Second Thoughts

Traffic

Yesterday the Concierge list was disrupted once again with fights as somebody began spreading the rumour about the Lindens removing traffic. I don't think they are actually doing that now, but I did forget to put it on my "What Next?" list -- they will do it, if they feel enough pressure, or if they are simply feeling destructive enough toward the inworld economy.

The usual suspects lined up to denounce traffic and call furiously for it to be removed. They cited the usual arguments:

o bots, which are being used as traffic infusers and which steal resources and aggravate everybody
o they don't need traffic, they have word-of-mouth sales
o people who need traffic for sales are losers; other people should realize traffic doesn't give them sales
o people who hate bots are necessarily driven to use them to compete with others who do, so they want traffic to be removed, so they don't have to do this
o if you need to watch your traffic, get a script to follow not only footfalls but hotspots, length of stay, etc. and get more useful metrics

Most of the people screeching about the removal of traffic are people with clubs or malls reluctantly using bots in order to keep up with other people who happily use bots. The remainder of haters are usually a certain brand of geek who wants bots used for science, but not commerce. That's where there is so much anger and hatred tied up into it -- people don't see the solution is to remove the bots, they want the traffic that the bots are generating to be removed instead.

I cite the usual arguments *for* traffic based on my vast experience of what works for people who rent my land for stores:

o search/places plus ordering by traffic is the single greatest engine of sales in SL, bar none
o people with word-of-mouth sales don't understand this and will never understand it; new people can't get WOM and they need other means to get started, sometimes for a year
o bots should be regulated by charging for any account using them, and labelling such accounts -- that will decimate them overnight
o once you get past the few gamed positions on highly-used search words, you see a merited traffic ordering, and that is used for sales, sales, sales -- this is definitely what shoppers use
o I personally do not use bots, campers, or any gimmicks of any nature, and in fact I benefit from placement by *other* means the Lindens have tweaked in "search all," and have lower placement in "search places".

This debate will never get anywhere, and is at a standstill as usual, but unfortunately, some new voices are weighing in on it now. Simone Stern, who is someone who has no need of traffic whatsoever, as she is a top brand in SL, is now denouncing traffic. Before, I noticed she didn't really comment; now she is.

Simone has always been a friend, and a former tenant, who I know for a fact didn't use traffic gimmicks because I don't allow them. She did for a time, like many of us, use camping on her main store, but not for long -- it was a needless expense and she had sales anyway. Somehow, we got into a wrangle about this as she claims it was merely an experiment by a manager for a day, but I recollect it differently as longer. No matter. Simone has traffic in the 2000s, which is in fact all you need to get sales paying rent/tier. And she has sales at outlets all over SL, and people buy on SLboutique.com of course. And she gets her sales by having mammoth word of mouth from a huge customer base, and from her coverage in RL media. God bless her, she deserves every inch of coverage she gets -- and then some. Her work for the Electric Sheep and other providers has also put her into high visibility -- and she deserves it. Now we just need her to realize that not everyone can use those formulas of high visibility, for which there is only a few slots available.

That's what I just plain don't get about people in SL. If something doesn't work for you, and you don't need it, why begrudge it to someone else? Why the hatred and viciousness? You are not objectively harmed by traffic if you don't need traffic. So if someone else gets it and uses it to make sales, what the hell skin is it off yours?!

Classifieds cannot deliver sales for everyone; getting on the first page is too expensive. Bots are expensive, too, and hated. So is camping, even more draining. That means search/places sorted by traffic is the best bet for every store that is NOT a Simone Stern store.

Geeks making gadgets who either could care less about sales or who have customers from Xstreet.com or word of mouth simply don't get traffic, either. They hate it the way geeks on Web 1.0 hated page hits -- they *loathed* page hits because it could be "gamed" and -- I would submit -- they loathed the democratic "vote with your feet" feel to it that it had which didn't then depend on geeks making complex algorithms. I still think page counters, which are scorned as "so very 1990s" are a great thing -- for a website that isn't in the top 100 on Alexa or Google or whatever. Yeah, we all realize these are gamed by link farmers and paid clickers. So what? Nobody is being paid to click on *my* little site, and in my little world of several dozen other such sites, it matters when I get real clicks, which I do, and in my little amount of traffic, it matters merely by comparison to my little circle, which also has little traffic, that's all.

