f13.net

What is it with Second Life?  I hear about it weekly - far out of proportion as to its import.  Somebody clue me in; how is it that this thing gets so much attention?

http://www.cnn.com/2006/AUTOS/11/17/2nd_life_cars/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2006/AUTOS/11/17/2nd_life_cars/index.html)

http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/09/technology/fastforward_secondlife.fortune/index.htm (http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/09/technology/fastforward_secondlife.fortune/index.htm)

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/11/13/second.life.university/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/11/13/second.life.university/index.html)

That's just this last week.  I thought Second Life was mostly about cybering and making toys.  And this number bandied about in each article - 1.3 million subscribers.  How do they count subscribers?  People who have registered?  Or actives?  (Somehow I doubt the latter).

I'm marvelling over their press machine.

I think the second article explains it the best.

Not really my idea of a good time, but it's definately a platform where you can do a lot more than cyber.  (Not that cybering is uncommon there.)  Somebody will probably come out with a better Cyberspace in time, in the same way Mozilla has come up wit ha better browser, but in the meanwhile Second Life is it.

Linden Lab has many high-profile investors including Benchmark Capital, Omidyar Network, Jeff Bezos, and Mitch Kapor which is why their press machine is so good. And Second Life is still the only 3D MMO that lets players create complex in-game items which allows for real-world to virtual-world crossovers like the fashion shows and music concerts which ganer it more publicity.

I think there are a number of reasons it's really starting to take off now.

SecondLife
Total Residents:     1,498,057
Logged In Last 60 Days:    611,793
Online Now:    12,900
US$ Spent Last 24h:    $566,509
LindeX Activity Last 24h:    $77,771

1) Money. According to the stats off their homepage their yearly transactions in US dollars as of today are $206 million a year. How fake that number is I don't know. Very fake I guess. They have X dollars changing hands per day. But they have a working unified micropayment system in place which is more than anyone else on the commercial web has going for them.

2) Web Stagnation. Places like Amazon.com are somewhat stagnating. AMZN is $18.45 lower per share than it was in 4Q 2003. Qtrly Earnings Growth (yoy):   -36.70%. How are they going to grow more? New frontier. I also think they are looking for better ways to present their content. Been to Amazon.com lately? It's overflowing with crap on every page. It's horrid. That article mentioned the CEO of IBM uses SL. Why? New frontier.

3) Private Servers. You can now own your own private island in SL for $1675 up front and $295 a month. They buy a server for you and plug it in. This makes them a hosting company now. The next step beyond this is SL open sourceing the server and you run it on your own machine. I believe they've said they are working towards this. Imagine how it will explode if they do this. The whole thing with Copybot is part of it. They want to keep their protocol open for when they go open source. They also re-opened teleport to and from anywhere (I think).

4) Making Friends. The number one thing people use IMVU for is to make new friends. I think that the IMVU guy stated this in an interview. SL probably has a lot of this same kind of thing. In both IMVU and SL since you are an avatar there is no social stigma if you're fat or ugly or green or goth or ghetto or whatever. Anyone who's ever played an MMO knows this.

5) Influential People. Look at the list of participants on the Metaverse Roadmap (http://metaverseroadmap.org/participants.html). All these people are pushing it (not specifically SL) in their respective organizations. 10 to 1 odds are that Raph is working on some metaverse stuff. Joi Ito (http://joi.ito.com/), isn't on that list but he's an influential technologist who uses SL as glue between WoW sessions or friends that are playing other MMOs (3D IRC if you want).

6) 3D+Broadband Penetration. We've finally reaching minimum 3D card and broadband critical mass for this stuff to start working.

7) Rapid 3D Prototyping. All kinds of people are using it for this. With 8 million people playing WoW and whatever else (re:  Massive's ingame advertising) marketers are looking to reach their target audiences. SL is a good prototyping spot for this kind of crap. Maybe the marketers fell less retarded about it since they aren't running around as an elf with a sword. NOAA (NOAC?) prototyped a weather simulation in SL.

8 ) Old People Get It. I'll wager if you plop just about anyone down in front of SL and tell them how to walk around they can figure it out from there. Larry King said the other day that he's never used the internet. I bet if you put him in front of SL he'd be able to figure it out. Car dealerships in SL are part of this.

