f13.net

Active User as defined in their Metrics Glossary (https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Metrics_Glossary):

Numbers for May and June as downloaded from Meta's metrics blog (http://blog.secondlife.com/author/metalinden/):

May 2007 - 507,844
June 2007 - 494,981      

Note that these aren't true unique user numbers despite the name since they include alts played for more than an hour (the spreadsheet column name Active Avatar Count is a more accurate description).

Publishing these numbers also confirms the anecdotal evidence that lots of people are trying SL but not many are sticking around. If you look at the Population tab in the July spreadsheet you can see that around 900K 850K new accounts ("Unique Residents") were created in June but the number of Active Users actually went down compared to May.

Good info.

I still think the best metric is the premium account holders. Those accounts show:

• The truly interested people who felt it was worth investing in the game world
• The only people who can own land, as only those who pay a fee can own land
• The only people who can build permanent stuff, as only those who own land can build stuff that doesn't disappear
• (in theory) the people actually buying most of what is for sale, mostly including land barons

The number of visitors (the 8mil+ number) is good for people who want to justify having a presence there, as this in theory could be advertising. Of course, it's harder to find people than be alone :)

Otherwise, people trying to justify presence in SL to further a political agenda or make money have to look at the far lower numbers to understand the true potential.

That's less and less true because of the Linden's anything goes libertarianism the mainland is a cesspool. So lots of people, probably a majority, own land that they rent from other residents on private sims. Since the premium account "tier" doesn't help with that, most of us with land on private sims are not premium members.

You're also not really land owners in the traditional sense. Renting in SL is similar to renting in RL in the sense that you don't own the land, but have the right to use it for a specific period of time. Your use is likely restricted based on the rules your landowner has set. In SL, that's your restrictive covenant, in RL, that's a lease.

Granted, I think those who truly "own" land in the SL sense are also just glorified renters, but that's just me.

I actually love my covenant. I've owned three plots on the mainland and every one has started nice and ended up with some purple cube monstrosity or a porno thing next door.

What bugs me are the covenants that accompany sales, not rentals.

If I wanted that, I'd go buy a RL home in some gated community.

I find it so minimally intrusive. To me it's all just common sense. It's less like a gated community and more like basic zoning.

Nalts (rising YouTube star) tries Second Life (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkXYSAe38tU)

I rent a place on a private covenant-restricted sim where I paid a purchase price and have rights to sell on the property, so it's effectively a permanent lease I suppose. I wouldn't dream of buying land on the mainland. It's clusterfuck shanty-town full of retards.

Couple questions on land ownership for those of you that do own.

Looks like you can rent from someone for just about the same cost and not have the real $ impact. In fact, I'm very confused on why they use Linden $'s for everything but the tier fees.

Sky rentals - I've seen a few floating structures - Seems like some enterprising individual could rent the sky above them for more $, why don't people do this? Or can you only sub-divide based on X and Y?

So, for $9.95 I can rent land, and pay at least $5 a month in land use fee's if I have more then a 22 meter x 22 meter space?

Do any of you make money in SL?

Nope, no sky rentals. Most of my builds used low-height to mid-height stuff (you can actually have observation rooms that just allow you to see the stuff below you), mostly because two of the really neat things I discovered early on were aircraft and skydiving.

I don't make money in SL, but I guess I could if I was to actually take the time to finish the prefab houses and furniture I'd created.

You can divide rental into "land rental" and "apartment/dwelling rental."

By apartment/dwelling rental, I mean places that have a bunch of prefabs already all set up, sometimes furnished usually not, with the land around them decorated. You pay lindens into a box in the front of the house and its yours for the week or month. These are a pretty good way to get a little space to call your own. But the rules of these sorts of places are usually very strict. More like living in a condomium than owning or renting a home. One of my friends lives in one of these. She has a condo which actually looks like a townhouse condo. Inside she has full decoration rights. Outside, it's prelandscaped and she has no rights to decorate her yard or the outdoors near the house. She can't have a skybox either. She has a boat and is allowed to park it at the dock because she has specific permission from the landlord.

