Top five predictions for today's town hall

Why should we let the mac fans have all the fun rumormongering? Without further ado, I present the top five predictions for today's town hall meeting. Pleae note that I have no factual basis for this and it is purely speculation on my part. In order from least likely to most likely:

5. Phillip admits that the SL codebase is hopelessly broken. Lacking suffient personnel to both maintain the existing grid and move SL development forward, Linden Labs will close down the grid. A new, improved SL will come up in 12-18 months.

4. LL will become a hosting company. All sims will be privately "owned" and managed under their own TOS.

3. In order to better recover costs associated with previously free accounts, LL moves Second Life to a monthly subscription fee for all accounts and eliminates all stipends.



2. Linden Lab or Second Life is to be bought by Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/Steve Wozniak's new startup/ insert name here.



1. Tier rises effective April 1.

There they are. We'll see what his eminence announces.

Apologies

I have been a non presence in this blog since the first of the year. The biggest reason for this is my involvement in that mosta hated of SL projeckts (sic), Neualtenburg, where I have now joined the political establishment, such as it exists.

First of all, let me answer the characterization of Neualtenburg as socialist. In the sense that there are land use covenants, and a significant proportion of public land (almost half the sim, although that includes some unsold lots), Neualtenburg is highly controlled compared to the mainland. However, there is private enterprise, the art musem is private, there are the beginnings of a private educational institution, and commercial spaces are springing up around the central plaza. It's inaccurate to characterize anything that's not anarchic as socialist.

I moved in to Neualtenburg because of the relatively low land fees and, most importantly, the existence of some sort of process. In other rental situations, if you upset the landlord, you can be out without recourse. As a relatively new resident, Neualtenburg made me feel more portected.

More on why I stayed later...

Why the Linux Client is a Bigger Deal than You Think

Cory Linden/Ondrejka has reportedly demoed a Linux client for SL by now. This has been promised for so long that I considered submitting it to the Wired Vaporware Awards. Comments at the Second Life Herald suggest the client, when it appears (I'm an optimist) won't make much difference. I disagree.

The naysayers are correct that a Linux client is unlikely to bring a large number of users to the platform. However, it's pretty clear that Linden Labs doesn't want a flood of new residents (unless they all buy private islands :) The staff is small, and it's clear from the recent problem with dwell distribution that SL has all the growth it can handle now.

The reason a Linux client will be a big plus is the kind of users it will bring to Second Life. Linux users tend to be technically inclined, patient, and creative. After all, many people run Linux precisely because they want to do it themselves. These are exactly the kind of residents Linden Labs wants because they are much more likely to become content creators. Cory has said in at least one conference presentation that Linden Labs is relying on residents to create the "cool" content that will attract people to the platform. How many potentially excellent builders and scripters aren't using SL because they won't touch Windows or an emulator? What might the "world" gain if those people come to the table?

All features are equal, but some are more equal than others

This weeks town meeting did and didn't give residents a roadmap to the future of SL. Although some projects 'in development' were listed, the timetable given was 'when they're done'. Essentially, Linden Labs indicated they will release new versions whenever new features are ready.

We see this new mindset in the 1.8 previews. The two new features: P2P teleport and rippling water, also known as an 800 pound gorilla and its trusty sidekick. There is something very egalitarian about this notion that a feature is a feature is a feature. However, it ignores the impact some changes have on SL culture and economics.

Rippling water is pretty and technically impressive but, all in all, doesn't really change how people behave in world. Point to point teleportation and the accompanying end of the telehub, on the other hand, will alter how people live their second lives. Maybe because, in the real world, big changes happen slowly 99% of the time, we expect the same in SL. Now that LL has laid out the features under development, at least we won't be able to say we didn't see them coming.

The ramifications of point to point teleportation.

So, point to point teleportation is coming to a metabverse near you. This idea has been tossed around for w while, so no one should have been completely surprised. What does it mean?

Community

Community building was given as the raison d'être for telehubs. By having to teleport and walk or teleport and fly, users were forced into an environment where they could meet others and interact. The theory was OK, but it didn't really work for two reasons. First, the hubs are so crowded that having a conversation is a difficult and sometimes lag-filled experience. Second, many of the people you meet at hubs are 'marketers' trying to attract you to a casino, club, or mall. SO, if the telehubs are abandoned, it certainly won't hurt community building. It might even help it. Telehubs will be used the few people who want to fly/walk to their destinations. Smaller crowds mean less impetus to use the hub and surrounding area as ad space.