Traffic is even more important as it is a public counter that, despite being "gamed," is deadly accurate as to popularity. Everybody knows that if you have 30,000 traffic on your site, unless you are a free sex or free Lindens location, you likely have bots or campers. So everybody can tell, also, that if Reuters has 124 or some other big company has 237, they are flops. People aren't coming. The sites aren't being used. And *that* is one of the reasons the Lindens want to get rid of it -- so big enterprises can keep their embarassments to themselves. That's exactly why it has to stay -- for the public's right to know what is happening in the economy.

What Next?

I was found it nauseating to watch Zee Linden take a star turn in the forums. It convinced all but the most seasoned and cynical in SL, and prompted some fanboyz to gush that it was a class act.

People left the thread saying that, wow, aren't they reasonable guys, why, Zee even admitted they screwed up.

If you believe in that, you believe in the tooth fairy. These people pose as idealistic and utopian California types, but in reality, they've gotten pretty instrumental and cynical at this point -- they are in the harsh start-up climate of Silicon Valley, which has finally begun to feel the recession already felt by the rest of the country for a year. They do what they have to do -- understood -- but let's not sugarcoat it, and let's not make it easy for them to delude themselves or us.

You can go on warbling about how wonderful these understanding and compassionate Lindens are, but watch this space. Here are the things that the Lindens will be springing on us *next*, which we really should be organizing to resist now, but which will be rammed down everyone's throats in the coming year because the Lindens will simply feel they have no choice.

Building a civilization online with democracy and free enterprise and a thriving middle class is a lot of work. It takes real countries decades, centuries even. The Lindens are an authoritarian executive power, and the world they create reflects their nature. They feel, like the early Soviet state, as if they are in "hostile encirclement" by other companies trying to kill them or eat their lunch or bloody their noses with other platforms and gadgets. They have no financial incentive to go slow, do less bells and whistles that cripple performance even if they serve as a showcase for investors or industry watchers, they have no objective need to make a world for socializers who don't make the Better World that they want so fervently to create -- so they can control it.

So their goal here is to get rid of the land business. This goal isn't just out of ideological hatred of arbitrage and what they see as greedy land flippers who don't add value. It's a goal that is more about encouraging a different kind of customer base, and discouraging the kind of customer base that only gets them bad press and CS headaches. It's about making the activities on their platform presentable yet profitable, and making them generate good headlines.

Spin Cycle

Remember the other day when I posted a blog entry about Second Life's "Negative Numbers"? I looked at the numbers that are indicators of health or trouble in the virtual world, and found these figures going down:

o number of inworld businesses, or people with "Positive Monthly Linden Flow," taking in more cash than they spent (without regard to tier)

o number of premiums -- an indication of people willing to commit to the actual connected world prototype on the Mainland -- which is going down

o number of 60-day uniques -- at 1.2 million, somewhat less than last year, and not budging upwards

o number of people who spend more than $1 -- at 419,000, not increasing, but still more than last year

o price of land -- at $1.9/m, it might almost make more sense to give it away -- it has not been so low *ever*, and was $5-8 per meter over the years in an alleged LL bid to "balance" it

So I was wondering how the Lindens would portray this, but I didn't expect quite the spin cycle we got from Zee, which says Q3 Closed on a High Note With an Exceptionally Strong September. I had to blink at that one, because there was an exceptionally big crash right at the end of October/beginning of November with the announcement of the openspace sim price hikes.

Negative Numbers for Inworld SL Economy

Linden Lab just posted their inworld economic figures as of November 10, and the numbers are not looking good for inworld business.

The "Positive Monthly Linden Flow" businesses -- avatars who take in more Lindens than they spend, but not counting payments to Currency Linden for sales to convert to tier -- is down from 62,663 to 61,467, 1,196 people going in the red, mostly in the US $50-100 group, going from 4,115 to 3,606, which had seen a rise in fact from June to July. July and August had seen a drop.

These businesses were likely related to rentals, especially open sims rentals. It's hard to say if the October 27 announcement of the price hikes affected the numbers for October -- there may have been an existing trend. But the grid shrunk by many islands -- we can't tell how many they sold and lost -- but the figure thus totalled is presented as -347.

The figure I always pay attention to, number of people who spent more than $1 inworld, has not budged, at
419,198.

The most curious thing to me is the Supply Linden sales of only $15,000,000 Lindens, or $54,750. That's a fraction of what they are normally, which is more like $500,000 US. I suppose this is a function of the huge influx of sales of Lindens, from LindEx and third-party sites tied to LindEx, to buy the Nautilus auctions. There were 333 residents, even in this recession economy, who could make transactions above $500,000 Lindens on the chart.