Land rental just means buying land on a private island without the upfront cost and you pay the landlord more per month than you would if you "bought." Like I bought my land with an upfront cost of about US $100, but it's on one of Ansche Chung's private islands. I pay $24 a month to Ansche Chung for a 1/16th of a sim. If I hadn't "bought" it with an upfront cost, I could have the same 4096 on an Anche Chung sim for $28. So there's a $4 premium for not paying that upfront cost. The land here is blank, I have complete control over it other than the covenant which is basically "don't create ugly crap that bothers your neigbors."

You can definitely rent "sky" spaces under the apartment model, but most people don't. Most skyboxes aren't all that attractive, so ground construction is easier to sell. And the real limiting factor on use of your property isn't how you divide it physically, but the number of prims you have available to build. So if you are renting in the sky, you effectively can't rent on the ground because you only have so many prims to work with. Though, I have seen one place that rents skyboxes by the hour for sex purposes.

I am starting to see a disturbing number of friends on Xfire playing Second Life. If that doesn't show the need for a decent new MMOG I don't know what does.

I just caught myself going...Hmmm...maybe I should check this out.

Thanks WAP for putting me back on the right path. I owe you one.

You remember how cool NWN's was going to be? How there were going to be TONS of great modules to play through, how much fun you were going to have fun playing D&D again? Then you downloaded a couple modules. And reality set it.

That. Is. Second. Life.

Just because you give everyone content creation tools doesn't mean everyone should be playing with them - Just like it was with NWN's.

That being said, there were 2 or 3 incredible modules to download, and it's the same with SL. I really need to post a SS of the zone I found last night. I was amazed. Someone had made a Japanese City Scape complete with Neon Evawhatever whatever robots. Then there was a cel shaded area with giant flowers, octopuses and tea-cups.

There are a couple great things to do. The rest of it sucks. If you can find the good stuff - it's a good diversion. I appreciate the lack of grindage. But for entertainment...I can step onto a dance floor with live music or a live DJ and immediately look like I could be dancing with the stars.

It's a sandbox.

One thing that Second Life has finally proven to me that I'm basically a Bartlesque explorer, because I can spend hours just looking at sims and all the shit people have created. And there are a lot of sims in Second Life. The other thing that can keep you there is, as one of Lum's posts on brokentoys mentions, getting yourself set-up in one of SL's communities, like the RP sims of Midian City or the City of Lost Angels, or the steampunk region Caledon. Some of the most interesting RP around is going down in SL.

On skyboxes, when you buy land you own the space above it and can build to about 700 feet. As Numtini says, the limit to building is running out of prims so if you're building on the land and in a skybox then you have to be a bit spartan. In the last couple of days I've been building what is a basically a huge box with a forest glade inside floating 700 feet above my land. I go up there to build shit without being pestered and work on my marksmanship for the RP/combat sims I mess around in.

Anyway, the game is not for everyone. There are no foozles, besides anything else. But I'd basically lost interest in traditional MMOGs in the last few years and needed something different to keep the love alive.

My only real issue with SL beyond the obvious ones (crap search function, crap UI, laggy/buggy, etc.) is that when I DO own land and I actively work on creating content towards that "open a shop" goal, I tend to get too involved time-wise to where I have to just stop playing for a while to reclaim my To Do list.

Building objects is a total time warper for me, I sit down to build "just one table" and then hours have gone by and I'm trying to hack several free scripts together to make the table do something strange like auto rez various place settings via voice commands.

I'd agree with both those statements. There is nothing worse then knowing what you want to find, but being unable to because you don't know the exact name of the person selling it or the store name.

My other complaint is that it seems like nothing gets cached. I should be able to save like 5 zones as favorites and it should store all their geometry and textures. When it takes 5 minutes to rez a zone, something is broken.

you wonder why they wouldn't just show unique CC holders, might give a better sense of unique subs.  Also, do they have numbers for members that have done an exchange -- i.e. that have made RL money? or did I miss that? thx

How the hell does SL make enough sense to roleplay in?

