Where Are You in This Picture? The SL Grid

If you went to Virtual Worlds 08, you would see something you wouldn't have seen at VW07: a booth from Linden Lab. At the very first VW07 in New York, Philip Rosedale was the keynoter, talking mainly somewhat incoherently about his childhood science inventions and physicists he loved and gazing at this thing he made and suddenly realize there were *people* on it -- then rushing off to Renaissance Weekend with Bill Clinton. SL didn't have a booth then because in May 2006, they were at the peak of the hype cycle, with a gadzillion news articles about LL, and if anything, a fear that people might be starting to hate them (I think Shirky had started bitching about the fake numbers by then, and there was back-biting all over). They didn't want to "over-expose" with a booth, apparently, and they let There.com and the Electric Sheep take the honours for publicity and deals.

Then at VW07 in San Jose, SL was again, everywhere yet nowhere -- Philip materialized on the expo floor one morning but didn't speak from the podium; there was no booth, and when asked, the Lindens said they preferred to let their customers like the Sheep -- who used their platform -- shine on their own. Anthony Zucker said a million people would burn up the servers, and threw candy at everybody; today, 4,000 detectives still return -- a lot by our lights, but not by the lights of TV Land.

So here we all are. There are dozens of new worlds competing with SL, Forseti is bitching about SL not meeting the grade, and implying that "all the MDCs" have left for greener pastures like the Sheep...except we can't see them. If the answer is "Virtual Lower East Side" or something, well, I don't get it. I'm waiting to see what they come up with in Metaplace or Multiverse or whatever Metas they are in. And speaking of Multiverse, here's how the Lindens conceive of the SL Grid concept: as including Multiverse.

THE HOOK-UP

How, you say?

Well, let's say that there's this big grid thing, where you can hook up your own server to the Linden SL Grid thing. If you are on Multiverse, and some day you chose to hook up to the SL Grid, you will be part of the SL Grid -- as it was explained to me by a Linden.

That sounds preposterous, of course, to the outsider, as it sounds like the Lindens are capturing under their flag anybody who so much as downloads their software or something. When there are bridges between platforms, there will be...some other thing. THAT will be the Metaverse, no? The connections...the spaces between the grids...the asset servers...right?

If Multiverse latches Second Life on to *its* Mother Ship, maybe Second Life then becomes part of the Multiverse Grid?!

Of course, we understand the Lindens have raced off to trademark the very term "Grid". I wonder if things like Con Edison, that has an electrical grid for New York City, etc. will be able to use the term lol. But of course in the context of virtual worlds, maybe they can pull this off.

WHERE ARE YOU?!

But here's the point: If you visited the SL Grid booth, you saw a big placard, a picture of that Linden money-green sea, with little islands and dots and the saying, "Where are You in This Picture?" You could pick up a little brochure, that for all the world, looked like those sort of good hygiene pamplets we used to get in school with titles like "The Miracle of Nature and You" or perhaps a handy reminder for those wishing to pray ALL the Mysteries of the Rosary, but finding themselves bogging down when they got to the Luminous. Or perhaps, one of those pamphlets on Malcolm X or Coca Cola Kills! in the back of some lefty bookstore on the Lower East Side.

So, the slogans for the WHERE ARE YOU IN THIS PICTURE are things like "all-staff meeting" or "mentoring powwow" or "proto-typing lab" or "college class" or "remote watercooler gathering" or "technical seminar".

The slogan is YOUR WORLD, YOUR WAY. Note the difference from that...other thing, you know, that connoted wings and soaring.

What's NOT on this picture is, oh, things like "Furry Gathering in the Forest" or "Live Music Concert With Frogg & Jaycatt" or "Simone's" or "Ravenglass Rentals" or even stuff like "Fuck You All Leave Me Alone" which some people actually write on their land description lol. In other words, that stuff that many people think of as "the community" or "the bunch of communities of different kinds" whether Ilha Brasil or the Miss Ebony Beauty Contest or the Elbow Room -- not to mention Hard Alley. That's just it. There can't be any Hard Alley on this picture.

