Kitely has potential but Second Life is still the Daddy

Kitely, an Opensim based virtual world provider, has been talked about by Maria Korolov over at Hypergrid Business and Hamlet Au over at New World Notes. The system, running from Amazon’s cloud services has some interesting concepts and some great potential, it’s also far from ready for prime time and very new.

Interesting points to note are that sims can go to sleep when not in use, rather quickly I’m told, this is an important concept because the billing policy of Kitely is per visitor minute, rather than a flat fee. That’s an interesting way of doing things. Logins are managed via Facebook connect, this for me is an absolute dealbreaker and no amount of saying lots of people use Facebook connect will change my mind, when that’s the only login choice in town, I simply choose not to engage. I’ve currently got Facebook blocked on my firewall, if I have a need to use it I’ll unblock it.

However plenty of folk are happy as Larry to use Facebook connect and therefore, Kitely is worthy of discussion, plus it’s a virtual world and I’m interested in them, and it’s my blog, so neener neener.

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Save Dick!

This post is for all the Dicks in the world. Linden Lab have deemed you too hot to be quoted on the official forum, personally I find writing Dick easier than writing **bleep**. However it’s the attempt to wipe Dick off the face of the PG planet that is most disturbing about Linden Lab’s forum word filter.

Dick is a name, there are 338 results under people search for Dick, you can’t currently properly reference any of these 338 residents on the official Linden Lab forum. Trying to silence Dick in this way is quite frankly absurd, but it gets worse, what if anyone wants to talk of the famous Dicks through the ages, fictional and non fictional, you simply can’t.

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Income Streams and Advertising

I’ve long felt that Linden Lab don’t do enough with premium memberships to sell them. Indeed I feel they should follow a lead from Mobile Phone companies and offer different deals. There are many people for whom the prospect of a weekly stipend and 512M of tier isn’t appealing, others would like a larger amount of tier.

There are those who would prefer a larger stipend and would forsake the 512M of tier as they don’t use it and have no intention of using it. Giving people choice is generally good. creating a premium package that appeals to different demographics is good, how about no free tier but advertising upto a certain Linden dollar value inworld or on the marketplace? How about a discount on marketplace advertising for premium members? How about different price points for premium membership where for more US dollars you get tier, the stipend and the marketplace or inworld advertising upto a certain value?

Then we get to partnerships, LL so far haven’t been that good on partnerships but their deal with GlamAdapt regarding Second Life Avertising Beta shows that they can do partnerships, unfortunately it also shows a flaw in Linden Lab’s own advertising.

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Bagman checks in

Jeff Petersen, Also now known as Bagman Linden, has been appointed VP of Engineering at Linden Lab and looking at his past history, this is very much a Rod Humble appointment. According to Wikipedia, Jeff Petersen was a developer on a game called Infantry, the lead developer on that game was; Rod Humble. Therefore it’s safe to suggest that Mr Humble has great faith in the abilities of Mr Petersen.

Bagman has an interesting gaming background Everquest, Everquest II, Star Wars Galaxies, Planetside, Untold Legends PS3, Field Commander PSP, FreeRealms, and CloneWars Adventures.

Purveyors of Adult activities in Second Life may have got excited when Bagman mentioned Subspace, but he was talking about a game, which I don’t recall, I don’t recall Bagman either!

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