"Let's see, there's a dark elf Jedi with his lightsaber glued to his crotch, Captain Yiffy of the Starship Furryprize won't stop pointing his tricorder at me, and I'm pretty sure a squadron of Messershmits with cocks painted on the side just flew by chasing a giant grapefruit.  What would my character, Throgdar the cyborg barbarian, really say in this situation?"

How the hell does SL make enough sense to roleplay in?

Because, like a mud, it lets you create a private area to RP in.

BTW if anyone hasn't seen Starry Nights, go peek. It's a machinima, Raph links to it.

Fixed it. I know I know, but it annoys me when people lump hack-n-slash MUDs with social oriented MUSH/MOO stuff.

I used to play a MOO when I was very, very little where we used to construct turn based pokemans.


It was fun for awhile.

MUD is the general term.

I don't recall if their economy reports include numbers on how many people bought vs cashed out, but that's where they'd be if they were released.

I found this in the member area under "economic status":

What PMLF is:

The chart looks like ass, I know. I spent some time trying to format it and was rather unsuccessful, although it looks perfect in the text entry box. At any rate, it doesn't really answer the question directly, but it's some kind of number regarding number of residents making dough.

Get rid of the tabs.

So, could I make the following statements about the gold in them thar digital hills?

- More than 90 per cent of Second Life accounts spend more than they earn in it.

- Half of those "earning money" earn less than $10 per month.

- Fees cancel out small incomes, so really 96 per cent of Second Life accounts spend more than they earn.

- Of half a million active Second Life accounts, only a few hundred could be said to earn a real world equivalent income from it.

Jesus, if I'd make 5k USD a month, I'd be playing this piece of shit all day, too.

Weak.  If they were real roleplayers, they'd just RP out in the world and rationalize it as them living in Hell or something.  :-D

Completely unrelated, but suddenly I am thinking about switching to e-surance...

Arguably. Some people use the term MUD to apply only to hack & slash games, others use the term to apply to online stuff universally. Apparently Viin belongs to the former group, and you belong to the latter. Neither of you own the term, so you're free to argue, but you ain't gonna convince each other in this thread or the next. Good luck.

Well MOO stands for "MUD Object Oriented" so he's wrong about that one by definition. And TinyMUSH/TinyMUCK, where the terms MUSH and MUCK came from, were both derived from TinyMUD (as well as whole bunch of others like TinyMUSE and TinyMUX) so unless he thinks TinyMUD is not a "MUD" he's wrong about those as well.

A. Land fee's of $200 (mainland) to $300 a month (Island).
B. Exhange rate of 270 Lindens to the dollar.

Which means...You have to do $54,000 to $81,000 Linden's of business a month. Just to break even. Considering your average clothing outfit goes for $50 to $500 lindens, that's a lot of sales you'll have to make. Granted, you are likely not going to utilize the full island or find a full zone on mainland.

If I had a ton of cash laying around I would think the way to make money would be to wait for the 75% of businesses that open to fold then buy their land to sell to the next person who thinks their future in SL is going to be full of RL MONEY!!!! But I don't have a ton of cash that I'm will to bet with. I'm also predicting SL is going to have their first bubble shortly with people realizing you don't need 100 empty strip clubs, 100 malls that are mostly vacant and 100 casino's that are going to be closed once the IRS contacts Linden Labs.

That's how Ansche Chung made her money.

A friend of mine here in Chicago owns one or two islands and just rents out lots. She makes enough to break even plus a few hundred bucks/mo that she uses for going out and whatnot.

So it's entirely doable.

The $1,700 one-time set up fee would scare me too much and the $295 monthly fee. But you are right, I should keep my eyes open for cheap parcels to snatch.

Then again I just had an idea...

A 12-15 linden an hour camping spot isn't too hard to find. So for 24 hours that would be 288 to 360 lindens. Let just say $300 lindens per day. With an exchange rate of 270 lindens to the dollar, that's about a dollar a day...