What's puzzling about this concept is that at first, when you realize it's just about corporate or educational use, you wonder where they "put" the other stuff. Whether they intend to make it fit -- if at all. It's not on the map. In fact, you begin to feel that "The Mainland" or "All these people on here now", if they aren't having an HR seminar or prototyping a product or pow-wowing with the other mentor chiefs are...nowhere. Non-existent. Invisible. You wonder if any of them ever sneak out and buy a dress!

WHO LEVELED UP TO GRID STATUS

Then it gets more puzzling when you see what is booked to this concept called Grid that we used to think *was* part of the world -- and now is something -- higher. For example Keystone Bouchard is shown in this prayer pamphlet as "using the Second Life Grid". I thought he just used Second Life, on his island, but it turns out that if you are special, if you merge real life and simulated life, if you have Real Life Clients, than you are "on the Grid".

You are either on the bus or off the bus.

Another entity that is "on the Grid" but not "in the world" is Intel. Of course, when I went to that Intel thing and planted a sunflower, I thought I was "still in the world". I didn't realize I had made a raid "to the Grid". You would think that if Intel attracted "as many as 50 avatars each week" for its developer classes (maybe that's all they could fit, not sure), then, well, those 50 people had to come from somewhere, and that place is "Second Life, the world". But maybe they just drop down off the Internet, and never set foot anywhere outside of that sim with the class in it, so they are Gridified.

The brochure contains yet some more Grid customers for LL are careerbuilder.com, and another business called AHG Training Simulations with this address: http://second-life-e-learning.ahg.com/second_life_simulations.htm Now...I wonder if you level up to the grid, whether all that "inSL" jazz applies to you, and you have to junk your use of the term "Second Life"? Apparently they are still doing fine with this address which is active.

60 PERCENT ARE CONSUMERS

I caught up with Glen Linden who was standing behind the counter of the SL Grid booth, for all the world looking like the manager of an old-fashioned General Store with his twinkling eyes and mustache, and I peppered him with questions, looking in vain for a cracker barrel (MOU was the only booth that had decent candy bars -- Mounds). I had heard that as much as 1/3 of the grid now was all corporations, keeping in mind that the "MDCs" hold sims for their customers. I didn't find that credible. He didn't confirm it. He said that *now* in this quarter apparently, 40 percent of sales are to corporations, but historically, that couldn't be said. I kept probing on this, and basically he said that 40 percent of the ownership is combined between corporations and educational institutions (and other non-profits), and 60 percent of the ownership is still consumer. These "consumers" include inworld businesses, of course.

I asked him pointedly if the goal of the Grid was basically to close down the original world and mainland as being in the way. Of course he's not going to tell me that's it's goal, but he gave one of those genuine and sincere pitches about how consumers still dominate the purchases and that's who is served, and the mainland is a core component, but...I couldn't see where it was drawn on this SL Grid picture. They better draw it.

PREMIUM ACCOUNTS DROP

The number of premium accounts actually dropped from January to February, from 92,096 to 91,531. That little-seen number (you have to go into the raw data on the economics page to see it) more than anything could have inspired this big firesaling of the sims. It's the first drop ever in LL's history, and in part it's because of the billing snafus that they just can't seem to fix (I let one of my premium alt accounts go because of that insanity -- others let go of mains and completely tier down or move out).

On the other hand, they sold 882 islands in March -- 882 islands that well, aren't worth what they were.

My favourite indicator to watch is "number who spent $1 in world" -- that's 348,772. It's not gone up by much, in other words. There might be greater concurrency, but there are less buys and less spends.

And that's why at a certain point, the economy has to cease to matter greatly to Linden Lab, and they have to look at their own economy exclusively, which will consist of a corporate-level accounts.

CORPORATE ACCOUNTS?

I pestered Glen, as others have pestered him who have a lot more money to spend and employees to deploy, about the corporate-level account. He implied that it was coming, being discussed, being worked out, but didn't have a deployment date. Next quarter?

