The challenge with a review of the year is to try and make it worth reading. There’s a balance between including information and including too much information. This year’s review is largely based on Second Life and my own posts, so there’s plenty of information that I will be missing. For those who want a more in depth review, Inara Pey has been reviewing 2013 too.
For me personally it was a difficult year, Reed, Dee, Izzy and TJ Linden all gave me wonderful support, even when I myself was more than a tad grouchy with them but I do appreciate the efforts they made to accommodate me.
This post is not as long as it looks, if you skip the pictures, links and embedded videos it won’t take as long to read as you may think at first glance. I did consider breaking this down in to different posts, as I did last year. However at the end of the day it is what it is, so it looks like it’s epic in length but it’s really not. However to aid people I’ve decided to go back to HTML school and create a table of contents! Hurrah.
Contents
The new year saw the return of an old favourite/menace, depending upon your point of view. Second Lie returned to Twitter, explaining that his absence had been due to being lagged for eight months.
However others wondered whether other old faces would return, with Honour McMillan adding weight to the speculation that 2013 could be the year that Magellan Linden returned to land.
Linden Lab expanded their empire by unleashing Versu and Dio at the start of the month. Later in the month the Linden Lab empire expanded further when they acquired Blocksworld. I tried Dio but it changed during the year to become something quite different to the initial offering, which I can’t say is engaging for me personally. Versu is not yet available for Android devices.
The year started with a bang, which promptly led to a wobble as Lag Storm Bernard (name by Loki Eliot) wreaked havoc across many Second Life sims. Warnings were issued for people not to rez objects.
Linden Lab took many of us by surprise, whilst people were awaiting their arrival on Steam, they pulled a rabbit out of a hat by expanding to Amazon. Unfortunately the offer had a few teething problems, one being that it was only available to US residents and a second issue of people abusing the offer which led to the promotion being pulled. Tateru Nino received an explanation from Linden Lab’s Peter Gray:
“This offer was terminated early due to repeated attempts to circumvent the one-per-customer limit, but we saw great demand for the deal and hope to be able to offer similar special promotions in the future”
Special promotions were not too far in the future, later in January Linden Lab announced another promotion via Amazon.
There were complaints about delays in the cashing out process. There would be more complaints on this matter throughout the year.
There were also complaints about the lack of availability of Linden Homes. This at least exemplified how popular they were.
Linden Lab demonstrated their experimental use of the Leap Motion controller in Second Life.
Flufee, the avatar that became a Machinima star thanks to the work of Draxtor Despres and Pooky Amsterdam was turned into a wind machine (as in burping style wind) after the IP owners of Flufee decided he needed to be taken in a new direction.
New email preferences were unveiled for the SL Marketplace, which were well received by merchants who had been asking for improved notifications.
I discovered on the Second Life Wiki a Pathfinding cookbook, which was incomplete, it’s still incomplete! This is supposed to have some recipes for good use of the Pathfinding feature available in Second Life.
Tyche Shepherd informed us that Adult rated sims now outnumbered General rated sims. At the time the difference was 3,932 Adult sims v 3,924 General sims. The gap between the two would grow during the year but Moderate rated sims remain the sim rating of popular choice.
Banner ads started to appear on the Second Life website, this received mixed reactions.
The Community Hub User Interface (CHUI) viewer was unveiled by Linden Lab as a beta viewer. As with many changes, it wasn’t universally greeted with 100% enthusiasm but I don’t see too many complaints about it now.
Draxtor Despres dusted himself down after the Flufee affair and published episode 1 of The Drax Files. Many more excellent episodes would be published during the year.
As well as launching the CHUI Beta viewer Linden Lab announced that a special project viewer for Macs was available, entitled Project Cocoa. I do not know what happened to this viewer.
CommerceTeam Linden announced that the old SL Exchange magic boxes were to be semi retired in April, their only real use now being for items for which a merchant does not have copy permissions. Reactions were mixed …. you might spot a theme here.
The Relay For Life fundraiser kicked off in Second Life on March 9th. A record breaking USD$393,000 would be raised during the year.
