Gavin Hird

The one you call Pocket MV was renamed to Pocket Metaverse about a year ago, and was the one I was referring to above. There is also another called Sparke, but it has not been updated for quite some time.

Nobody is talking about a full fledged SL experience on a mobile device for now. The point is the get a client by which you can be connected to SL throughout the day to stay in contact with friends, follow business and events, thereby making SL relevant in the same way as people feel they must be connected with Facebook or on twitter all day. Many smart phones have the ability to do a number of rudimentary operations today including IM and chat, payments, inventory, map and teleports, and the PocketMetaverse app on iPhone/iPad is a good example of this. I have only seen a video of the Blue Mars client, but it takes operation a bit further where it renders the avatar in full 3D and you can animate it and dress/undress it. From their original posting they will build on that to be able to render the immediate surroundings and perhaps close by avatars later. The iPad and iPhone can already fully use the SLM via the website, and purchases would be directed to any client you would be logged in with. The problem is that an app such as the current version of Pocketmetaverse cannot render anything, so unless you could receive directly to inventory and unpack without rezzing in-world, you would not be able to enjoy your purchases on such a client. Even such a limited client will be attractive to a wide audience. Remember how much time is spent in SL shopping, composing and dressing/undressing for outfits. Having the barbie doll in you hand so to speak would be the result of such a client. Many would possibly stop there, but others would want to venture into the full experience through a desktop viewer. At least for an iOS device, the app will have to be built from scratch with the iOS SDK in Objective C, but since iOS supports OpenGL and libsecondlife has already been ported, it should be possible to render the avatar and objects without too much tweaking of existing libraries (of course there are limitations on a mobile device.) Also remember all these devices have wi-fi, so bandwidth may not be such an enormous constraint as you think it would be. When connected via 3G or lower, you could fall back to basic operation and cached content.

I thought Blue Mars is now dead. Why is is still being mentioned as some greener type of virtual grass "over there"? I don't think so. They have submitted their first mobile client to Apple for approval and distribution in the App Store. This client will have a potential exposure of around 100 million new customers in 2011 (iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad) in addition to the installed base. Industry estimates are that Apple will sell 55-65 million iPads in 2011, and these are very capable of running such a client BM wants to go in the market with. There is a lot of VC going into the mobile space these days.

... they'd be intentionally trying to destroy the current model, our work, our efforts, investments, and society. The problem is that the current business model is not sustainable for Linden Lab. They will not be able to survive by printing new land like they have done in the past. In addition the burden of the 85k accounts we talked about earlier is too high to be attractive for any large number to enter as a new customer. What they (think they) must do to survive is to change their business model to one that takes a cut out of every visitor indirectly through ads, or directly through reasonably priced subscriptions and commission on sales of virtual goods. I believe some of the changes in the TOS that has been made provides the legal framework to be able to go ahead with the destruction of the current model. Primarily through the change that make them, not you, the ultimate owner of all virtual goods and creations you put on the grid. This in addition to the text on change of service. They can change the service to be whatever they'd like it to be, and makes no guarantees on anything. This is now different from Blue Mars where content creators are the owners.

Interesting post Gavin. I hope you'll be wrong on most counts....but should you be correct, there will surely be a mass exodus out of here! Overnight OS grids will get an influx of disllusioned residents The VCs are currently unhappy with groups of customers standing in the way to acieve their overall business goal; to a make Secondlife available and attractive to a wide, family oriented audience. They would be thrilled if there was an exodus of said groups. These groups are the adult community (Zindra et al), GOR, child avatars and some other fringe groups.

There is a lot of truth in that Gavin. And the game the new CEO is most famously associated with - The Sims Online - made it accessible to a "wide, family oriented audience" There you have it! I left out the merge of the grids to justify phase 2 of the adult thing. The area I believe they are unprepared for is mobile, and they may have been taken by surprise by Blue Mars. They have been absolutely silent on mobile – not technically feasible it has been said. Blue Mars sent their first app to Apple for approval a couple days ago. Without too many bugs, we could see it in the app store in 14 days time.