I asked him, as others did, whether the rumours of a special "enterprise edition" or "separate grid completely" (not the IBM firewall thing) were true. Curiously, the "enterprise edition" story is something that educators at Ohio State University in Athens speak very clearly and frankly about, as if there is no secret, and no possibly controversy (the university has a grant from the Dept. of Labour to teach game design and study virtual worlds). It's an edition that will stuff like "no nakies" for corporate use. This isn't just a browser, but a different version of SL. Yet LL won't confirm this, so I leave it as speculation that everyone can go on chewing on forever, until long past its relevance.

THE SMALLNESS OF SMALL BUSINESS

The number of inworld business owners has steadily increased (I don't know if this figure actually ends up counting outworld businesses who still somehow collect micropayments -- I think not). There are 31,082 who make more than US $10/month. And...just 165 who make over $5000. And 367 who make between $2000-5000.

Of course, this is BEFORE tier and before other expenses like payroll, contractors, furniture, etc. The number of people who make US $100-500 is more large -- 2,093. That's a number where you can really start to show a point to a business, if it really enhances lots more people's lives by enabling either to break even on larger scale creative projects or it enables them to make their gas or tuition or phone bill payments in a month.

However, there's something obvious about all this, even with the Lindens hyping all over the idea that "a thousand people make over $1000 a month" (technically true). It's not a business model. For them. It means that the $1 million that they make per month off the top producers (and the rest of the $1-2 more million from the rest) -- most of which goes to tier payments or expenses or just play money -- winds up with LL. A million, 3 million -- you cannot run SL's servers on only such a million-three a month in revenue. Not enough people could get in business at high enough level, for a sustained enough number of purchases, to justify a world, an economy, inworld business, as something they should bother with.

That's sad, of course, because I'm sure others agree with me that over time, this could be built upon and enlarged in all kinds of way -- and it has never been consciously supported. As much as you love yourself and your friends as inworld businesses, and as much as LL points to this as some kind of cool thing when it needs to, obviously, it is not part of their business model. It didn't emerge at enough scale for them. You could say they failed us, or we failed them, but there it is: there isn't enough revenue generated by inworld small business to justify doing a thing except perhaps mercy-killing it. Discuss.

SL VIEW

I had a chance to sit down and talk with Robin Linden for awhile at VW07. She didn't seem to have any agenda for me -- she had asked to talk to me, and I figured that my long-awaited deal to become either Prokofy Linden, or to collect US $100,000 in exchange for putting my land to sale and leaving SL and ceasing my blog was AT LAST coming to pass lol!

However, I was to be disappointed, as Robin didn't have an awful lot new to say and was just kind of making a courtesy call. One of my conditions for ceasing to be "done" with the Lindens, and engaging them again and coming to their office hours with the fanboyz, etc. was to be unbanned from the forums. We discussed the "forums facelift". She basically reiterated what was already on the blog. I urged her not to make a case-by-case review of each person, deciding with discretionary powers who should come back or not, but to make a blanket amnesty. I also urged LL to decouple the "forums ban=world ban" thing, and urged Robin to read Desmond's post with suggestions. And I urged that volunteers not be used.

She didn't provide assurances on the way the bans will be handled as this is still being worked out -- first hiring the full-time communications person (who, it turns out, is NOT Katt Kongo, but someone named Katt in real life who is not any big player in SL as a resident, apparently), then fixing up the software which is busted, then working out the rules of the road. Not sure when this can be expected. She also explained that the list of volunteers were merely thanked -- but sent on their way. They will not be back to be resmods. Not sure how one Linden, even full-time benefited office staff (something I always urged) will cope, but you know, it's not the big deal so many think it is.

Of course, in a world where IBM hooks up its own servers behind firewalls, and Intel has dev meetings and all kinds of other Gridstuff, what happens on the forums must seem like pretty small beer. Still, I pressed on.

