Second Life Orgy of Press Hype

[Xanthippe]

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://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

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.

[geldonyetich]

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.

[Trippy]

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.

[Krakrok]

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. 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, 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 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).

[Samwise]

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.

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.   

[Krakrok]

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.   

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?

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[Trippy]

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.

[Numtini]

it's definately a platform where you can do a lot more than cyber

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.

[damijin]

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.

[Hoax]

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

[Signe]

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.

[SnakeCharmer]

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.

[stray]

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).

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.

[damijin]

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.)

[Xilren's Twin]

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.

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

[Soln]

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.

[Trippy]

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?

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

[Morfiend]

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

[HaemishM]

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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.

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.

[Miasma]

Second Life Safari.  Starting at the oldest entry helps explain some stuff.  Some of the videos linked in the articles are NSFW.

[geldonyetich]

Most of somethingawful is NSFW on some level.

[Xanthippe]

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.

[HaemishM]

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

[Tale]

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?

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.

[HaemishM]

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...

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

[Krakrok]

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.

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.

[Numtini]

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

[SnakeCharmer]

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.

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.

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

[geldonyetich]

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.

[Cheddar]

HAHAHAHA SILLY FUCKERS!

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

A virus has infected a virtual world, and there’s no Matrix like Neo saviour in sight, flying around the world zapping the bug with his super matrix-y powers. Instead, Second Life’s technicians needed to take the world offline over the weekend and clean it of all sings of the virus before turning it all back on again.

[Arthur_Parker]

It made the BBC1 six o'clock news tonight.

[DataGod]

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

[Tale]

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...

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

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).