Linden Lab – Page 118

April 2, 2014April 2, 2014

SL Share Extends To Flickr And Twitter But What Next For SL Profiles?

Linden Lab have blogged that the SL Share feature that was initially introduced to allow people to share photos, status and check ins on Facebook has now been extended to include functionality for Flickr and Twitter.

Personally I feel Flickr and Twitter are a much better fit for Second Life as both allow people to have their Second Life user name as their profile name, whereas Facebook is still in the bah humbug arena regarding pseudonyms.

In both cases they are taking advantage of features and requirements of the respective platforms, with Twitter the hashtag of #SecondLife is automatically added and with Flickr, they respect the fact that maturity ratings are sometimes required.

However there are also other funky features, such as post processing of pictures, as explained in the blog post :

This update will also introduce a set of post-processing filters that you can run your pictures through to create cool one-of-a-kind images! The new filters were inspired by the images posted to Flickr by Second Life Residents. With more than a million uploads, most of them enhanced by some post-processing, we thought it would be great to include this feature right in SLShare. These filters will work regardless of which social network you choose to share your Second Life pictures to.

However if you don’t like those filters, you can use the advanced features and create your own filters, the wiki has more details.

Now to take advantage of these features, you will need to download a special project viewer, which you can find here.

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March 29, 2014

Facebook Should Not Buy Second Life For The Sake Of Both Companies

Bopete Yossarian has started a thread over at SLUniverse to discuss an article that appeared this week on Gamasutra : Why Facebook should buy Linden Lab. The article is posted by a community member called Nick Harris, rather than a regular member of the Gamasutra staff, the opinions in the article are therefore not the opinions of Gamasutra or its parent company.

The article doesn’t really delve into the reasons why Nick Harris thinks this is a good idea, which sort of undermines the article. However the idea is an interesting one, so is the idea that Microsoft or Yahoo! should buy Linden Lab. The ideas are interesting in terms of discussion but generally lack any real meat on the bones.

The article also falls into the trap of saying :

Facebook have tried to retain its dominance through simple critical mass, if that is where everyone is, if you have to join Facebook to not miss out on invites to your friend’s impromptu parties then their hope is that you will and you won’t mind the data mining they do on you for market research and the targeted advertising. You aren’t in a position to complain, really, as it is a service they are providing to you for free.

This is a pet peeve of mine. Facebook is not free, it’s an exchange of resources. They provide the service, users provide the content, Facebook then realise value from said content. Although there’s no money exchanging hands in terms of basic usage of Facebook, there is a trade of content for service. However that aside, the author really doesn’t make much of a case for Facebook to buy Second Life :

Not only is this primarily a social nexus like Facebook (a place where you can project whatever version of yourself you choose others to see, either using a younger image of yourself, or making an effort to dress up for the photo when you are actually a slob in real life, or use someone else’s image entirely out of low esteem, or some catfish scam), but you are encouraged to create an escapist alter ego through which to indulge your fantasies, to travel without time, cost, or hassle to “see the sights”, to meet new people who share your interests unrestricted by enormous geographical separation.

Whereas I can see to a degree what he’s trying to get at, he seems to be missing a gaping point about the differences between Second Life and Facebook.

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March 25, 2014

The Slow Down In Region Losses … With Charts!

To fully appreciate the full extent of the slow down in region losses it’s best to turn to an expert. Unfortunately Tyche Shepherd doesn’t blog here, so you’ll have to read me instead. However the good news, I’m basing this post on the expert work of Tyche Shepherd and Tyche has kindly agreed to let me use her charts. Now please remember, these charts are Tyche’s work and copyrighted by Tyche, in other words, they shouldn’t be used without permission.

Ok on with the show.

Private Region Changes 2012 – 2014 (2 years)

Chart Of Private Region Changes 2012 - 2014 — Private Region Changes 2012 – 2014

Unfortunately this chart doesn’t display well on a blog this small, you can get a much better view of it on SLUniverse because there when you click the link, it enlarges. This chart shows the change in private regions between 1st Jan 2012 and 29th December 2013, so that’s around 2 years, give or take a few days. Private regions shrunk from 23,857 down to 19,273. A loss of 4,584 regions or 19.2%. That’s an alarming figure but hopefully you can see the slow down. The second half of the chart shows very few weeks where the third line down was reached.