10) Critical Mass. I don't know what the exact number is but once X number (a million maybe?) of users is reached on a disruptive technology it explodes exponentially as people tell their social network about it. ICQ. Napster. Google. Myspace. Firefox. YouTube.

3pointd (http://www.3pointd.com/) has pretty good coverage of SL related crap.


The real question I have is where the hell is the competition? SL is total crap technology wise (and the SL programmer guy even says this as he wrote the scripting language it uses in a weekend or something).

Have you actually tried Second Life out?  I gave it a whirl a little while ago and was shocked at how unpolished and unintuitive it is.   :-P

See: SL is total crap technology wise.


I just mean the visual nature of SL is something computer (information?) averse people can relate to. What is more intuitive -- a avatar with a chat bubble or a line of text with a name by it?

Sure it might be just a fairly successful pseudo-MMO with a few too many cybering furries.  Sure nobody wants to go to a "virtual fashion show" except the sort of people who play Second Life.  But damn it, it's got three-dimensional avatars doing something besides acting out some fucking stupid Dungeons & Dragons game, and that's enough to set off people's "OMFG CYBERSPACE IS TEH FUTURE" reflex.

Or maybe acting out a stupid D&D game is the future, at least for the forseeable one. I find it telling that the graphical MUDs are playing out exactly the same way the text MUDs did. Maybe someday having a shiny graphical client for holding inane conservations will be all that matters but for now people prefer having a directed game experience.

Can do more? Yes.

Actually do more? Not so much.

I really do see the potential in SL, but honestly, while you can do all sorts of things with it, nobody ever seemed to.

I wanted to spend time making stuff in SL, but I was pretty sure anything cool you might make would be ignored by the cybering furries and turn out to be a massive waste of time.

Yeah I have to repress my OMG Snowcrash reflex every once in awhile and stay away from the furry breeding ground.

Allegedly, people are using it for all sorts of thing, like Numtini said.  Business confereces, displaying art, introducing products and inventions, making music... unfortunately, also like Numtini said, I couldn't seem to find any of that stuff when I looked.  I think they just SAY their doing it and actually doing the furry thing that everyone else accused them of. 

I also see the potential here and I kind of hope it works out.  It could give people who would never otherwise have one, a venue to showcase their talent.

There actually is some pretty neat stuff there:
1) Live music (it's mostly angst filled women singing about heroin addiction and lesbianism, and waaaay too much "Cats in the Cradle I hate my father" kinda stuff).
2) Live comedy shows (some are actually pretty damn funny)
3) ....Thats about it

Way too much bondage / s&m / slavery, and cyb0rz in general.  The PG areas are kinda blah, but you can't walk 5 steps in the 'mature' areas without seeing a huge model of a penis.

Susanne Vega was on NPR a few weeks ago saying she put on a virtual concert in Second Life. Don't think it was about heroin though.

I tried pretty hard to find live music, because the concept interested me. All I could find was a music genre themed club where people stand around and show off their dancing animations at ~3fps while listening to pirated MP3s being streamed live.

The DJs for the club were pretty cool though, and they seemed to have DJs active nearly 24 hours a day (I think I was there around 2:00 AM and one dude was signing off as another was coming on for a 5 hour shift or something.)

Maybe it's just me, but I see a lot of parallel's between the user base for SL today and the early adopter Mud crowd back in the day.  The cliqueness of the self selecting userbase of forward thinkers, proud of what they can do in their nascent new virtural environment is like same sort of vibe I got from Mud's who appeared to feel superior to gamers not in the know.  Course, a lot of early mudders being from the university intelligensia crowd didn't hurt either.  Early adopters in any market tend to be able to both spend more money, and put up with more crap than you're average folk.  So is SL the equivalent of an early text Mud, or Meridian 59?

Xilren

I was promised an orgy by this thread.  Where is it?



A lot of SL's numbers are felt somewhat suspect (see Raph et al).  Situation resembles the same kind hype Vonage is doing to survive.

I consider SL to be the graphical version of LambdaMOO, except with all the more "mature" aspects more exposed (LambdaMOO had that as well but it was more hidden with rooms you could only teleport or needed a key to get into, etc.).

