What are your SL Predictions for 2010?

As 2009 comes to an end what are your Second Life predictions for 2010?

I wish you all a happy new year 2010!

New avatar transparency and clothing layer support will only be released in "viewer 2.0" as a push to get people to switch, after "viewer 2.0" is released to poor reviews.

My prediction is that Mark Kingdon will resign as CEO of Linden Lab this year.

Here is my reasoning:

I've been here for almost three years now. Second Life, and Linden Lab, have had many continuing, consistent, screwy problems over those three years.

However, it just seems to me that the tone of Linden Lab changed when Kingdon took over as CEO. Prior to Kingdon, even if Linden Lab may have been failing in many areas, it still seemed as if they were making an honest attempt to acheive that grand sort of vision that inspired Second Life. Since Kingdon has taken over, it seems as if that wonderful grand vision has been abandoned. Instead of working toward that future vision, the goal is to suck as much money out of Second Life as possible and leave it for dead when there is no money left.

Since Kindgon took over Linden Lab, the company seems like a company that hates the product it sells. That attitude has to start at the top. I do not think Kingdon wants to be CEO of Linden Lab. Kingdon does not want to be CEO of Linden Lab.

He's going to do his time, pad his resume with a few accomplishments, and move on to a job that he really wants. He is coming up on his two year mark as CEO; two years is about the minimum amount of time he needs to log to make this stop look good on his resume. Optmistic predictions are that the U.S. economy will finally start real job growth in the first quarter of 2010; top level executive tech jobs should probably be among the first to benefit since they are close to the flow of investment dollars.

Kingdon want out. His sentence will have been served by May of 2010. Opportunities will be availble. Kingdon will be gone before 2010 ends.

- forum drama
- ability to sell to other virtual worlds via Xstreet
- ability to purchase Lindens via gift card type products you can acquire at brick and mortar type establishments
- social networking stuff via the website ie. chatting to inworld friends from the website
- release of 2.0 viewer with a dumbed down interface as the default. New users will like it and oldbies will hate it.
- further addition of different forms of limits to manage growth with differing limits based on membership level. class differences emerge between basic and premium
- push continues to retain new sign-ups and more premium benefits.
- increased paid advertising in mainstream media
- revision to the TOS and CS surrounding IP
- increased collaboration between LL and resident or enterprise businesses for promotional/marketing purposes - it won't be cheap though
- further collaboration between large communities and LL in merging portions of mainland with private estates like the Blake Sea
- rumours of an IPO or buyout will start in Q3-Q4 but will not materialize in 2010
- Torley leaves Linden Labs
- forums migrate over to the jive software.
- lurid sex scandal involving an LL employee
- Philip gets a makeover
- renewed media reports of terrorists using virtual worlds for planning purposes.
- forum drama

"Floating" land. It won't be tied to a fixed location or height, and only exists while the owner is logged on.

Lifetime memberships will be available for a very brief period.

Sim links that allow you to walk from one sim to another, non-adjacent sim.

Ok for 2010

Viewer 2010 becomes known as viewer 2011.

Wild rumours that the grids will be merged.

Business friendly mainland annoys the hordes, Lindens talk about their passionate residents. In these areas you have to call everyone "sir" or "madam" with the exception of Connolly, who will continue to be known as Connolly.

Homestead pricing will be adjusted.

Two half assed policies will be announced that will never be enforced properly.

Don't look at the blog in November, they have been working on this bombshell all year.

It's already been renamed "Viewer 2.0".

I predict...

You're gonna take a walk in the rain
And you're gonna get wet
I predict.

And in SL...

1. Shadows and advanced lighting will finally make it to SL in a regular way, but may will be upset to find they do not have the minimum requirements to use them.

2. Mesh importing will hit the grid, causing an even greater gap between those who build in SL and those who buy.

3. Viewer 2.0, a change which will be heralded by a whole lot of drama. Some will swear by new features in them, others will be put off by the interface, especially any 'simplification' involved in it.

