2009's November Surprise?

Sl is on a downhill slide. They know it. Many of us know it. I don't need to list all the reasons because entire threads have been devoted to it before.
Watch for them to raise rates, and do everything else (facebook, etc) to earn the distinction of Corporatist greedsters so they can suck every last penny out of you before it goes belly up.

IMO most of the changes since M.Linden's arrival haven't been that favourable to the SL community......so whatever announcement that might occur, i think it will follow a similar pattern. Phillip Linden taking a backward step away from LL....sounds a bit ominous to me and a sad chapter in the history of SL.

I'm bracing myself.


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Well if SL does self destruct...one blessing in disguise is that LL have proved that the business model can be very lucrative & profitable. That should be enough for an ambitious company to fill the obvious vacuum and produce a similar platform based on similar concepts. (an economy and the power to create & sell) Right now, there's obviously a market for 3D virtual worlds.





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I think there is a market also; however, few have money to burn in the worldwide DEPRESSION. SL only remains for a few reasons: 1. one does not need to pay to reach their potential 2. the residents created this world and still do.

As soon as SL goes the way of Blue Mars and uses paid outsourced contracted content, SL is doomed. Blue Mars is doomed already for this reason.

Many of the people here are independent artists (Music, creation, scripting, etc) They do it because they love it and they love to share with others.

Bringing in people purely for profit AND Raising prices again will destroy the character of SL and run many of the old ones out for good...indeed it already has as judged by the number of beautiful places in my LMs that no longer exist.

I don't see SL itself going away, but I do see the SL that many of us love going away. It has been slowly deflating over past year or so. LL wll monetize it, leverage it, corproatize it and do anything else to make it mainstream and "normal", and in the process remove all the fun and fantasy and make nothing more than a computer driven copy of RL....totally unappealing to a lot of it's current users I think.Some will stay and be able to find a place in the new SL, but I bet a lot won't and will leave. I see myself in the latter group eventually, perhaps within a year or so.

Alternate prediction:

LL sells the remainder of the Mainland to Dreamland and a select few other mega land barons...

There's a recurring theme through a lot of threads:

'M is changing thing drastically. Phillip/Phil/Pip doesn't agree with it and he's moving on.'

Who wrote this recently?

The Codpiece Himself. And he is right. Those changes will be necessary to make SL accessable to all those people. But it will also be necessary to dilute and dumb down SL to make those people want to use it. It will be mainstreamed and corporatized, predictable and clean. And dul,l boring and of little interest to a lot of us.

RL is mainstreamed and corporatized.
And yet, people find each other and ways to do their creative non-mainstream thing.

If LL don't take away the current build ability for all, and don't make it economically impossible for individuals to host their own creations on SL land, then everything we have can continue.
Wacky SL can continue in the same way that wackiness continues in RL. It's actually much better in SL. The wackiness is very accessible.

Precisely. And when it is dumbed down and corporatised and mainstreamed, many of us will leave and let them have it.

RL is irrelevant. People are in SL to GET AWAY from that. If they can no longer do so, then there will no longer be a reason for the creative escape that is SL.

For now. But SL isn't mainstreamed yet. It is still used by such a small percentage of people, most people out there don't even know what it is. And the the wackiness will disappear with corporatization because that is not in the the corporate mindgrame. They are are about cokkie cutter and boring, monkey see, monkey do. Predictable banality is what corporations espouse. Right now they aren't really here in the geberal landscape. They are in their own private spaces. But they want our eyeballs on their marketing garbage just as much as in Rl, and will pay LL big money to do so. And by viryue of those payments, they will decide what SL is and isn't.

There you go.

Consider that the creative escape can still be there even if *mainstream* SL is bland.

I don't accept that most people are escaping though. For my own part, SL is another way of expressing myself, meeting like minds and meeting challenging minds.
It's part of my RL

QFT!!