Edit: for clarity

Its what we talked about in the long thread with a bunch of people trying to bash Raph. Its myspace meets mmo, and its starting to take off. My friend recently tried it, we had a few good hours of laughing at the ads for cyboring. The best one was along the line of:

Tranny for sale
loves S&M and rough sex.
hates spitting and scat.
L$100 per blowjob
L$300 per sex for 30 minutes

Second Life is everything you've ever heard about it and more. It's shitty tech, but we've all seen how the most advanced tech stuff can flop because it doesn't hit a niche. Fuck, MySpace is the most eye-fucking piece of web design ever concieved, but it's successful.

Second Life is getting coverage because of MONEY. Krakok has most of it exactly right. As for the $206 million a year, I can believe it. You can buy a whole bunch of shit, and to buy it you need to buy Linden at 1000= $3 I think. It's all there, and every person who has dreamed of making money through micro-transactions should be on it.

I don't like it much, but I appreciate what it's doing, furries and all.

Make a dynamite vest, then run into the middle of a furry party screaming "JIHAD!" and explode.  I need to get my lurker brother to post about his Second Life adventures in griefing furries.

Second Life Safari. (http://www.somethingawful.com/secondlifesafari/)  Starting at the oldest entry helps explain some stuff.  Some of the videos linked in the articles are NSFW.

Most of somethingawful is NSFW on some level.

As much as there is right with it, there's just so much wrong with it.  This is the part that boggles, for me.  The shitty graphics, the rudimentary implementation is inconsistent with the amount of attention this thing gets.

It's potentially innovative but the actual implementation - combined with the cyber furryness - is the part where it all falls apart for me to make sense of the amount of attention it gets.

I realize that investment requires hype.  What I don't understand is how this piece of shit application manages to continue to attract attention.

I feel the same way about EQ1 and Quake and I actually liked EQ1 before the grind-rape began.

Because of Reuters.

Most news stories, especially on the web and in the deeper parts of newspapers/TV news bulletins, originate with the agencies Associated Press, Agence France Presse or Reuters. They have no publications of their own, just journalists, photographers and TV crews around the world, churning out stuff that others pay to use. As a consequence, most publications and TV networks have no foreign correspondents anymore, and if they do, that correspondent usually picks up something from an agency anyway.

A few weeks ago, a technology reporter at Reuters apparently became involved with Second Life and "set up a virtual news bureau" to report from inside it, like it was a country. Reuters issued a story announcing this in its news feed, and most websites picked it up and ran with it (quirky story + website = CPM income). Seems like it was a combination of his geek obsession and a publicity stunt for Reuters (though perhaps even a paid, underhand publicity stunt for Second Life too - these things do happen).

The effect of that story was enormous. I work in a newsroom in Australia with colleagues who know nothing about computers or gaming, and they all read that Second Life story and forwarded it to each other. I owned up to knowing way too much about these things and explained there were other online worlds too, and they had no idea. Most people, including mainstream journalists, are still unaware of MMORPGs, let alone World of Warcraft or anything else. The existence of a 3D online world with a virtual economy was amazing to them. And most journalists didn't have me to tell them "there are others", so they only heard about Second Life.

Then they went back to their families, their other work, their leisure time at the beach, and thought no more of it, because they're not geeks. But now they know what Second Life is, and that it might be the future (even Reuters set up an agency), and that it's a great subject for news stories that people will read.

And most journalists have become lazy twats for whom research is a black art.

That's the thing. Their whole implementation is such a piece of crap that the market is ripe for someone to pull a Myspace on them. There is no loyalty to SecondLife. If someone else comes along with better technology who's servers aren't crashing lagged pieces of crap everyone will jump ship.

OMG I'm laughing so hard I'm going to die. THAT is the Second Life I know and don't particularly love.

Could part of the problem with server stability be its open source foundation?  Too many crappy / poorly programmed objects by the masses?

I'm not denying that Second Life is far from the best implementation of cyberspace, which is why I suspect somebody's going to make a better, more efficient platform also fated to be converted over to a furry love convention to the developers' chagrin and eventual acceptance.

