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Second Life is....

Community created...

Community driven...

Community maintained...

Community killed.

We only have ourselves to blame if Second Life kicks the bucket from the mortal coil. With any social media development, the "human factor" is paramount. New mediums to serve the fast and furious fashionists then there's Second Life, a slow steady tanking snail that only hardened residents keep alive. So far, what I witness, LL is appearing to go into the fast and furious lane whilst trying to ride a racing snail. It is the community to service that snail with all the turbo it needs to survive.

Just my 3.142 thought provoking cents. ;)

Happy RPin.

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That doesn't come as a surprise. Except for a handful of deluded fanboys, we've all long known that SL's heyday is over and the slow decline has begun.

And no, that's not negativity and naysaying. If I say that Windows 7 or Intel's Core i7 processor will be hopelessly outdated at some point in the foreseeable future, and entirely vanish from the market during our lifetime, does that make me a doom sayer? I don't think so. It's just the way of technological progress.

SL is a social 3D platform / MMO that is already outdated. At some point, it will cease to attract new users, and the existing residents will wander off as other virtual world platforms and social sandbox MMOs become available. A small loyal core will stay around and keep SL on life support until LL decide that the profits no longer justify the costs of business. It has happened or is happening to all past MMOs and will inevitably happen to all current ones.

But there still are a few hardcore fans and cheerleaders who believe that SL is destined to become the shiny new 3D internet and AXE deodorant can really get you laid, and anyone who says different is a hater. Well, I love SL. I'll stay around as long as possible and mourn its passing. But I'm also a realist and know that nothing lasts forever.

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TriJin Bade wrote:

We only have ourselves to blame if Second Life kicks the bucket from the mortal coil.

Um... no. We are what makes SL as relatively successful as it still is. What is to blame is the technological progress that stops for no one. As well as Linden Lab, who are currently alienating the existing user base by trying to turn SL into something that it's not in an attempt to attract a whole new audience that has little use for SL.

It was a desperate gamble, and it's pretty that LL have lost it. Yet most of us are still here, and we still do our best to keep the dream alive. Not that it will change anything in the long run, but if it wasn't for the community, SL would have long faded into the annals of internet history.

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Jessika Rang wrote:

Easy Chicken Little, the sky is not falling!

And Windows 7 is here to stay, along with the current CPU generation :) We'll never have to buy a new PC again.

 


Life however is ever evolving.

Which is exactly why everything is bound to be replaced by something different and hopefully better. You, I, Second Life. Nothing lasts forever.

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We have had a big increase in the new folks dropping into our club recently. They are very interested in what is happening and what SL is all about. We help them as much as possible without the aid of voice [Note: Voice in Basic Viewer is NEEDED for retention and communication] and they are a welcome change.:smileywink: It is hard to hook folks in without being able to give them LMs, freebies and such.

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have never used voice...don't like voice...don't need voice..let em learn to type and IM properly and create a personality without a voice..I got a phone I want to talk to someone..

Just my 3.145 cents...

and let us all remember the world didn't actually fall apart when they bought in voice...or made the adult continent...or did wind light and raised SL's minimum requirements...or when they messed up the open spaces and homesteads.It was just that a very vocal group told us it would...and yet here we still are. Until the RL economy gets re settled and balanced again stats are not very relevant. The plain and simple fact is...this is about money above and beyond living expenses and RL playing expenses and that amount is low.

 

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stone by stone.

there have been a few posts from people asking where their inventory has gone, its been explained that this is a new suicide tactic from linden labs to make it easier to forget about.

if a few have to ask, how many won't even bother to ask?

laurel and hardy could manage LL better.

 

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WeeWillie Wylie wrote:

and let us all remember the world didn't actually fall apart when they bought in voice...or made the adult continent...or did wind light and raised SL's minimum requirements...or when they messed up the open spaces and homesteads.  

SL did not fall apart all at once, but the concurrency started to slowly decline shortly after the maturity rating changes, and has overall been declining ever since. Falling apart is a slow process.