Private Region Changes 1st January 2012 – 23rd December 2012

Chart Of Grid Size Image — Private region changes during 2012

This chart shows the private region changes during most of 2012, 51 weeks of it. Two things to note, the losses during 2012 came in at 2,863, this means the majority of the two year losses came during 2012, it works out at around 62.46% of the two year losses coming during 2012, which of course means, the slow down in private region losses did not get well under way until we hit 2013.

Private Region Changes 30th December 2012 – 29th December 2013

Private Region Changes 2013 Chart — Private Region Changes 2013

Above is the chart for those losses in 2013 and what we can see is that there was a total net loss of 1,719 regions or 8.2% for the year. As I said, this is considerably lower than during 2012 but still probably a little high. The losses are heavily loaded towards the first half of the year, the slow down really starts to become apparent around July and August but as we head into the Autumn we do some weeks where the losses picked up again. None of this really indicated what was to come during the first few weeks of 2014, but the slow down is most definitely apparent.

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March 23, 2014

Second Life Grid Size – Steady As She Goes

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd’s weekly grid report breaks the news this week that the Second Life grid size has remained static for a second week in a row, although the net number of private regions grew by one sim, this was cancelled out by one Linden owned region disappearing.

The current scores on the doors are a total number of 26,178 regions on the Second Life grid, with 19,195 being private estates and 6,983 being Linden owned.

Now to get this shift in fortunes into some sort of perspective, let’s compare the scores on the doors during the first few months of 2012, 2013 and 2014.

2012

Type	01/01/2012	25/03/2012	Change	Percentage
Estate	23,857	23,046	-811	-3.4%
Linden Owned	7,221	7,105	-116	-1.60%
Overall	31,078	30,151	-927	-2.98%

In the above table we can see that overall losses were over 900 regions in the first few months of 2012, coming in at just under 3%. This table is a little bit odd because there were a higher number of Linden owned regions disappearing than we’ll see for 2013 and 2014, but this table is also the one with the largest losses for private regions too, both in numbers and percentage wise.

2013

Type	30/12/2012	24/03/2013	Change	Percentage
Estate	20,992	20,469	-523	-2.49%
Linden Owned	7,102	7,088	-14	-0.2%
Overall	28,094	27,557	-537	-1.91%

Here we can see that losses were still rather high with a net loss of over 500 private regions, but that in itself was an improvement on the early part of 2012, although the figures look disappointing there is indication of a slow down with a net loss that is almost 300 less than a similar period in 2013.

2014

Type	30/12/2013	23/03/2014	Change	Percentage
Estate	19,273	19,195	-78	-0.40%
Linden Owned	6,986	6,983	-3	-0.04%
Overall	26,259	26,178	-81	-0.31%

Here we can see that the slowdown in net region losses is getting quite significant. A net loss of just 78 private regions as opposed to the 523 in 2013 and the 811 in 2012 is extremely impressive. That’s just 9.61% of the net losses we saw during a similar period in 2012 and just 14.91% of the net losses we saw during a similar period in 2013.

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March 21, 2014

A Massive Cross Promotion Opportunity Stares Linden Lab And Adobe In The Face

Adobe are currently offering Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5 for a subscription of $9.99 a month if you sign up for a one year plan :

For a limited time, you can join a special Creative Cloud plan. It includes access to Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5, plus feature updates and upgrades as they are available, 20GB of cloud storage for file sharing and collaboration, and a Behance ProSite. And it’s just US $9.99/month when you sign up for a one-year plan, but you need to join by March 31, 2014.

Now if you’re in the the Euro zone it’s 12.29 a month including VAT and in the UK it’s £8.78 including VAT … the temptation to rant here is rather immense, but I’ll let it pass. The prices are reasonable, here’s the thing, Adobe Photoshop is a very powerful tool that could be used for Second Life content creation. Adobe used to have an island in Second Life, I don’t know if they still have that island but I visited the place when they had an event many moons ago.

The transport was a freebie and they had entertainment there during the day, so Adobe did at one stage have a clue about how to use Second Life. However even if they no longer have an island, their new monthly subscription plan is ideally placed for being bundled with some sort of Second Life premium membership plan. One aimed at content creators.

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