I've been a bit hard on Linden Lab in the past, but I'd like to address something that I started, but never finished. The topic would be that of my loss of inventory in April of 2007. Linden Lab recently announced that they are doing what they can to minimize this situation, and I believe them. Eloise touched upon the subject, but I'd like to elaborate on it more from my standpoint.

What happened to me was like hitting the lottery. If I recall correctly, only about nine of us lost our entire inventory and they worked diligently to fix it for us. At the time, I wanted to calm the hysteria that I caused, so I ceased to report on it, but a funny thing happened along the way. I somehow became a shoulder to cry on about lost inventory. There are apparently many types of inventory loss, from single items disappearing, to folders not showing up. Some of these errors don't have fixes yet, but there are certain steps that you can take to keep this kind of loss at a minimum.

If I had to decide which Second Life feature was the most profoundly useful to me, it wouldn't be the group tools, or streaming movies on a prim. Sculpted prims would certainly be in the running, but the "lumpy" nature of sculpties makes them less revolutionary than I had hoped (they aren't very good for, say, a car fender.) I would have to say, the coolest, most useful, "thank god I have them" feature, summed up in one word is:

Megaprims.

But I'm a little worried right now. Linden Lab appears to be fishing around for what the reaction would be to the removal of megaprims in a recent blog post by Michael Linden. Some cynics may say this is nothing more than an obligatory symbolic gesture before they go ahead and remove megaprims anyways. But I'm not cynical! I'm all sunshine, baby! So go ahead and read what Michael's has to say over at the Official Linden Lab blog. I'll take a shot at addressing his concerns here.

Every MMO/NGO/VW has bugs. Every patch, every update for every one of them brings a slew of fresh bugs, glitches, imbalances and lost property. Dealing with those bugs, glitches and whatnot can be a pain in the ass quite frankly, but in Second Life, we're not just dealing with peoples' fun. We're also dealing with their revenue.

While Ginsu Linden made quite an effort to make everyone understand that Linden Lab understands the position that it is in, relative to the users, it's obvious enough from reading the comments that many of the users themselves either do not understand Linden Lab's position, or do not think Linden Lab understands it. Pick one.

With virtual worlds now firmly embedded in popular culture, the virtual landscape may seem like an archipelago with Second Life, There, Active Worlds, Doppelganger, Multiverse, Kaneva, and many more. Sailing between these isolated little islands is possible, but the voyage is daunting.

One of the earliest sailors willing to make the journey was Wells Fargo who, after creating their virtual presence in Second Life, decided to pack up and move to Active Worlds. While I'm not privy to the details of their migration, I can surmise that the textures were transported to Active Worlds by hand while the geometry data was either exported via scripts so that it could be generated from within Active Worlds, or simply re-built from scratch. Long story short, it wasn't an effortless transition.

Well all that may be changing with a recent announcement that Linden Lab and IBM will be working together on standards to bridge the gaps between virtual worlds. The announcement included several areas of focus with the overarching theme that users will one day be able to move freely between virtual worlds including "Universal" Avatars, Security-Rich Transactions, Platform Stability, Integration with existing Web and business processes, and Open standards for interoperability with the current web.

A number of factors lately seem to have contributed to increasing the friction between different nationalities and cultures of residents within Second Life.

Firstly, of course, we have the ... robust nature of some of the political extrusions into Second Life - largely harmless and inconsequential wars between small numbers of ideological groups - though no less deadly serious to the participants.

It appears I've been ARed and muted. I'll continue to report on the process of being an alleged evildoer, if anything comes of it, whilst respecting the TOS and not giving away any details about who or where.

I got an IM saying: Abuse report filed against you for your griefing of my ad parcel with trees at (location removed)"
I pointed out in reply that my trees, if they were over his parcel, had been there for longer than he owned the parcel, and that he hadn't asked me to move them. Implicit in that, I would have moved them if he'd asked.
The charming, if ungrammatical, reply (verbatim): i dont have to ask, you have no rights beyond yoru border. anyways i care not, the lindens will remove them and mark it on your record. your muted.