 


It was just that a very vocal group told us it would...and yet here we still are.

Yes, here we still are. LL had to let go of 1/3 of their staff, close all overseas offices, and outsource support to the cheapest bidder. But we are still here and will continue to be here for a few more years, bemoaning the ever dropping concurrency. Until the lights go out at some point.

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Ishtara Rothschild wrote:


WeeWillie Wylie wrote:

and let us all remember the world didn't actually fall apart when they bought in voice...or made the adult continent...or did wind light and raised SL's minimum requirements...or when they messed up the open spaces and homesteads.  

SL did not fall apart all at once, but the concurrency started to slowly decline shortly after the maturity rating changes, and has overall been declining ever since. Falling apart is a slow process.

 

It was just that a very vocal group told us it would...and yet here we still are.

Yes, here we still are. LL had to let go of 1/3 of their staff, close all overseas offices, and outsource support to the cheapest bidder. But we are still here and will continue to be here for a few more years, bemoaning the ever dropping concurrency. Until the lights go out at some point.

 

there was a lot more to it imho.

LL lost all trust with the homestead fiasco.

the gambling laws lost a lot of people.

the near death of camping lost a lot of people.

the marketplace threats lost a lot of people.

LL simply are not trustworthy and business needs trust.

LL also need someone who really understands the mind of the avarage user, building a raft and a hut isnt anywhere near it.

even this new forum is a failure.

 

 

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(Not a direct reply to Dogboat, just clicked 'reply' there)

Let's think what SL is - an experiment to see if this sort of virtual world could work.  An experiment only fails if you don't learn the lessons from it and it only ends when you have learnt all the lessons you want or have a better experiment.  Lots of things get half-implemented, don't they?  = Beta-plus testing, "yes, it works, let's stress-test it with SL's users".  No need to fix things in SL if you can take the products and lessons learnt to a better market.  Apart from anything else it's obvious that while millions of people want to get online to slaughter things/each-other (eg; WoW) or 'play a game' (say, Farmville) that isn't the case for a free-form world.  It's the very range of things we can do in SL that puts people off now whereas most existing residents would hate it if SL introduced ranks and roles ... like these forums did (*gasp*)

Then think how successful SL has already been.  It's lasted more than 6 years alread, grown from ~15 sims and a couple of thousand users to 30,000 sims and a minimum similar number of people logged-in.  Voice, windlight, sculpts and, hehe, jiggles, have been added, it works on Wednesdays and a lot more reliably all the time than it used to.  During that time several competitors have come and gone and while some have been better at graphics, avatar-customisation or whatever, none have managed to beat SL (or we wouldn't still be here!).  Probably the nearest competitors - at the moment - are based on OpenSim, basically SL with a different name.  So SL and LL must have been doing something right.

No, I'm not a dogmatic fan though and, yes, I think SL will be replaced.  Ultimately I think SL has reached the limits of what it can be and do so needs to be replaced.  Thing is, I think the people with the most experience, who have learnt most and know the pitfalls, are LL-employees or ex-employees.  Arguably the next most skilled group are (ex) residents of SL because there are/were so many of us and, let's face it, a lot of us are pretty geeky *grin*.

Put all that together and what I think will replace SL will be ... SL version 2.

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TriJin Bade wrote:

Second Life is....

Community created...

Community driven...

Community maintained...

Community killed.

We only have ourselves to blame if Second Life kicks the bucket from the mortal coil. With any social media development, the "human factor" is paramount. New mediums to serve the fast and furious fashionists then there's Second Life, a slow steady tanking snail that only hardened residents keep alive. So far, what I witness, LL is appearing to go into the fast and furious lane whilst trying to ride a racing snail. It is the community to service that snail with all the turbo it needs to survive.

Just my 3.142 thought provoking cents.
;)

Happy RPin.

 

A business that blames its customers for its failure has failed twice.

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Good point Tateru about the not starting at zero thing!

Its an easy way to get overblown looking charts that actually only reflect small market movements.

