Has SL lost its way?

You misinterpreted what I meant. I was talking about the matrix itself and the world mentioned in the book Snowcrash. I wasn't suggesting recreating the plot of the matrix or the plot of Snowcrash. I was talking about the virtual worlds that existed within those fictional stories. The platforms.

And because you bought into that you are having these hissy fits every time LL does something contrary to what your idea of what SL is or is not. SL is unique. It can be a business platform for those who work it that way. I can be a commnunication platform for those who work it that way. It can be social networking platform for those so inclined. You can go on and on on what SL is (or is not) but any platform is ultimately defined by how it's used by the majority of it's users. The design of SL is a browser.........a portal for people (residents) to "go", "do", "experience" whatever it is they want. That's what the vision was at the beginning and, with refinements, that's what it is today. The direction SL is going is the same as it was the day I joined......it's what you make it to be within the confines of the platform.

Seems the difficulty a lot here have is that THEY feel LL has lost it's way when, in fact, those same people never knew the way in the first place. I know where SL is headed.........and as long as LL doesn't make it too difficult on me getting there I'll remain. If that threshold is crossed then I'm gone. No sweat, no anger, no disappointment, no feeling abandoned, left twisting in the wind.........nothing like what I'm hearing a lot of you spouting about.

If you want your perfect world...........go make it yourself. Real life might be an easier place to accomplish that however. Threat the plaform for what it is and you'll likely have a less difficult time accomplishing your goals. Glorified game fits the definition better than any other I've heard yet.

/me sighs.

I see the same thing.

Let's not blame it on him. From Phillip's speeches about early adapters giving away to progress, this was Phillip's vision all along- we early adapters would beta-test and provide the content for Second Life, and when all the free labor was extracted from those early adapaters, they would be left behind for Linden Lab to profit from their free work. It was Phillip's vision. He just probably saw that Linden Lab wouldn't make the profit he had envisioned, and cashed out at Second Life's peak rather than sticking around for the downhill slide.

I seriously doubt Phillip was this cold hearted when it all began considering his explaination of HOW it all begain.

As to the question, given nothing else but LL's recent descision to charge people to give away free items on SLX, I'd say that LL HAS very much lost their (original) way.

Someone please tell me what that "original way" was. LL developed a unique platform and opened it to beta testers......it can be argued that it never really came out of that beta testing stage. LL developed a make believe economy for residents to finance their endeavors in a world built for their imagination.........and a way for those who were successful to reap a real monetary benefit. LL always had a finger in the till........they never said anyone was entitled to a free ride. They purchased two outside competitors to get in on the action directly......business decision (after all LL had become a major player in the virtual world market). And now they start taking a cut (fingers in the till again).

What do you think LL started this whole virtual world thing for? Fun? Out of generosity? To become willing slaves to angry brats who only see a very narrow part of a very large whole? Get real..........if you expected anything else you are so much more foolish than you are acting.

What Happened?

They gave anyone with a high speed internet account the right to free infinate anonymous disposable alt accounts and tuned SL into a "all you can eat buffet" for scammers, griefers and theives.

No no no.... you'll get Pep in here!

I noticed that but Peggy was nice to me the other day . . .

Pep (so she gets carte blanche, for a while, anyway. )

PS In any case, everybody "knows" she's one of my alts.

PPS Props to Hank!

I think most reasonable people would not disagree that LL is entitled to have it's fingers in the till, but it seems they are now into fisting.

I agree with this for the most part. Unfortunately a lot of people bought into "Your World, Your Imagination".

I sometimes think there's a 'well, what do we do next?' syndrome that sometimes affects us in SL. Linden Lab has provided us with a wonderful kit to enter a virtual world that is mostly created by us, the ordinary residents. But because it's so immersive, as they say, we might find ourselves in search of a holy grail of total immersion in SL, which is something that is never going to happen except perhaps for the occasional few minutes on a particularly good day.

Sorry that is absolutely wrong. I've been speaking a corporate type who works directly with M. Linden, who i used to date, who bought me my first sim for SL first island shopping estate.

They are not moving anywhere in Philips direction. Philip was trying to move in their direction a little, saw that he could not and quit.

They don't even refer to Philip respectfully behind his back anymore.

It is all M. and his corporate cohorts.

Hank,

don't waste your bandwidth. A couple prolific posters here think they have all the pieces of the puzzle figured out and oldbies like you are just ignorant.

Engaging people on a topic like this in this forum is a waste of time, if you can't already read that from the replies of at least 1 run off at the mouth person.

Seriously.