Hamlet Au broke the news that Linden Lab were quietly offering the old 50% discount to selected educational or non-profit sims.
Lilith Heart, plant maker extraordinaire found herself on the receiving end of a mysterious 24 hour suspension.
I discovered Gayworld-TV news InsyX show, which was produced by Teno Theriac or Rocky Constantine. The interviews are interesting but a lot longer than The Drax Files.
Philip Rosedale’s new virtual world High Fidelity started to get tongues wagging. This was in its very early stages at this time and is only now going into the alpha stage so patience please.
An issue regarding missing prims was starting to plague some Second Life sims. Andrew Linden was one of the team who investigated this.
April for me was dominated by Fantasy Faire 2013. I stayed with The Dwarfins.
However I did not stay in the tavern all the time, I would encounter magic from Zachh Barkley’s The Arcanum, marvel at the crystals from Khyle Sion’s Refined Wild, be entwined in silks and jewels from Thorn Witrial’s The Golden Thorn and the strange situation of looking at Meka Aeon’s hair … well hair from her store Lupoaica.
I would also find myself involved in a quest for a Golden Prim.
Fantasy Faire is such a magical event, if you haven’t been before, you should go, if it’s running in 2014 of course.
Linden Lab announced a new process for beta viewers. Instead of one beta viewer there would be multiple beta viewers. This was aimed to improve the pace of changes and seems to have worked quite well.
The Linden Lab terms of service was updated. This would not be the last terms of service change of the year. This change was centred around third party exchanges and outlined that selling Linden Dollars on such exchanges was now strictly forbidden. This caused some unrest because it was far quicker to cash out via Third Party exchanges but it seems changes to financial regulations in the United States were at the heart of the matter and Linden Lab were forced to act.
The fallout led to Linden Lab taking a slight step back in terms of where people could buy Linden Dollars, an authorised reseller program was unveiled.
Flickr changed the design of their product and there was much criticism. I still find the changes absurd.
Daniel Voyager spotted Rod Humble inworld! Many of us were shocked.
After the rare sighting of Rod Humble inworld, Draxtor Despres got an even bigger scoop with an interview with the CEO.
The Materials Project Beta viewer was unveiled. This was greeted very positively, in a break with tradition. This would allow normal and specular maps to be used as textures within Second Life to hopefully add more oomph.
June marked the official 10th birthday of Second Life. Linden Lab released a freebie bear avatar for the event, which I promptly used.
There were builds for the birthday event, if you wanted to listen to Second Life associated phrases spoken in a voice similar to William Shatner’s there was Crap Mariner’s SL10B Shatoetry Project.
There were plenty of other places to enjoy too, including a scavenger hunt on behalf of the grumpy but brilliant Magellan Linden.
However June was not just about SL10B. The Under The Sea expo was in full swing too. This demonstrated some of the wonders that can be found … well under the Second Life seas.
However a disappointing aspect in June came to light when Misty Mole announced she had had her Mole status revoked in a dispute over fees for her musical work. Misty provided a youTube video to demonstrate some of her work over the years.
MadPea Productions unveiled the wonderfully noirish Mad City, which included the room 326 game.
Rod Humble may have been quiet on the Second Life website but in July he gave an excellent interview to AllThingsD regarding Second Life’s tween years.
Tyche Shepherd reported that Private Sims had dropped below the 20,000 mark as sims continued to disappear from the grid. However there were signs that the rate of losses was slowing down and this trend would continue until the end of the year.
Linden Lab announced the return of the 50% discount for all qualifying educational or non-profit sims. In March this had only been being applied to selected sims.
Linden Lab further expanded their new empire by purchasing the PC gaming digital distribution platform of Desura.
August was a quiet month for me on the blogging front, although not as quiet as September would be. I interviewed adult Second Life artist Laura Demonista and conducted another interview with not at all adult Second Life artist Strawberry Singh.
Linden Lab launched, rather quietly, a new affiliate program via Commission Junction. This came about because the old Google Advertising Network had closed down.
News of season 2 of The Blackened Mirror started to leak out, with the word on the street being that someone who had starred in television series Babylon 5 being involved. The Blackened Mirror is filmed in Second Life.