Since the game is open source now, modifying the client should be fairly easy to make a "minimal" install that doesn't bother with lots of the overhead. Get it so you can run 10 copies on one machine then: (Insert picture of 21 computers UO gold farming dude used) And there is 210 dollars a day...$75K a year! I'm pretty sure it wouldn't last. I've already run across one, 12 people all dressed the same with newbie clothes and newbie hair.

 I had a Second Life once.  I went to the forest and met these two dudes who showed me their base.  Then, later, we watched a snuff film in 8 mm.  Then I uninstalled and reformatted my hard drive. 

I should make my brother post about his SL adventures.  He joined with a bunch of guys from the WW2 Online forums who went there with the express purpose of griefing the shit out of the place.  Nothing spoils a virtual sex party like a midget in a Wehrmacht uniform armed with an ass-shaped gun that fires shit.  And given the nature of the SL community, by spoil I mean make better.

I went to a live concert three nights ago in a pretty bay. They provided security, and when a boat broke loose from it's moorings and rammed into the stage, security rushed in to help the skipper and move him someplace safe.

I've also been visiting a nightclub that plays a nice selection of old wave/industrial/goth music, last night two handicaped individuals in wheelchairs appeared to be imbibing too much alcohol and got sick on a couple of club patrons, the hostess asked that they stop drinking, when they continued they were ejected from the club.

Is it easy to grief in SL? Yes. Especially because you can create an account in about 5 minutes. Is it easy to deal with griefers? Yes, you just need someone present with the proper permissions.

I ran across a donkey show last night. And no - I didn't search for it...

Thought this was a pretty cool video of a zone someone made...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxVDVggLqsA&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblog%2Esecondlife%2Ecom%2F%3Fs%3Dwindlight (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxVDVggLqsA&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblog%2Esecondlife%2Ecom%2F%3Fs%3Dwindlight)

They banned all gambling.

Quite aggressively in some cases I understand. Like taking money out of people's accounts.

This cracked me up:

Full article from Second Life Herald:

http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/07/the-disneyifica.html#more

I forsee more lawsuits in their future.

This is really the Second Life version of the NGE. Except instead of $15/month for entertainment purposes, they've sold this as an investment vehicle and people have thousands of dollars at stake.

I'm very much on the side of "well it stinks, but it's just a game" side on something like SWG. But when you're talking significant economic investment as well as emotional, that's a different story. Linden declared that this was legitimate activity within their world and people made investments based on that.

It would seem to me that it's an investment, which isn't without risk. Sure, people relied on LL not stopping gambling to last forever, but people rely on the government not changing the rules all the time in RL. Their TOS is still technically legally solid, even if a specific part was invalidated, so until there's movement on that front, according to the statements provided by LL to the user, all of your virtual stuff is without value and subject to the maniacal whims of the LL staff.

Granted, I also think they should take somewhat of an asspounding in general, but that's because I have serious misgivings about behavior that has already hosed them once in court. Not only is their TOS largely unenforceable (IMO), but I don't think they're really a simple "service provider." Banning gambling demonstrates further control they're exerting over their network, which already had significant company involvement (due to the social aspects) above and beyond that of a traditional ISP or portal.

Ok, broken record rant over.

How prevalent was this in SL? We talking a good percentage of the playerbase being banned for the activity right now or just any new activity being banned once discovered?

Seems to me spotting gambling in SL is not as easy as spotting gold duping in a directed-play experience. I imagine they can follow the transactions to a degree, but industrious folks will find a way around that too (like betting with prims instead of LLs ;) ), no?

Short of actually policing the grid themselves, they have community policing (ratting out casinos), and the most visible ones are easy to find, obviously.

More likely than not, this is just yet another move to try and disclaim liability for stuff the users do that is not quite legal in many places.

"Hey, we don't allow that, and we remove people we catch doing it, and cooperate with the authorities. But hey, we're jsut a service provider, we don't really KNOW what goes on in our network."

It's pretty damn easy to find gambling in Second Life without looking for it. There are tons of casinos, and hell, I even did some betting on sports games in a soccer kit shop while trying to buy a Liverpool jersey. It really was pretty prevalent, at least in my experience.

