Second Life Grid(tm)

Do you think this is marketing are a new change in Linden Lab direction?

I wish we could vote for two... becasue I really could use some pie.

Its marketing and a bit more......

I think it’s the vision of web 3.0 - an interactive experience.
(But still Google Pay per click is more cost effective)

I would love to integrate my website into SL, but I don’t think the time has come yet.

Soon maybe, but so many questions

Went to Telstra BigPond site. They have a SecondLife Portal thing where customers using the broadband service can use Secondlife free of bandwidh limits.
There are caveats. Must download client from their servers. Must also update via their servers. You enter via the BigPond Orientation Island and can see and do all there, in keeping with the zero bandwidth limit but once you leave the BigPond Islands, data costs step in.
Don't know the whole story but that about sums it up.

It's all about the money. Lindenlags, good ol Lindenlags. Just to look at the SL.com site says it all. BUYL SellL USD spent. All about the paper. Greed. Milk the masses for every dime and laugh as they gleefully give it. And the secondlife grid..Laughable. Education my ass. It's a business portal so LL can get some nice Co-milkers to come in here and do they're best to bleed us dry right alongside Rosedale and his greedy minions. Well piss on em I say. I see some edu content. I'll check it out. I see big bleeder 500% CEO run corps in here..Well..I just might snap. Let em bleed the Europeans. I'm done paying for them anyways.

Its just more marketing. Nothing new here.

What irks me slightly is how they are trying to redefine a resident spawned word, the grid, to mean what they want it to mean instead of what it is being used as. Not enough to get my hair in my ass about, but irksome all teh same.

Nothing new here, just more Philipspeak.

i think its about time ll admited what they think of their non-corp customers.
and now its obvious why concierge went 24 hour.

Yep, not a bad deal, though it tends to discourage mixing with others on the grid a bit I find.

so its basically gamearena sl then. instead of cogs you use some branded telstra viewer with all the bugs left in it.
ill give it a miss (and stick with optus).

and you cant even leave the boring corporate sim without the bandwidth applying. is the estate full of ads and crosspromotions? ill bet it is. australia is the worst country in the world for that shit.

Hmm, I guess Optus gives you free bandwidth in all of SL then? Seeing in your eyes free bandwidth in a group of sims seems to be ripping you off somehow? How is the Optus sim looking btw, are there friendly staff there 20/7, can't seem to find it in search.......

Yeah the ads are a bit overdone, but the regulars there are cool and the onsite staff/builders are too (they try their best to workaround the typical big company bullcrap). Gary and his team frequently reposition things for residents improve seating etc, when asked nicely

It's about protecting teh chidrens

A rising tide floats all boats.

The LL texts associated with this are just standard marketing muppetry. No big deal IMO.
I, for one, welcome our new corp and edu underlings

If corps and edu to have their own gateways into SL then
1. LL will have to provide a stable platform for them, and the non-corps share in that platform.
2. Avatars who escape from corp/edu islands will probably have been acclimatised to SL. "House-trained" would be too disparaging a term.
3. Avatars who escape into the main grid would tend to be the ones driven by curiosity.
4. The more revenue LL get from the big pockets, the less they will need to hit those with small pockets.
5. If LL can keep the big pockets on board, then SL has a better chance of surviving into the future.


What are the numbers??
Will the numbers of corp/edu sims and avatars grow so quickly as to render the existing grid insignificant? I really don't see that happening - certainly not with the existing technical state of SL.


My only *potential* concern would be that LL would engage in internal bandwidth management in order to give priority to grid database traffic for corp/edu sims and avatars.
I've worked with corporate sales muppets. It would be standard behaviour for a corp/edu sales function to make that sort of self-interested blinkered demand.
*IF* that were to happen, LL could never keep it under wraps, and the backlash would kill them.

Yeah, it's such a shame when people running businesses want to make a profit on them, rather than just spend millions of dollars to make something they give away to everybody.

What is the world coming to?

optus gives me 'almost free' bandwidth during the hours i am on sl
optus have also never charged me for exceeding bandwidth either. telstra otoh have a rich history of sending $300 bandwidth bills out in the post.
optus dont even have a single game server anymore, so i dont expect to see an optus sim anytime soon. and thats fine by me, i dont think i would ever visit it even if there was one. so free bandwidth on an optus or telstra sim has 0 value for me.

an afl sim is another story altogether...

