How likely is SL to cease existing?

I think Philip said something at one point about getting that 40% RL females figure from credit card names.

I can confirm one female, as my wife plays, but if you want to go out on a limb and guess two...

On LL website it states that SL is the company's first project. When they start working on the second project, HippoWars, all the effort will be put into that and support for SL will wane.

Have you seen the preview shots for HippoWars? It ain't pretty. Still, with the Seburo upgrades and the soon-to-be-released Hippo-Sex-Balls, all should be fun again. I also hear where will be some cross-world travel allowed, so look out for giant heavily armed hippos coming into SL looking for some cheap av-sex soon...

shut up shut up SHUT UP!

You're all freaking me out.

Is the Jones last name retired permanenetly? Januani gave me a great ideae for a musical interpretation. We need a SL Tom Jones to sing an alternate version of "Sex Bomb" as "Sex Balls". Maybe use them in TV advertising to boost subscriptions....

"Aw, aw baby, yeah, ooh yeak, huh, listen to this
Spy on me baby, use satellite
Infrared to see me move through the night
Aim gonna fire shoot me right
Aim gonna like the way you fight
And I love the way you fight

Now you found the secret code ('show' + 'sit here')
I use to wash away my lonely blues well
So I can’t deny or lie cause you’re a
Sex balls, sex balls you’re my sex balls uh, huh
You can give it to me when I need to come along"

SL is here for the long run.

It's a new form of entertainment. It caters to a very different population from other online worlds, most notably women and senior citizens (for whom 'SECOND life' takes on a very literal meaning).

Chatting, building, hanging out listening to music, existing virtually in a Second Life in the guise that we invent, with no constraint whatsoever, is unique to Second Life.

The first critical point happened when L$ became easily convertible to USD and Euro. People could suddenly justify 'playing' on a grand scale. And Linden Labs made sure they could measure out the money supply against value created, contrary to what happens in the other worlds that are chronically plagued by inflation.

Yet, today, SL's scale is still limited by the absence of 'global media' and of 'big events' due to the ~20 AVIs per Sim limit. It's a shame because the REAL scale of SL is made clearer by the renderings posted last week on the web site: We're not a bunch of quaint locations with a club here and there: We're already a sprawling city.

But this limit is going away now: The ability to link a web page to any object is essential: It makes that Global Media possible.

So, next in coming are marketing, advertising and media (first media to come: web links and online magazines, including streamed non-QT, video in the browser - video the SL way is harder and still restrained by the location dependency).

That, combined with SL's growth, will provide the reach and critical mass for content providers to go Pro - Both for objects created for resale and for media content (the support for advertising), and we'll reach the second critical point:

We're soon going to see teams of pro graphists and scripters (i.e. with salaries paid in $, and IP going to/coming from the employing company) churning out branded content, and publicizing it 'worldwide'. Their revenue will dwarve and drive out all but the very very few best builders we have today. A lot of this content willl repackage RL Intellectual Property and Content. Dark Dharma does great AVIs. Can you see her heading a team of artists from Disney or Warner Bros and producing 10 AVIs A WEEK?

And then we'll reach the third critical point: SL will be populous enough to rival the web for some segments - given the better user experience it provides. And our world will become the avenue for standard web commerce of RL stuff.

By then (2008, 2009?) Linden Labs will have to fight for survival, because it will converge head first towards what Yahoo Messenger, MSN, Google and Sony will likely offer: 3D persistent, virtual worlds distributing digital content and entertainment.

Supporting that statement, think of where we already are going when SL is down: if you're like me and many on my SL friends, on Yahoo and MSN. Those community are already budding virtual worlds. Only differences are in the way they're getting at it:

- They started with the commerce and advertising rather than with the technology
- They already each have 10s of MILLIONS subscribers worldwide
- They're geared towards a youngish/teen population

To add to your thoughts what are the two features in the next major releases of Windows? IM like seamless messenging and full incorporation of 3D in the UI. I'm not sure what it brings to Excel and Word honestly . Or is it that MS has in its sight a full category of software and entertainment they want to dominate?

Longhorn ETA: end 2006, beginning 2007: NOT coincidentally, when 60% of PCs in households can comfortably run SL, as well as hand-held consoles and maybe some mobile phone, and when the potential market is of a size that interests MS.

And to be honest I'm not sure SL will win that last one. Says someone who lived (died?) through AOL absorbing Compuserve .

Another way to put it: SL is already the next WWW - Will Linden Labs stay on top? Remain a dominant player? Become a niche player a la Salon or Apple ?

Well, SL hasn't gone open-source yet, so in all likelihood it will die.

Seriously, any system whose longevity is dependent on the finances of a corporate is in the queue waiting for demise, unless that corporate is IBM. It's nice to be optimistic about SL since it's such an interesting system in principle, but one has to be a realist and look at precedent.

The best way of helping LL to survive and prosper and hence to keep SL alive is to encourage them to use open-source more than at present. (Philip has stated quite openly that this is the general intention anyway.)

Development costs a *lot* of money, and the more that can be done by unpaid but highly skilled external professionals/enthusiasts the better for the assured longevity of both the company and the world.

Agreed, they must learn to leverage the community more.

The upgrade to 1.6 was a result of the a very small team trying to tackle a task much to big for them.

It's been said from a few lidnens at various town halls that the eventual goal is to open up a lot of the SL architecture -- I think LLabs' evental long-term goal is to become a "sim hosting provider" rather than a software developer.

They want us to develop as much as possible -- for proof, you should see what people in IRC are conjuring up.. with curious lindens asking questions It's nuts.

LF

Well, that's not exactly correct. Linden Lab (SL) didn't buy the banners, a player did. It just looked like SL did. You're absolutely correct that a few people that left There went back on the forums to blast There and praise SL.

As for the special trial thing: the whole "asking for the password" thing literally only lasted about 3 hours. I saw it a few minutes after they put it up, I immediately contacted them, and informed them of a much better way to check if someone is a paying member. I suggested that they just view the person's There profile, instead of log on with the password. LL agreed, and they changed the promo webpage to reflect that.

I wonder if someday Microsoft will approach LL and attempt to buy them out. They will integrate SL into a future version of Windows and call it Windows World. First there was Live Meeting..and then Windows World!

Thanks for the clarifications, James. Unfortunately, regardless of how long it was up, that password request made me figure they were a bunch of inexperienced, unprofessional amatures I wouldn't trust with my money or credit card info. At least I didn't just figure they were phishing crooks. Anyway, I would have tried SL sooner if I hadn't been shocked by that and stayed away because of it. Good on you for straightening them out!

Oooh, examples please.