This morning's closing speech

I'm sure when the Fed hears about this one they will have an Important Announcement too.

I believe there's already government hearings with the Lindens, one the things I think is that IRS considerd every account holder making money a Linden employee so the want everyone profiting to be registered with IRS and working for Linden.... Taxes, taxes taxes....

I see quite a bit of that around here.

Awarding a prize in Lindens$ for the doing the most for humanity is absurd. Why don't they print up zillions of them and send them to all the NGO's in the world and then let those orgs cash them in on the Lindex, complete with a copy of Snow Crash and a big glass of Lol-Aid.

Why would the Fed care. They do the exact same thing. It is a big reason why the economy is crashing the way it is and why oil prices are going sky high. But there is a big difference. The Fed does it in the REAL world and LL does it in a PRETEND world.

Parker Brothers has been doing it for decades, what's wrong with LL doing it now? (o.o)

Please. If monopoly money could be exchanged on the ParkerX it would be gambling, counterfeiting and money laundering.

So selling or buying what amounts to little more than poker chips in private transactions is the same as counterfeiting and money laundering? Get real.

[/character]

Only federal notes of legal tender are regulated by the federal government. Any other exchange of assumed "dollar" value is an unmonitored and unregulated commodity of a private organization.

[character] (^_^)y

If you'd have said this to me this time last year I'd not have agreed with you on a personal level, just an intellectual one. Never thought for a second that I'd just plain agree with this viewpoint.

But on the plus side, don't really care anything like as much as I once did ...

Then again, outlawing virtual poker chips in a private transaction got outlawed, by virtue of very fuzzy laws. Meh.

Has anyone got a transcript by any chance?

I dunno about how and who - but I did get told that there was a very likely chance that the mentors were going to get hoofed off to some private company to run. That, plus the appalling standard of performance at the time was what made me chuck in the towel. I still feel that was the right decision - if I was feeling like a corporate shill then, I'd be feeling a damned sight worse by now.

The act of wagering them on random chance got outlawed. You're free to trade whatever tokens you want in normal transactions, whether they are L$, objects called "poker chips", or "Snailracer trading card" textures.

I turned on and wound up tuned out. It was rambling. Oh, I did find out what the 'major announcement' after listening to something about pioneering? I think it was about pioneering, anyways.

Poor guy. Seems Phil has infected him, so next will be the cod piece...

Trust me I know. I was being ironic.

(I've bored people witless about the wagering ban, work in online gaming)

You may have a point there about the nad protectors ...

A transcript is supposed to be coming, soon. (tm)

Some of my further thoughts on the announcement:

http://mmccann.livejournal.com/18116.html

Very nicely said. I think the mistake is to compare SL too closely to the early days of the web without seeing the social changes that the web brought..

I believe that creativity is a basic human gift. I know many residents who discovered themselves as artists here, as creative people. At the very least, it is a form of how we play, how we present our avatars.

I believe that the consumer culture has co-opted our creativity and ability to entertain ourselves and build meaningful lives and then sold it back to ourselves in a variety of manipulated lifestyles. I think SL gives us the opportunity to take it back as a personal expression.

If we have our own creativity, our own un-marketed sexuality, will we keep buying things to fill the void if the void no longer exists? Is that why given a chance we didn't hang about American Apparel breathlessly awaiting their next Tshirt?

Good blog. (^_^)y

Mari, I think you remember the guy at the start of your fireworks show in SL5B that was wondering why "nobody was talking" and why we didn't take our "typing ways back to IRC"? I can just smell the parallels there. (>_<

/me holds her breath for the transcript/recording to come out. (o.o)

I think it represents the least imaginative use for Second Life: as a mere chatroom/conferencer. Facebook on steroids. People already use it as a dating service, oddly enough. But wider adoption means that its use will become more mundane, that the consumers will far outnumber those that create. It's a good and bad thing. Think about the web: how many people make anything beyond a basic web site, if at all? Far more consumers than producers. It is both good and bad, in that the potential is not fully tapped, but at the same time there is a market for services by creators of all kinds.

Yup. And how many of were talking versus the numbers typing?

This isn't a rant against voice. I've used voice in some instances, and it is a tool. But voice is not best *for me* for a number of reasons, RL age being only one of 'em. Meanwhile, I've bounced around th' net long enough to have seen any nomber of other services introduce voice, only to be surprised that very few want to use it.

But it's only one example of a disconnect that Mitch seems to have with the residents of SL.

In a sense, though, I think they've hit the nail on the head. A percentage of users (and potential consumers, from their perspective) are not comfortable with a keyboard, grew up on Facebook and Myspace, phone keypad messaging and Blackberries, may have business or educational goals but do not (for the most part) view the 'net as a place for creativity.

The habit of diving into the backbone of a system and getting to know how it works represents a kind of generation gap. Not so much in terms of age, but possibly in terms of exposure. I'm seeing a lot of users these days who really seem to want things pre-packaged, like a point-and-click Myspace layout, but applied globally to everything they interact with. If it's more difficult than they'd like, because they have gotten used to a world of fifty different options for any given thing, they're far more likely to just drop it and go elsewhere.

This is very different from those users who adjusted to the endless tweaking and jack-of-all-trades skill sets required for computer work up until about 1990; I think we're more likely to tough it out, assume there are less option (which in this case is true) and appreciate the thing as it stands, warts and all.

The problem facing LLabs and most other businesses on the internet these days is that the end users themselves are changing, and they may feel that they're getting more point-and-clickers than creative, backbone-delvers. Alternately and cynically, it may be that we're the new minority simply because they've -decided- that we're the minority.

I would have to say that the newer users better fit the business model and seem more like something a company would feel confident that it could market to ...but again, that's just me being cynical.

tl;dr: Yes, some people fear teh keyboard and tech tools that seem so much a part of the SL experience, and I think LLabs is setting sites on that percentage simply because they have more demographic info on 'em. But I'm a cynic.

While I pretty much agree, here is my "glass half full" take on it:
http://talirosca.livejournal.com/2008/07/08/

Also the least resource demanding.

The Grid is suffering terrible technical growing pains scaling beyond its current plateau of 64K-ish peak concurrency. So, for now, the best possible new customer is one who neither notices the problems nor adds to them--basically trafficbots with good skins and suits purchased by an avatar appearance consultant. It doesn't use much LL bandwidth to sit in a conference room, motionless but for the standard-issue corporate animations, and watch a slide texture change once every two minutes and an occasional media clip from a stream provider.