Category: Virtual Worlds

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The Rod Humble Years- Improved Technology Combined With Poor Communication

As revealed yesterday, Rod Humble has departed Linden Lab after three years at the helm as CEO. Who the new Linden Lab CEO will regenerate as is not yet known, but Rod was the third or fourth regeneration of the Linden Lab CEO. This depends upon whether you count Bob Komin’s temporary stint as CEO. Fans of the franchise are divided upon whether Bob Komin was a legitimate regeneration.

Linden Lab announced Rod’s arrival in December 2010, although it is my understanding that he officially started work in January 2011. There was also a blog post in January 2011 when he arrived in Second Life in a toga. Early in his tenure he gave an impressive interview with Rock,Paper,Shotgun in which he explained some of the positives of Second Life:

What makes Second Life so intriguing to me is its hard to define nature. I have heard people call it a virtual world, a game, the 3d internet, a social media platform.. the list goes on. I like that kind of unresolved ambiguity, I think it shows something that is not yet fully evolved and has exciting new roads to discover. 

That interview also revealed that Rod had worked at Electronic Arts for six and a half years, which was the longest period he had worked anywhere, this is worth bearing in mind considering the recent news. Just shy of a couple of years into his tenure Rod gave another interview, this time to Giant Bomb, which shed light on this reasons for joining Second Life in the first place:

“When I was thinking about leaving EA,” said Humble during a recent meeting. “I was going to do my own company, and it was going to be around creative spaces–games that emphasize creativity tools more. When the opportunity came up and Linden Lab got in touch…first of all, Second Life? Is that still around? [laughs] I looked, and it was really, really healthy. Also, it was a company that was ready made to do a whole bunch of other products, which I wanted to do.”

This is also worth bearing in mind as Hamlet’s blog post on Rod’s departure includes his Facebook announcement about his departure in which he says:

I am starting up a company to make Art, Entertainment and unusual things! More on that in a few weeks!

Which sounds like he’s doing the sort of thing that he wanted to do before joining Linden Lab, the sort of thing he thought he could do with Linden Lab. Rod’s time at Linden Lab looks, on the face of it, to have been very good. He expanded the Linden Lab empire and put the Lab back into the Linden. However there were downsides during his reign.

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The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 3 – Esteban!

Third time lucky! Hopfully no virtual world CEO’s quit or platforms announce their forthcoming closure whilst I’m finishing this post! I’ll have more on the Rod Humble departure later. The third episode of The Drax Files Radio Hour is out and this week’s episode is a controversial affair with an introduction and interview with the infamous Esteban Winsmore, I’ll be honest, I’ve never heard of him but Second Life is a very big place. Yes, I’m someone who had until now not heard of Esteban, apologies for that.

The show covers many issues, coming out of the virtual closet being one. This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, many people prefer to keep segments of their life separate but it does demonstrate very well that many people are happy to share their virtual world experiences with people who are not so familiar with the concept.

There’s an interview with Monty Linden full of geeky goodness about the HTTP project in Second Life.

A feature about a documentary from Loki Eliot regarding the history and future of  virtual reality. Jo Yardley and Inara Pey have more on this, I haven’t watched it in full yet but the brief preview looks fascinating.

There’s mention of a Twitter exchange between Hamlet Au of New World Notes, Philip Rosedale, you should all know who he is, Cory Ondrejka, who used to be CTO at Linden Lab and Marc Andreesen, a man who was hugely influential in the growth of the web browser due to his work on Mosaic which turned into Netscape. Younger readers should note that Netscape was once the browser to have before Microsoft came along and unleashed the browser wars.

The extent of these browser wars was highlighted when Microsoft released IE4. The legend is that after the release party for IE4, Microsoft engineers planted a ten foot Microsot IE logo on the lawn of the Netscape HQ. Netscape called it a fraternity style prank to get revenge and then promptly replaced the logo with their Mozilla dinosaur mascot and a sign pointing out Netscape was still far and away the prominent browser. We’re talking back in 1997 here but the importance of Marc Andreesen’s work should definitely be appreciated. I’ve gone off on a big tangent here! Continue reading “The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 3 – Esteban!”