HAHAHAHA SILLY FUCKERS!

http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/7304/52/

It made the BBC1 six o'clock news tonight. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ukfs_news/hi/bb_rm_fs.stm?news=1&bbram=1&bbwm=1&nbram=1&nbwm=1&nol_storyid=6167278&checkedBandwidth=bb&checkedMedia=ram&subtitles=hide&alreadySeen=1)

I was going to reply, then I realized HaemishM pretty much nailed it with every post....

Actually I think they're just spread too thin. They know "a little bit about everything, and a lot about nothing". A little bit about every politician, nation, lifestyle, life form and molecule. A news journalist has room to know there are virtual worlds on the Internet, but no room to explore them. They have 30 minutes to comprehend and write about the latest development in a political scandal that dates back to 1970. Then they have five minutes to understand Second Life, because the 15 minutes after that is for writing the story about it, interrupted by writing about the building on fire downtown.

When I was an IT journalist I had time to understand things better, or even too well. As a general journalist I can grab the facts I need, try to absorb more, and I sometimes miss the vital bit. It takes a superior journalist to spot the bigger angle in the small story, and what the next question should really be. And with Second Life, that's really for the IT journalists (and as far as i'm concerned, they are failing).

Yes and no. The scripting language (LSL) is crappy which just about everyone acknowledges. Times that by X billion objects.

SL has ~2700 servers or some such and only 12000 people online. On the other hand you have normal webservers that host multiple customers per box with thousands of scripts (PHP/ASP/Python/Perl/whatever) and can handle maybe 1200 requests a second. Or EVE which has ~75 world servers running Python and ~28,000 people online.

Sounds like an architecture issue to me but MMOGs are hard.

The $200+m figure is for INTERNAL transactions. It's akin to the calculation saying that EQ is bigger than Russia economically.

At least I was on the right track ;)
Thanks for the clarification.

So I get home from class and turn the TV on. I'm flipping channels and land on BBC. Second Life.

I quickly change channels to my local ABC affiliate. More Second Life.

At that point, I go outside for a walk.

Yeah, I got home from work last night some time between 10 and 11 (crunch time), switched on the BBC 24 hour news, and there was Second bloody Life, with their tech correspondent floating around and saying it was the future, while admitting he couldn't really find anything to do and that he had trouble seeing the point after a couple of days.

Raph is right, of course: the best you can say about their megabucks announcement is that the money has a certain velocity around the economy.  Since transaction costs are minimal, two people could sell a house back and forth for a few billion Linden dollars all day long and that would be added to their figures.  They lie, they hype: it's just like 1999 again.

And you wouldn't fucking believe it, but right after I posted above, I went into work and our top online video for the morning was that exact BBC Second Life story (http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ifs_news/hi/nb_wm_fs.stm?news=1&bbram=1&bbwm=1&nbram=1&nbwm=1&nol_storyid=6167278).

I tried to explain to my boss how I'd just been discussing Second Life and how overhyped it was, and he (being a total non-gamer and non-Internet geek) looked at me as if I was talking about my obsession with the price of fish in Ghana. He didn't care that Second Life is three years old and crappy, as long as people watched the story. After a while, neither did I :)

Watching their magic box of population numbers can be interesting.

A game that averages 15k peak logins has added 27,265 accounts in the last 9 hours. Since yesterday when Kakrok posted his totals, it's added 46,675 accounts.

it's magic!

I like how when I decide to look around again (for the second time in 2-3 years) the server is down and not accepting new logins.

I'll be interested to see where they go with this whole "open source" thingy they have going. Maybe someone will make a better engine to run on top of it.

Actually, it is related to the ability to make infinite free accounts without any real identity verification.  Most residents have at least three alts.  Seriously.

Urge to create Second Life account... drop Tubgirl billboards all over the place until banned... rising!

EDIT:  Client downloading now.  Oh man, they have you pick an avatar when you register.  There's one normal male and normal female, and the rest are either furries (Yes, right there at the start!) or so gay they make the average Final Fantasy protagonist look like Bruce Willis.  I can tell this is going to be fun.

EDIT 2:  Flew around aimlessly for fifteen minutes, reveling in the shitty graphics.  Realized I didn't really have anything to do.  Logged off.

Yah, I don't even like the game and I think I have at least four different accounts/characters. I figure that's where the way out of proportion total logins to population comes from. (I also wonder if logging into the web site, which you need to do to look at most of it, counts as a login--that would make me an active player.)

