Why SL cannot succeed - a personal opinion.

Hey Avion. The connection is just that the same tools used to build SL ... the asset servers and avatars and region software and rendering software and voice etc. ... could be used to build other worlds of a vastly different character. I don't think anyone believes that SL itself will evolve into a business platform - it really is an online community with its own culture.

But the same tools ... the same "platform" ... could be used to build a completely different private grid where, for example, Boeing could collaborate with other companies to design and test a new airplane. They could have meeting rooms, many test sims with different "flight" weather, tie-ins to show simulations from real modeling software, virtual offices, ... really anything you might try to do in a video conference can be done in an SL-like environment better.
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OMG Colette, sticking to forum rules under punishment of moderation is SOOOO 2007.

To be honest, over all the time I've been here, SL has gotten consistently better. It is a pain the rear quite frequently, and has periods of _intense_ annoyance, but I remember when the entire grid used to go down once a week from griefing; when you couldn't stack half a dozen physical cubes on top of each other without the sim grinding to a halt; the days before llHTTPRequest, before hardware lighting, before push restrictions...

Obviously one _expects_ improvements over time, but I really can't say that it has gotten worse. The grid now is a much better place to be.

*Hello. I am the new self-imposed, self-important, self-proclaimed res-mod.*

Give it up luv.

I have no interest in being a resmod at all. I just don't see the purpose of *this* thread.


There were several other threads already started about hating LL, Phil could have posted to those.

Trailblazing is arduous work. You don't really know where you are going, sometimes you have to backtrack, sometimes you run head-on into an insurmountable obstacle, sometimes you fail, sometimes you take a wrong path, sometimes you just plain get lost.

Without risk, there is no reward. Somebody else may find a shorter path up the mountain, but the guy who got there first is the one who goes down in history.

Yeah, it wasn't a question, Colette, but I think what seems like 20 different threads complaining about the 503 error are worse.

In LL's defense, a little bit, their rush to add features seems to me an attempt to preempt stuff competitors might use to claim they're "better" than SL. That's good strategy. And voice is a key element if they want to be a venue for corporate teleconferencing. Finally, the kind of customer support people yearn for is very labor-intensive and the kind of labor the customer base could tolerate in that function is expensive. There are probably always going to be serious limits to that - for any platform.

That said they have two major problems I think they really must solve. The main one is stability: How many corporations are going to teleconference on a platform that keeps crashing on them? The other is finding ways to make it easier for new Residents to get up to speed: The retention rate around here is a sad joke. Fix that, and they wouldn't have to fake their stats.

I don't even care that it wasn't a question.

I more care that the rant was a *supposed* answer.


I guess I shouldn't have bothered with the subtlety.

It doesn't matter if you see the point of it....! God.

Some of us see a point. Keep up dear please.

So many people are abusing the lack of moderation here, that I think it's ok for a long-time contributor to voice her displeasure over it.

Trying to moderate someone calling for moderation is a pot/kettle action. As is this post moderating a moderator of a moderator.

Shit, I shouldn't post while on cold medicine.

I think the 3D teleconferencing thing is a red herring anyway.

Considering the network resources SL hogs up, existing stand alone Video / Phone Conferencing systems make a lot more sense.

The 3D avatar representative really wouldn't serve a useful purpose during a business meeting.

It was more a gimmick than anything else.

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I am interested in knowing this huge list of bad business decisions LL has made.

We all claim it exists --

But for every "bad" decision you can see where LL was coming from if you try to see it from their side.

Except for DOB your neighbor. That was just lame.

I actually have given up moderating myself from moderating. Caught myself doing it last night. My God, someone has to around here.

Btw, I love your new sig.

Ditto... (for 4 years!)

Like the tide, "Better" and "Worse" come and go, and will continue to do so.

Despite the frustration during the 'worse' times, it's still better than the ultimate world killer: stagnation

fwiw: 503 is the new rezmod.

Getting back to the Topic *My God did I actually say that?* If success means SL becomes the New Internet/Metaverse, then I don't know if it will happen. As much as it may annoy people, _to_me, SL is still more of a game than anything else. It is too unstable, too unpredictable to be considered any type of serious communication/business platform.

Second Life is having it's growing pains and experiencing it's own childhood diseases:griefers, lack of any coherent societal rules and enforcement, technical shortcomings, poor initiation and retention.Most of these can be addressed relatively easily. However they are hampered by what could be the fatal one. Poor business planning and implementation, awful communication, and 3rd rate support.

I'm not an Artist/Creator, Business Owner or a Computer Whiz. I don't know how SL works, and I really don't care. As a consumer, I just expect it to work. That's what I pay for. And for me, it does , for the most part. It is my own private theme park, with many activities for my entertainment and amusement. As I passed one year here and reevaluated what I want from SL, I have considered making a deeper investment, more land to to a couple of things I think I might like, maybe even at least a partial sim ownership. But right now, I can't say I have faith in Linden as a service provider/business to make any sort of financial committment beyond that I already have.

I think SL is at a crossroads. It can be known as the New Internet or it can be remembered as where the concepts of the New Internet were first put into practice. Or it can be remembered as a fancy computer game that never quite caught on.

I have wondered about a 3D world for one's webcammed face (perhaps on a body, perhaps not) to move around in, or a system with both, videos of your face around the edge of the screen say, while your avatar is in the virtual world.

It does seem that for business purposes, being able to record voice conversation, send voicemail, shared whiteboards, wikis, send email, share files, collaborate on spreadsheets and databases and word processor files, perhaps have speech to text conversion going for the recorded voicechat so that you could do keyword searches for recorded chat, stuff like that, might be more useful than a virtual world like Second Life.

I look for a future where you don't watch your virtual environment on a little screen, it's on big screens, multiple big screens, and holographic projectors, so that you are IN your virtual and mirror worlds, screens and projectors with the accuracy of Cisco Telepresence systems, so you can feel like you are right with anyone in the world, with them perhaps where one of you are, or with them in a place where neither of you are, or with them in a place that couldn't exist, in whatever guise you choose.

I doubt I'll live long enough to see this.

So sorry. Please assume the mandatory question at the end of my initial post - "Thoughts?"

This RA forum is now a general discussion forum. Whatever it was not long ago, it has now become just general discussion.

THat version sor tof reminds me of an Asimov book in which robots had taken over everything except leisure pursuits to the point where people had huge estate for only 1 person and were NEVER in each others physical presence.

I read that.

My idea doesn't involve staying away from others in real life. I think we need people to be able to feel close to each other regardless of where they are, and life size, spatially accurate representations of them are shown to do that to a considerable degree.

I think we will find it is cheaper to move the data needed to make us feel like the world is one place, not that big, really, than it is to move our bodies. Bodies are big and heavy compared to data.

For making SL useful to businesses, someone should hook SL up to Zoho. Zoho 3D.

SL is hardly blazing trails, it will be comming up on its 10th birthday shortly they STILL have some of the same old problems

and the guy who got there first was active worlds and its quite amusing to see SL do alot of the same things AW did 4 years before

know your enemy, and learn from their mistakes

Thats if we make it to 2009 in this mess..........I sure hope we do........Just being honest here..........Unlike som rah rah people .

the question is not if but how

trough the normal clients or trough slIRC

Well at this stage maybe if we suck every part out of in game features like Groups, profile sizes limits etc. Maybe well make it.

so basicly adapt the world to sleek usage befor downgrading completly, gotcha