Making Plans For Dio

Laval Industries today announced plans for dio. “We’re only making plans for dio, we only want what’s best for them, we’re only making plans for dio, dio just needs this helping hand” Laval Industires chief development officer told me in a top secret meeting today. Three interactive fiction titles are already in the works.

The Search For Hod Rumble

Hod Rumble, CEO of technology company Lendin Laboratories, has gone missing. Customers of Lendin Laboratories main product, Alternative Existence, haven’t seen hide or hair of Hod Rumble for months. In this compelling story you will get to choose a companion to help you in your search for Hod Rumble and this will determine which storyline you follow.  Companions include:

  • Former CEO and technology pioneer Philip Eladesor.
  • Blogger and author James Amadeus Oh
  • Industry superstar Harper Robins
  • Ace developer and producer Little Bo Bargrass
  • The Lord of Dee … this guy is like Hitchcock, he appears in all his own productions!

As well as different storylines determined by the character, plans are afoot for different storylines within the storylines “This is confusing us too” a developer at Laval Industries confided in me.

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Linden Lab Starting To See Value In Blog News

As a long time critic of Linden Lab’s lack of communication with the Second Life populace and their sparse use of their own blog for news, I welcome what looks like a resurgence in blog use.

Three recent posts have appeared, one once again highlighting the destination guide: Highlights from the Second Life Destination Guide – Jan. 31, 2013

Another exemplifies use of the Leap Motion Controller:  Reaching into Second Life with Leap Motion

The third is an addition to the quick tips: Shopping in Second Life Video Tutorial

What I particularly like about the Leap Motion blog is what appears at the end of the embedded YouTube video:

An Image Should Be Here
Second Life Blog News

Yes please! That is exactly the right place for people to be looking for Second Life news, my main criticism has been that there isn’t enough news!

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New Land Products Would Halt The Land Losses, But What Would They Do For LL’s Revenue?

Tyche Shepherd this week reported that the grid is ligher to the tune of another 61 private regions, this brings the losses for this year to roughly around 235, I say roughly because I’m basing this on Tyche’s last four reports and there’s a little bit of carry over from the last day or two of last year and the last report was on January 27th, so it is almost certainly slighly higher.

Now a lot of people want Linden Lab to slash tier and in many ways, that would halt the decline, for example they could slash the tier on homesteads back down to USD$75.00, or slash the tier on Openspaces to USD$25.00 a month and insist they’re only used for scenery with a stingy prim count. Openspaces at USD$75.00 a month seems extremely high to me. They could even slash tier on full regions to say USD$195.00 a month. All of these moves would halt the decline of sim losses, temporarily at least. However another route would be to introduce new products.

Now there’s no doubt that one way Linden Lab could halt the losses is to introduce new land products, such as a region that supports 7,500 prims for around USD$150.00 per month, or a region that supports 11,250 prims for USD$225.00 a month, or mega regions that were double, treble or quadruple the size of current regions in terms of prim count and land mass but had a pro-rata rata tier rate that was a fair bit cheaper than four individual regions, that might appeal to the large Land Barons.

There is a precedent for new products increasing the land mass, it came with the Openspace fiasco. When Linden Lab removed the requirement to buy Openspaces in packs of four and then allowed them to be placed anywhere on the grid, the land mass exploded, so much so that on July 8th 2008 Zee Linden opened his blog post with:

Linden Lab is pleased to announce results for Second Life the second Quarter.

 Land mass grew over 44%. The total number of 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.

Now as those of us who were around at the time know, this didn’t end well, but in terms of bringing new land to the grid, the Openspace initiative produced staggering results.

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dio Definitely Has Potential

Dio6

I must confess that the blurb about dio hadn’t gripped me at all, it looked like another social network, with some funky features but we’ve seen it all before. Versu is the forthcoming Linden Lab project I’ve been looking forward to, that’s the interactive fiction, that’s the creative space that appeals most to me.

However, after using dio, I’ve changed my mind. There’s a lot of potential here and it’s a very diverse place. There are also quite a few Second Life and virtual world users setting up home there already, sneaky bunch aren’t we.

dio1

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You’ve been Left On Your Own, Like A Rainbow In The Dark

Linden Lab have unleashed another new product, this time dio, where you may be able to ride the tiger, you can see his stripes but you know he’s clean. dio has been on the horizon for a while, but now it seems to be cooking on gas and you can see some good commentary on Inara Pey’s blog post and Hamlet Au’s blog post, alternatively you can stick with me for cheesy 80’s rock references, look, someone was going to do it, I’m just taking one for the team and sparing other bloggers the pain of the cheesy references!

There’s also a very hand press release from Linden Lab, which can be read here. I’m still awaiting a reply from Peter Gray from an email from years ago now that I think about it, but one day, you never know. Anyway, what is dio I hear you ask, and no don’t go all 80’s rock again, well not just yet! Where was I? Oh yes, what is dio, well from the press reference Rod Humble is quoted as saying:

dio is a new shared creative space on the web, based around the concept of linked spaces, dio makes it easy and fun to create or visit experiences of all kinds. dio is still in development, and we have deliberately kept the tools as broad as possible, but so far our testers have created a vast range of spaces, from wedding keepsakes, to house tours, to games, to rich media-linked chat rooms about sports and ancient history. I’m really looking forward to seeing what people will create now that dio is more widely available.

I think this is something we’re going to need to see in action to really understand what’s going on, but an interesting part of dio is that there’s talk of being able to earn money, initially via ad revenue and further down the line from creations and what makes this press release more positive, from a Second Life perspective, is that Rod Humble even makes a reference to Second Life in the press release! Hurrah!

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