After such explosive growth that I've seen since I began in Second Life, what else is to be expected?

It's like making a big deal when brand new company sees 100% growth, well of course that's easy they had a concurrency of 500 in Q1 and concurrency of 1000 in Q2. The movements will be more volatile when its small numbers.

As someone used to observing longterm market trends I would say this is a stabilization or market contraction.

It's normal. Nonstop explosive longterm growth is a danger sign meaning its definitely a bubble so get out now.

Markets go up & down, it is nothing new or unique to SL, this is expected behavior.

In terms of what I have seen so far in Q1 2011, business is up this year in SL. With concurrency down, this increase in business could reflect a significant transition to a higher quality of concurrency.

Less people could be better. Its the quality of concurrency that matters. Would you rather do business in a world with 1000000 griefers and people who won't spend a dime inworld, or a world of 10000 excited hardcore community contributors and big spenders? I'd definitely take the latter choice & I think Linden Lab would too.

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Ishtara Rothschild wrote:

That doesn't come as a surprise. Except for a handful of deluded fanboys, we've all long known that SL's heyday is over and the slow decline has begun.

And no, that's not negativity and naysaying. If I say that Windows 7 or Intel's Core i7 processor will be hopelessly outdated at some point in the foreseeable future, and entirely vanish from the market during our lifetime, does that make me a doom sayer? I don't think so. It's just the way of technological progress.

 

Sorry Ishy, gonna have to pick you up on this one because the comparision isn't exactly accurate.

Will Microsoft or Intel one day die completely and be overtaken by a new dominat force in the OS and CPU markets? Possibly. I agree with you that technological progress is an unstoppable force (baring some major global disaster I suppose!)  What is more likely though is that both corporations will adapt to technological progess. They have both had competitors that have attempted (with varying degrees of success) to top them off their pedestals, but they have adapted to maintain their dominance.

Microsoft could have at one point felt threatened by Apple's MAC OS overtaking Windows, but the majority stuck with PC over MAC. They may have concerns about Google OS but I suspect those concerns are limited. Perhaps one day an cloud OS along the lines of what Google are attempting will be the technological norm, but I would still expect Microsoft to use their dominant force to make sure they are at the forefront if and when people are ready for that.

Intel were seriously threatened by AMD a couple of years ago when AMD stole a march on them. For a while AMD processors offered a heck of a lot more bangs per buck than the aging Pentium4 based processors. Intel pulled their socks up and retook the lead with the Core2Duo range and now the Core i5 and i7 ranges though.

So, if SL is seeing a decline, I'd argue it's more of a decline in the same way that Microsoft may have seen a decline in the earlier days of Apple hype. It could even get to a similar point that Intel found themselves in  with a competitor stealing a march on them (although I'm yet to see any evidence of a major competitor to SL coming anywhere close to stealing a march on them!)

The question becomes can LL adpat in the ways that Microsoft and Intel did to bolster their position and maintain their lead. Some would argue (myself included) that LL are attempting to do just that with a number or recent changes. Will they suceed? Only time will tell.

So, while it is quite possible that any company (be they huge like Microsoft and Intel or more modest like LL) may one day lose their market dominance as technology progresses, I would also expect them to do everything in their power to adapt and maintain their position. They might experience downturns along the way but a downturn doesn't necessarily mean a terminal decline (as the Intel case proves - they went from huge dominace to fairly serious decline in the face of progress from AMD, but then completely turned it aorund again to come back stronger than ever).

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i went  to help island today, not much to do so i thought id offer my limited assistance,

i sat in a rocking chair, used my radar, found a 0 days newbie and started up a chat, she had quite a few questions.

her first one was, "why are you sitting in a chair?" i said "you can do that in SL too"

she said "no, you are in the chair, not on it"

i said "oh that happens to me a lot, i look ok to me, its just SL"

hmm she said.

i taught her to open boxes and she redressed, then i tped her to a place for scuba diving for a bit of R&R, by the time she had arrived she was topless and bald, when i told her she said "wierd, i look ok to me" and ran behind some rocks when i showed her a snapshot i had taken.

i never saw her again...

