Lively and Deadly

I had a chance to go fool around in Google's new Lively, and wasn't surprised to find the most popular lots already taken over by SL people with rooms like "Linden Lab" and "FIC" and "Pathfinder's Room" etc. -- SL people stampeded there, especially the early pioneer types like Suezanne Baskerville. Everybody pawed it over to see if it was "like SL" but of course - it isn't. One thing that is really a lot better is that it is easy to install and jump into and even link to your website (look down to the right to see my room Prokofy's Flamingo Court Lively). And it's much easier to move objects around -- you just click and hold and move them around with your mouse -- that also moves your avatar or moves your view into the scene -- dead easy, and so much less wonky that right-clicking on an object to get its edit mode, than painfully moving it along the XYZ access. When you don't have to stop to do that (we didn't have to in TSO, either), it ads to immersiveness and playfulness.

What's the down side? Well, it's shallow, not deep, and not chunky with prims and edit mode, but has meshes -- that's all supposed to be "better," but in fact the chunkier prim worlds help overcome the lack of tactile sensation and help immersiveness to some extent. If Lively has user content, I don't see it yet, except for the Google FIC beta testers who got to make stuff and get recognition first, but as someone put it, they have "abuse report this object" inserted into the interface already, which means they probably anticipate UGC. Imagine being able to abuse report *every single object in the world* -- the schoolmarms and Prim Puritans of SL will have a field day. Griefers have arrived first, of course -- somebody already took my name "Prokofy" so I had to make "ProkofyN" -- the real Prokofy.

What else is missing? Well, there's no economy and no real estate market. But then, as I quipped for the Concierge List, we don't have that in SL any more either...(maybe the Sears-like Lively catalogue replete with Sims look-alike objects will sell stuff for real money some day for lucky content creators).

Lively can only get better. But...Deadly is what we might call the Linden's policies around the mainland and even their formerly privileged island white-flight suburbs. The Revolution is Eating its Children. Zee Linden has pretty much sounded the death knell if you didn't hear it tolling for thee earlier by saying that "regions owned by residents increased 44.2% over Q1 to just over 1.5 billion square meters. Our growth was due to the popularity of our newly launched “Openspace” land product along with a change in pricing to make the purchase of land more accessible to first time buyers."

What happened is that LL didn't really get that many new users, even if they got new *buyers* -- the whopping 44.2 percent increase is made up largely of the Open Space sims (they won't say how much) which essentially a) began killing off the mainland end user market, as no one could see the sense in paying $250 and $75 tier for an 8192 when they could have their own island; b) killed off a portion of the 4096 and 8192 rentals market, as no one could see the sense of renting either mainland or for that matter, private islands with possible annoying neighbours, when they could have their humper bunkers in private.

Open space sims kill community. They destroy all the work of development poured into the Mainland and private island continents in the last five years. All the efforts at resident zoning on the mainland, whacked hard by their privileging of islands, were seriously jeopardized by the Lindens' refusal to make good on a May policy to ban ad extortionists (who merely got more clever to go under the weak policy's radar).

Linden Lab room.

All the efforts at making communities on private islands with beautiful use of space for recreation and group socializing and exploring, as well as themed areas -- are pretty much whacked senseless by the Open Spaces.

People are overusing them for chopped-up rentals with more privacy and nothing in the view; they are using them by the batch for mini-continents. But they are like empty calories in terms of community and economy: in one short period, they leached out the rich minerals and nutrients of the rest of the land economy, and they also raise a major question of what will happen when people tire of them or their performance, if it lags, and try to sell them: there is absolutely ZERO re-sale market, leaving room for plenty of unscrupulous dealers to get rich quick. The Lindens now have an atomized world of cybering silos accounting for a huge burst of growth, as others silently retreat.

I had written about the bleakness of the humper bunker landscape before, but I hadn't realized that Zee Linden had so cynically decided simply to retire the premium account and not promote or protect it any more. Instead of adding value to the premium account to encourage good stewardship of the mainland -- prefabs, higher stipends or more tier, they've simply added land you don't need the premiums to get.

The premium account with its 512 tier is one way that brought people together. They could form groups or communities or businesses or non-profits by sharing tier. This has been a big part of my rentals system and other businesses and non-profit communities on the Mainland who accept tier donations either in exchange for rental discount or for housing on a communal sim. By having one group for rentals and islands, I can accept mainland tier even for island rentals. Tier donations is what keeps the SL Public Land Preserve alive and flourishing -- 12 big donors keep it going as the mainstays, yet others come and go when they can with even a 256 m2 if they can spare which eases the load for the larger donors and helps build a sense of collaboration.

