Second Thoughts

Cool Linden Jelly Fish

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Bothnia/191/65/1

An Underwater Linden Build

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Bothnia/191/65/1

Saint Pimushe -- Villa Open to the Public

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife//16/83/50

For the People of Ukraine

A Prayer

Finally Some Nice Neighbours in Carlysle!

Gone is that big box of those idiots and now I have a nicely-landscaped
fellow rentals business. Hooray! Come rent this view now : )

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Carlisle/200/169/28

Rod Humble Departs Second Life, Slaying Land Bots -- Ushering in the Internet of Things

One of the last bots seen in the wild eating 0.6/meter land in Hartwick before departing CEO Rod Humble slayed them all.

I have no idea what they're doing up there at the Lab.

Perhaps they are being bought out.  (By Yahoo? I'd be glad if Marissa Mayer bought us, then maybe we'd at least have updated news on the front page every day).

It is rather abrupt, and odd, but they've run through three of these CEOs now in 10 years, it happens, it's Silicon Valley.

Rod will be remembered for:

o mesh

o losing the Steam deal because Woodbury sabotaged it

o decoupling the Lindens from the world

o making some other products that were sort of the Etch-a-Sketch of our time but didn't take off yet

I think from the perspective of good business, removing the Lindens from the world, as much as people howled, was probably a good thing.

Either you were going to make this a world, with real stewards, and people who would care-take it until they could raise a crop of decent leaders to rule it - -a process fraught with drama and crazyness and loss of revenue and high staff turnover.

OR you were going to declare the world "a product" and just manage it remotely like you would vacuum cleaners. Obviously, they chose the latter as it made better business sense.

Obviously, when the Hoover people sell you a vacuum cleaner, they don't a) give previews of their new models to their special friends and cultivate a vacuum repair class above others b) come along with you and create Vacuum World where they become involved in how you vacuum your carpet c) cut you in on their revenue-sharing deal by having you rent out your vacuum cleaner to other people.

The first model is much more intellectually interesting; the latter is far less so, which is partly while my attention has moved to other things on my other blog (like Snowden! Read my new e-book!).

I had no idea that when I snapped a shot of a LanDump land bot the other day, that he was likely one of the last bots in the wild that I'd ever see!

Because now they're being banned! SLuniverse had the story. The policy is here. (I especially love his outfit, which looks like the old metal grill texture from the original Library).

As many are saying, 10 years - or at least 7 years -- too late. I sure could have used this policy back when I was struggling to make communities and actually encourage people to buy first land and have a sense of rootedness.

So the two things seem linked, somehow, because we're in the dark and forced to read tea-leaves, as per usual.

Here's my bet -- there was a board meeting, they looked at the annual numbers, they weren't good, and they had to blame somebody, so they decided Rod had to go for poor numbers. Maybe revenue is down because island sales are down and so on. Maybe those new products didn't take off, I don't know.

Rod Humble came to this job because he saw it as a troubled organization where they'd be glad to have him and his game skills and his name, he would only add and not subtract -- and where they'd be glad as well to have him bring in Will Wright (they were in EA.com together) to bolster the board. Then Rod could then use the time to try different ideas he had for making creative products, and then move on to his next thing. No harm, no foul.

I suspect they will take some woman in the back office who has a title like Vice President for Customer Engagement or something like that and make her the CEO. Lean in, and all that.

Then maybe they will be bought by Yahoo. Yahoo bought out Cloud Party (Cory Ondrekja and other Lindens' "not SL" project) but it was to kill it off.

Second Life is valuable now --  hot, even -- not as a virtual world, and not as a game engine, and not as a training simulator, but as the place where the Internet of Things happen.

As many of you know, I personally am for suffocating the Internet of Things in its cradle, but no one listens to me... Google bought out Nest... it is happening everywhere around us.

See, once you wire up all that stuff in your house -- your coffee pot, your car, your kids -- then you need a place to manage them in 3D. You need a simulation of your house in miniature, where you can watch all this stuff and get alerts if it is mal-functioning and so on. And where you plan things around it or adjust things or trade things.