September was the month of the TOS change that caused major controversy amongst content creators. The change actually took place in August, but it was in September when people seemed to start noticing it. The heart of the problem was that rather than content being used for promoting the service, as the previous TOS had stated, the new TOS required users to give Linden Lab the right to use content for any purpose whatsoever.
CG Textures and Renderosity got wind of this and promptly disallowed use of their content within Second Life going forward. Inara Pey contacted Linden Lab for further clarification and received a reply from Peter Gray which didn’t soothe tensions. This was largely due to people not being convinced that intent trumps wording.
The TOS fallout continued. Former Linden Karl Stiefvater (AKA Qarl Fizz, AKA Qarl Linden) announced he had deleted his sim and said goodbye to Second Life over the issue.
Bixyl Shuftan published a summary of a meeting of concerned Second Life content creators and Second Life Bar association members regarding the TOS changes.
Kitely and Cloud Party both published blog posts that sound far more content creator friendly than the new Second Life TOS.
Away from the TOS controversy Linden Lab emailed a random set of users asking if they’d be interested in beta testing a mobile client version of Second Life.
Cloud Party unveiled a new landing page.
The Isle Of Dee was sunk by the tier monster, even The Goblin King couldn’t save the Isle. However the refugees found themselves a new home.
Dr Fran Babcock’s SL Oldbie project got off the ground with an interview with Malachi Petunia. More interviews would follow in November.
A kickstarter was created for a virtual world called Ever,Jane. This was an interesting looking concept based on the world of Jane Austen and headed by Judy L Tyrer, a former senior engineering manager at Linden Lab who worked on Second Life. The Kickstarter successfully met its minimum goal in early December.
Questions were asked as to exactly what had happened to AnnMarie OToole’s automated vehicles. Some found them fun, others found them hideous but in November they seemed to have disappeared. Reports in December suggest they may be making a comeback.
Linden Lab announced that new Marketplace merchants will need to have registered payment info on file before opening a store. Reaction to this was largely positive although there were one or two initial teething problems.
CasperTech launched PrimBay, an alternative online selling catalogue for Second Life merchants who use the CasperTech sales system.
Machinima came under the spotlight as the Machinima Expo 6 ran over the weekend of November 17th.
MetaReality Podcast returned after an absence of six months. Questions were raised about the lack of a beeping machine.
Linden Lab blogged regarding new tax requirements. Better late than never, people had been asking about why they’d been asked for this information in various forums prior to the blog post appearing.
Linden Lab then blogged about fitted mesh. There was a project viewer to accompany this with the aim of testing whether the new collision bones solution to make mesh clothing fit more comfortably worked well. This also meant that Qarl’s Mesh Deformer project which users had funded, was dead in the water for Second Life. Qarl was quite reasonable about the decision saying:
“The simplest solution is the best one – and collision bones are indeed MUCH simpler than the mesh deformer”
Maria Korolov posted the fourth annual open sim survey results over at Hypergrid Business. Kitely came out very well in this survey.
Season 2 of The Blackened Mirror was launched. Featuring Peter Jurasik (Londo Mollari in Babylon 5), Zander Greene and others with stage and screen backgrounds. Prim Perfect’s Saffia Widdershins and Honour McMillan were director and assistant director respectively. I’ll embed episode 1 of season 2 here, two more episodes were released in December. The final three episodes will be aired in January.
The sad news was posted at SLUniverse that Alliez Mysterio, owner of D’Alliez estates had passed away after a battle with cancer. Misinformation or mischief making of the worst kind later in that month would lead to Alliez’s daughter having to post that D’Alliez estates is NOT closing.
The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker made a documentary for Channel 4 entitled “How Videogames Changed The World“. I enjoyed this greatly, although I felt the number 1 of the 25 games they used as examples was a bit of a cop out.
Toysoldier Thor blogged about how he had made the jump from a Second Life digital artist to exhibiting art in an exhibition of his work in a real world space, and the results were very positive.