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1920’s Berlin Breaking 2014 News – Rod Humble Leaves Linden Lab

1920’s Berlin chief Jo (Frau) Yardley has broken the news that Rod Humble has left Linden Lab! As this is the second post tonight to throw me off my schedule of writing about the Drax Files Radio hour I’m just going to post the early twitter reactions and grab a beer!

 

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Another One Bites The Dust – Cloud Party To Close February 21st

Pirates? Ahoy?

In a not that surprising announcement, Sam Thompson has announced that Cloud Party will close on February 21st. I say not that surprisng because Cloud Party users had been commenting on the lack of updates during December, prompting Sam Thompson to say on the forums:

We see you’ve noticed how quiet we are. Things always seem to slow down around here this time of year, and this year is no exception. We’re going to pick it up a bit on the bug front over the next couple of weeks and make sure we are catching those. Be sure to use the in-world bug report feature, we try to follow the forums but sometimes bugs reported on the forums slip through the cracks.

Right now we are having another time of introspection while we figure out where we want to go next with Cloud Party. We will be talking with everyone more before the holiday break, so please be patient with us. Hope you are having a great holiday season so far!

Cloud Party had some wonderful concepts, some excellent building tools and being browser based meant that people didn’t have to fuddle around with a client. However they couldn’t quite gain enough traction to make an identity of their own for enough people to embrace the product in my view. Content creators were also shy of investing too much there as cashing out proved problematic due to new financial regulations.

The blog post says:

We’re excited to announce that the time has come for the Cloud Party team to start our next adventure. We are joining Yahoo! The last two years have been an incredible experience for everyone here. We’ve been continually amazed by your creativity and the worlds you’ve built and shared with us.

Cloud Party will continue to run until February 21, 2014. We want to support our community during this transition. In the interest of preserving your extraordinary Cloud Party creations, we’ve added export tools and written this guide to help you export your content. If you have any questions, please contact support.

We are privileged to have had so many wonderful users share ideas and creations. We are excited to bring our vision and experience to a team that is as passionate about games as we are. Thank you all for sharing in this journey with us, and we hope you stick around for what’s next!

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I’ll stick around to see what they do with Yahoo! considering the steaming mess they’ve made of Flickr since May 2013, Yahoo! are not a company I have great faith in, but I will give anyone a fair chance and it may be that Yahoo! with the Cloud Party team do come up with something useful.

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Could Second Life Sister Grids Be The Future Way Forward For Virtual Worlds?

BopetteYossarian has posted a question regarding online gambling over at SLUniverse, namely whether rumblings in some US states regarding legalising online gambling could see a return of gambling to Second Life. Bopette links to a story on Fox News.

The story mentions that certain states are making moves, or have made moves, to allow online gambling, despite the fact that Federal law still forbids it. However in terms of Second Life, this is pretty much a non starter as far as I’m concerned.

When gambling was allowed in Second Life, it really wasn’t legal online gambling in my view. I say this because I know of no officially licensed bookmakers or gambling institutions who were running online gambling in Second Life. The reason gambling seemed to get a pass in Second Life was due to the fact that Linden Dollars were being exchanged, rather than cash and the authorities weren’t paying close enough attention to new fangled technology. That changed in July 2007 when gambling was prohibited in Second Life, with rumours that it was due to an FBI investigation, hence the authorities appeared to have noticed something may be amiss with this new fangled technology.

The only way I could ever see gambling returning to Second Life would involve Second Life adopting a new model of land ownership and this may actually be beneficial to organisations other than gambling ventures, however we’ll stick with gambling for the example of how this may work. Imagine there were no legal obstacles to gambling, Linden Lab would still probably want nothing to do with it, namely because as far as I’m aware, they aren’t a licensed gambling operator. However what if a licensed gambling operator wanted to come in and it was legally possible? That’s where the different model of land ownership comes in.

The gambling operator would be on a sister grid, this wouldn’t show on the map, but teleporting there would be possible if you signed up with the gambling operator. They would handle the registrations, the age verification and the legal right for people to gamble there, you wouldn’t take your Linden Dollars with you, they’d have their own currency system. Linden Lab would provide the support, maintenance and hardware resources and charge a fee for those services, but they wouldn’t be responsible for the account verification or the TOS on the sister grid.

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