Well, technically he's correct, I don't have rights to build beyond my land. I didn't know I had built beyond my land, in fact I don't think I have, but I'm not going to go and check right now. But is a little common courtesy out of the question? Do you think an IM saying "Excuse me, your trees are on my parcel at (such and such a place), please can you move them?" as a first resort is more reasonable? I know I do, and I know polite queries similar to this have worked for me, both for overhanging builds and for deliveries that have gone astray. What do you think? Just Askin.

[UPDATE] Apparently the person that ARed me really doesn't have a clue, or, is at risk of being ARed himself for spamming me. 2 hours after the first message, I've got a repeat message telling me I'm ARed for "griefing" his precious parcel. I wonder how often he will do that before he gets action taken against him for malicious reporting?

"According to the recently published Yankee Group Note, Wither Second Life?, the growth rate of Second Life users has slowed since its peak in October 2006, while user engagement (as measured by average time spent per user) has leveled off at just 12 minutes per month." -- Yankee Group's own press release, via Virtual World News.

"I've looked at that sentence several times, and can't make head or tail of it, because it's totally at odds with all meaningful available metrics." - Hamlet Au, New World Notes.

This story's starting to spread all over the mainstream media, so let's actually do the math - because Yankee Group doesn't seem to have done any themselves.

That's the question this article asks, and it's an interesting one. From the article: ""You can have expressional relationships in Second Life that can say a lot about you. Are you wearing power red? Are you rearing dark blue? There are so many social indicators that we use in real life that are being transported into virtual universes. As such, you can tell a lot about people by their avatars' physical attributes because what they're doing - maybe unbeknownst to themselves - is creating characters with a lot of social cues and signals," says Dr. Darren Nicholson of Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J.

What do you all think? The presumption here is that this would be an interview with a RL company, not an SL one, which I'd think would be a lot more relaxed. What's appropriate dress for a SL job interview?

(Via associatedcontent)

Two weeks ago, at the Life 2.0 quarterly summit, I gave a special keynote at the invitation of organizers John Zhaoying and Rissa Maidstone who were kind enough to invite me, and to accommodate my handicaps and timezone enough to make it possible.

While I am, perhaps, known for statistical data and numeric analysis, those are just the things that put food on the table. Human factors are far more interesting, and no metrics - however detailed and methodical - are complete without the consideration of the human factors involved.

With that in mind, I chose to discuss the interplay of four key human factors and their role in virtual worlds. The audience was very generous in their appreciation, and the bright discussion afterwards was very stimulating.

Below the fold is a transcript of the talk, reformatted to be a little easier on the eyes.

SL gets a lot of press for being a sensational platform for those looking for sensational pursuits -- sex, gambling, combat, etc. However, there is another side to the virtual world that doesn't get the same amount of coverage, and that's its value as a testing ground for proving concepts, virtual or otherwise.

This article goes over that idea. Corporations who are in the development stage of their product can utilize SL as a laboratory, saving time and money over the traditional method, which can be costly and take a long time to manage. The article mentions to aspects of experimentation: working on a product, and working on experimentation methods themselves. One leads to the creation and distribution of an object, the other helps develop methods of experimentation itself, helping to create tools that non-programmers can use.

As with many proprietary technologies, however, security can be a concern. Given SL's reputation for griefing, some companies might think twice before committing to developing an important project in SL. Ideas about age verification and increased security might help assuage those companies' fears, but those technologies are still to be tested and tried. Until then, the future of SL as a testing ground remains in the design stages.

(Via CNN)

Here's a great article on how the roots of today's virtual technologies lie in the distant past -- the late 90s. The post makes great use of screenshots that look remarkably similar to what we have today to make the point that what we have isn't quite as new as many seem to think it is. One way to look at this is that we really haven't progressed at all in a decade's time, but that's merely cosmetic. It's worthwhile to look back at your history to evaluate where you're headed today, but the changes are buried at a level not discernible with the naked eye.