4. Land prices will continue to slump, as will concurrency. Both will tip upwards by the end of 2010.

5. At least three new info hubs will show up on the grid, and a number of older, smaller ones will be shuttered. This will lead to a lot of drama from those around the ones closed. Some of those will, however, be saved as a result.

6. The SLRR finally begins to run again, as does the Nova Albion Trolley

7. Yet another major land mass comes onto the grid, possibly another themed "city" area. Bay City is also expanded. Some additional linkages are forged between the continental masses.

8. Additional "simplifications" are made to the registration process. This does lead to more new users, though not necessarily any more retention.

9. True HTML on a prim comes to Second Life, as well as implementation of Flash and other features. Some third-party sites balk at this, or put in limitations to the use of their content in Second Life/

10. The SL Forums are finally shuttered, but the "blogorum" never fully catches on. Another system eventually replaces both, but also fails to gain substantive use.

Mmm Happy New Year ...

Server 1.34.2 will be deployed 12/31/09
Posted by Status Desk on December 31st, 2009 at 03:56 pm PST

Server 1.34.2 will be deployed tonight in order to fix a severe sim-crashing bug. The roll will be commencing as soon as possible, which is expected to be around 18:00 PST. Status updates will be posted here and in the forums.

* 2009-12-31, ASAP (~18:00 Pacific) - 100% sim roll

As with all of our server deploys, each region will be restarted once during one of the rolling restart periods. Most regions should be down no more than 5-10 minutes, although some fraction of the regions will take 20-30 minutes to upgrade. If your region stays down for more than 30 minutes, please contact support. Each region will receive warnings starting 5 minutes before that region is restarted.



For questions / comments, please refer to the forums: /348/30/358040/1.html#post2655138

Joshooah Lovenkraft: you had me halfway thru then i provierbially spit-take - er, spit-took. (um... spit-thek?)

Seven Okelli: oooooo!!! wormholes?? ;0

The recession will destroy them. If they continue to become greedier when it comes to buying land, etc. then they'll lose a lot of customers.

1) Concurrency will trend upward almost all year as LL never enforces its bot ban (but see #2). We'll flirt with 100K in 3Q, and then it will start dropping again.

2) LL will bless someone's bot client as "not really a bot". You won't get in trouble for using it. LL will say this allows them to track how many avatars are bots. They won't enforce the bot ban, though, so only 10% will use the official bot client. LL will claim this proves there are only 10%-15% bots on the grid. Despite low take-up, someone will make a killing on this bot client.

3) A well-known content creator will turn out to be a Linden family member or friend. In the teaser journalism that precedes the announcement, someone will throw out a different name, and that one, too, will be shown to have ties to LL. LL will not confirm either, but will announce (and not deliver) plans to distance itself from its favorite content creators, and will announce (and not deliver) plans to open the Gold Solution Provider program to more people.

4) Stroker and LL will settle out of court. Stroker will leave SL.

5) The size of the grid will peak in 2Q.

6) LL will announce but will not deliver in 2010 a super-size sim. This will be in response to a rush of things-to-look-at cities that sprout up in Blue Mars. LL will also promise but not deliver a completely new pricing model based on load rather than square meters.

7) M will leave The Lab. Philip will take his place.

User-to-user transactions will increase every quarter until M leaves. Then LL will mysteriously stop publishing this statistic.

9) Search will be revamped. Xstreet listings will be integrated into in-world search. It will suck slightly less.

10) An LL-approved merchant class will be created. Before it is implemented, though, the above-mentioned content creator story will break, and the merchant class will be quietly forgotten.

11) Anshe will quietly exit SL.

12) Script limits will be implemented, will be disruptive, will be abandoned, and planned revisions will not be delivered in 2010. Eventually the plan will change to "when the load-based pricing model is implemented."

13) A supposedly private sim grouping will suddenly disappear. Someone will document that LL had been experimenting with "social bots", but that experiment suddenly disappeared.

