New worlds: new visions?

Many of the new grids seem to be marketing themselves solely on the basis of not being run by LL. As a short-term strategy to recruit disgruntled SL residents, that'll work fine. A whiny populace is still a populace But long-term, each of these grids is going to have to develop a distinct vision for their world that differentiates them from SL.

I think that SL's reliability, though still not great, has improved enough that it's unlikely that any world in Beta can differentiate itself on the basis of simply "working". It COULD be that a couple can do so based on superior technology .. better build paradigm, open source servers, even better avatars. What do you think?

I find myself thinking of the desktop OS wars. There were many early contenders who marketed their operating systems mainly on the proposition that they were not Microsoft. They made a couple of technical improvements on Windows, and therefore were better -- for a year or two. But the only two serious contenders left nowadays both defined their products independent from whatever Microsoft was or was not doing: Mac OS has always striven to be a truly personal plug-and-play multimedia computer, and Linux was simply the open source version of Unix. Similarly, Legends and all the rest of the new virtual worlds will have to rapidly figure out a viable long-term vision that is different from LL's.

What "vision" do YOU think a new virtual world should embrace to succeed?
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well one direction i think would be family orientated..something suited for families if you can have such a thing on the net..

That is a tough one...

That is a tough question. To succeed, I think you need to perk the interests of a large audience. And that really depends on your angle. Being your own project, I"m sure you want to appeal to certain types of people, and while there's definitely an audience for just about anything out there, you sometimes have to sacrifice some of your ideals to attain and keep a population that will stabilize your company.

"Your World, Your Imagination" doesn't always work, either though. While you can appeal to a large amount of people, that's almost an impossible dream to keep alive. Everyone's world and imagination is different, as are their beliefs and morals. In a situation like that, you are never going to make everyone 100% happy, and I think that's where you lose customer loyalty.

I'm by no means an educated person, and I know nothing of business and of consumers, but that's just my own little opinion.

Well said. Selling based on "we're not them" isn't a good sell. Look at U.S. Politics for that - Kerry was "not Bush." and McCain was "not Obama." Being "Not LL" only works so far.

Really, IMO, they need unique features to market, whether is it technology or setting.

And that is, in essence, the secret of SL's success. Because it does not have one specific angle. It lets the residents choose their own angle.

Being cheaper. Linden Lab are going to lose this war of the worlds, if they've got any sense, and I still believe they have despite the diabolical business decisions recently, they'll position themselves to sell their technology to others who will create their own universes in their own image.

I always believed this was part of LL's vision ... you know, the 3D web thang. But the occasional conversation with the few Lindens I know seem to indicate that they won't be selling the technology. However, they may HOST other worlds on the SL grid that are not connected to the rest of SL, and/or they may connect to SL servers that are hosted by other corporations.

So far, they seem to me to be very clear that LL will sink or swim with SL, this one world.

Assuming that internet speeds increase sufficiently, won't the prim lose it's "highly compact" advantage?

One thing that occurs to me would be to reduce the degree to which a new user of a virtual world is entering a place completely divorced from their existing online connections. When you join any number of things like friendfeed, myspace, etc., you get asked if you want to find people in your existing contact lists who are already members, and to invite those on your contact list who aren't already members.

I second that!

Internet speeds have increased, but not on LL's servers.

I'll be interested to see if other grids can manage to deliver content at much higher rates. But I suspect many of them will be running on a laptop under somebodies bed. It definitely felt that way when I tried one. I could almost smell old socks.

The problems not the internet speeds, it's the amount of stuff downloading, any new fledgeling world should be having a good hard look at it's asset server permissions to avoid having 5000 red brick wall textures that no one can spot a difference between.
I suggest some sort of system where it's not cheap to ad a new texture, so you better be serious about doing so. And if you do then yes you can sell them for a decent price.
I wonder how lag would be if everyone was encouraged to make 50% of their builds from a default texture library?

Yes I suspect a lot of people jumping shipfor greater reliabilty will eventually realise their bicycle world is cheaper and more reliable than a car world for very obvious reasons when they decide they want to do more than ride up and down the driveway.

yes it is


But I do agree that there's far too many textures out there which makes exploring SL a rather gray experience. I'm not convinced that increasing the texture upload fee is the answer.

I prefer the idea of referencing external images. So you would create a texture in your inventory and enter it's location into its properties. Like:- http://www.woop.com/blah.bmp

This wont necessarily make the grid less gray, but it'll mean we can store textures on speedier sites and so the gray will fade away much faster.

Having said all that, I think the mainland is destined to suck regardless because of the user created content. So I'm all for private sims.

That would majorly stink for those us who are Artist, Texture Artist and Doodlers
who do so for fun aren't expecting whole lot of profits.
I don't think it would make difference if the sim was laggy or if the designer was making
low impact textures, even then sometimes there is issues if you've got computer that doesn't have very good graphics card or very much memory.
I don't but I am extremely careful with textures I put up too.

Ya know, I wonder how much LL makes off 10$L uploads in a day.

Yes and imagine the mess we would have if texuture uploads were free, unless the libary is watched somehow, it will just keep bloating and bloating till it becomes unusable due to the sheer volume of repeated or similar textures or textures not even existant in world or likely to ever be again.
I think texture artists would make more money because people would buy from them rather than just pirating textures into SL from the www. Textures in the library would be used rather than looked at then decided they weren't good and put in a storage cube till 2020.

they are also making crazy promises, which I can't even fathom computing on the best of the days in Secondlife. Yet when one logs into these grids about 90% of their features, things such as the ability to run scripts, just are not working, not tested, not nearly as dynamic. People talk, I don't have to listen, show me the goods here.

As for price point, that is upto the individual I suppose, I have not spent one real life penny in Secondlife in the three years since I joined. Not one, absolutely being honest.

This