Gambling was very very common in SL. There were a load of casinos, enough that people were making solid RL money just selling the different forms of slot machines. There were also a ton of different places that used some form of gambling to draw people in. A few slot machines in the corner or a "sploder" (put money it and it starts counting down until it "explodes" and randomly pays $ back out) over the dance floor.

Starting a casino was also a big draw for "get rich quick" types and a lot of money was poured into prefab casinos that failed miserably. That money all ends up in the hands of SL content developers--not just slot machine makers, but furniture, buildings, and so on. So it affects lots of people who never gambled.

Enforcement is easy. If you can't advertise, you can't make any money. And you have an asset worthy of confiscation, your SL land, so you have a lot to lose by violating the rules.

Most of my friends are feeling a bit like death row inmates waiting for their turn. They all have something they do in SL (bondage/kink, furries, violence, kid avatars) that they assume is going to be banned within the next year and will result in them leaving the game.

It was insanely common. But I don't understand why. You had nothing to insure you had close to a fair payout rate.

I see lots of poker tables opening.

Casinos were almost all of the top destinations in the 'most visited places' list. Same goes for the advertising lists (whoever paid the most was at the top of the advertising list or some such).

Question for you lawyers out there...

On TV, there's advertisement for poker sites, that says in a nutshell that you're not gambling with money.  Couldn't these casinos put up a disclaimer that by entering you agree not to be gambling with real cash?  Or is the inherent value of linden dollars (as put forth by the sales of linden dollars by linden labs) the issue here?

Is LL scared of the FBI coming knocking on their doors, saying they are enabling illegal and unregulated gambling?

What am I missing?

They already did:

http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/04/fbi_considers_p.html

 :-o

Since the not-real-cash is readily convertable to USD via a system that LL owns, it's pretty hard to say that, in the context of a casino, the $L is anything less than a poker chip. The more that LL tried to tap into revenue streams (like the $L market), and the more it hypes the "Make money here!" meme, the deeper it sinks itself into a mire of potential liability.

It's really fascinating to watch.  Well, for me at least.

It's definately going to have an impact on the game. I think this is a good move on their part given how unregulated it was.

Payouts were horrid. If you had a busy casino, you more then made any money you lost.

On the bright side for, I expect some cheap land sales fairly soon :) There were a lot of casinos. With no gambling income I expect many to sell their land. I also look forward to seeing the effect this has on the economy in the next few months. If I wasn't so risk adverse I would consider buying an island when the fire-sale happens and turning it into a residential island, renting the houses in lindens.  I'm really curious if LL's is clueless on their economy or if they have a plan in place to no put the world into a recession.

They'll probably eliminate the stipend for all accounts.

That'd be one way to do it.

The TV ads for the poker sites all direct you to go to pokersite.net
Those sites only deal in play money, but all encourage you to go to the real .com site for real money play.

Ah, ok.  I've never been to the online poker sits before.  When I gamble, I want to see the actual cards in front of me. 

Besides, I quit playing poker the minute all these celebrity tournaments started happening and it became the 'in' thing to do.

I still don't understand why the taxes are in RL dollars instead of lindens. (Well - I do, they want an assured income in RL dollars).

Have they changed anything about land costs over the last few years?  I always liked the idea of playing around with SL but it all hinges on the land.  I'd want a quite large plot without obnoxious neighbors and I'd want it for 15 bucks a month.  I'd probably settle for something even smaller if it was on a tiny island or what not.

I can't see how SL will ever have any large appeal without afford land.  Limits on primitives and scripting make sense but if I want a very large building that's nothing more than a box I expect to be able to get it cheaply.

The last time I checked years ago though it seemed like any decent size plot was 50~100 bucks a month.  Certainly way too expensive for a mere diversion.

Land costs are about the same for tier or rent and prices to buy are actually higher, but I suspect will go down.

If you want a large plot but don't care about prims, there are "low prim" areas in some of the private islands. They are used to balance out lag. You get, if memory serves me, 16000m but the same prims as 4096.

There's sort of a floor on pricing because one "sim" apparently really does equal one CPU.

