Is this good or bad news for SL?

It is bad news for SL. The more advanced tools are made available for free like this the greater the chances of someone coming along and getting the support/backing to make something better.

I am no longer married to SL as i once was. I will go to whatever virtual world my main friends go to and start from there.

I looked at There some time ago. Very cartoony and primitive compared to SL but with smooth movement and no lag.

I mentioned earlier in this thread that I thought that if a competitor for SL appears, it will spring from the 'clones' of SL based on OpenSim. My first loyalty is to SL and LL, but I have belonged to Open Life for some time, although I rarely go there and I'm just a basic free member there. It really only differs from SL in that land ownership is only by full regions and you can make normal prims up to 100m x 100m x 100m.

BUT..... I was just looking on the Open Life website and their attention is turning to developing their "next generation platform". No details of what it would be, but they're holding an in-world meeting about it.

Aside from dealing with performance issues, one of the things that would make a big change to SL would be to introduce in-world sculpting with mesh prims, larger prim sizes and a master control for orientation of the build axes for individual objects and for land parcels, so that it's easier to build or modify things that aren't aligned North/South/East/West.

If it somehow supports a viewer that runs on iPhone or Android, it matters; otherwise it's just more wishful thinking and time wasted from potentially useful projects.
I don't think it's any secret that meshes are coming. (I suspect Qarl is just sick to death of trying to shoehorn any more functionality into sculpties.) Also, just to be sure: you know about using the Local frame of reference (instead of World) for building, right? It certainly doesn't solve everything, but is a necessity for building off-axis.

If Unity and Blue Mars are competition for SL, then so is Activeworlds, There.com, IMVU, and Twinity. There are already several, perhaps dozens, of 3d VR environments similar to these newcomers, some of them already superior to SL in many areas, and with many times the user base.

SL's market niche is not the same as these environments. You would be better off asking what will happen to IMVU.

Mind if I correct that? Try "Blue Mars is a good experiment. It is a genie that granted some developers every thing they asked. Now they can learn if they asked for the right things."

Don't assume that the Microsofts of Second Life speak for all of us.

Chicxulub.

Only if you consider Disneyworld one as well.

Or... it's become almost common for politicians to use a hotel room as their "legal residence" so they can campaign in a politically favorable district. You don't think they really think of that temporary residence as their home, do you?

If you can't make a mark on it, it's not a world.

No, I don't think that any of these pose a threat to SL. SL has the backing of the educational community, and I think that universities won't want to see their money go to waste. Unfortunately, I don't think that SL is currently offering all that it could be, because they haven't needed to. When they had the market niche, they could work as slowly as they wanted to address technological and creative concerns from their users.

Competition is a good thing, it drives the product to the next level, which for the sake of SL is imperative. I liken this to the myspace/facebook craziness, and each application has a slightly different use (though the two seem to be sharing more and more of the same users and applications). Second life has established itself and currently carries a certain name recognition. But as we know from MySpace and Facebook that consumers are fickle, and as another SL resident stated, many users are not as "married" to SL as they once were.

I have no clue is LL actually reads these blogs, but they would do well to increase their customer service for new residents. To offer a certain number of "free" lindens upon signing up would engage and keep residents. Additionally, Linden should do what BM has done by "paying" residents to work with players less than 120 days old. This would greatly increase the number or residtents who stay in the game and increase their viability.

LL may be banking that Second Life has reached its 100th monkey and doesn't need to further their market share. Who knows??

/me facepalms.

Oh no! They've gotten to Brenda at last. She's gotten hooked on the power trip of having a store and a blog and strangers starting to know her name. A little Fame...and suddenly you want your name on EVERYTHING!

I suggest Connoland.

LOL. I read that as "Chicks' Club".

I think people with super powered cell phones will still want to watch shows and movies and play online multiplayer games with high quality 3D graphics on screens that don't fit in the palm of your hand.

That's not to say that the super powered cell phones or mobile internet devices or whatever they might be called won't shake things up.

What do you expect from a people who called their war-god "Huitzilopōchtli"?

I've looked at several of these too. They might have one or two things that work better than SL (e.g. There being lag-free). But There is very cartoony, IMVU was very clumsy when I looked at it and I think Twinity is the one where you must have an avatar with your real name, based on photos of yourself and you can only wander round a virtual Berlin - or is that another virtual world?

Oh, I agree--for the moment. But with cloud computing pulling stuff off our disks, and mobile devices pulling eyeballs off those desktop screens, a virtual world able to deliver some plausible "VR lite" experience on tomorrow's smartphone will enjoy a game-changing first-mover advantage, especially for a world based on user content and microtransactions (and much less so for those whose mindshare depends on shiny graphics and spine-tingling physics).

Not at all sure what point you're trying to make, a virtual world is a virtual world, that the rules are different is irrelevant to it being a virtual world.

Calling something a world doesn't make it a world, any more than calling something a home makes it a home. Calling Warcraft a "virtual world" is the same kind of cynical manipulation of the language that allowed George Bush to run for the Governor of Texas with a hotel room in Houston as his "primary residence".

SL has allways been about community and friendship. Graphics are less essentail than we've been led to believe.
Contact and communication and interaction. Global partnering and intimacy.
SL owns that I think.

Real competition would be good for Linden Labs. They might learn how to treat their customer base better.....and maybe re-think the Land Tier structure (overpriced).
Having said that i tried Blue Mars and wasn't overly impressed! I don't think they'll be serious competition to SL any time soon! The computer spec to run it properly is quite high.....it will be a few years yet until your average household PC will be able to run BM adequately.

You chatted with people.



Then you went back to being alone in SL.

In fairness, you can find people in SL at the welcome areas, and if you've found the forums you can also find a handful of other places where there are sometimes real, live people, so the social experience in SL is at least as good, but...

The things I hear people like about SL aren't at all social, and that's disappointing. It's no wonder SL hasn't become a social platform.

Yes, they are. That they aren't exactly like SL misses the point. Some people (a lot of people, actually) use these things, and those people might otherwise be in SL, enhancing SL simply through their presence and availability for social interaction, and maybe even commerce. But they aren't here. They are someplace else. So those other places *are* competition.

Except that it makes for ghost towns of all of these virtual worlds. I think virtual space is increasing a lot faster than interest in virtual spaces.

The killer app for virtual worlds is going to be bots that are interesting to talk to. Until then virtual worlds will be creepy, empty ghost towns.

That's a good point. We technogeek introverts are over-represented in SL, and many of us dread a future SL as social networking platform. One might think Blue Mars the perfect place for us, or even an off-the-grid OpenSim running on that old machine we never quite recycled. Yet somehow we keep using SL, even at the risk of a chance meeting with another avatar.

One of the things that would make a big change to SL would be if people came to use it as a social platform.

And don't start thinking about the technical means to enable that. Boring boring boring. It's irrelevant if people don't actually want to be social. If what excites people is in-world sculpting, mesh prims and build axes, then all the social tools in the world will not make SL a social place.

Do any of these alternatives support Linux? If not, then they are not viable for me, and will not have me as a member.

One of the things that sets Second Life apart from all the rest is that it is *truly* a multi-platform world and does not exclude anybody based on their chosen computer platform.

It's not that people don't want a social platform. It's that the market is already over-saturated with social platforms - everything trying to take every social concept and turn it into Web 2.0, or a graphical Facebook. There's too many of these, and more being mass-produced every day. What we *don't* have an abundance of, however, are virtual worlds in which residents have nearly complete control over their environments, where they can build things out of basic primitives, terraform their land, have places they can call their own made from their own two hands and a mouse. Like someone here said earlier, it's not a virtual world if you cannot leave your mark on it.