One very, very crucial element of moderation is not to be morally equivalent, ambiguous, or tentative about identifying problems. Time and again, Lindens or resmods will come in and say "let's be nice now" or "let's not make attacks," when what is happening is that ONE PERSON is making the attack, and needs to be called on it, promptly, and firmly. "Joe Avatar, you are making personal insults and I'll ask you to stop please".

Naming the problem is really very important to curbing that person -- it's precisely when such people don't adhere to the original TOS; don't think that blanket statements ever apply to them; and keep on being abusive; that I, and others, in the absence of justice, will take justice into our own hands and *fight back*. Few recall that in addition to having my RL information outed on the forums, I was falsely accused of plagiarism in a real-life job (it was a case of mistaken identity that grew out of a similar name found in a Google witch-hunt). You can be goddamn sure that in the absence of Lindens lifting a finger to stop people doing shit like that to me, and banning me for telling off Cristiano merely by reciting back to him what Lindens themselves had said, that I sure as hell would come back on an alt and defend my good name. If they fail to protect people and uphold the rule of law, if they cannot curb the abusers, if they cannot recognize the difference between critical assessments of bad actors and "personal attacks," then I'm happy to help educate them, even at the price of banning.

I also cranked about how the ad policy was only a partial success, as the ad extortionists weren't removed, but in fact blessed if they merely took the price off their land, and allowed to come back bigger and badder and to stalk me as well. Unacceptable!

I complained about the DPW competing with their own customers with this 1950s Chicago theme thing, and criticized the failure to do the obvious thing first, which was to repair the roads and infrastructure. Robin seemed genuinely surprised to hear this, as if in fact only roads was what it was supposed to do. And indeed, it's on their menu, just not the first priority.

I could see from a lack of traction I was getting on these last 2 issues that Robin is simply not the person to go to with these issues anymore. I thought that she maintained some sort of oversight over Jack and Cyn and their staff, even though now Cyn has the title "VP of Customer Relations". I've exchanged emails exactly once in my entire 3 years in SL with Cyn. People love Cyn to death because they...are island owners, and she gets their island transferred to them and troubleshoots, so they have no reason to be unhappy. Jack is approachable and affable and has always tried to address problems, but ultimately, this entire DPW and ad policy stuff comes from him, he is not accepting any requests to change anything about it (only under pressure I guess he opened up the employment list) and that's that. There's just no more point in trying to raise it with him. That's why I'm "done".

FAILURE TO ENCOURAGE INWORLD BUSINESS

I tried another topic on Robin, which was the failure to encourage inworld business. Who is the Linden who is supposed to do this? Everett, she replied, since he's the community Linden or person on the customer relations team that deals with inworld groups. I just looked at her. One can try going to Everett's office hours, of course. But their idea of community is one that really doesn't encompass a serious support of inworld business.

I then endeavoured to explain that outworld business had the developers' groups, Glen Linden, etc. and even special licensings. The sort of stuff Nobody is griping about now as it is not being made available to him.

But strictly inworld businesses are not supported, let alone feted. Instead, they are wacked. Long ago, it was the end to dwell, the end to events and education payouts, the dwellopers' awards -- of course these had to go.

Then it was telehubs, GOMing the GOM, $1000 auctions, casinos, banks, the threat of age verification that didn't materialize (I changed over one entire sim to accommodate that new system, got some customers to comply, but then it was so buggy I lost others and just finally undid the entire adult checkoff thing as it wasn't being required that I could tell and not working). Then it was VAT. Then the trademark thing. Now the land crash and slash of prices. It's as if the golden goose that lays the egg of tier payments constantly has to be slaughtered, and miraculously, it limps back.

Gridniks get an entire grid with promised corporate account status and enterprise versions and special effects like firewalls! That's as it should be (if they will pay more). Scripters get a MacPro prize if they are extra unctuous policing the JIRA; opensourceniks get Architectural Working Group and facetime with Lindens. And here I was, with my 40 minutes of face-time lol -- but...what does it get me but a lousy Free Prok T-shirt lol? I did my best to raise broader, universal issues, and issues of governance but with a sense that it really isn't going to be accommodated.