Of course NONE of this entered into the thinking of John Zhdanowski -- Zee Linden -- whose past resume includes not only MBA sort of stuff but RL online real estate selling. Which is basically about getting the inventory sold, not worrying about things like civil society and its slow and painstaking formation.

Earlier Lindens, including even Jack Linden in his day, cared about how to promote communities. However, they've had their ideals -- like ours -- fall on some pretty hard rocks. The people who use tier to make communities, or to share "the magic of getting along with your neighbour" as Philip once put it in a town hall, are in a distinct minority. There are only 88,000 premium owners now, and of these, I would say probably little better than half use the tier on mainland purchases of sims they share with other neighbours doing the same thing, trying to get along, or in conscious zoned communities in groups sharing tier (I would estimate that such tier-sharing groups are more than the Lindens think, but not enough to get them to do anything to preserve it).

It's not just Zee calling land "a product". We were conditioned to that already from Gene Yoon (Ginsu Linden) who spoke just as coldly of the product that people still were silly enough to see as a metaphor for "land".

But it's the decision simply to do nothing to promote the premium account -- read: mainland sims and communities -- that has to be a very sharp course corrective for people trying to save the mainland, as the Lindens are known for almost never reversing a bad policy except by adding a bad modification on it. Bay City was merely a deal for out-of-work corporate builders to get at least $10/hour from Linden; it gave casino and bank owners forced into closure a place to put all their cash; and it gave Currency and Supply Linden extra real cash, too.

Zee believes that the premiums declined due to the $300 stipend. Whatever the truth of that attrition, constant problems with billing caused many thousands more to give up and switch to something that seems to work better: buying Lindens for rentals on islands. You don't need a premium to buy an island parcel, which nowadays is merely a low set-up fee, not a purchase of land such as on the mainland, because there is such a glut on the market.

But the real reason most people have had to cut back on, or end their mainland purchases or communal efforts is because of the Lindens' autistic (to use the word from the forums response to this blog of Zee's) refusal to get feedback from customers *and act on it* regarding zoning, ad farms, and the group tool bugs.

The Linden laissez-faire hippie insanity that is barely masked by their capitalistic commercial greed on selling empty-calorie Open Spaces really reaches an apex with ad extortion. They've now not only given up on enforcing their wan policy; they now police people who tree-wave into a viewjacker's 16 m2 or puts up a sign to counter their evil and nasty propaganda, which amounts (they call anyone who protests against them "land tyrants" and "fascists").

Worse, the group tool bug now erodes one of the achievements of the reforms of group tools in 2005, that helped mainland rentals and other communities stay on par with the islands: the ability to designate who in the group got to access "share with group" objects and deed them or sell them. Before the reforms, there was no distinction in this regard, so that if you had an open group, anyone could join and grief anything put in "share with group" for the convenience of members, i.e. shared builds, prefabs, tutorial objects, special events equipment, etc. They could easily drop malicious scripts into the object or modify it and drag it around and litter with hit.

Because all Linden library items rez out automatically with all the hippie commie stuff turned on full blast ("share with group" and "copy" and "modify" and "transfer"), griefers -- not hippies -- wind up exploiting the party hat for massive attacks on SL, and scout around for beach balls and dice left out by unwitting residents, and then making or replicating objects to grief them. The Lindens could undo an enormous amount of harm by turning off this "share with group" crap on their own library objects, but this sort of thing escapes them.

The 2005-2006 reforms and bug quashing removed this ability, so that you could granulate your group, still leaving it open, or having it invitation-only, but being able to distinguish between large groups of users of rentals or special events and clubs, etc. and managers, i.e. officers. You could check off the boxes "share with group" and "deed with group" knowing that only those officers with those powers could handle those objects. That enabled mainland rentals to give paying tenants the right to deed objects, but not sell property and brought them closer to competing with island rentals.

Now, because Soft Linden and various other lifers like Lex Neva on the JIRA have decided that "sharing is good," now this exploit is suddenly, illogically, and belligerently declared "a desired feature," and suddenly someone's bug report on its malfunctioning, which I seconded, gets Soft's response that "if we want to make this a feature we can go support another JIRA".