But even that doesn't explain new accounts at a rate of twice game population every day. Though I suppose given how lousy the game looks and how jerk the avies are, particulalry initially, it could be that they really do require 10 or 20 trials to get a single player who lasts more than 5 minutes.

The FT has a third of a page today devoted to Second Life and one Ailin Graf, a Chinese-born teacher living in Frankfurt who plays as 'Anshe Chung' and claims to have a Second Life business with revenues of $2.5M, and around 80 employees based in China. This being the FT it includes a quote I found particularly amusing...





I honestly don't know if by 'investors' she meant herself, or people who own Linden.

Chung gets mentioned quite a bit (http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&lr=&q=+site:terranova.blogs.com+%22terra+nova%22+%22anshe+chung%22) on Terra Nova.

As unbelievably as it may sound, Anshe was the guildleader of my first guild in Shadowbane, Braialla's Presence, and when she moved to Second Life I bought some land lots (she paid me for that service) on her account helping to start the big business that made her what she is now.

The internet is so small.

You know that feeling you get when you're burned out on an MMO, and it all just seems like a pointless graphical chat room?  That was Second Life for me after ten minutes.  I could maybe fly around dozens of weird-looking and deserted buildings until I found someone, then start talking to them out of the blue, and maybe hope their company was so fascinating that it made slogging through this clunky shitty-looking "cyberspace" nonsense worthwhile.

I knew it was only a matter of time. A feminist blog (really good one actually) ran a story about virtual rape kits  (http://feministing.com/archives/006218.html#c59472)in Second Life. Wait until they find out about the entire pedo area.

I love how people in SL somehow feel entitled to measures to protect their "business" - they're trading bits in a game. I don't even understand how the land works in that game - LL makes all the land, correct? If so, why is it even necessary to buy from any of these leeching middlepersons?

A huge problem I see with SL is that a lot of people are going to follow some of the things they do in future games, such as introducing real world value into games. Keep the fucking money out of my game.

Cause the rich people will buy up huge swaths of land or complete islands and then resell smaller portions to people who want them. It costs ~$1600 (that's real US dollars, not ingame Linden $) for a 16 acre island (65Km2) buying direct from LL. On the other hand the newbie "first-time buyer" plot of land that you buy direct from LL only costs about $2 (512 L$) for a 512m2 plot of land.

Edit: clarified island purchase

In addition to what Trippy said, there's people who, for some reason, prefer to rent thier land in themed areas, etc.  When you see stuff about Anshe Chung in a SL media whoring article, it's because she's paying her RL bills as a land speculator/developer in SL.  Anyone with the proper amount of seed money can pull it off, but she's done it really, really well.

Why would someone rent the land instead of own it?  Lots of reasons -- some people want prebuilt housing on their land, some people don't want to use a CC with SL and prefer to buy their currency, etc.

The Anshe communities are like themed homeowners associations. It's a way to make sure someone doesn't open up an eyesore next door or just something you don't want to deal with. You have to agree to certain limitations and I think she actually retains ownership of the land. So she is actually adding value.

It's basically a reaction to the libertarian roots of SL. When someone builds a 200' orange and purple penis statue next to your quiet house, suddenly rules seem like a really good idea.

AND THEY WILL.


Yes.

Very first thing I saw when I first tried SL and hopped over to my "newbie plot" - giant flashing billboards offering to buy my land from me.

Well I am frankly tired of going into the whole SL sucks thing. Theyre good at some things teh suck at others no biggie.

The have a huge press machine because they're VC's are hugely connected to the media, also no biggie its common for investors to flog thier portfolio


It was clunky, yes but OPEN

What I saw when I first logged in ON THE NEWBIE ISLAND, seriously I shit you not:

I large naked fat man, wielding a axe, with a burger king like over sized crown, simulating sex with a cat woman and a young leather gay boy love slave......

You cant even make that shit up for a new user experiance.....

Of course they stopped what they were doing and came to welcome "me" but I flew off

PS: I didnt know SL had a pedo area, thats crossing the Fing line IMO, wait til the media get a hold of that little gem.....Im sure that board meeting will be interesting.

If it's not in a video, it didn't happen. Or at least a screenshot.