So how to promote inworld business, instead of constantly hacking and slashing away at it and pruning it back, even as it is *the engine of SL's growth, and the engine of their revenue generation for this current business model*.

It LL is profitable, it's because we don't bill our hours.

BUSINESS COUNCIL?

So. At the very least, I suggested that LL make some sort of Business Council or Chamber of Commerce, although I was aware of all kinds of hideous past efforts that I myself roundly denounced -- council would be better than chamber. Business Improvement District. Some kind of roundtable, expo, something -- a communications vehicle with the same status as AWG or SL Views. Why do script kiddies and IBM suits get to decide whether we have permissions, currency, land markets in the next world after open source???!!!! why don't we get to be part of this decision-making when we pay for it? Why couldn't we be mapping out a road-map just as heeded, just as politically relevant, a whatever the AWG freaks come up with?!

I'm told that LL is in fact helping promote inworld business by the INSL trademark (sigh) and lame thing whereby yet again, people are supposed to put out freebies for newbies (sigh), and perhaps get away with a landmark to their shop on the help islands or the main concierge office or whatever. But that just doesn't cut it. There has to be more acknowledgement and more respect and recognition than that.

How do you make people share power in decision-making when you pay their bills? In a population that won't boycott? I think the short answer is: you don't. It's very discouraging.

LL's website endlessly shows shoppers -- but who makes the stuff that the people are shopping for?! Inworld businesses, either sole proprietorships or virtual companies. Of course the land business, about which LL is ambiguous to say the least, is very much a part of this. Even taking out the land business from their numbers (which is despicable), the rentals business is still reflected (AFAIK).

Of course, if the Lindens acknowledge inworld business as being the source of their revenue and the caretaker of the customers they don't take care of, that would mean they'd have to keep an economy and a world. And they don't want that, long-term.

'THANKFULLY, THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A MAINLAND'--JACK LINDEN

Nowhere on this HERE BE MONSTERS SL Grid do I see even a small patch, "Ye Olde Mainlande"; indeed, the old mainland, the remainder of private islands that are left after the land price slash, and are left after a possible new host-your-own drive, will be out of sight, out of mind underneath the grid.

Eventually, it's my estimate that LL will ask one of the big power users of Open Sim or whatever grid-level customer they find appropriate to do this, to take over the management of the mainland, as LL converts from heavy customer service to the 60,000 online at any time, at least 1 percent of whom demand service (and probably more like 10-20), to grid-level support of some other companies that will take care of those 60,000.

The fact that most of those 60,000 who bother to keep coming back for 60 or 90 days are in rentals; that you already have inworld businesses providing content and land and activities for them, isn't something that LL seems very impressed with.

I wonder why.

The mainland, the non-host-your-own islands, it sees mainly as a threat, or a challenge, and not an opportunity. A source of lawsuits and media embarassment.

WHO GOT THE SIGN-UPS?

Gwyn and others complaining about the trademarking deal, saying that all these years, SL blogs made LL's reputation and helped them catapault to international fame.

Well, no. That's about as fake an understanding of the situation as you can imagine. The old dead tree and slow electron media did that for LL, not the new Internet social media sort of blogosphere. Only a handful of blogs have anything but a few hundred readers in niche groups who mainly bitch about SL. The Herald, with thousands of hits a day, the most associated with SL if you search on that term, other than LL, spends a lot of time either mining the depths of depravity or banging on LL for imagined sins. I hardly think you can credit the Herald or the whiney Vint Falken or even Tateru Nino for selling sims and sign-ups.

Gwyn may have sold a sim or too off her blog, which is heavily pro-Linden and she knows what the Lindens are going to do 5 minutes before they know it themselves, and often plants the idea in their head! But Gwyn cannot account for 12 million sign-ups. Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Time, Der Spiegel, etc. are what accounted for those sign-ups, like it or not.