When I confronted Soft Linden about this, citing the actual history of the group tools, in which the granularity of the roles and rights to access "share" in fact were in the tool's design, and functioned normally for more than a year, suddenly she said that "a public triage meeting had decided it". Now she says not to make "verbose" rebuttals on the JIRA, although she remains blind to Lex Neva's idiotic self-referential demand for share because of some very isolated hippie usage of it on his own sim.

I've long been suspicious of the public triage, having been to it and found it two lies in two words. There is no "public" in any meaningful sense, even of JIRA users. There are merely the usual lifers and code kiddies pushing a narrow agenda -- not triaging but deciding whatever burr up their own particular asses they have that week is what gets attention, and this is almost never related to business in SL.

Apparently the "share is good" freetardery prevailed that day -- I'd love to see the transcript but don't see one. In any event. never mind if people lose thousands of dollars to griefers wreckage, and if they now have to absolutely discourage and police vigorously "share," when before it was something they could safely manage for the good of the community. REAL communities seldom matter to these abstract utopianists who like ramming *the idea* of hippie communism down your throat than studying what *really* builds communities in real practice.

Zee also confesses that bots make up 10-20 percent of log-ons, and puts paid to all this childish ranting that there is "no way" to distinguish a bot (and therefore in fact makes it possible to regulate them) with this: "Based on a set of behavioral characteristics that we observe bots having, we believe that about 10% to 15% of our user hours are attributable to bots. This has been consistent for some time.

Among the many painful things to read on this blog is Desmond's suck-up, in which he first kisses ass, then carefully puts an idea into the Lindens' head, which is to decouple the "land baron" requirement from open-sim sales -- something that he can afford to promote because he has a themed continent that isn't going to be threatened in any way by masses of separate open-space sims unless his plan is to keep endlessly expanding.

My sense is that the growth in user hours, the growth in "positive Linden flow" businesses is churn, and also empty calories. One RL CPA commented that if you used terms like "positive flow" or "profit" even in scare quotes about something that represented only your revenue, you'd lose your CPA license. For sure -- Linden flow doesn't come into your coffers until you pay expenses like wages or advertising or land or prefabs, let's say, and tier! What's left over after tier would show only a very small minority of businesses in the black.

Dusan Writer has more critique of the land mass increase hype; and the discussion on RightasRain's blog continues poking holes in the Linden numbers.

Comments

[Ann Otoole]

I notice annotoole is already taken so I made a theannotoole account. Checked lively out. Wrote it off as yet another place for kids and their pedo stalkers and lots of cops to frequent.

It is lame. Why Linden Lab staff is burning time there is curious when they have so many issues they need to be working. But hey they work when they please on what they please so not much hope for the real hard issues to ever be addressed.

[Prokofy Neva]

We can't be sure the thing there called "Linden Lab" is really made by them, and I find it odd that so man SL names are taken, Moo Money said her name was taken. That just doesn't seem to be a coincidence.

[Desmond Shang]

Prok, don't be ridiculous.

I've got fifteen of those openspace regions myself. I certainly wouldn't be sunk if openspaces were opened up to everyone, but it would definitely put a hard dent in my bottom line. And such a move would do substantial, perhaps estate-killing damage to anyone else's largely openspace estates - "estate lites" if you will.

Eventually the Company may have to make them widely available to fend off cheap competition. This is why I see asking for any 'commitment' from the Company regarding openspace policy as pointless. The market will dictate what happens, long term. Regardless, I would sure like to know how they feel about such policy changes.

With present demand I could easily roll out a fairly good sized mini-continent of openspaces; and they are highly appropriate for wild, scenic and connected land. But first I'm going to see what Zee and M do with regard to the economy for at least another quarter or so. That's the due diligence required to run an estate right. Maybe that's why I'll never be Anshe, but that's okay.

* * * * *

I view new product excitement with a bit of caution, even though I think the openspaces really are what a lot of people want. Remember when the snow regions first came online? It would be wise to see what kind of staying power openspaces have in the current market. Too many openspaces in one area *can* feel desolate and barren. Done right, a standard region can stay booked to the gills with a waiting list - even an older class 4 region with a telehub. While there will certainly always be a market for standalone openspaces, let's see if the bloom stays on the openspace rose. I'm fairly confident, though, that it will.

[Ann Otoole]

Well that means someone is eating up google accounts and if later they try to use the names in a perverted form of a trademark scam whoever is doing it will simply lose. Sounds like one of the domain name tards is out of jr high for the summer.