I'm already biased so I might be missing it but I don't ever (in the past or in the present) see LL promote SL as an "entertainment" product. When they highlight SL it's education, corporate, the economy or something that ties in to RL somehow even though they'd probably be far more successful if they focused on it as an entertainment product.

I consistently see LL backing away and side-stepping "imagination" meaning a fantasy world where individuals can be "whatever they want to be" (having only a human avie mesh with a flat world and extremely limited terraforming opportunities is a world that models RL far more than it would encourage free-form "imagination".

Residents turned (or "forced" SL into a social entertainment oriented world where some opportunists found a way to make money by creating content but in my view one of the reasons everyone constantly runs into issues (no content theft protection to speak of, no useful tools to track sales information, hack upon hack to make some content work, no incentive for any resident to pay for anything, etc etc) is because SL was never intented to be what it is today.

Anything that comes along that detracts from "immersion" isn't due to a vocal minority demanding it, it's just LL following its roadmap for SL. A niche market where people play dress-up barbie or ken doesn't interest LL; a world shattering product that people will use to augment their *real* lives is the end goal (both Philip and M are consistent in it when talking about the future).

So, "Your World, Your Imagination" really was bullshit then.

I agree with everything you said here and subsequently. They really need to hammer out the flaws and add more improvements to basics such as the avatar mesh and interaction - it would be great to manage something simple like a handshake between avatars without the vagaries of using a hug hud, for instance.

Nevertheless, I'm entirely in sympathy with the OP because the focus does appear to be on dumbing SL down to meet popular social networking media at the expense of developing what really makes SL unique.


That's plain nonsense but if you are sincere it certainly goes a long way toward explaining your failure to take the OP's point.


Please be consistent: a browser can't be considered unique by any stretch of the imagination.

As far as I'm concerned, the shift of SL into the realm of social networking will be an ultimately pointless exercise because it goes against 'the Brand'. While I've never liked the name 'Second Life' it is resonant of more potential than mere social networking where brands like TwitFace or MyBook suit these less complex media brilliantly.

The OP released an update of the code for his Universal Translator just this week and the implications of developing such a tool must surely go without saying. Nevertheless, while I have read discussion of building the code into the development of Snowglobe elsewhere on these forums, it would seem that the Snowglobe project is itself on the backburner in favour of the vaunted Viewer 2.0. Anyone who has read the leaked email regarding the grossly inadequate communications flaws of Viewer 2.0 would have to pause for thought.

It certainly gives me the willies and I don't mean that in a 'nice' way.

As they have said many times, it came from the ideals of Burning Man.

Wow, good find! I actually quite a lot of these but like you, I find them disturbing. What alarms me most is that there are no inworld pics since September 11. There's nothing for almost two months after that and then suddenly, this prolific doodling (all uploaded on November 2). He has spent a LOT of time doing these ... I see he has left comments open ... that's brave ...

It depends on how you read it .

"We made something but we're not quite sure how to turn it into a marketable product to 'better the human condition' though but someone out there must be imaginative enough to turn this virtual world nonsense into a goldmine that will make us go down in history so have at it!"

Additionally: "buy your world for only US$55k plus a pitiful few thousand $ in yearly upkeep and your imagination is the limit on what you can do with it!". If you summarize Desmond's other thread then landbarons become responsible for newbies, offering residential land, offering commercial land, support; all in all they replace LL for everything practical. Everyone deals with the landbaron and LL deals with one single person and in essence you already have a independent grid within a grid that can be cut loose without too much hassle.

Taking it another step further landbarons buy an adjusted version of SL Enterprise, each host their own grid and do what they do now but where LL is only responsible for delivering pieces of software: no icky residents to deal with, no worries about DMCAs because they're not hosting anything, no need for governance, etc etc and XStreetSL as the de-facto portal for inter-grid commerce which is already on the roadmap on a more limited scale.

Then they can bask in the wonderful things people come up with and gloat about "we made that possible!" and dismiss the rest of us as "well, there's ridiculous sites on the internet too. We just deliver a piece of hardware running our software to that grid operator you see and if they're all playing dress-up and having sex... well, we have nothing to do with that at all!".

This has the chilling ring of truth about it.

What I see in addition, in reading your post is, "Great to be them, then; sucks to be the rest of us" but also, reading about the land barons having to be the portal: "Why would any of them want to deal with that: aren't they about profit?" - but then, they must know how to squeeze lemons and get lemonade or they wouldn't have made it this far to begin with.

Hi Hank, I think part of the reason why some just don't understand your point is because people like us, and Briana and Suezanne, have an historical memory dating back to the very start of SL when it was primarily a medium for creativity and not merely a backstabbing venue for commerce.

