Category: Social Networking

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2012 Reviewed – January To March

January

The year started with the news that the mesh clothing parametric deformer, paid for and funded by Second Life residents, was going Alpha.

Mesh itself got a boost with the news that the 1920’s Berlin sim was embracing mesh.

Direct Delivery, the new funky way of selling items on the SL Marketplace went beta.

Bryn Oh’s art installation of Immersiva, which had been previously subsidised thanks to the generous nature of Dusan Writer, had to close due to financial difficulties.

llSetMemoryLimit a new scripting function to set the upper limit a script can use in terms of memory usage, got rolled out.

The Simple Inventory Project Viewer was launched for testing, this was a project aimed at improving how inventory performs.

Avatar Rendering Cost was replaced by Avatar Draw Weight, with this being a new performance tool to show us how costly our avatars are.

Duran Duran got their very own section on the destination guide, it’s still there today.

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Cloud Party Removes Facebook Only Restriction

I’ve blogged about Cloud Party a couple of times and both times I mentioned that to have an account you needed to use Facebook. This is something I simply do not support, although as I said in both posts, I can understand why startups turn to Facebook for logins, it fills a hole in the starting process but the longer a product continues to be Facebook login only, the more it becomes an albatross around the neck of a product. Facebook should simply not be the only login in town, keeping Facebook logins as an option is sensible, but there should be other options.

Kitely was initially Facebook login only, so that’s another example of a startup turning to Facebook, but Kitely moved on and now I’m pleased to say, so has Cloud Party. Hamlet Au over at New World Notes blogged about the change yesterday. They have also added flight, which along with other changes, such as their marketplace and royalties system, shows that Cloud Party is developing rather nicely.

Cloud Party has some interesting people involved in its development, such as ex Linden Cory Ondrejka and Cryptic Studio’s ex-CTO Bruce Rogers, who are I believe investors, I don’t know if they’re hands on. Cloud Party is also developing with previous worlds in mind, for example one of the reasons cited for Facebook logins is to minimise griefing.

So how does this new accout creation work? Well I, as a fearless hero, dipped my toes into the water.

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Cloud Party Improves But Remains Nerfed By Facebook Login Requirement

Hamlet Au reports on improvements to Cloud Party, in a blog post over at New World Notes. There are some interesting improvements going on with the product, especially in terms of the marketplace, which you can read about on the cloud party wiki, here.

Those who have US bank accounts can now cash out their Cloud Party Gold coins, but there’s no date set for when this will be available to international customers. They have a really interesting royalty feature for items and this is something Linden Lab may want to pay attention to. Royalties can be read about here. This allows a merchant to sell an asset and then have a royalty from all future sales of that asset, sent to them. So for example, if your asset is used in another users build, when that user sells their item, the original creator would receive royalties, this is a very good idea.

However where Cloud Party continues to languish in epic fail territory, in my opinion, is the requirement for those who seriously want to use the platform to use a Facebook login.

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Versu Is Starting To Look Very Interesting

The Guardian have gained such a reputation for typos that their nickname is The Grauniad. Indeed if you type in grauniad.co.uk into a web browser you’ll end up at The Guardian’s website. Linden Lab are so often called Linden Labs that, typing lindenlabs.com into a web browser takes you to … http://lindenlabs.com/ … which is the same website as http://lindenlab.com/ I mean, people just cannot help but call the company Linden Labs.

Which brings us to a Techcrunch article entitled : How Linden Lab Hopes To Find Second Life In Mobile Creative Play aha! They got the name right? Well not quite, there’s a comment telling the author that the company is called Linden Lab, the URL has LindenLabs in it and a google search lists the story with Linden Labs in the headline. Now, is it important that people get the name right? Well not really, people know who they’re talking about, so with that over, let’s move on.

Creatoverse and Patterns have been getting a lot of coverage lately, Inara Pey takes a look at Creatoverse here. However Dio and Versu have been a bit more vague, I mean we know Emily Short is involved in Versu and that it’s interactive fiction. The TechCrunch article puts a bit more meat on the bones, although it’s not exactly clear what’s on the horizon.

Dio is hard to explain apparently, it sounds a bit like Google’s Lively from that article, involving doors to get to other spaces, having an avatar and an inventory. Apparently you can create a MUSH (multi user shared hack) and a hobby space very easily.

Versu …. this is starting to look very interesting.

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Second Life Cited In Divorce Case

I sometimes google news of Second Life, or Rod Humble, to see if there’s any news on Second Life or Rod Humble! So today I discover a story that claims that a man’s addiction to Second Life was cited in a divorce case. The story claims that the man, who can’t be named (and nor can his avatar) spent twenty five hours a week in Second Life.

He was also said to be addicted to watching porn on his computer, one would hope he was not partaking in adult activities in Second Life and then going for more outside of Second Life! There are claims that this may be the first case whereby Second Life has been cited in a divorce case, but it’s unfortunately not, in 2008 there was the Dave Barmy affair. This one involves all sorts of shennanigans, including a honey trap!

Then there’s a case that was apparently reported in the now defunct News Of The World, but made its way to the Huffington Post: Second Life Divorce: Woman Catches Husband In Virtual Gay Affair :

“I saw John’s little person having it off with another man in a dungeon on the screen,” said horrified Lisa, 28.

This sort of thing isn’t specific to Second Life, Facebook and other social media sites have been cited in divorce cases and I expect this to increase, especially as we embrace the digital world more firmly. The issue isn’t really Second Life, or Facebook, there will be far deeper issues involved in all of these cases, ones that will make more sense and should be taken more seriously.

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