WHY INWORLD BUSINESS DOESN'T MATTER

Looked at starkly, the Lindens don't have a lot of reason to go chasing after the 2,004 people who make more than US $500 a month from SL *before tier* -- the 367 who make more than US $2000 or the 165 who make more than US $5000. Do you see where I'm going with this? Those people -- I'm one of them -- doesn't do anything that fabulous for them. They are only part of the 60 percent of the consumer class paying the bottom line. They are an important 10-25 percent of the concurrent log-ons, of course, in that they take care of others and give them something to do, but in the arcade of Second Life, on the boulevard of dreams, they are just some of the stalls, some of the concessions, not even all the rides, and probably a sector that the Lindens would like to diminish, if not phase out.

Of course, one way you get a sluggish and reluctant game god to do stuff is, instead of propitiating them endlessly with prostrations and lavish praises in office hours, is to organize and present lists of demands. That's not likely to ever happen with the SL crowd, not only because they are contentious, but because the are split for every good and valid reasons: some of them make their bread and butter in scripting or aspire to grow from being small-time consultants to bigger solutions providers and they can only favour a non-economy, non-land, non-business class approach to SL and curry favour with the Lindens to level up to the Grid.

Those who remain who do want micropayments, content, land and concessions from Lindens instead of to them, well, they have never succeeded in getting their attention in all this time. Maybe it's because when they do try to show their muscle, not in concert, for whatever interest grabs them, they do it as a grandstand, like Bragg, over issues that are important in the abstract but ultimately settled out of court; or they do it as part of the sex industry, which also gets a modest settlement out of court -- and bad press for SL, in that it shows it to be a den of iniquity and a place where flying penises might emerge.

NOT LATTE BUT SLURPEE

Why can't business do better and attract more loving-kindness and investment of concern and care from the Lindens, propelling it to its own separate grid-level status of sorts?

Well, again, look at the numbers. Remember that paltry number of only 358,000 people who spend more than a dollar? 119,205 of them are in the $1-500 sector. That means almost half the people in SL who bother to log on can't or won't spend more than US $1.82 a month on Second Life. . These aren't latte liberals who can spend $3.72 on a venti soy mocha latte, but gun-toters getting a Slurpee at the 7/11.

Yes. Burn it in, people. Most people in SL are unwilling to spend even what they spend on a latte at Starbucks in SL, even if they earn salaries higher than Linden programmers.

Can't -- or won't -- spend more than $1.82 a month. No wonder business can't grow. What kind of business could make itself a profit even on 4096 m2 of land with $25 US tier a month if it has customers not willing to spend a grand total of $1.82 a month?!

FREETARDS

There are reasons for this, of course. One is the culture of overdeployment of freebies -- the culture of early adapter opensourcenik freetards who want everything to be free and loathe commerce, especially other people's. That's been a big crippler for the economy. Various aggressive opensource operations that want to undercut the commodities market of SL with their own widely publicized freebies, whether Clever Zebra or even New Media Consortium (although they claim they aren't competition) are part of the problem when you multiple them by the 100s of entities like them giving away gadzillion things for free.

Another is the problem you can see reflected here in my poll at the Voting Lodge:

WHY ARE YOU TAKING MONEY FROM THIS MONEY TREE?

17 votes: Poor in Real Life
8 votes: Partner Won't Let Me Spend on Games
4 votes: Don't Know How to Get L$
6 votes: Fear Using My Credit Card to Buy L$
24 votes: Just Need a Boost to Start
4 votes: I'm an Alt-Scammer

CASH FLOW?

So, accordingly, given how many votes still involve not knowing how to get money, fearing credit cards, or fearing a partner's wrath, the Lindens, as part of an economic stimulus package that helps inworld business and not just their outworld business, could have merchants give out vouchers to get Lindens. Of course, any kind of game code thing like this could be hacked or gamed, I realize, but it bears reflection. How to get people to buy more $500 packs of Lindens for $1.82 US, when a credit card company many not accept that charge or if it does, makes it more expensive to put it on there and keep it on there than it is worth? And...I can just hear the howling now. Economic stimulus packages for people who make $1000 US off this thing, when they only spend $10, not make $10?! Etc. Corporate welfare! Shock! see, SL is such a good petri dish to try to understand how things work...