We remember Philip and the other early Lindens in world with us in 2003 creating and exploring all the possibilities of SL. (Who can forget Philip's wind chimes that crashed sims!) SL was a very different place then but that world is gone, replaced by commercialism and a constant drum beat about content theft with the accompanying witch hunt conducted by those devoted to that cause. We, on the other hand, remember a relatively empty world consisting of a handful of sims on the mainland where we created for fun and had a ton of fun.

I am not sure it is just that LL lost its way, I think it is also that the rest of the world found SL and helped make it into a commercial entity other than the original creative vision.

It doesn't have to be realistic, not much of what LL does ever is .

They can try and offload support, orientation, land fees, etc to "bigger players" in SL but in the end it doesn't get them what they really want. Everything is still happening on their servers so they still all have to micromanage us, deal with DMCAs and everything else. The only way around that is to kick every private continent off to its own grid since then all the micromanaging becomes someone else's problem.

XStreetSL could be incredibly compelling since it already has tons and tons of content listed with pictures, keywords and a description. Tie that in with the in-world search and actually improve the results to be more relevant and it would be a big boost in terms of transforming in-world shopping from fighting the near-useless search and "tp to store 1, wait for 5 minute rez, cam around, tp to store 2, etc". But instead they seem content to leave it the way it is and focus on integrating it with "SL Enterprise" so content can be sold across grid boundaries if desired.

When I read the blog most of the times when they highlight anything someone does in SL it's "meh, I don't care about university this or company's remote meetings that or *yawn* on being able to stream PowerPoint presentations inworld with the new LLMedia API" and have to consider that they're highlighting those things because they're what they feel SL should be about and illustrates what they're trying to encourage. And consistently it has little to nothing to do with what *we* do in SL.

So I guess it does "suck to be us" since I personally don't feel like LL really cares for what we made of "our world", nor does it seem terribly interested in demeaning itself in supporting what for most of us is "entertainment" and making that experience more compelling.

I'm not exactly sure who you have in mind as that "at least 1 run off at the mouth person".........but I have a pretty good idea.

So, let me get this straight.......so I know where the boundaries are drawn in order to offer opinions of views that differ from the fine folks who have 2 years more experience in SL (as if that's an important qualification to possess in order to voice what I happen to know and believe). I happened on SL back in Oct, 2005 after seeing a short blurb on one of my local television channels. I read all "about us", what the world entailed, system requirements (all the normal stuff most people would probably read before installing an online delivered software program on their personal computers). During that period of time I read the ToS, Community Standards, benefits of becoming premium, how a premium membership could be paid for (and how to cancel if I wanted), and all the hype about "your imagination, your world". Everything was presented to me (or anyone reading before installing) was a "sales pitch"...........just as most any other business wanting my business and participation. Very much like Ford tries to sell me a new car on TV...........I listen or watch knowing exactly what their goal is. I know they will not willingly tell me anything negative about their cars/trucks.......it's tainted heavily with exactly what they want you to hear. When LL said "my imagination, my world" I read that for exactly what it was.........a sales pitch. I knew perfectly well that LL was never going to GIVE me anything that they did not want me to have. My world, my imagination means I can "create my world using my imagination with whatever tools or freedoms LL allowed" It did not mean I could demand anything.....nor did it mean "my world, my imagination" would forever remain in my control (especially since it never was in the first place).

That's how I approached SL back then. After a few months in SL I began to see what Phillip Rosedale and Linden Lab envisioned SL to become. LL has always put SL forth as some sort of new internet.........a 3d internet. They have always tried to court the corporate, educational, financial, and charity aspects of the internet. I happen to believe they have failed miserably in that endeavor but who am I to tell LL anything? It's their goal, always has been, and, as far as I can see, always will be. All this is my opinion based on my experience over the last 4 years..........it's not untrue. And just because a few vocal "oldbies" say LL has lost their way does not change that fact for me. So if that's being a run off of the mouth" then so be it. I'm not in lockstep with the people who bought into a sale pitch without putting their brain in gear. I guess it does make some feel better being bolstered by others who couldn't see (or failed to understand) a baited hook that they swallowed hook, line and sinker. Go all the way back to at least 2005 and you'll see a pretty consistant march to where SL is now.....and look at the pattern and you'll see where LL is headed.

LL has not lost it's way. The people who believe that are the people who blindly ate up all the hype without applying much, if any intelligence to it. Hurt your feeling? Sorry.

Kinda hard to lose your way when you have no idea where you're going in the first place.

Maybe they took a right at Albuquerque?