Zoning

People are complaining that commercial plots will go from being anchored around telehubs to anywhere and everywhere retail development. This could happen, but I doubt it. First, visibility is everything in a crowded market, which SL is. If your store is tucked where no one can find it without a resolute search, you'll kill your floor traffic and your dwell. Commercial plots will want to stay together so 1)people can find them and 2) they can pool their marketing resources.

Point to point could also help the growth of zoned sims. People who want to be protected from commercial blight will move where it's prohibited. Both Linden Labs and in-world parties have started creating these.

Marketing

With the decline of automatic traffic from the hubs, good advertising will become even more important. It will require the advertisers to be very creative and targeted. If you can teleport anywhere, big billboards won't work either. It will be interesting to see how the marketers react.

Blumfield and the economics of Linden Labs

There's been much blog traffic recently about the Linden Plan to offer a free virtual tract house for those upgrading to premium accounts (see recent posts by Prokofy Neva and Satchmo Prototype). Left out of the discussions of the effect on the internal economy and SL retention is the connection to the Linden Labs bottom line.

Despite Phillip Linden's oft repeated assertion that SL is a country, its owner, Linden Labs, exists to make money. This simple fact illuminates a number of policies and policy changes in SL. As an example, the most obvious of these are prim limits and land size. Computing resources are represented by land and the limited number of prims you can put on that land, tied directly to parcel size at one prim per 4-1/3 square meters.

In the beginning (and no, I wasn't around then), Second Life generated revenue in two ways, the $9.95 one-time fee for new basic accounts and tier/premium fees for those who bought land. From those revenue streams, Linden Labs had to pay for salaries, bandwith, server replacement, electricity, etc. -- all recurring expenses. Using one time funds (basic account fees) to pay recurring expenses won't work in the long term. That is, I believe, why basic accounts are now free. In this light, Blumfield makes perfect sense for Linden Labs. The free land and prefab encourage users to pay recurring premium rates.

Linden's bottom line also explains Lindex and the accompanying squeeze on GOM. When your virtual currency is convertible, there is another source of real world revenue -- the conversion of US dollars to Linden dollars by those who are net consumers in the virtual world. This is particularly efficient for Linden Labs, which has the lowest marginal cost for the creation of Linden dollars. Granted there are issues of money supply and in-world economic stability, but there is real world money to be made just from the transaction fees, as GOM demonstrated. Add the synergy of running both the currency exchange and the in-world money supply, and you have yourself a lucrative enterprise.

Having said all this, I am still somewhat willing to accept the official explanation that these changes, especially Blumfield, are about user experience rather than revenue. After all, Linden has done zoned sims before. If it really wanted to move agressively into this market, it would be popping up new sims left and right and cutting off the land barons at the knees in one fell swoop. They haven't yet. I suppose time will tell.

All of this begs the following question: If Phillip Rosedale/Linden means what he says and SL is a nascent country, how will Linden Labs generate the real dollar revenue to pay for it/make it profitable? Sign up fees didn't work. Land fees arent' working yet. Is an income tax in the virtual future?

Persona differentiation in Second Life

I've been in Sl for a couple of weeks, and, inspired by Gwyneth Llewelyn's post on the generations of SL users and Aimee Weber's post on SL political "parties", I've Identified another SL dichotomy.

On one hand are those who view their avatars as extensions of their RL personalities. They may have different names or look different, but these folks will discuss their First Lives in world. In that sense their avatar "is" them.

On the other side are those who keep their First Lives and Second Lives strictly separated. They refuse to discuss their first lives in world, and may not discuss their second lives outside of the metaverse. My first reaction is to view this as escapist, but i'm certainly in no psition to judge.

This raises several interesting questions:

Does one group spend more time in world than the other?

How do the two groups behave differently in terms of their reaction to server outages, TOS / code changes, etc.

What about people like Anshe Chung (No, I've never met her) whose avatar is better known in RL than the person behind it?

Just a few late night thoughts.

Welcome

This is my attempt to chronicle my experience in Linden Labs' virtual world Second Life. The url comes from the fact that I'm a French speaker (though not natively). In an attempt to address SL's francophone community, I intend to do at least some posting in French. Join me on my journey.