December 2015 – Page 2

December 4, 2015December 4, 2015

Exclusive – There Is No Secret Second Life Bloggers Club

Picture the scene, Daniel Voyager, Draxtor Despres, Inara Pey, Loki Eliot, Jo Yardley, Nalates Uriah, Canary Beck, Strawberry Singh, Hamlet Au and myself are all in a darkened room somewhere in Second Life, quite possibly Linden World, which is a top secret bunker. A door opens, the creak echoes in the room and we hear footsteps. Fire lights the room, a wooden torch held up to reveal that Gray of the Lab from San Francisco (AKA Pete Linden, AKA Peter Gray), Ebbe Altberg and Xiola Linden have entered the room.

They look at us, suspiciously, there’s a hush and then we are all asked to swear an oath of secrecy before being handed a dossier entitled “Top Secret”. This dossier contains secret plans from the evil empire with regards to taking over the virtual world under the banner of “Project ~~Sanasr~~ Sansar”. *See comments for explanation of the strike through.

“At least one of you will betray us .. three times to be precise,” Xiola Linden tells us.

“Three of you may betray us once each”, ponders Gray of the Lab from San Francisco.

“All of you belong to us,” cackles Ebbe Altberg and with that they leave the room. The bloggers stand there, cold and in silence.

I look at the dossier in front of me, this is gold. I’ll have countless blogs on this subject. At that point, Strawberry Singh elbows me in the ribs and glares at me “You swore an oath!”

So I’m here to tell you that I can’t tell you about the top secret dossier. What I can exclusively tell you is that Secret Second Life Bloggers Club doesn’t exist. The last person you would entrust with secret plans for virtual world domination is a blogger, seriously.

Continue reading “Exclusive – There Is No Secret Second Life Bloggers Club”

December 2, 2015

Project Sansar Won’t Eat Second Life

Fancy a bite,
My appetite,
Yum yum gee it’s fun,
Banging on a different drum,

There seems to be a concern in some quarters that Linden Lab’s Project Sansar is poised to eat Linden Lab’s Second Life. I’m not quite sure where this concern stems from and that’s before we mention that Linden Lab have another product; Blocksworld, which people don’t pay much attention to in terms of eating too much of the Linden Lab pie.

Yes, Project Sansar is the project that Linden Lab have most employees working on, yes it’s new and shiny, yes it will tie in better with HMD’s than Second Life does. None of this means that Second Life will be swallowed by the Project Sansar shark. A lot of the current concern seems to stem from the recent Lab Chat and a question from long time Second Life resident and all round good guy, Qie Niangao :

Assuming Sansar makes it into a revenue-generating beta, how will the Lab organization be structured to keep SL and Sansar from sabotaging each other’s success?

This has been a problem for the Lab, historically, most disastrously with the competition between Marketplace and the Land product, but this could be worse: the Sansar team has a natural incentive to cannibalize the Second Life business — but if that’s premature, LL could be left with no profit from either product. How will you prevent this?

(Yes, eventually Sansar’s market should be so large that the current Second Life business doesn’t even register as a blip on the adoption curve. But initially, Sansar Marketing will be tempted to feed off SL, potentially leaving neither platform viable).

Good question, which deserves a good answer and it pretty much got one from Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO :

Well, I’m not sure why we would try to sabotage ourselves in the first place. But they are two very separate teams, from product and design and engineering are two completely separate teams … at some point they meet-up in the organisation higher up, but they are working very independently today.

And there’s some pieces the two products will share. Clearly we don’t want to have to replicate the whole virtual economy pieces, and all the compliance work that goes with that, so that is something we try to make sure we only do once; and that will be a service both Sansar and Second Life will leverage. but other than that, the teams are free to work completely independently on what they think is best for them and their users every day.

However the answer went further, it went into the cannibalisation issue and that’s where things get a bit messy in the minds of some.

Continue reading “Project Sansar Won’t Eat Second Life”

December 1, 2015

Linden Lab TOS Change Addresses Harassment Of Linden Lab Employees

Linden Lab today launched a new terms of service, which has been updated in three areas :

Remove outdated references to Desura and Authorised Resellers.
Explicitly address our intolerance of harassment of Linden Lab employees.
Clarify the arbitration provision in accordance with applicable law.

Some of these changes reflect the fact that terms of service changes can be a slow process. Desura went long ago, as did authorised resellers. The arbitration issue, I have absolutely no idea what that’s about, although I’m sure others will highlight those changes. The harassment of Linden Lab employees change is something that can be easily found in section 6.1 :

(iv) Post, display, or transmit Content (including any communication(s) with employees of Linden Lab) that is harmful, threatening or harassing, defamatory, libelous, false, inaccurate, misleading, or invades another person’s privacy.

The important point to note here is the any communication(s) part. That is going to cover, well, any communications. That means outside of Second Life, on Twitter, Facebook, email etc. Now I’m not sure what has happened to force Linden Lab to make this change, as I would have thought that this section would cover Linden Lab employees without explicitly stating that it does. The general points about not posting, displaying, transmitting said content would in theory cover it. However Linden Lab feel the need to explicitly address their intolerance of harassment of Linden Lab employees, so this will give it more teeth I guess.

Continue reading “Linden Lab TOS Change Addresses Harassment Of Linden Lab Employees”