More detailed spreadsheets aren't updated yet, but we will look to see what happened with premium accounts, which M Linden thinks are irrelevant to his business. They aren't to ours; a premium account is to be treasured, because a person who cares about managing land is more stable, buys prefabs, furniture, etc. and doesn't just come and go and use sales and rentals as sandboxes, as Dirk Talamasca was remarking. He made the apt point that rentals, in this volatile atmosphere, have become a way of life for many because they can expand or contract their SL depending on the economy. I still find a good chunk of people who want to buy and control their land, even mainland.

Jack Jacks the Jacks

Dear Second Life. All in a turmoil again over yet another price...er...adjustment. Clubside handed me two notecards this afternoon with a transcript of Jack Linden, popping into Concierge List to invite everyone to a "chat".

All of this feels so familiar. And I mean, not only from the last four years of going to various protests and seeing hundreds of people on sims with signs and anger. It's like those big demonstrations by the Manezh outside Red Square, where, fingers freezing, I would try to write a sentence on a reporter's notebook. The demonstrators would be bought off, because none of them could really get out from under the Kremlin -- they were too dependent on it for food and shelter and health care.

Shelter. You don't even really need a roof over your head or a house in SL, but everyone wants one, and that's ok! If the Lindens are trying out their usual method -- let's bomb them with a really harsh announcement, then see where the "pain points" are, and solve accordingly -- it may backfire this time.

The Lindens are really sandbagged with this one. Andrew "Throttle" Linden could have explained all this to us long ago. There are too many people trying to do too many things on the sims, but nobody wants to be the one to curtail them *with the software itself*. We've discussed billing by CPU usage for years, so that laggy clubs with 40 avatars nightly would pay more than the little old ladies who log on to their 512m2 on that sim on Sundays. But nobody wants to curb the users, because curbing users with inventory or script limits means curbing "creativity" -- and the Lindens are still in beta-test-love-fest sandbox mode -- even today, even with M Linden at the helm.

What a monster they'd create if they had discretionary examination of each and every OS sim, to see if it was "compliant" or not. I can see people taking off their poseballs when inspected, only to put them out again the minute the Inspector General rides on to the next oblast. "Oh, Second Life, where are you rushing?"

When I come out on a protest like today's -- and it's still going on late into the evening with people from all over the world, people who never post on a blog, or have blogs, or post on forums, or ever get in the news -- just people on SL -- I realize what a big disconnect there is between the Lab and its lofty aspirations of Better World sims with NPR-like activities, education, government, business meetings, all without scripts, and *these* people, blinged out in their best RP duds, prim hair enough to sink a sim, scripted heels and AOs and genitalia bringing the world to a crawl. It's like they aren't even supposed to be here, and yet they *pay* for the thing, while the other dream, the dream of all those primless but proper people from Eduworld or Bizworld doesn't quite materialize because they say that "telepresence" just doesn't cut it, when only an f2f will do, that walled gardens without firewalls aren't an acceptable solution.

On the other hand, nobody has experience in this. Nobody has ever managed the pricing and maintenance of pricing over time with a virtual world like this because nobody has ever made one. In that sense while we can all bang on Jack Linden for not managing this properly, what can you do? Either he sold the sims in good faith and other bean-counters at the Lab then began to crab about CPU, or he faced real opposition to trying to do anything about curbing users, or some other black-box event we can never know. Lessons learned from past civic disruptions like this? It's never enough notice -- this time it's 60 days, not 14, and it's never enough. And it's always painful -- many people will be put out of business and some will leave LL. But ultimately, LL knows that the people who put in the most user hours will adjust. They always do. New people won't know or care. There's always another guy to buy the island, as Kenny Linden once explained to Random Unsung...

Jack Bombs the Humper Bunkers

I've never seen the Concierge List so hopping mad, more pissed than the GOMing of the GOM, more angry than the withdrawal of telehubs, more incensed than the expose of the insider island price, more aggro'd than the sudden Bolshevik price drop devaluing sims by 60 percent (now the price is going up more than 60 percent). Furious! (Indeed, those who don't remember those historical lows of SL I've just linked here are doomed to repeat them...)