[Prokofy Neva]

Desmond, you are so pompous and full of shit. It's pathetic. Your notion that you are being prudent by waiting to see what these wildassed cowboys do in another quarter is insane. They already did. A themed continent is a niche market. You can add open spaces to the mix, even invisible ones, it won't matter, it's very different than other more general rentals.

The bloom isn't going to come off, but instead, the Lindens will do what they need to do, which does not involve helping you even though you suck up mightily.

[Ciaran Laval]

The Lindens worry about worlds like Lively and so they should. Good innovations aren't always winning innovations and a popular David can slay a superior Goliath.

Something doesn't add up with Zee's comments. Premium members are where it's at for mainland tier, even Land Barons are going to baulk at land not being rented or sold on new sims and with concurrency regularly reaching what appears to be peak usage, just where is the scope for expansion? Open sim? That will only create more problems in the short term.

Of course they could be planning a bait and switch move of lowering up front costs again and increasing tier. If they deem that 67,000 is their top line and they feel demand is high, they'll want people to leave to let new people come in and pay more.

[Razrcut Brooks]

Yes, so far Lively is lame without user created content. However, the imbedded functionality on any webpage is nice and the simplicity you mentioned Prok is refreshing so I will continue to visit.

Prok, I tried to visit your room directly from this page however I think you need to move the location away from the side of the page as only half the room is visible.
Of Note: I visited the Linden Room and saw a pretty black female avatar named Pathfinder Linden. I started to talk with Pathfinder-then I realized it was impossible to know if this was the same PL from SL. So I did not waste my time....
Finally, it will be interesting to see if Google censors the abundant sex rooms that appear on the front page of popular rooms......

Razrcut Brooks
"RazercutBrooksinSL" on Lively

[Razrcut Brooks]

...and another important note about about Lively I just noticed: You can easily change your avatar name once logged on and in world. Right click on your avatar and simply type in ANY name you want under profile/avatar name. This name is what appears next to you and is persistent through re-logs.
Your original avatar name that you created the account with only shows up in the profile/My ID and cannot be duplicated..the avatar name everyone sees CAN be duplicated...

My point being if you see 10 "ProkofyN" avatars in a room , right click on each the "true" Prok will have "ProkofyN" under the ID section of profile.

[economic mip]

The Lindens do not like Limits, it is quite annoying. Not just the share with group problem, but also the inability to say "no I do not want to share this object" if someone has modify rights. This really can cause problems and has made the share feature mostly a joke.

[Prokofy Neva]

Razorcut, I don't see that I can put the room anywhere else. This for-dummies template I have only enables me to paste in code in Typelist/Notes which can only fit on the sides unless there's something I'm not getting. You can pan around the room tho.

[Prokofy Neva]

Actually, I think what happens is that if you have used the name in your Igoogle account already, it takes that name. And I don't get how you can pick it up then. It's a mystery.

[Clubside Granville]

Lively is garbage, and those cheering web page embedding and rooms instead of a contiguous world are fools. It is the antithesis of a virtual world. It's sad to say that Lively's design is more myopic than Sony's Home.

A virtual world implies connection and scope, where Lively is a collection of rooms you pop in and out of, another graphic sheen on IRC with a guest book.

While Lively's window can be detached, its life and viral design begin with the browser. This demeans the concept of a metaverse, reducing it to just another embedded game or Flash chat. It's amusing how game companies and others think using the browser as a host reduces the cost of entry to the user. It's sad that many users lap up this ridiculousness. It still requires an install, and a launch mechanism. However, much of the interface design of the last decade has encouraged leaning toward the moron. No Child Left Behind ain't just for the chillin' anymo'.

Even with content creation Lively would still be some college team effort implementation of a design-by-committee focus group watered-down pile of crap. What is it's point? Why would I want to go there? I may not be happy with what Second Life is relative to how it was advertised to me in early 2006, but it is a vision of a virtual world. It was built for exploration despite today's rampant ban lines and scripted security junk. Searching allows a user to have a "Lively" experience in finding things, but in SL you can just go off and wander through screations as varied as "your imagination", something not posible crammed into a virtual room.

The only good thing about Lively is its impending irrelevance, another deserved black eye for Google, and a continued debate about the creation of a true virtual world Internet RFC that can satisfy the chatters, the gamers, the artists, the capitalists and the commies.