To suggest they are running around headless without any plan is a bit of a stretch IMHO. I can see the contours of this happening: Business goal is to clean up SecondLife to make it accessible to a wide, family oriented audienceThe phases in reaching that goal – some of which have already transpired, are roughly this: Compliance; get rid of banking and gambling Adult content phase 1 was to establish an adult zone (Zindra + adult sims) and get the most annoying adult content and businesses hidden behind the restriction of account verification. This makes it easy to dump that zone when the time is right Adult content phase 2 is to take control of both web-based and in-world marketing through the acquisition of xStreetSL, a total rewrite to be able to add maturity and adult controls to the site. At he same time market the hell out of the web based marketplace to accustom new residents to do their shopping there and marginalize in-world merchants. The maturity changes we have seen on SLM this week has the overall goal to marginalize and displace adult and certain mature content out of the view of new residents. This makes it easy to dump it later. Linden Homes may be all that a future resident will get in terms of owning land. This will make it very much easier to scale the grid as you can pack a substantial amount of residents on few servers. Develop a new viewer that de-emphasize building. That functionality might even be completely gone in a future standard resident viewer. The rezz from inventory functionality would support this. Introduce mesh as a measure to displace prim based content and establish professional content developers. This will both clean up the grid, but more important make the massive asset store manageable as it will significantly reduce the number of assets required to produce the same type of goods and experience Cut the ties to generation 1.x viewers not by close sourcing the viewer, but by developing functionality that lies outside the viewer in essence; browser based search, browser based profiles, browser based group and chat/IM functionality. This is not easily copied by upcoming competitors as the business logic will reside in the servers and not in the viewer so much any more. Establish a framework for advertising in the viewer primarily to replace the lost business by sims currently rented by residents for building and hosting of unwanted (adult) content. When the above is sufficiently baked, announce a switchover to a new product, and perhaps introduce a new owner. ????! PROFIT – or so they hope

Rachel Darling wrote: ... lose potential sales, because they won't be reaching their target market. I think that is the idea here; to marginalize the adult and some of the mature content in an effort to clean up the grid for opening to a bigger family oriented audience. We saw exactly the same when they moved people to Zindra with secret keywords and issues in the event and classifieds system that took ages to fix (if ever.) That keyword list may still be around somewhere. It used to be on slapt.me, but that site is gone.

If you use the Safari browser, you can use an extension like Incognito that will prevent both Google and Facebook from tracking you. You can also use one of many extensions like Defacer to remove Like buttons and such from pages you visit. I am sure there are similar extensions to other browsers.

Gavin, forgive me, but that is an old, tired, cliche and uninteresting argument. I agree with you in concept, SL is more than just a game... but I have to question: are you here to debate and argue over semantics... or are you interested in the actual points being made? I don't know about the others here, but I'm not here to argue just for the sake of arguing. I'm focusing on the issues at hand, namely: is Second Life doing as well as Linden Lab PR is trying to present? How does whether or not SL is a "game" apply to that concept in any way? How does that have anything to do with the questionable stats listed in this blog? It has everything to do with the poor performance this place has compared to other "games". Why? Every time it is repeated in the public or by residents that SecondLife is a game, it sets expectations for new signups that can never be met. They walk in to Welcome Island and expect to find action and suspense like they do in other games out there, or on their consoles. They find nothing of the sorts and walk out the door within the next hour never to come back, telling their mates – if they even speak about it, how lame and boring the game SecondLife is. I can't give you a good answer what SecondLife exactly is. I came here some years ago with virtually no expectations, but something hit a nerve. I think I was struck by the creativity and general friendliness of folks around here. A fascination of what, at the time, seemed like an unregulated frontier where anything could happen. It is not like that any more. We have a mother company that has started to compete with its customers and the folks who made this place come alive. A company who needs to skew the numbers and remove stats. A company that is so – I don't know – perhaps desperate it will sell our profiles out for ad space. A company that in just about every communication with their customers points them to Facebook, the biggest competitor for their customers time! Hey, what the heck will a new signup think – perhaps even coming in from Facebook, when the first thing he sees on the login screen is "meet us on Facebook". Chances are pretty high he will turn back to where he came from. Within the next few minutes. It sure ain't no game around here any more.

A computer game has a programmed start, some pathways through the game and a few fixed endings depending on the path taken. SecondLife has no such thing and cannot be classified as a game.

According to gridsurvey.com there are a total of 32444 Linden homes. I think they put 48 of them on a sim, so that should make 675 sims. Each home takes 1024 sq m so there could be 64 on them on a sim, but I don't believe I have seen any sim that dense. If that was the case it would be about 507 sims. They would have to be dispersed throughout where they could find space for the homes.

