be implemented!); others, by contrast, seem to be utterly insane (and some of those might get implemented too!). Ideas about how that experience should actually be abound; there is really no limit to our imagination.

Nevertheless, after two years, none of the strategies implemented by Linden Lab has worked. New registrations are still at 10,000 per day and SL has crossed the mythical line of having 20 million registered avatars (and no, they’re not all alts and bots — they’re almost all real human beings, who just registered, logged in once, and gave up just a few minutes after being in-world). But they don’t stay. No matter what we do and say… they simply go away. Some last minutes, some hours, some days, a few sometimes are bold enough to stay for a whole year… but ultimately they go away.

Why?

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Post tags: community, creativity, entertainment, first hour experience, self-entertainment

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Good-bye, meshes!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 21:03:33 +0000

Well, with the untimely firing of Qarl Linden, following in the steps of Pastrami Linden, it seems that Philip didn’t really mean that meshes would “merely” be postponed. They seemed now to be completely gone from the drawing board and its existence at the ‘Lab relegated to merely another one of the hundreds of failed and/or incomplete projects. Worse than that, it seems that the only person at LL with a clue on how the renderer works is now Runitai Linden, who has to walk on the steps of giants.

It is really with great sadness that I see this happening. The reasons for meshes being so important, as hopefully you shall understand, are twofold. One is personal and related to my own line of work. The other is more generalist and affects everybody.

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Post tags: mesh, meshes, qarl linden

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What have you achieved??

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 10:30:01 +0000

I found it rather amusing that Hamlet Au, a.k.a. Wagner James Au in RL, did generate a lot of fuss with his proposed achievements system for Second Life, published first at Social Times and later on New World Notes. While some of his other suggestions are mostly fine (“better text chat” will definitely be an improvement worth developing, specially when Philip sort of promised to remove it from the sim software and put it on a stand-alone system, hopefully one that supports XMPP [like Google Talk/Wave]), the suggested achievements system has been quite controversial, as most commenters have been almost unanimously against it.

Hamlet’s reasoning is that SL already had an achievements system in the past: it was called the SL Leaderboard, and was also tied to a rating system. LL’s idea was to make content creation, avatar personalisation, and socialising not only more engaging, but competitive. And you got money prizes out for that. You can immediately figure out how this was so intensely gamed that it was dropped from SL.

Or wasn’t it…? The Emerald guys apparently found out that the ratings are still there, they just don’t work on the viewer, so it seems that they are tweaking their own SL Viewer to display the ratings again, like Prad reports.

The main reason why this is not a good idea is not merely that it will be heavily gamed, and thus quickly become worthless — again. No, the main reason is that it totally changes the assumption of what Second Life is supposed to be.

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Fast, Easy & Fun!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 01:47:47 +0000

Search for “Fast Easy Fun Second Life” in Google, and you get two million results. By now, it’s quite hard to believe that anyone vaguely familiar with Second Life hasn’t heard the new motto, launched by Philip Linden during his Town Hall meeting last Friday (July 30, 2010).

If you missed all the fun, you can still watch the archived video stream from Treet.TV. If, like me, you’re too lazy to spend an hour watching videos while you should be doing something more productive, you might be more comfortable reading the full transcript. If you just want the highlights, you can get them from SLOG, Daniel Voyager, or Adric Antfarm. For thorough analysis, well… you pretty much can get them from any blog on the SLogosphere I guess; there’s hardly anybody who did not write on the subject.

Overall, what I can say is that this was, strangely enough, the most informative Town Hall meeting ever held by Philip (co-starring with BK Linden, and moderated by Wallace Linden). Usually, Philip is vague and avoids the tough questions. This Friday, however, he was way more specific, at least on most points. If that’s just trying to deal with the insanely high expectations that so many have put on his shoulders, or really a change in the Lab’s attitude towards the SL residents, I don’t know. But it was rather refreshing to listen to a different Philip!

Let me be honest and state, from the beginning, that I’m not part of the hyper-enthusiastic, mega-optimistic crowd that believes that all problems in SL will be over by the end of the year. I’m carefully optimistic. My major issue is that I really do not understand what really happened at Linden Lab. There have been so many conjectures and wild theories floating around that it’s pretty much impossible to figure out which one is right. Most of them explain a few of the issues but quickly lead to contradictions.

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Post tags: easy, fast, fun, linden lab, philip rosedale, second life, town hall

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Town Hall Wishlist!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:20:50 +0000

As promised, Philip Linden is holding his first Town Hall meeting after coming back as interim CEO. While I personally subscribe to the mainstream opinion that this is going to be mostly the announcement that Bob Komin (aka BK Linden) is going to replace Philip as the new CEO — if not this Friday, possibly in the near future.

In the mean time, while Philip is temporarily at the helm, he’s seen as the Miracle Man, a sort of Jesus Christ on His Second Coming, who will finally get everything right. There is a whole load of extreme expectations regarding what miracles Philip will perform. A few are worth reading about and have been posted on Philip’s former article two weeks ago. If you read them carefully, you’ll notice that many have actually opposing goals! This is not surprising. The end result, of course, will be that Philip will be unable to please everybody. Some will be incredibly disappointed as he picks an option that was not on our list — but that’s unavoidable.

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Post tags: ceo, philip linden, philip rosedale, wishlist

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Gwyn's Home » Homepage

Identity crisis!

Kiddie talk

A storm in a glass of water

(...)Read the rest of A storm in a glass of water (2,112 words) © Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2010. | Permalink | 16 comments | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: agile computing, open source, scrum, snowstorm Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Hypergrid 1.5: Building the Metaverse, one grid at a time

Linden Lab turns residential; OpenSim embraces business and education

Self-entertainment and the end of newbies

Good-bye, meshes!

What have you achieved??

Fast, Easy & Fun!

Town Hall Wishlist!

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Read the rest of A storm in a glass of water (2,112 words)

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2010. | Permalink | 16 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agile computing, open source, scrum, snowstorm

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