The thing those corporate folks fail to realize is... SL did NOT get where it is today cause of those crafty lindens. Sl is where it is today cause of the residents. The content created by those amazing minds. Hell, the best patches that have *fixed* what LL broke were written by 3rd party viewer coders, who, still, continually do those things that LL said were impossible. *BOUNCE!*


Anyway, maybe the surprise this year will be M going the way of the Dinosaur, and Torley getting his job.

Then at LEAST the awesomeness would reign supreme.


~Brie

That would be AWESOME!!!

Crazy and bizarre to the extreme.... but awesome!

*readies her watermelon launcher in salute*

Maybe take another year. So far they've been able to keep the board deluded that this corporate marketing boondoggle will actually happen--hell, even Forums posters seem to think there's some risk of its success. It will probably take a few quarters before the hopeless absurdity of it all finally settles in and the suit-suiters show themselves the door.

In the above quote, what does "the design" mean?

Literal interpretation:

Design = "Everything" - "the UI" - "the orientation experience" - "the tools"


ETA:

" - " above means 'minus'

That's a completely wrong statement about how Blue Mars works. I got my Blue Mars City Developer's kit yesterday, about a month after getting the lower tier item and block kits. Total money changing hands so far? zero.

Item creation is done offline in a sandbox environment, not very different from how opensim works if you run a standalone region. When ready, its uploaded to their servers to share with other people. That can be individual items like skins and clothing, or entire "cities".

Here is what I have done so far:

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/members/danielravennest/albums/
http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/members/danielravennest/albums/

Avatar Reality is hosting an art competition, and I have seen some of the work actual artists are creating, its pretty cool:

http://www.bluemarsdev.com/gettingstarted/artcompetition.html
http://www.bluemarsdev.com/gettingstarted/artcompetition.html

In fact, its *easier* to share things in Blue Mars, because all the content creation is done offline. Its just files, which can be emailed, posted on a public site, etc.

It's only when you want to sell stuff to the public, or have it hosted live on their servers that money is involved.

Paranoia strikes deep. The corporations will indeed get what they want, and that is more separation from the hoi polloi who are here for entertainment. SL is not a good advertising platform; if you look at secondlifegrid.net, do you see words about using SL for marketing? Nope. It's all teaching and collaboration.

I have my own fears though, which are similar in nature but don't involve corporations at all. If LL chases some sort of Facebook wetdream, they will promote more and more "reality" in SL. Lots of short-timer residents will show up who are concerned that their profiles are in line with their RL image. Wackiness could be marginalized, and it could become more difficult to find kimono-clad otters who live in a cavorite-powered airship, have whelps who are into bondage, and know how to decorate you with creativity when you're afk.Haha! Virtual collaboration is at the center of this business proposition, and I too have serious doubts that if LL builds it, they will come.

I suspect Philip meant the back-end architecture. They've already done some big work on the LLNet stuff. The sim code probably has some really big chunks that need some serious rework, too.

As pissed off at Suit Linden as I have been lately, I do have to say I'm pretty impressed that they (they = people like Andrew et al, not the suits) kept it running (more or less) through the insane growth of 2006-2007. I'm sure there's lots & lots of duct tape, rubber bands and bent coat hangers holding various parts of it together that they need to go back and fix for real.

/me remains convinced that the best way for SL to get back onto the growth path is to make their users happy. I also remain pissed off that, near as I can tell, they spend so very little time working on that. Here, right here in this forum, is the biggest population of involved, informed users that SL has and how do they treat it? Bastard not-to-be-talked-about child at best.

And to guess at Des' OP question, I think they're due for not being jerks and will launch the eastern US colo or maybe announce more serious plans to put one across the pond.

Sl goes bankrupt, or SL will become irrationally expensive out of sudden. (due to finances going wrong.) If you look at the trends the last 2 years, you see this approach progressing more and more.

Please send me more information about your valuable prizes!

How is that easier than dragging an item out of your inventory onto someone's profile?