If so, they charge a durn high fee for server space. Linden Lab is an entertainment industry company Ummm, actually no. They don't provide any entertainment. They provide sim hosting in addition to SAAS for both the server and client software. Apart from that they don't provide any content but some starter kit found in the Library. So they are not an entertainment company. You can liken it to Apple and the App Store. Apple provides a hardware platform (iPod Touch / iPhone / iPad), a client in the form of iOS running on the hardware, in addition to the iOS SDK which to a certain extent is similar to the building tools provided in SL. The majority of the Apps in the App Store are provided by third party content developers, consumed by customers in the store. Apple is not an entertainment company. Linden Lab is not an entertainment company. If they try to evolve to become an entertainment company, it will be at the expense of all resident developed content and experiences, and they will never be able to replace it - the cost would be astronomical. This is true for both Apple and Linden Lab.

Very true Prok that LL is in the server space lease business with SAAS on top of it. What we have seen, however, over the last 2 years is that Linden more and more encroach into what used to be resident territory and this creates a lot of friction as residents have increasing problems sustaining their business model and that undermines Linden Lab's. SLM, Linden Homes are just two examples, and the latest wholesale of the profiles for ad space is contentious to say it the least. Frankly, I believe Linden lab would do better as a pure play SAAS catering to businesses that want to create virtual world experiences – experiences that could be tailored to themes, interest groups and adapted to local legislation. In such a scenario the ability to wander between grids and inventory portability is important for the overall environment and experience. In this way, Linden Lab could get out of the business of trying to play big brother, sweet mother, dictator and judge; all of which they hardly master at all. They need to get out of governance, and start to be a focused business with the grid software and a tailorable viewer as their core. SecondLife; the world could be spun off as an own entity separate from SecondLife; the infrastructure. To the comment about servers idling, you are correct, they can't take the mainland sims offline without creating gaping holes in the landscape. Hence, it is better to utilize that space and place things like the Linden Homes in the existing landscape, after which they would free up server capacity.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Gavin.Hird wrote: The logical thing to do would be to send the list to the email address of all registered merchants, in addition to post it in the wiki. It is not like 16 yos have never seen such words before if they stumbled over the wiki page... Pardon my interruption here but .. can you imagine the outcry that would occur if only ONE email got sent to a minor? "Yup, good old Linden Lab. Sending email laced with rude, offensive and disgusting language .. to MINORS .. via email." Can we say "Witch Hunt"? Maybe "Rioting Villagers with Torches and Pitchforks"? You can choose between that and mass exodus of merchants when this fully dawns on them. As we have discussed in the 4Q economy blog thread: "...if LL expects a monthly contribution of $470 from each of these few accounts (85k) to make their business model work, they must do everything they can to support OUR business model so we can make payments. If not their business model will collapse faster than they can remake it into something else."

Marx Dudek wrote: Gavin.Hird wrote: Will these guidelines be detailed enough to also apply to goods sold in-world? I mean there is no point i locking them out of the marketplace if they can purchase the "forbidden fruits" in-world. There's a marked difference between a sale taking place on SLM and a sale taking place inworld - SL is not a direct intermediary in the sale. The same restrictions will apply - technically. Will Lindens be actively policing the G mainland for adult products for sale? No. Further, will this keep a TG resident with a MG alt from buying a transferable adult product and transfering it to their TG account? Nope - because inworld objects do not have any kind of rating flag. Even if a content-rating flag could be added to objects/textures/snapshots by their creators, it would not cover anything made prior to that point by creators who are no longer on the grid. Nor could it be protected against circumvention on copybotted items. With no personal judgement made against Linden Lab, this is a "due diligence" action on their part to protect the company as much as possible. Yes, I understand that, but I am not sure that will hold any more now that they are going to the lengths of publishing profiles, groups and classifieds unfiltered on the net.

Suella Ember wrote: Having said that, it would be handy if LL could somehow find a way to publish the list in a location ... The logical thing to do would be to send the list to the email address of all registered merchants, in addition to post it in the wiki. It is not like 16 yos have never seen such words before if they stumbled over the wiki page... Message was edited by: Gavin.Hird We cannot have a repeat of the situation we had when people had to move to Zindra, and would have to go through daily guesswork on what was acceptable in classified, event and land descriptions and whatnot.

Thanks Wayfinder and Rene ... and my main point (buried in the above) is that if LL expects a monthly contribution of $470 from each of these few accounts (85k) to make their business model work, they must do everything they can to support OUR business model so we can make payments. If not their business model will collapse faster than they can remake it into something else.