Perhaps the Lindens need to make US $3.65 or US $5.00 shopper accounts without tier in them? But the billing and maintenance of such smaller amounts may not be justified. Drug-stores now sell phone time cards for only $5 or Amex prepaid cards for $10, and if LL accepted those, that would be progress. I don't have a quick way of solving this beyond the existing recipe of the premium account, which I think probably the Lindens have simply decided not to bother promoting anymore (occasionally they talk in office hours about having new ideas for premiums like putting in houses or skins, but haven't heard that lately).

To be honest, I don't have a lot of good ideas. I know that economies and private property right and content permissions are all important features of a free world and an open society. I will go on fighting for them, of course. Those who make boatloads more from their businesses may wish to fight even more strategically in some fashion, but the fact is, some of them are going to bail now due to the land crash.

There's also the much larger strategic question of whether virtual worlds and Second Life in particular is really the place to make the stand against the coming totalitarian prospects of "the singularity" or whether social media, which has many more millions of people affected by the same bad policies, would be a better place to spend time and effort.

Comments

[Gus]

Are you sure it's Ohio State that you're hearing from? Ohio University in Athens (as opposed to OSU, which is in Columbus) is the one with the US Government grant to work in virtual worlds/SL. You might want to double check on that.

[Prokofy Neva]

Hehe right! My grandfather was a graduate of Ohio State : )

I'll make the correction, and thanks for the confirmation!

[Yumi Murakami]

I think the really interesting bit is the people who only took money from the money tree because "they needed a boost to start".

That gives you a clue as to what the real problem is, which is that what people want is progress and improvement. Buying L$ doesn't provide that - you buy a certain amount of L$ and then you spend it on things and then you are done. Progress, apparantly, is cheap and instant if you pay and non-existant if you don't. But why do people play WoW day in, day out, all the time? It's because they know that when they go to bed that night, they're a slightly better warrior/wizard/whatever than they were when they started the game session. SL doesn't have that. And we all know that virtual worlds are escapist, well, that's an aspect of the real world that people want to escape - that most things are static, or if they can change, they can change for the worse too.

[Ric Mollor]

The fact that very few players spend appreciable amounts of RL currency in SL is an issue that will eventually have to be addressed. As you noted, Second Life is moving towards 'freebie saturation'. This saturation will slowly spell the end of in-world businesses and perhaps finally catch the attention of the Linden Labs when it does.

The economy of Second Life is flawed (perhaps fatally) by the lack of object decay, a seemingly limitless inventory, and zero cost of production. Given these conditions it's an inescapable eventuality that the growing abundance of free items will one day satisfy the majority of users.

And it's certainly not a random coincidence that a world that offers unlimited free item storage is also vexed with inventory server problems. Is there _any_ limit to personal inventory? I've spoken to many users that had over 100,000 items and were spending their time shopping for more when I interviewed them.

I'm not aware of the percentage of Second Life land that is occupied by malls, stores, and sales booths but it seems to be a considerable amount. What will happen to the land market as those businesses continue closing and put their holdings on the market?

[Stroker Serpentine]

Was this slogan actually a part of LL's media at VW '07?

"The slogan is YOUR WORLD, YOUR WAY. Note the difference from that...other thing, you know, that connoted wings and soaring."

Just curious...because Icarus Studios has used that slogan for years.

[Stroker Serpentine]

Was this slogan actually a part of LL's media at VW '08?

"The slogan is YOUR WORLD, YOUR WAY. Note the difference from that...other thing, you know, that connoted wings and soaring."