However, it's still fun to look! I actually kind of prefer the rez-backward look of some of those screenshots, with their flat facets and blurry textures. But then again, I'm kind of a nostalgia freak.

(Thanks, Dr. Andrew!)

Reader Zenmonk writes in to ask "What in your Second Life would you like to see in your First Life?"

Obviously, flying is going to top a great many lists, as will the ability to teleport instantly to anywhere you desire. Zenmonk mentions the ability to instantly change the color and texture of any of your objects, which would be a grand thing indeed; imagine the Golden Gate Bridge completely cerulean blue!

I'll take it a step farther and ask: What would you not like to see from SL in RL? We define our emotional resting state by two measures -- what makes us happy and what makes us unhappy. Can you imagine a world in which lag is a constant? Or your limbs suddenly detaching themselves? Or suddenly dropping through objects that ought to support you? Readers, send in your thoughts -- what's desirable, what's not?

When I saw the title of this article, I thought "Oh, New Delhi has a sim to itself, just like Amsterdam and the like." But no, instead, it's a sort-of-fluff piece about how the majority of India's SL users are from New Delhi.

At the risk of sounding boorish: So what? Is that really a fact strong enough to carry an entire article? The rest of the thing is mostly outsider information about SL and LL, with a bit more about India thrown in. Honestly, the whole thing has me scratching my head -- and I've been recently flea dipped, so I know it's not parasites. I mean, Go India and everything, this is no slur on New Delhi by a longshot, just ... huh?

(Via indianexpress)

I've always wanted a nice picture of my avatar to hang on my real life wall. That's what motivated me to enter the 12 Avatars calendar contest. The premise was simple. You snap a pic of your avatar and then submit it in a notecard to a kiosk. It's really a popularity contest, though. Two avatars with the most votes would win a spot in the calendar.

Two of the spots were predetermined, which leaves eight spots remaining, of which they're milking every day of suspense out of it. When I saw the behavior of one employee of the contest, I became turned off from it entirely. As soon as he found out I was a blogger, he kept trying to offer me scoops. I let him know that I felt it would be a conflict of interest, but he was willing to keep that a secret.

I sat on this knowledge instead. He asked later if I would be blogging about my entering the contest and promised to deliver me "leaked" information, as well as pictures, but he never did. I guess my question here would be why he was so eager for me to blog about the contest when they had almost 600 entries? If he was so willing to tell me things, who else did he share knowledge with?

As for my contest entry, I got a whopping 3 votes from who knows where. I barely told anyone I'd entered at all. When I AM ready to adorn my walls with homages to my avatar, I'll get someone I trust to do it. At least I know they play fair.

*UPDATE: It's been called to my attention that not all of the eight chosen will be selected from the entrants. Some of the calendar spots will be awarded to residents that didn't even participate in the contest!*

This article aims to warn RL companies that there will likely be knockoffs of their products in SL, many of which might even make use of their unmodified logo. I'm less interested in debating the efficacy of suing residents for damages than I am in debating the nature of these 'fakes' themselves.

First of all, let's say you're Sprite. You arrive in-world and set up vending machines that provide little cans of soda. There's not too much to it, is there? It's a cylinder with your logo on it. Can Sprite hire MoU to make higher-res cans? Would it be worth it? When residents get Sprite vending machines for their sims or clubs from content creators other than Sprite, do they think they're getting the real branded experience? Are they likely to call foul and wait for the actual presence to arrive?

Virtual worlds, by necessity, require a brand-new mode of thought regarding what's allowable. Clearly, people paying ellz for faux-Armani clothing for their avatars realize it's not a real Armani suit, and they probably don't care. Virtual clothes don't carry the same cachet as the real ones do. In a world where nearly any object you desire from your real life can be fabricated for next to nothing, does Branding even matter? Is it worth suing people over?

(Via theretailbulletin)