I agree with your prediction.

For all I know, Kingdon is a top-drawer business executive and an all-around great guy. But the fact that he finds the experience of being inside Second Life to be distasteful will continue to have consequences for LL (and for us!) far beyond the obvious ones relating to the timing of his leaving, and the transition to his replacement.

These consequences mainly revolve around the MK-resume-padding-era imperative to 'suck money' out of SL that you noted, Amity.

So my 2010 predictions are:

***The initial XStreet 'roadmap' fees will be increased after they've been in place six months or so.

***As the smaller, less-established XStreet merchants desert the site for others (that never really succeed in reaching any impressive volume of sales), plans progress for restricting SL Resident-to-Resident purchases. A commission on in-world sales will be floated, if not actually implemented in 2010. The eventual change to a list of Approved Vendors (who will be the only Residents allowed to charge for content from a fairly all-inclusive list, and who will pay LL 'vendor registration' fees as well as commission) will be planned if not implemented in 2010.

***LL will trumpet a change to Tier: 'you've all been asking for smaller jumps between tier levels, and we've heard you and are responding!' What they will refrain from mentioning is that along with this asked-for change will be a decidedly NOT asked-for one: the monthly tier amount paid at every level of land-ownership will go up substantially (e.g. a 1024sqm parcel will now cost $7/mo, a 1535sqm will now be $10/m, etc.)

***The price of Premium membership will rise at the moment LL announces the Premium-only feature of being able to IM someone inworld from outside SL (perhaps from the SL.com site, as Joshooah predicted). LL will assume that this Killer Ap will reconcile current Premium members to paying more, and will even induce basics to go Premium.

***None of these initiatives will produce profits justifying optimistic LL predictions. MK will largely have to rely on what must be a prodigious sales talent* to get himself that new job.





*I'm assuming he has such a talent, on the further assumption that Philip Rosedale wouldn't willingly have turned his brainchild over to someone who visibly cringed at the prospect of rubbing elbows with all us disreputable SL-users, or at 'wasting' time in so pointless a pursuit as Second Life. I'm assuming MK was able to hide the cringe---and that DOES take the same type of talent that it takes to sell.

1) 2.0 will be pushed through and it will take at least the rest of the year to get a client where the current features work nearly as well as what we have now

2) Philip & M will continue to do things contrary to SL's current user base's wishes/priorities in persuit of their wet dream of "improving the human condition"

3) price increase (kind of a given since they do that every year)

4) LL will once again show how out of touch it is by imposing script limits in such a way that a large portion of people is adversely affected and will flip the switch before they deliver any/all new LSL "promised" functions or land owner tools

5) LL (mostly Philip) will continue to salivate at the thought of a concurrency of millions and ignore its existing resident while coming up with (unsuccessful) schemes to try and attract new residents

6) the "content protection roadmap" will backfire on content creators in yet unimaginable ways and reduce consumer confidence when prominent and seemingly trustworth creators are found to be infringing and LL clears out any purchased item from people's inventory

7) the above, script limits and other "protection schemes" (ie "no rez" will make tools and viewers that allow someone to "copybot" things more and more mainstream (ie no mod pair of shoes with unremovable resizing scripts leads to "oh, you can download X, use it to copy them and they'll be script free and you can use them"

LL will throw in the towel and start neutering group chat because they're incapable of fixing the errors and chat lag citing that it's necessary because it "won't scale"

This already happened. The scripted agent switch lets you run bots that aren't supposed to show up on traffic, but they apparently haven't implemented that bit yet. No need for a new client.

Where do you get this? He's in SL almost every day, albeit in short sessions typically between five minutes and half an hour.

I predict LL will Disney-fy SL even more, to the point where its like playing a childrens MMO.

I'm glad to hear it (though I'm curious as to how you know this is true...?)

Obviously I have no access to the inside of the guy's brain and can't be certain what his motivations are. But I can deduce them the same way we all deduce the motivations of others---from their actions.