The nerds are going to have to get much better at this, of course. The other day my poor fellow parishioner was SWATed by her own med-alert type of device. The elderly woman was making breakfast in her night gown early in the morning, when suddenly three burly firemen came bursting in the door with a defilibrator. It took awhile to sort out the fact that her warning device had gone off by mistake. She nearly had the real heart attack then, while the Fire Department was bursting in the door. She is bewildered as to how this "gadget" did this to her. Couldn't they have called first? I guess it has a system where if it gets a signal and then doesn't get an "all clear" after X amount of time, it sends the fire brigades in.

So naturally there is enormous latitude for the Internet of Things to go wildly wrong constantly, and bad will and greed everywhere as there always is, but one way to fix this is to have the 3-D visualization at your finger tips. Imagine if the driver for joining SL wasn't lack of a social life or the need to crash sandboxes and grief Prokofy, but a desire to set up a nice little kitchen with the coffee pot, refrigerator, etc. and then your entertainment center, and then manage them. Imagine if it did all these little things like glow red if your coffee filters had run out or if you needed more milk or if your kids were watching an R-rated movie at the TV. Anyway -- just a thought on that -- potential.

But whatever it is, it's something. Something's up.

My bet with the land thing is that they are preparing to set all land to $0. This was always Philip's dream, equalizing cost and removing arbitrage out of the game --- removal of the land market. It never occurred to him that if he was selling sims on an auction, the only way anyone could justify buying one was if they could have a land market in-world to work with further. No, he wanted land to be a frame for content, and that's it.

They had to slay off the bots, because they couldn't have them go wild gobbling zero land everywhere. So to be fair to those bot businesses, which at least paid for some (if not all) of their tier, they had to ban them.

One of the topics that completely obsesses Desmond Shang for reasons that are opaque to me given that he is no longer even on the Mainland, is the idea that swathes of mainland are abandoned and sims seem to be redundant and non-efficient. So he wants these "consolidated." Some people hate looking at the map and seeing those scrofulous spots everywhere. Maybe the Lindens could clean up some of this, but in most cases, they can't, i.e. force people to move. They can hardly afford the manpower, trouble-tickets and agida of another Zindra-like move, where they get everybody on sims that are only half full to move on to sims that are a quarter full.

So my guess is that they will homestead it. They will basically just open it all up, and anybody can take anything they can pay the tier on. It might still be possible to arbitrage based on such a system, i.e. run rentals, but only if there are still things like 10% discount for group land - that at least makes some approximation of all the perks island dealers like Desmond got (which he brags about once again, and even does an insufferable little star turn telling everyone how he spent three days and as many hours trying to get the Lindens to move the price of some of his islands UP from their deep discount as it was "only fair.")

I don't know if you open it up and let it rip whether you'd get better balance, but they might just start going through and saying sims are closing so get off them. That might be terrible -- so then they do this:  offer everyone to get twice as much land as they had before on new sims, because they are slashing tier in half. Or something.

Another way they might do it is say they are making a brand-new Mainland, prettier, with nicer textures, but only X percentage of the size. Everyone will have a space, but you better move fast... kind of like the way Zindra was filled up. Only without tickets and management but just -- let 'er rip.

Somehow, I don't think this level of granularity and planning for Mainland stuff could possibly be happening in this Lab that has ignored the Mainland for years, but who knows, mainly. Let's not forget that the Mainland makes up only a fraction of all the sims the Lindens' rent out. I forget the number now, but it's low -- the real money and the bulk of the population is on islands. Given that small percentage they might a) do nothing in fact or b) do some radical thing that they know will hurt some people, but there will be so few of them that they won't care.

So...perhaps they'll completely close the Mainland, and our Grand Experiment in International Living will end. We will be told to take a number and be moved into Ansheland or Desmondland, where big landlords will be told to pick up the Mainland slack.

That would be sad, but I have to say -- it doesn't feel that sad to me. This song always sort of summed up to me the feeling you can have moving from world to world in the Metaverse. Some other world will appear; we will all move there.