 

 

 

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Ossian wrote:

 

TriJin Bade wrote:

Second Life is....

Community created...

Community driven...

Community maintained...

Community killed.

We only have ourselves to blame if Second Life kicks the bucket from the mortal coil. With any social media development, the "human factor" is paramount. New mediums to serve the fast and furious fashionists then there's Second Life, a slow steady tanking snail that only hardened residents keep alive. So far, what I witness, LL is appearing to go into the fast and furious lane whilst trying to ride a racing snail. It is the community to service that snail with all the turbo it needs to survive.

Just my 3.142 thought provoking cents.
;)

Happy RPin.

 

A business that blames its customers for its failure has failed twice.

(I felt that needed to be said with a bit more ... force.)

 

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WeeWillie Wylie wrote:

have never used voice...don't like voice...don't need voice..let em learn to type and IM properly and create a personality without a voice..I got a phone I want to talk to someone..

Just my 3.145 cents...

and let us all remember the world didn't actually fall apart when they bought in voice...or made the adult continent...or did wind light and raised SL's minimum requirements...or when they messed up the open spaces and homesteads.It was just that a very vocal group told us it would...and yet here we still are. Until the RL economy gets re settled and balanced again stats are not very relevant. The plain and simple fact is...this is about money above and beyond living expenses and RL playing expenses and that amount is low.

 

Dim Sum Garden group banner (750x167).jpg

 

"Fall apart" is a relative term but as your post was written, I'd have to disagree with it.

Voice polarized the community, started witchhunts, started discriminatory practices in which people have been ostracized and barred from places in SL where people have decided that if you don't voice you're not welcome. Petty people who use voice as a crutch have gone out of their way to make "Your World Your Imagination" a farce, and this behavior has cost LL users and diminished the spirit of the place.

The adult continent, the age verification systems, etc. introduced its own form of paranoia and concern about account details, information security, and freedom of expression. The ordeal over child avies also alienated and led to its own witchhunts.

The banning of sploders and capitulation over gambling has cost the SL community some really great clubs. Of the ones I went to that were packed every single time I went there back in '07 and '08, only one remains, and that's GOL, which I've never seen doing the kind of business it once did. Festival Island, Hard Rocks, Phoenix Island, tons of places have left as a result.

It's no coincidence that almost none of the people I knew who were devoted SL residents and business owners in many cases were still here a year later. In some cases even a matter of months and even weeks after these changes went into effect.

You're right. None of these things instantly closed SL down. But SL was on a rocketship to the moon in '07 and post-changes it's dropped off the collective radar. There's no way they're not connected. SL is not FB and will never be FB. That crowd is never going to adopt this interface, with all of its challenges, to do the same things they are already doing with FB sans issues. And as unwieldy and security challenged as FB has become to many of its users, I'm not sure why LL would see that as a bad thing.

There has been a disconnect between the company and the community in terms of priorities for a very long time. The same people who built SL with their unfailing loyalty are maintaining SL now, and those are the long term residents. As long as that realization is not reached by the company, and not only reached but understood and valued, that support structure will continue to erode, and SL will continue to plummet in stature.

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Kascha Matova wrote:


WeeWillie Wylie wrote:

have never used voice...don't like voice...don't need voice..let em learn to type and IM properly and create a personality without a voice..I got a phone I want to talk to someone..

Just my 3.145 cents...

and let us all remember the world didn't actually fall apart when they bought in voice...or made the adult continent...or did wind light and raised SL's minimum requirements...or when they messed up the open spaces and homesteads.It was just that a very vocal group told us it would...and yet here we still are. Until the RL economy gets re settled and balanced again stats are not very relevant. The plain and simple fact is...this is about money above and beyond living expenses and RL playing expenses and that amount is low.

 

Dim Sum Garden group banner (750x167).jpg

 

"Fall apart" is a relative term but as your post was written, I'd have to disagree with it.