One of the largest contributors to my belief that MK doesn't care for being inworld comes from the LL push to sell SL as the site of business meetings.

Yes, it makes sense to sell alternatives to physical travel (especially with this latest wave of restrictions put in place after The Exploding Underwear Guy's adventure Christmas day).

But it seems to me that only someone who's either not been to inworld meetings much, or has not been to real-world meetings much, could make the mistake of thinking that actual business executives would find the expressionless, non-body-language-revealing avatars of SL to be adequate stand-ins for the cheaper* alternative of video-teleconferencing.

We can be pretty sure that MK is no stranger to real-world business meetings.

So, logically, he must not be in the habit of holding inworld meetings in which negotiations of any kind must take.

Because if he were in such a habit, he'd have noticed that not being able to see the faces or body language of those with whom you're negotiating puts you in a very disadvantaged position. He'd have seen that other business executives, to whom LL would love to sell islands and training and monthly tier, etc., would ALSO figure out that SL can't really work for meetings in which negotiations (including negotiating with your own team to assign work) must take place.

He'd have seen that the idea was a non-starter.

My conclusion is that he hasn't spent more than a few minutes here and a few minutes there, inworld.

My conclusion also draws from the initiatives to attract Facebook and Twitter fans to SL (which I believe also demonstrates a lack of understanding of what SL's offerings and limitations are--a lack of understanding that can only come from a lack of familiarity).

There are other reasons for my belief, but these are enough to support it, I think.

I mean, I could be wrong about him. But I bet I'm not.




*Cheaper not only because of the costs of buying an island, paying tier, and giving up hours of workers' time because the workers have to learn how to walk around without bumping into walls---but primarily because most businesses don't buy computers for their workers that are capable of running SL adequately.

He's just following through on LL's mission statement though.

LL's goal for SL seems to be to change the world in much the same way the internet became a part of a lot of average people's every day life (I personally thinks it's utterly ridiculous but it seems to come up every time Philip or M get interviewed).

They won't accomplish that by letting a few hundred thousand people play dress-up Barbie or Ken (though we do fund development and perform live testing), but by sweettalking educational institutions and targetting businesses and hope one of them will eventually come up with a "killer use" for SL.

I do think LL is heading towards a dead end (and isn't too concerned about alienating pretty much anyone currently using SL because ultimately we're not what LL wants) but I don't see M being contrary to what they've said they want in the past.

In 2006 we worried about would happen when online concurrency rose above 17K

In 2010 we will worry about what will happen when online concurrency drops below 17K......

Jig will get laid. Men will be happier for it.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's not hard to keep track of that kind of thing, really.

I don't think he's thinking of executive meetings where people negotiate, he's thinking of training and seminars and staff meetings, and stuff for peons. Those are the meetings that are seen as costing too much. Executives don't think their OWN meetings are a waste of money.

Most Lindens are trackable via avatar trackers available in world and on XStreet. Lindens do have the ability to hide there online status completely (even from scripted trackers), but most do not bother to hide their status. I sell a 10 avi tracker in my shop that will track any resident, and any Linden not hiding their status.

I used to track Philip Linden's online status and when he was on, I'd go to his parcel in Waterhead as he would often show up there and chat with residents. I've had the opportunity to chat with him a few times in world, and he's very nice, and it's very interesting to talk with him. I've yet to meet M in world, but virtually every blog post he makes talks about places he's visited in world. I don't know why people get the idea that he 'hates' SL as he seems to explore more than any other Linden except maybe for Philip.

As far as predictions go, the only thing I can say for sure is that Resident Answers (A forum for asking/answering questions) will continue to be the Resident Whiners forum.

Death and Hades will be emptied of the dead that were in them and every one will be judged as his deeds deserved. Then Death and Hades will be hurled into the burning lake. This burning lake is the second death and anybody whose name cannot be found written in the book of life will be hurled into the burning lake.

Failing that, Brazil wins the World Cup. Again.