Just another unauthorised virtual world fansite
I was never a child who wanted a pony, I wanted to play for The Villa, be a superhero, fight crime, but a pony wasn’t on my list. So quite a few days I received an inventory offer from Rodvik, I opened it up and found:
This was most surprising! For a start it wasn’t a bear, as is traditional, secondly, it’s not claret and blue, however it is rather cool, so I left it in my workshop.
Rodvik has blogged with too much bold and spelling realise with a Z. This from a man who likes curries and football is not good, he needs a visit home! The blog post is a chirpy upbeat post reporting the best number of new signups for four years in August and that Linden homes are now at record levels too.
Other news includes trying to improve service response times with expanded staffing, which is good news and viewer changes to merge advanaced and basic modes, which is a hmmm we’ll wait and see. The biggest positive about this post is that it didn’t include and price rises or majorly bad news, although traditionally they come at the end of October, full sim price rises were announced near the end of October 2006 and The Openspace fiassco kicked off near the end of October 2008, not until we’re well into November will we be able to breathe a sight of relief!
The big news for me though was the talk of artificial life and NPC’s, although testing won’t start until December on this, it’s something I’m keen to see.
This is a bit of a rambling post on a varitety of subjects, the lack of official music channels in Second Life, a new messaging feature via web profiles and some strange claims by Linden Lab over premium features, I’m blaming the hottest end of September since 1895 for this rambling!
As some of you may have noticed, I’m a bit miffed about the whole Spotify now requiring new users to have a Facebook account, largely because I think this is absolutely ridiculous. However where I do think Spotify have made a sensible choice is in making their offerings available to Facebook users. This may sound contrary, but it really isn’t, my criticisms of Linden Lab pushing Facebook have been due to Linden Lab seeming to push Facebook our side, pushing Second Life Facebook side makes perfect sense.
However the deal does raise the concept of media, Second Life is a place that is ripe for media, music, videos, live performances, they are all popular within Second Life and for bands looking to make a cheap promotion, Second Life seems a reasonable cost solution and yet, we don’t see much of it. However this brings me to another gripe, which is the lack of a decent API for advertising events, I love the showcase widgets we can create, I’d love to do the same for Events or get a feed of some sort of events strream with a nice level of richness, but it’s not available.
Continue reading “New Profile Options Coming And Media Pondering”
TechRadar has a fairly balanced article regarding what happened to Second Life and where it’s heading, which you can read here. What I like about this article is that it doesn’t end by saying Second Life is going nowhere, it also has quotes from people like Tateru Nino and current Linden Lab CEO RodVilla Humble.
The article is realistic, there was too much hype, big brands thought they could come in, build something and people would come. I have long maintained that the big brands should have intergrated more, I understand that this is tricky in a user generated content world, they lose some control and maybe didn’t want their brand side by side with a store with a huge phallus on the top of the building (I saw stores like this when I first arrived and they made me cringe). However brands should have been looking to sponsor more gigs, sponsor art galleries, plant adverts in sims, generally engage with the Second Life public.
Then there’s the issue of the learning curve and whereas more experienced Second Life users find it hard to understand that the learning curve is steep, it simply is for many people. I joined Eve-Online earlier in the year for a while, they have superb tutorials, they email you with more tips when you’re new, Eve-Online has a steep learning curve too but they do try harder to keep new users engaged with those tutorials but in a user generated world where Linden Lab have less control than the creators of a world like Eve-Online, it’s harder to guide people.
So there I am stalking Rodvik’s profile when I notice he’s into wargames and Russian history, which reminds me I need to catch up on this week’s episode of Spooks. I then go to his wall, where you know you might find the odd hello or something about his interests …. unfortunately you don’t find that you find an unholy mess of people using Rodvik’s wall as a discussion forum.
Now look, I know he appears nice and all that and he’s engaged with the community on twitter, in the forums, over at SLUniverse and commented on blogs but for goodness sake, a profile wall isn’t a place to discuss some of the subjects being raised there, he’s one man, he can’t fix everything and he’s not about to stop some commie plot from taking over a sim, well actually he comes not far from where the intelligence headquarters GCHQ are located as I recall …… hmmm! Anyway! He’s not going to fix all these problems!