Islands are priced at US$1,675 for 65,536 square meters (about 16 acres). Monthly land fees for maintenance are US$295. (Mainland is $195 per month - but good luck finding someplace without blight)

So if you get lucky you could get 1/16th of an island for $18 a month? You would be "renting" this land though to avoid the $15 per month "Allow me to own land" loophole. Which means the owner could (And will) sell it out from under you when they get a better offer.

So yea - owning land is pricey.

If there's a lot of land that goes up for sale in teh wake of the "no casino" thing, I think we'll see the land market change a bit in the near future.

Well, not the renting vs. buying part, but maybe some cheap bought land.

Yes, you'll have to worry about neighbors, but to me, that's half the fun of leaving your ground area very minimal and doing kickass floating builds.

ETA -- On the casino subject, if someone wanted to get really pissy and sue about the change in policy, this case (http://pubcit.typepad.com/clpblog/2007/07/courts-says-aol.html) may be useful. I doubt they would, but that's a pretty nifty little case there -- changing the terms on your website is not sufficient notice to make a binding change to an EULA/TOS.

Doesn't redisplaying the TOS basically solve that issue though?

Also there's been no change in the TOS, only a change in the interpretation of the TOS. "As you review this new policy, please remember that Resident compliance with real world laws has always been an integral part of our Terms of Service."

It's not that gambling or virtual child molesting was against the TOS. It's that Lindens just didn't realize that gambling online was against US law or that virtual child prostitution was broadly offensive.

Redisplaying the TOS upon login MAY remedy the situation, but given the nature of how the contract is accepted, I'd argue that, without more, there's no effective notice.

Basically, you need to make it SUPER DUPER CLEAR (all caps makes it a legal term) to a user that there has been a significant change to the TOS.

It may not apply to this as much because it's a new policy/interpretation of the TOS, but since those policies/interpretations are incorporated via reference into teh TOS, and since apprising oneself of THOSE policies involves even yet more website use, it may be even more problematic.

How much do people really rent 1/16th of an island for though?  Considering the initial costs I can't really think people would rent that much land for 1/16th of the maintenance fees.  How does renting work too?  Is there a game system to handle it or are people just "trusting" each other to not scam?


That's quite interesting to me but how does that work?  I didn't know people who rented out land could change the prim limits on it.

With rentals, you just pay the sim owner and they pay the tier. If you don't pay on time they just retake the land and resell it.

Renting vs. buying. At least in Ansche Chung's sims if you "buy" land from her with an upfront payment, your payments to her are $6/1024m a month. If you rent, it's $8/1024, but there is no up front payment at all.

On the low and high prim stuff. Island owners have a lot of discretion. I've seen some where whole sims are low prim to reduce lag. I've seen other sims where all the pricing and prims are double, but they leave big spaces between the different plots for sale that are empty or have

If you have an account, go to the Vidar sim, it's one of Ansche's low prim ones. It's $24/month but you only get 450 prims. So you get the land space of 16000m, but you pay as if it was 4096m, and you get the same prims as a 2048m. Great if you want a large beach or you're a very light builder.

Can they scam you though I mean?  Like offer to let you rent then kick you out before your time limit is up? Or change the rules on you somehow?

Yes, any private island can scam you, which is why it pays to rent from one of the larger and more reputable ones.

Ansche owns a million dollars worth of sims. If her operation goes tits up, that'll be it for Second Life anyway. Or Linden will step in to deal with it.

Why can't they highlight the changes in a color? Shit, MS Word has had Track Changes for years. I know the very last thing most developers expect is for someone to actually read all that stuff. But if these things become a legal issue, highlighting "here's what we changed" in yellow would go a long way to proving full disclosure.

In a situation like this, contract law basically expects you to deliver the changes in writing separate from the contract, or deliver the full changed contract in writing, separately from any "normal" use.

At another live show right now.

If you are someone that plays well and has a fear of crowds SL is really awesome. (Maximillion Kleene show right now).