Rene, Linden Lab does ONLY take payment for land from land-owners. These land owners can be full sim owners - being estate or mainland. They can be parcel owners on mainland sims, and they can be premium account holders who don't have any land holding. There are about 85k such people. How the money flows to these 85k people does not have any bearing on Linden lab. They all come - ultimately from external sources flowing via these 85k people to Linden Lab. The money these 85k people pay to Linden Lab on a monthly basis is a mix of subscription fees and setup fees (for new land purchases - not resold resident owned land.) These 85k people pay each, on a monthly basis about $470 amounting to 40 MUSD per month or closer to 480 MUSD per year.

"All the above I call TIER - paid for by "premium account holders". <-----Wrong you don't need to be a premiun account holder to own Estate sims......it only applies to Mainland & Linden Homes. You understand the meaning of quotes, right? Let me use another word rather than tier; subscription fee So one of the revenue streams are subscription fees, paid for by subscribers on a monthly basis. The other revenue stream is land sales and the requirement for being able to purchase land is that you accept to pay a subscription fee in addition to a setup fee (the land purchase of sims and recycled abandoned land.) The subscribers must, through setup fees and subscription fees, contribute 40 MUSD per month to keep LL float.

Rene, you are just being bone-headed about this ALL land owners - whether they are SIM or mainland holders pay a monthly fee, $295 for a sim, $125 for a homestead, $195 for a full mainland sim. In addition there are some premium account holders who pay the monthly fee ($9.95 less discounts and stipend) that possibly don't hold any land, but that fee gives them the right to "own" 512 sq.m for "free". It is for all practical purposes a tier. All the above I call TIER - paid for by "premium account holders". There are approximately 85k people who fall into this category. It is one of two big revenue streams for Linden Lab. The other major revenue stream is sale of fresh sims and recycled abandoned land. In the calculation that was set up last year, it was estimated that all these 85k people must contribute, on an average - through tier and land purchases, $470 per month each to keep Linden Lab floating. That is about 40 MUSD per month, or 479 MUSD per year, which is reasonably consistent with the estimate of the overall revenue generated by LL in 2009. The main point here is that these 85k people carry the annual burden of about 475 MUSD to keep LL and SL as we know it floating. Anything Linden Lab gives out for free, still comes out of the pocket of these people.

If it does not come from the premium account holders, where do you think it comes from? Linden Labs two main sources of income are land sales and tier. The rest is just pocket change. Who pays for the land they sell? Premium accounts. Who pays tier? Premium accounts. If you can take the servers being utilized for the Linden homes out of service and put these parcels on idle mainland, there are net saving in the datacenter, on server lease, network bandwidth and system admin cost. Savings that can be put into marketing, or development. In addition you would most likely contribute to increase the value of the surrounding land since people would be there, which again could be the base of a hangout, a bar, a club, a mall, more attractive homes, what have you. This again would result in more land being paid tier for. Donating 300 sims to a select group of accounts only gives those accounts free marketing and push the cost of the 300 sims (tier) over on the remaining premium accounts who pay for their land in addition to all idle and free sims. Those accounts would possibly lower their own landholdings too, resulting in even less tier being paid.

Well, they have the sims, but they don't have the staff to develop them on their own. That is where the overhead will come from when you say LL should develop. 200-300 sims donated does not come out of the pockets of Linden lab, but of all the premium account holders. So no, they should not give them away. To reduce the number of sims, they could merge the Linden homes into the current mainland. That would create new opportunities for everyone and get mainland more crowded. Yes, there is overhead in doing that job, but it might be worth the dollars as it would upgrade the neighborhoods and make it possible for small communities to flourish.

If you don't see it yourself type "site:my.secondlife.com group" into google searh or "site:my.secondlife.com resident" or "site:my.secondlife.com picks" to see what google has indexed for others.

Instead Linden Lab could invest and develop in mini-Continents as public areas.....an Arts continent (That was actually a good suggestion by M.Linden), Gaming & Entertainment (non-commercial, but free activity) continent.....a continent that houses some of the best ever SL Sim builds like the Nemo Trilogy or Rezzables or whatever (again non-commercial). I disagree that Linden Lab should develop. Why? Because in doing so they would have to add significant overhead to their own staff either salaried or consultants both for the content creation, management and support. What they need to do is cut the red tape, get out of the way and make it easy for content providers to develop also mainland. That will get their revenue flowing. In reverting back to be a platform provider - and being a great one at that, and let the residents develop their offerings, their content, their fantasies and worlds on top of it, I believe LL will have a much bigger chance of long term success. They could even (gasp) license out the platform to people who would build worlds with other TOS and adapted to other localities and jurisdictions than CA law. In addition they need to move into the mobile space urgently and with vigor.