Ciaran Laval

August 2, 2013

Are Yahoo/Flickr Trolling Their Members?

I was reading the Flickr forums the other week when I saw a comment along the lines of “I think Yahoo are just trolling us now“, which made me laugh. However I’m now starting to think that the comment is squarely in the “Many a true word said in jest” category.

There has been much criticism of the new Flickr design from users, tech bloggers heaped praise on it but the comments from users tell a different story. Two quick examples of this, The Torygraph ran an article about the great new revamped Flickr, and below the line you see Flickr users disagreeing about the new awesome, with comments such as: “Check out the 139 pages of mostly negative comments on the changes on Flickr’s help pages. This isn’t an improvement. It’s a downgrade.”

There’s a similar pattern from The Grauniad article on the new Flickr, where we see comments like this: “It’s a terrible change. I used to be able to carefully curate my beautiful photostream, now it’s just a mass of photos. All the descriptions have gone too. I think Yahoo have made a big mistake. It’s like they don’t *get* Flickr.”

So Yahoo/Flickr have somehow done something political parties crave, they’ve united the right (Torygraph) and left (Grauniad), I suppose they deserve some sort of credit for that! The Flickr forums have heated up again this week, because not content with unleashing the new awesome on photostreams, search and explore, they’ve now hit groups. Some people who were all “Neener Neener” when people complained about the redesign have now had the penny firmly drop, because they largely use groups so put the complaints down as whining, but now they see the new awesome in all its glory.

The problem with the new Flickr is one that should ring a bell with Second Life users. Sometimes we land in a sim and it’s busy, we see grey people, it’s slow. One of the factors for this can be too many large sized textures loading, Linden Lab even have a page on texture usage that explains the problem. So when Flickr started serving up larger images, I was not surprised to see people complaining they were seeing grey boxes!

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July 26, 2013

Dwarfins – New Avatars, Affiliates, Developer API and Auction Listings

The Dwarfins team have been busy lately, six new avatars were released this week. The new avatars for your roleplaying fun are:

Butcher
Hunter
Barbarian
Jester
King and Queen
Royal Guards

This explains why when I was in the Dwarfins store a few days ago, Dante Spectre kept changing outfits before my eyes, I thought it was the ale! Do not try and outdrink Dante, I still have a sore head. I think he brews the ale himself, he sure puts them away!

However other developments have happened. the first of which I’ll discuss is their Affiliate program. The program offers you 10% of sales and there are a variety of options for your vendor packages, if you are accepted. This is not a free affiliate program, there is a choice of five different vendors, each of which costs L$3,000 or you can get the whole kit and caboodle for L$13,500.

The vendors cover different aspects of all things Dwarfin, Fishing, Gardening, Roleplay (Mesh Avatars), interactives for your breedable Dwarfins and of course, the breedable Dwarfins themself. Then you will have to allow DwarfinsJudy to setup the displays. DwarfinsJudy is a very mysterious character, nobody knows the true identity, my money is on it being Thorrak Rockbeard, although the smart money is on it being Judy Chestnut …. hmmm, maybe I haven’t thought this through properly!

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July 24, 2013

Educational And Non-Profit Ventures See The Return Of The 50% Discount

Linden Lab have formally announced the return of a 50% discount for educational and Non Profit organisations. This is a welcome step and sees the return of something that should never have been taken away in the first place. The blog post informs us:

“We’re pleased to announce an update to Second Life pricing for educational and nonprofit institutions. Effective immediately, any accredited educational institution or any organization with a 501(c)(3) charitable non-profit tax status (or equivalent) is eligible for a 50% discount on private region set-up costs and a 50% discount on private region maintenance costs.”

The discounts are effective immediately to any organisations who meet the criteria Linden Lab have set, which can be found here. The discounts apply to setup fees and tier costs for private regions and homesteads.

On top of this there’s a special orders website mentioned in the blog, this is for invoicing of educational and non profit organisations as well as invoicing for those aged 16-18 as their parent of guardian needs to pay the bill, details of the can be found here.

There’s a criteria to this, those eligible have to pay at least six months in advance. Invoicing is for setup fees, maintenance (tier) fees and bulk purhcasing Linden Dollars. The website is out of date as it mentions there’s no longer a discount for education, however as that’s now back, the first line will soon be changed… I hope!

I’m not sure why Linden Lab can’t invoice businesses in this manner to be honest, I’m sure some business owners would prefer this method of billing.

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July 23, 2013

Could Linden Lab Follow Amazon’s Lead In Fan Based Creativity?

I was reading an article over at New World Notes: Attack on Titan Fan Game in Second Life Attacked by Attack on Titan Publisher? This is an old concept, Second Life creators create world or roleplay based on a known product for which they don’t appear to have rights to do so. Here’s the thing, Attack on Titan is something I’d never heard of until I read Hamlet’s article. Obviously we all can’t know about everything, but the franchise gets free publicity via usage in Second Life.

Now of course Intellectual Property rights are a very important area and publishers need to ensure they maintain their rights, so ignoring IP is not a clever thing to do, no matter how much free publicity it brings to a franchise. However I’ve long maintained that companies should consider the potential of Second Life and the realites of what Second Life creators can afford, and come to a compromise that is sensible. This isn’t an easy thing to do, but Amazon have a model that could potentially be expanded to virtual worlds.

Kindle Worlds is the Amazon model, it’s where fan fiction can be published. There is a criteria but here’s some of the blurb:

“Welcome to Kindle Worlds, a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries; Valiant Entertainment for Archer & Armstrong, Bloodshot, Harbinger, Shadowman, and X-O Manowar; Hugh Howey’s Silo Saga; Barry Eisler’s John Rain novels; Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines series; and The Foreworld Saga by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Mark Teppo, Eric Bear, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, and Cooper Moo. Licenses for more Worlds are on the way.”

Now Amazon Kindle is a completely different platform to Second Life and has less of the chaotic nature of Second Life, as once published, a story is published, but the idea, bring licensed products to a user generated content platform is something that Linden Lab should investigate.

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July 23, 2013

Blender 2.68 Now With Improved Weight Painting Tools

Gaia Clary has announced in the official forums that the latest version of Blender, 2.68, now has improved weight painting tools. I’m not familiar with these sort of tools, so I don’t know how much of an improvement they are, Gaia, who does know about these matters seems pretty impressed. Gaia also helps to develop these improvements, so deserves much credit. I’ll embed Gaia’s video explaining the improvements at the end of the post, but this video is aimed at those who already have a knowledge of weight painting.

Gaia and fellow colleagues have worked on development with Blender to make it more useful for the Second Life community, for example they have been instrumental in seeing that Collada support is maintained and their work also saw options mentioning Second Life, coming to the Blender client.

However they don’t do this alone and Gaia thanks the main devs too for their assistance, so it seems there’s a very good working relationship at play, which is positive for Second Life going forward.

Version 2.68 also has other improvements over previous versions of Blender.

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