What services has LL co-opted and what services will LindenLab co-opt or just kill?

It's like the comeback of a classic rock band, or something.

Next: CITY SIMS!

They didn't tell us anything.

But, who knows, maybe you have a hotline to Philip and he told you why he's doing this?

Hahaha.

This is a funny, funny "world" we live in.

I love plot twists.

Ok maybe I shouldn't have been that snarky.

Yes they DID tell us, Blaze, when they announced this contest in the Announcements. We knew that the purpose was to get more premium accounts.

coco

OK, well maybe they didn't spell out what they were going to do with all these houses, but they did tell us somewhere along the line, cause I know I found out.

coco

P.S. Anyway, it did say neighborhood project, so we knew they were going to make a neighborhood out of them from the get-go.

Blaze she was part of the project and did get a tour of the sim before it was complete. She might very well have been told some information that not everyone knows. I found Cocoanut to be very helpful on this topic.

Thank you for your great insight Cocoanut.

Lovely! Makes me wonder how this relates to the following Linden actions since May:

Mar 2005: Introduction of private island land deeding and happily watch land barons invest in lotsa private island sims
May 2005: Removal of private island parcels from FIND
May 2005: Linden staff beginning to attempt to brand private island land deed sales as "rental" and such create impression of inferior product compared to their mainland "sales"
July 2005: Private estate prices increased from 980$ to 1250$, mainland sim prices as low as 1000$
Sep 2005: Lindens start German and Japanese community sims competing with resident German and Japanese community sims and projects. Of course they make good use of all their world admin powers such as mass mails to all Japanese SL users.
Oct 2005: No more listing of land as for "Land Sale" in Classifieds tab
Oct 2005: Removal of Dreamland, Hiroland, Azure Island and all other resident rental continents and private islands from the world map
Nov 2005: Removal of resident structures from worldmap, so that it is no longer possible to use map to find vacant land in private islands

Your World. Your Imagination.

So you're suggesting it's intentional and LL are lying to us?

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The first part of the post has been hashed over to many times to count, lets just leave that alone. The sale rental debate has been talked into the ground. The increase in price is really not that bad. Islands include the first month free so that is like have the mainland sims start at 1195. Not much of a differance there.

Now, the Linden run sims, I agree with you on. That does go against the whole idea of what I thought SL was. The listing thing, I have no idea about any of that, so I won't pass judgement. I really really hope that it is just a bug and not staying like that. I have also notice that the new sims they have brought online also don't show up. And the structures not showing up, that is a bug, LL has said as much that is was a bug.

LL is not winning any friends. First they push out GOM because it worked, then the in world classifieds, the country sims, and now zoned sims. If we make anything that is worth while, LL is just going to copy it and place it as part of SL. Why do we even create anything anymore?

Geshhhhhhh but how many are really japanese?:/ germans i can see making a community for but japanese? LL was better off creating a Chinese sim then japanese sim. Why? because Japanese when over 18 mostly are working or going to school. They offen DON`T have time play these types of ONline games. Yes Sony Has the market share here but mostly the are males playing these game not girls. Being japanese why in the world would I play in a japanese sim if i already live in japan. It does not make sence?!?!??!?!?!Besides I can`t even read Japanese fonts, because there seems to be bug in the SL client when it comes to font being written in in the sl public and Im. I am using a Japanese WIndoes OS. But the second life client seems more driven for non japanese japanese font packs then the native OS Fonts. I can understand building these communities for bug and R&D. But but otherwise they should have created a chinese forum and Sim.
Just my 2 yen

::laughs nervously::

To restate and repeat the obvious: This trend is very disconcerting for a world that is supposedly user content/creation driven.

Jan is right around the corner.I wonder what going to happen...................Scary a

Not at all, I just wasn't aware of those posts. Thanks for the links

Hey, read my signature. This was all planned from the beginning.

Uh, yeah, everyone knows that, and I've told you that myself before. I specifically said you should think of yourself as a volunteer co-developer and you should feel honored that LL "co-opt" one of your projects. That means you won the game.
But of course, there are two kinds of people in this world... those who believe in it and want to help develop it, and those who want to rape it for personal gain.

It's called rational self interest. Without it, SL will cease to exist.

But we do have a rational self-interest in seeing SL emerge as the next big thing in content development. If we give them the input they need to make SL grand there will be more money in it for everyone, right?
What you can't do is sit back and be complacent. If LL doesn't take interest in your project then some other person will.

It's a balance of sacrificing for the whole and the self interest of the individual.

We need solutions that are good for the whole and the individual. Not just the whole and not just the individual.

I don't dispute that. But much like patents eventually expire, you will have ample time to recoup your development costs, or you can even offer to sell LL your software.
Hugh Perkins made and sold them the feature voting tool.
Scripters got Bad Geometry hosted on their website for free.
GOM had a chance to sell, but they were too proud for that.
GOM also had a change to continue to compete and innovate, but they were too lazy for that.

Yah, in the case of GOM, they definitely made some errors.

However, GOM in itself wasn't a problem. I expected it and so did everyone else.

The problem with GOM is two fold:

a- it's not an isolated incident
b- Philip should have realised that these guys didn't know what they were doing. Any good CEO can step in and educate people where they've gone wrong. The fact that Philip was unable or unwilling does not bode well.

It's interesting, I do think Linden Lab's myseriousness when it comes to their plans impedes some user driven development, although how much of an impact it really has overall, I don't know. I'm probably not the only person who doesn't want make a big investment or commitment to developing something if there's not a good chance of making money out of it. But at the same time I know that anything that's very successful is exactly the kind of thing LL might decide to add as a feature or a service. This would seem like a more manageable risk if there were some sort of organized developer program or even a roadmap, but there isn't. The closest thing, as far as I can tell, is socializing with the Lindens or monitoring IRC in the hopes of picking up some information. The most valuable user contributions to SL are exactly those that you could argue should be a built-in part of the product. Which means there's a danger that LL will add it without notice or compensation. I create primarily for myself and at my leisure partly because of this.

User programmers in particular are in an interesting position when you view SL as a platform. Because users are restricted to a scripting language and API which are so limited compared to the native code of the software, they can't build components that might compete with a built-in compent of the platform or even be added to it. A former business partner of mine made his money by creating a network utility for the Mac as a product. It was so successful that Apple licensed it and added it to the system. As a user he was able to contribute to the platform and to profit from it because he had almost the same resources as the platform developers. On the other hand, if LL decides your widget is so cool that something like it should be part of SL, they're not going to add an LSL script to the client. Imagine what the Mac would be like if programmers could only write in JavaScript with a tiny API.

Again, for all I know the effect of these things is negligible. On the other hand it will be interesting to see what happens if someone develops a 3D space that's treated from the ground up as a full-fledged developer platform rather than a game. Why not?

http://www.ogleearth.com/2005/10/bill_gates_is_s.html