Jack has thrown a bomb with his announcement tonight that openspace sims' tier will jump from $75 to $125 after January 1, the initial purchase price will go from $250 to $375, and educational discounts will be removed. Worst of all, from the perspective of the land baron sector, the abililty to designate other owner/tierpayers to the Lindens, to completely turn over these products to secondary buyers, will be removed (you have to have a private island to be able to purchase them, and island owners were thus able to make a killing flipping the islands over to renters with full estate permissions).

There is outraged talk of "bait and switch" and lawsuits and attorneys -- but I'm afraid the Lindens have covered themselves pretty well on this one:

Thugs' Life

Land baron Scott Maroon, winner of 10 auctions in Nautilus.

This isn't a post about the shopping mall called Thugs' Life where I've been camping and being bitten by zombies. No, it's about the Second Life Land Auctions, which have no transparency, permission for dubious practices, and therefore create an atmosphere of thuggishness around the land market. This really needs to stop, although calls for auction transparency go unheeded by the Lindens. When I've questioned Jack Linden specifically about this problem of the failure to show who bid or even who won any more, he told me last year that it was a coding problem that had to do with using ebay software that doesn't show that. But the Lindens' own program used to show this and it was not only a useful deterrent to packing numerous bidds in everywhere to jack up prices, it was a necessary measure of accountability in a very secretive process.

Recently I decided to bid on the land in the new Dolphins build that the Lindens have lavished such mole attention on in the continent of Nautilus. I figured that much like Bay City, I would have to bid very high, at least $50,000 for these double-prim 1024 lots which cannot be subdivided or joined. The Lindens have also made even more landscaping and protected waterfront land in this build by contrast with Bay City, which was more urban.

At first, I was encouraged by seeing that a lot of the parcels seemed to be bid only to 15,000 or 20,000 with only a day left. So I bid on first one, then another, only to find that as soon as I did that, repeatedly, it went up to $50,000 or even $60,000 and showed no sign of stopping. I then tried about 6 more, trying to bid on them, and first seeing them seeming to stop at 30,000 or 40,000, and then, with only an hour left, going up much more. At once point, I had bids on about 6 or 7 of them, but I realized they could be bid up very high. I saw land barons flying around like vultures inworld, and various obvious alts.

I decided to visit Yamm, the site of some particularly nice lots overlooking waterfront and a purple quartz crystal mounted in a little atrium, to see what was up. I spotted Scott Maroon, a land baron with a sales and rental business who is also maker of the Ultimate Tip Jar. He's a member of Honourable Land Dealers, a group that promises to give people back any botted land if it was set too low by mistake. I never did understand if they had any other ethical practices they support.

It occurred to me that there was absolutely nothing or nobody to stop a land baron from going on every single one of hundreds of auctions for the day and bidding them way up to a fantastic price, $50,000 or above, precisely to make it appear to anyone that attempts to bid on them that they are very high bids. That will discourage casual bidders, or people just looking to bid on one particular parcel they like. It means that if they face discouragement one or two times on one bid, or on several parcels, they'll give up.

That leaves the way clear for many of the bids to sit at lower prices, that in fact will go for those lower prices, enabling determined land barons to pick up the auctions that they've put on very high bids for a much lower price than their bid, discourage competition, and then pay premium on only a few that go way up -- winning with visibly higher prices and discouraging others. It raised the question to me as to whether this method was being used, and whether it makes sense to push for a limit on bids on the auction.

Flying around, I came upon the same land baron over and over again on the parcels I bid on, so I decided just to ask him what he was up to:

Camping to Death

You know, it's gotten damn hard to camp.

Here I am reporting live to you from PRO Textures, on an island called Rock, a store that sells "Hair Wallpaper Homes Windows Brick Wood" (what a combo!) and which has a nice little Italianate cafe offering camping, which is cleverly disguised as anims that say "socialize". A group of about 10 of us, half of us reduced to blurry white balls (they Caspered) are sitting like zombies, not uttering a word, but periodically, the chat is punctuated with a notice: PROKOFY NEVA HAS EARNED $20 FOR SOCIALIZING! I think it bumps us off after a certain point, because that's how I got a seat.

And boy, was it hard. Yesterday I started very early in the morning simply trying to find a place -- I wanted to see how the sector was doing. I went to a number of places where the camping was broken and disabled.