They can I guess, but if you scam someone you then have to pay the tier yourself. Land doesn't sell quickly enough that you can just sell it again in a couple of days. It might take weeks or months. Either way, the thought did cross my mind when I read the covenant for my land, which said that the owner could turf me off my property for whatever reason they liked. But then they'd put so much work into their sim and the land prices were so relatively low, that it was obvious that it was their baby, rather than a way of making loadsamoney.

Another clause of the contract was that they can change the rules at any time. I'd imagine that that's pretty common among covenants. Again, though, the only way to enforce a clause is by kicking people off the land and paying the tier yourself, so I can't imagine too many people being interested in enforcing insane covenant clauses.

I've known a couple of times when private island owners who were fairly large changed covenants from residential to commercial or vice versa. The ones I've known about offered resettlement in a similar sim.

Some of the small owners have closed up shop and sold the sim. And Gods, beware anyone offering you free space on their land. Everyone I know that's done this has had it sold out from under them when the owners got bored with SL or were short on cash.

They are adding voice chat into the second life client. http://secondlife.com/community/firstlook.php (http://secondlife.com/community/firstlook.php)

I know someone will put in the screaming bee plug, but it doesn't work well enough. You sound like a guy trying to make his voice sound higher.

Going to be interesting to see what impact this has on escorting and other aspects of the game. I'm still really enjoying the live music. Turns out one of acts I've seen twice is a local performer, so I might have to catch one of his real shows.

I thought SL already had this? Vivox has been takling about it for the last two years of conventions, particularly in being able to make real world phone calls from within (and into) the SL client.

Nope. I know they have been working on it a long time. No RL phone call ability either.

It does work with Vivox, because I have been at seminars in SL where it was used.

It's not part of the LL distro, but it is absolutely doable.

Thought this was interesting...http://slcreativity.org/blog/?p=32 (http://slcreativity.org/blog/?p=32)

BTW I'm another live music fan, it's one of the things in SL I'm very fond of.

Voice client is now live.

I'm not sure I really like how it is going to change the experience.

I'm in an RP community a large amount of the time and we simply won't be using it.

In general, if I'm in SL I am not really paying a huge amount of attention. I am in SL a lot while I'm cooking dinner, especially if it's something where I'm in and out a lot. Text lets me run out and stir the sauce or baste something or whatever and still be part of the conversation. Or for that matter, surf the net, or occasionally if I'm alone in my office, do work while SL runs in the background.

I can't do any of that with voice. You have to be there and be able to pay attention. And if I can do that, I'll be in EQ2 or whatever my flavor of the month action game is.

I also watched the effect it had when they added it to There and it was, for me, amazingly negative. The maturity level dropped like a stone.

I'd agree that text is much more passive then voice, with being able to recall the "history" of text super easily. It's also much more "disruptive" in that you can only have 1 person coherantly speaking at a time.

And there are some people who shouldn't be talking.

Can't you use both?

EDIT: lol, you aint going to be doing much roleplaying afk.

Yes and that is another problem. It requires tracking multiple conversations in text and voice. Regardless if you miss something in voice, you can't scroll back up and listen to it again.

Every day I walk by Linden Labs SF location on my way home from work.  Every day I wish I had a f13.net shirt so I could bust in and demand interviews and shwag then proceed to hump their office furniture and scream about bats.

Or I could just be the guy standing behind one of the Bay Area green names trying not to crack up while he does a legit interview.  I'd be the heavy hitter or something.

Mostly what I'm trying to say is why dont we have fucking f13.net shirts?

I thought we had cars instead?

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118670164592393622.html?mod=blog

thought this was an interesting read.

Ya think?

The male quotient shocks me. Men bond well in real life. I can only assume it's less than half as that half is anti-social in real life. Now the 53% of women does not shock me. At all.

Second Wife.

Just thought I would mention I'm still enjoying listening to live music in SL.

Here are a couple people who I've been watching.

http://www.myspace.com/knavybluesontherun (http://www.myspace.com/knavybluesontherun) His version of All along the watchtower floored me.

http://www.myspace.com/maximillionkleene (http://www.myspace.com/maximillionkleene) He's just entertaining. Video doesn't convey it really.

vSide.

But, yea :)