Not only is this just marketing, it is mediocre marketing. I mean, while the website is well crafted, the message is not. The thrust of it is to urge businesses to buy an island and create a portal, then they are on their own to figure out how to make it work. Pushing for the immediate tier is a mistake on LL's part.

They should provide much more guidance on what works and what doesn't; should promote facilities already available for rental for corporate functions (to allow a company to get its feet wet without buying); should have a training program for corporate IT on using LL for intracorporate communications, and later a training program for corporate marketeers on how to reach consumers in SL; should provide some case studies of unsuccessful launches, should already have a corporate liason team in place, which I may have missed but saw no sign of.

This way, they are pointing companies down the path of more empty islands ...

Wouldn't this be a first step to larger organizations being able to host their part of SL on thier own servers?

I think this is kinda big folks. Not in the short term but the long term.

In the long term, yes this will be very big. LL's language seems to point toward partitioning of the grid into corporate zones, hosted directly by companies themselves. I doubt this is an open source model, more likely to be licensing.

I think it is likely that such corporate zones will have the ability to federate with the main grid if desired. Federation could also be of use in solving the gambling problem.

So, long term, of course corporate presence will be an immense thing. However imho, in terms of dollar volume, having SL be an effective vehicle to reach Us (the residents) has much more potential than using the platform for purely intra-corporate communication. Intra-corporate communication using audio & videoconferencing is so cost-effective now, that I think 3D vehicles will remain a frill deployed by companies that can afford it. Other companies will rent on occasion from providers within SL such as IBM and, probably, Webex and the like.

As much as I resist change, I think secondlifegrid.net is a good thing. It's diversification. From what little I learned during a brief visit to the site, it feels like a re-packaging. Nothing wrong with that.

For those of us who enjoy SL and hope that it survives and prospers, we should first Question Authority, but then also support Linden Lab in it's effort to keep things going.

Btw...as a site designer...I like the design...

- Infrared

I think it's a step towards Open Sourcing the server.

LL are trying to get to have two products: the open source Second Life (which they could sell support for) but which can run anywhere; and Second Life Grid, which will be Second Life running on their particular servers.

On the other hand, I still believe that selling Second Life as a platform is a disasterous idea all around, but LL seem determined to do it.

first point. when the greedy corp types get here they feel all sticky cause they aint weaing a suit and nobody will tell them where to get one so they need their own portal

point two. LL knows that the people who are sl's backbone probably look at that grid site as a pretty place to put all the bookmarks we already know about

point three. the lindens were probably pretty upset about Time mag, rating sl as like the 5th worst website, but they shouldint be cause nobody reads time no more and the other website was myspace and number 1 was eHarmony.

All that is, are corprate dudes who cant find out where to buy a good suit being mad that their islands are empty

And this is TV and Mags just being jealous of the computer
they just dont know

All your base are belong to us!

and basically they are trying to sell us out but we knew if we made it all kewel they were gonna sell it and as soon as the GRID gets all shiny and lag free, they gonna put it on ebay

----------------------- I found the Time article just in case you wanted ta see it ------------

5 Worst Websites

Sites to avoid 5 of 5

SecondLife.com

We're sure that somebody out there is enjoying Second Life, but why?

Visually, this vast virtual world can be quite impressive, but it's notoriously slow to load (it runs on free software you have to download) and difficult to navigate, even with a broadband connection. You interact in the space through an avatar, but creating and personalizing this animated representation of yourself is tedious.

Movements feel clunky and there can be a terrible lag. As on many sites, there's a learning curve for novices, but Second Life's is simply too steep.

And there are crazy people around every corner — disruptive types that spread graffiti and get in your way and throw you off your groove. Fans praise Second Life as a virtual hangout where you can meet and chat and buy sneakers and real estate (that's fake stuff for real money) and dance and go bowling and have sex — suggesting that "virtual humans" doing "human things" online in Second Life is somehow less pathetic than, say, cooking Kaldorei spider kabobs or making magic pantaloons in World of Warcraft.

The corporate world's embrace of the place as a venue for staff meetings and training sessions does seem to lend Second Life a layer of legitimacy. But maybe it's a case of some CEOs trying too hard to be hip.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1638344_1638341_1633628,00.html

I just went straight to the pie.

/me settles down with a nice cuppa java, and pie(mmmmmpumkin ), and takes the wait and see stance, but knows somehow this will not end well.

Ditto, blueberry preferred