Then, I kept TPing to the top traffic stores, but all the camp spots were taken. They were also very cleverly hidden. Nowadays, say, a furniture store, will strew their camp stations all around the entire island, and they come in the form not of benches with CAMP texts floating over them, but flower beds, wheelbarrows, painting ladders, street food vendor carts, etc. At first, seeing these busy, happy people doing various activities like planting, you feel as if you are in the Sims again, until you see that they are AFK, and earning money. I went to so many places, and stared around trying to find so many "work stations", that when I finally got on the bus for work later in the morning in RL, and saw a man digging in the earth, kneeling by a wheelbarrow, I fully expected to see the text "$2/15 minutes" floating over his head, and had to resist the urge to right-click on him.

IBM Again, and RRR Again

I've been interested to follow Virtual Worlds London 2008 from afar, I was sorry not to get to another one of these expos because they always seem to be state-of-the-art.

And without being present for all the corridor chat, it's hard to know what's going, but I figure that the Immersive Workspaces thing must have probed a nerve or something, as the unattractive Nick Wilson of Clever Zebra was trying to put it down, and play up kids' worlds lol. He thinks there is "stagnation in the VW space" probably because he has no new gigs or something lol.

And here's a kind of funny blog from IBM Eightbar's epredator. Basically, after a long description of the expo, I put a comment, and then it's yet another round in this long-running debate about IP protection in which yet another IBMer ducks and bobs. I think it's the ultimate irony that IBM and other companies demand behind-the-firewall solutions precisely to protect privacy, IP, and experience, and yet are busy trying to create interoperability and undo those very same features for us chickens on the open grid. I've always found it the height of hypocrisy that these corporate opensourceniks can tout the firewall, but scorn the walled garden. It really is awful.

epredator even has a condescending explanation for me about "how it all works". See, there are banks. And they hold your money (well, they used to). And they need to talk to each other, so they need interoperability. But they also need to keep your money safe and have security, see. Hmm. Are there deeper things to think about? I mean, here banks keep out of state checks for 5 or even 7 days, even though that is a total holdover from the old days before the Internet. There is absolutely nothing to stop them using instant electronic means to see that your check drawn on that other bank and made out to you is good, and clearable. This taking of 5-7 days or even 1 day is completely unjustified, as all the bank is doing is using your money -- the float -- to invest and make a profit, and yet you don't have the use of it. Interoperability, eh?

Measure the Country, not the Game

I'm so tired of Tateru Nino's screeds on Massively.com. I mean, here she has this huge, amplified visible perch on a high-traffic gaming blog. And instead of showing at least some modicum of enthusiasm about Second Life, which provides her bread and butter for this gig, she's constantly knocking it and expressing that snarky, sour take on SL, especially its tech, that is so very common to the FIC. Oh, I'm dyspeptic myself, God knows, but I'm *passionately* dyspeptic. Dyspeptic for a *cause*. Tateru is always fighting the battle of who could care less, always too cool for school, frowning -- and feeling superior -- about just about everything.

Here she runs a totally misleading headline: Second Life September Metrics: Mostly Falls. For her, "failure" is signified in less user hours, less premiums, and a claimed "reduction in economic activity".

But in fact, the number of "positive monthly Linden flow" businesses, i.e. businesses with more Lindens coming in their account than go out in tier, have increased. One category, $50-100 US, has increased significantly.

As for user hours, they have steadily climbed in the last few months. I'm not seeing where she finds a "decline" on the chart. Even if there is, I don't see that it is significant -- other indicators like higher traffic at welcome areas and infohubs are indicators of more entries.

Premiums fell from 86,547 to 84,883, but that isn't surprising -- the stipend is smaller, and you don't need a premium to buy or rent island land, the bulk of rentals and purchases.

A figure I find the most important for signs of a healthy economy is the number of people who made an expenditure of $1 or more: 413,307. That has grown very rapidly.

User-to-user transactions increased nearly 11 percent, but literalist Tateru harks back to the days when the Lindens cautioned about this figure as insignificant -- yet that was back in the days of the casinos pouring from the empty into the void. Today, more user transactions could well be more meaningful as just what it claims.

The average amount exchanged has fallen very slightly by only a few Lindens, but there are more buys than sells, a sign of new entries.

Please -- let's measure the world -- the country -- not the game. You measure a country with figures like number of businesses, land sold, volume of currency sold, number of people spending money, etc. "User hours" and "sign-ups" aren't economic activities per se in a country; demographics are just that -- demographics. It's what the demographics *do* that matters. Games measure sign-ups and user hours; countries measures GNP. And that's all growing.