Voice polarized the community, started witchhunts, started discriminatory practices in which people have been ostracized and barred from places in SL where people have decided that if you don't voice you're not welcome. Petty people who use voice as a crutch have gone out of their way to make "Your World Your Imagination" a farce, and this behavior has cost LL users and diminished the spirit of the place.



o.O I do not know of any place that demands you use voice or leave. The way I feel about it is if you want to use voice, fine, if not that is fine too. I find that teaching folks about the "how to do it" phase of SL is much easier on voice. Very few folks RTFM let alone notecards. The new Basic Viewer folks do not have an inventory to put these notecards into and text chat is very confusing for someone who is on sensory visual overload. Text chat including IMs requires multi-tasking ... that is tough to do when you are concerned about how to fly and walk:smileywink:

 

 

my tuppence:smileywink:

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Good points have already been made, so no point in repeating them.

The thing I want to point out is this... SL has very limited commercial value. Regardless of what fanboys say, it doesn't run well on a lot of cheap off-the-shelf hardware. It certainly doesn't run on the average business PC. Out of my employers' PC considerable, world-wide PC pool, maybe a handful of PCs will run it. That alone limits SLs use for any kind of commercial use. Then there is the "what for?" question. What can SL do that other tools can't? 3D visualization? Well, maybe with mesh. Collaboration? There's better tools for that. Conferencing and telepresence? There's better tools for that. There _are_ some limited ways that SL can be used, but again, it's too expensive, too buggy and generally there are very often better and more useful tools to get the same benefit.

Phillip Rosedale often likened SL to the next evolution for the Internet. He missed a lot of key points: The Internet is going mobile, and turning to augmented reality, not virtual reality. LL could easily have made SL accessible via cellphones. It's trivial to do, yet no one there seems to see beyond the walls of their crystal palace. That might have broadened the appeal, but I doubt it. It'd only delay the demise.

SL missed the boat long ago. It'll still be around for a while, but in todays world, everything has to be rush-rush, don't pay attention to anything for more than a minute then it gets boring. Multitask with the delusion that it increases productivity. We've raised an ADHD generation. LL lacks vision and direction. Combined, that's more than enough to kill off SL.

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Argus Collingwood wrote:

 

o.O

I do not know of any place that demands you use voice or leave. The way I feel about it is if you want to use voice, fine, if not that is fine too. I find that teaching folks about the "how to do it" phase of SL is much easier on voice. Very few folks RTFM let alone notecards. The new Basic Viewer folks do not have an inventory to put these notecards into and text chat is very confusing for someone who is on sensory visual overload. Text chat including IMs requires multi-tasking ... that is tough to do when you are concerned about how to fly and walk:smileywink:

 

 

my tuppence:smileywink:

They're out there; both voice only venues and so-called "Voice Verified" groups. I've seen their descriptions in Search. Of course I won't mention their names, but they are out there.

Of course, it doesn't really even take a signpost to achieve that effect, does it? Once people not using voice stand around for five minutes while people in a voice activated sim blab on as if nothing is untoward, the same reality is faced. There is suddenly a part of SL that requires either that one voice, or that people who are voicing find them important enough to type for, which is not a universal sentiment at all.

I'm not saying nobody using voice will text in the presence of a non-voice resident. But that the need for such decisions exists suggests that there is room for such decisions or lack thereof to cause problems, which didn't exist before voice.

And then of course there are the people who have faced drama because their true identity doesn't match their avie to the last hair. Where voice has become exactly what I said earlier. A tool with which petty people can be petty and attempt to play Judge and Jury.

The muti-tasking issue doesn't hold water in my opinion because the bulk of the people LL is trying to bring in are people bent on and accustomed to, multitasking. Or else what are FB, party and chat lines, and iPhone and iPad idolatry about? LL isn't marketing voice, or SL in general trying to capture the business of Q-Tips who wish we'd never gone past the abacus because they can't handle more than one task at a time.

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