Just curious...because Icarus Studios has used that slogan for years.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ric,

You've raised some very important issues about economies that are never dealt with -- other games have them. For example, the Sims Online had inventory limits very strictly established by level of parcel, with the larger parcel that could absorb more inventory costing more simoleons. I believe There.com also charges to rez out stuff. I've just come from listening to Cory Ondrejka talk about how they jettisoned this idea after trying it in SL because they didn't like how "rich people too advantage," i.e. those with more money put out bigger houses because they had more money to buy prim space.

I'm at a loss sometimes how to ever deal with these hippies.

The Sims Online also had depreciation of objects, and you had to use skills/time/money to get a dying object back up to speed, or else turn it into scrap and make something else out of it or even just delete it.

I have 19,000 things in inventory, and one of the reasons that's the case is there is no quick, simple, easy way to archive landmarks or notecards. It's like the exasperations of email, that instead of providing you with one searchable big document/database to save easily on to your hard-drive to look up old email notes easily, it makes you put each and every email into a separate folder, which of course you never do.

The folder method of managing inventory is just insane. Maybe there are technical reasons for this, but I think the notecards surely can -- and in fact in part *are* -- backed up on your hard drive (you can find folders/named notecards for every person you've talked to if you check off those options).

But it has no way to easily save notecards you write and keep yourself.

[Prokofy Neva]

Really?! Yes, Stroker, I'm looking straight at this brochure: YOUR WORLD, YOUR WAY.

And you can see it also on secondlifegrid.net

[Cocoanut Koala]

"It's as if the golden goose that lays the egg of tier payments constantly has to be slaughtered, and miraculously, it limps back."

You can say that again.

coco

[Nicholaz Beresford]

Given that over the recent months asset server were the main cause of grid woes, I've always wondered why they don't put some limit (like 5000 items) on free account inventories. My own account runs with 1500 and half of them are obsolete I guess and heck, it would provide people with a real incentive to go premium (Land never had any appeal for me, so I was always running a free one merely because there was just no reason to go Premium (and I would not have minded at all to pay for the service had there been a reason or incentive, I'm doing that (paying) for services which I used a lot less).

And probably, the biggest benefit of the closed IBM grid will be that they can start with a fresh asset cluster.

[Prokofy Neva]

Right. So that's why my question for over a year now has been: why doesn't Linden Lab itself start with a "fresh asset cluster" and create a separate but non-equal (lol) grid for business that has a clean boot on a fresh asset server, without the billions of bling and McMansion prefab kits and freebie dresses?

Wouldn't that be the logical thing to do? Linden Lab could create the firewall in a sense by creating log-ons for a separate grid. They already have various separte things, no, agni, and the other things named after Indian goddesses.

Of course, the answer to that, which I got from Joe Miller at VW07 a year ago, was that that "would be contrary to the vision of our founder", i.e. Philip always wanted to have one All Hail the Central Asset Server One W'ura'ld as Khamon is always saying.

I wouldn't care if they had a separate corporate or separate educational grid for more expensive accounts, because then they'd be honest about what they are doing. Now, all they do is the same thing, only secretly, in a sense, by laying on more staff, more efforts for corporations, but without transparency.

Perhaps it wouldn't be logical for LL to have a separate business grid with no nakies and a specialized enterprise version or SL 2.0 -- if the plan was for all those big enterprises just to have their own servers and firewalls and such, LL wouldn't need to make them training wheels.

BTW, I always used to think "enterprise" was a term and a culture only used in the Soviet Union, until I came to Second Life and began to live inside a company and see companies and see the culture of how they refer to themselves.

BTW, I always think it's hilarious, this culture of the versions of software. Right now, we're up to 1.9 something. and it's like when we were kids, where you keep going, when you count to 100, 99 and a half, 99 and three fours, 99 and nine tenths lol. What makes it get to 2.0? Ever? lol

Oh, you say, how unfair! Why can't the common man have a clean grid and fresh boot? Think of the people who would jump to pay $250 US a month even if their SL *just worked*. Just worked! LL would have no problem selling the accounts to such a platinum SL.