The Guardian broke the news that the NSA and GCHQ had been spying in games and virtual worlds, including Second Life. There was much mirth about this along with much concern.
Kitely announced some changes to their pricing structure. Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner responded to my request for an interview on the changes.
Linden Lab quietly changed their bot policy to restrict the number of messages a bot could send in a 24 hour period.
In what may or may not have been a quiet policy change, Sonja Smedley reported that she was no longer able to send private messages on MySecondLife. Others agreed with her with one user reporting that Linden Lab had told him the feature had been discontinued. Further information has been requested.
Daniel Voyager, Inara Pey and Nalates Urriah all reported that Andrew Linden (AKA employee number 2) was leaving Linden Lab to join High Fidelity. At this point I also noticed that High Fidelity was accepting Alpha signups and that for those with the means, it looked like it was possible to login to High Fidelity.
Sam Thompson of Cloud Party posted that they were having a period of introspection whilst they figured out where they want to go next.
So that’s it, well done if you’ve made it this far. The positives were many for Linden Lab. Expanding their empire is absolutely the right thing to be doing and they’ve made some decent acquisitions as well as new launches themselves. There have been technological improvements and new added features for Second Life which suggest Linden Lab recognise the importance of their core product.
On the negative side the tier in Second Life remains too damn high, for which there is no easy fix. The Jira is still neutered by the restrictions placed upon it last year and sim losses are still worrying, although there has been a slowdown in losses during 2013 compared to 2012. The TOS debacle was also a negative, I’m not at all sure what Linden Lab are trying to do there. Then there’s Linden Lab’s lack of communication and community engagement, which hit an all time low this year.
However overall, Linden Lab look to be heading in the right direction. Personally I feel that Rod Humble is definitely the right man for the job, he’s just a bit too quiet. I can assure you I’m not biased by his nationality or great taste in football teams.
My highlight of the year was Fantasy Faire, this is such an epic event that ticks so many right boxes for me.
Draxtor Despres production of The Drax Files were a wonderful highlight for the year, highlighting many excellent use cases for Second Life and virtual worlds in general. Really positive stuff from Drax.
Outside Second Life, both Kitely and Cloud Party have done some soul searching and made changes or are considering making them, whilst High Fidelity seems to be gaining a little bit of traction by accepting alpha signups. That will be worth keeping an eye on.
Associated Links
Small point of niggle.
Daniel didn’t actually break the news about Andrew leaving.
Nalates Urriah and I were both at the meeting where Andrew made his annoucement, and Nalates was the first to blog on the news – so credit should go to her. Daniel’s blog post was actually a follow-up to mine.
In my original post on Andrew’s departure I said that Daniel, yourself and Nalates broke the news on Andrew’s departure. In this post I said that Daniel reported the news. I first read about the news via a tweet from Daniel so it is fair to say Daniel reported the news although I would have read it via your blog or Nalates blog if I had not seen Daniel’s tweet.
However, as there are a distinct lack of links to Nalates blog in my round up I’ll update it.
Yeah – Nal also tweeted first on posting.
I’m not concerned about links to my blog; I’m just sensitive over the fact that oftentimes people get upset if the correct attribution for breaking the news isn’t given, It’s something I’ve encountered myself when pointing to this or that blog post for news, only to have someone leave a comment stating, “Actually, it was X who did that…”
In this case, Nal was very clearly the first to break the news, Twitter, Plurk and blog-wise.
My rule of thumb is to generally follow the route by which I found the news, in this case it was via Daniel’s tweet, to his blog post. I think that’s the fair way to do it because that’s how I discovered the news, so that route deserves to be credited. I’ll make exceptions if the route contains too much profanity or adult imagery.
The first person I saw discussing the Gmail spam issue was Innula Zenovka, who posted about it in both the official forum and SLUniverse a few days before Christmas, you found out about this via Saffia and therefore rightly credited Saffia for the information.
Even if you’d discovered Innula’s posts, I’d still think you were right to credit Saffia, as that’s how you discovered the information.
And its a great review of the year 2013, i do hope we could see SL making the final step, a bridge between users and the team, the only thing that is lacking now!