Is the Demise of Second Life Nearing?

But I bet the group most interested in ending that situation is LL. Look, corporations and organizations have to have an audience to remain in SL after the hoopla is over, so the ones remaining are universities and similar non-profits with a built in audience. The other really good sims have an inherent problem - if they aren't funded by a non-profit, their life is as long as their creators' interest or actual life span. There is no easy way for a bored creator to pass on their sim even if the only problem is that they want to build something new, with new ideas, and they can only afford what they have.

So IMO, bottom line, SL at the sim level will always be in the process of change, with no fixed destination sites lasting any appreciable time in economic terms. So their future is two directions: get a standard for browsers/clients and be a portal. Keep them in SL for a bit before they wander off into the 3D world, offer some managed direction to other sites no longer SL based, but SL modal, and find as many as monetized hooks as possible.

Otherwise, they are another AOL trying to keep visitors in-house when the best sites were elsewhere. All IMO.

Question to sim owners (I was one in a previous incarnation on SL): How long would your sim last if you died tomorrow? Its not property on the corner - it's bits and bytes that will disappear when the first payment is missed.

I'm sorry, I can't imagine what basis you have for this statement. Universities and similar non-profits couldn't afford to pay to keep SL running if you gave them free internet and a pony.
I have dozens of avatars and other assets that are no longer available in-world *anywhere*. It doesn't matter if Whinge Languish stops selling his avatars or shuts down Supellex City, I'll still have them in my inventory and I'd lose them (and the hundreds of other products I've bought) if I left SL for another virtual world. Lucah Solvang hasn't made any avatars in years, but I still see people with avatars based on Lucah's horses and deer on a regular basis.
I'm not sure how exactly that's supposed to be relevant to anything. I don't own any sims, sims aren't assets, sims aren't in any sense a "barrier to entry". Assets are. Clothes, prims, scripts, and everything built from them.
I suspect people will be using my products for years after I leave SL.

Everything you are saying has been said a million times before. SL is a flash in the pan, SL is transient, as soon as something else comes along then everyone will leave, this problem will cause everyone to leave and then LL will be sorry etc, etc, ad nauseum. The downfall of SL has been preached for years and yet every single one has been proven wrong. SL is not only still here but has had steady growth the whole time even after OS.

Irrelevant.

When you die in RL, your property is loss if there is no one there to pick up the mortgage and taxes. Why should anything be different in SL?

And what is the relevance of the question?

"Is the Demise of Second Life Nearing?"







But..but..I thought it was already dead since long ago. Don't let it fool you, it's been long dead and buried. What remains are just lag, bad textures and lousy customer service.

My point wasn't that the universities will support SL, only that of the organizations, they are the type that will remain with any consistency and LL is starting to realize that and that they aren't enough to support SL, so LL has to change. The other point is that if there is an event horizon for most sims, then LL can't use a paradigm that is based on sims, it has to be on content and portal hooks. Highlighting sims that will and do disappear overnight (such as October Country, which was on their Showcase until recently) will not work.

I'll go now - can't argue with you experts, mostly saying the same things for months and years. Change happens - hope you notice it when it hits you in the face.

FWIW, I regularly work on one of the Washington/Baltimore campuses that has multiple sims on SL. Those departments are not hurting for equipment or Internet access and two non-profit sims would be an incredibly small budget item. Membership non-profits have many affluent organizations with large budgets. Not that it was my point, but you are lumping them together like they are all alike and they are not.

Since I didn't say that, you evidently have problems reading, so I will make my last post short. LL will not make the money or have the consistency with income that they wish with a sim/'land' based model and they have tried several major fixes in their approach that did not seem to work either. While the base will continue as a whole, the components change too often and will do so more in the future to make this the basis for the way LL makes money, so they will have to find a different way to do it. The way for LL to make money is as a portal, which will retain the sim base as a cash cow and allow LL to make as many safe monetized hooks with the smallest exposure to issues like morality and teen grid crap. Push the showcase items to the log-in process, grab a few more as they land in SL to move them to sponsor sites, and take/make a little off those that go to other grids and corporate sites. All this presupposes that SL is strong enough to remain a player, just not the only player, but part of a growing grid. And that paying regular members as SL users increase slowly and portal members even more so.

OUt of here - too many people with all the answers and too much belief that SL is incredibly special. Almost wonder how many of you still use a AOL account.

Read the comments posted below the article this guy got owned XD

Also reading those comments makes me proud to be part of SL because just about all of them were intelligent well thought out and coming from the point of view of direct experience. Sadly cant quite say the same for the Journo who wrote the article though.

I don't know if anyone has brought this up, but it seems people expect prices to go down in a recession, well in the UK the £ has fallen in a value by quite a lot so all external goods are actually much more expensive, we're stuck with that for a long time, this time around I think.

I predict violence in the streets in the UK starting early May, possibly one police officer death.

It's an interesting topic, historically. A recent book, http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/159420182X describes how central bankers in the US, UK, France, and Germany "Broke the World" by clinging to the gold standard--and in the case of the Bank of England, convincing Churchill to return to the gold standard after World War I, which he later called "the biggest blunder" he ever made. By propping up the pound at too high a level against gold (and other world currencies), England suffered deflation, reduced exports, and huge unemployment, triggering a general strike--in contrast to France, which enjoyed a boom during that interval by keeping the franc low.

I couldn't resist ranting at this ugly ass blogger.

He doesn't know what he's talking about. But then again, aren't most media this way?

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!?

Is AOL still going?

But seriously, folks ...

I guess I might be cross-posting here*, but I am convinced a better avatar mesh is the single most important thing that would improve business in SL.


Which is every bit as true for business in RL as well as SL, of course.

The PBS article linked by the unimaginative dork** in the article under question mentioned that American Apparel closed down their SL sim and I don't think it takes a great leap of the imagination to ascertain why?

Although SL seems to be 'sold' to RL business as a virtual office rather than a sales point, I am sure the advantage to sales and advertising of having an in-world line of ersatz products would not be lost on established fashion marks. The trouble is that damn mesh because there is no advantage to be gained in putting your company logo on a polo-shirt or vest with smudgey shoulders or a pair of jeans with a melting crotch is there?

I found ARMANI via Manzoni while it was under development last year. It was a professionally designed sim, finished very much in the style of the Milan shop but another empty corporate edifice nonetheless where the racks and display boards were links to RL products on the company's official web site. There was a single man's suit on sale (reasonably priced at 150 lindens) which I assume was an experiment. It was the best man's suit I had found up to that point in SL because of it's plain, unfussy finish and good choice of colour - very much like an example of their RL product. It still wasn't 'quite the thing' because modern style suits just don't work well on male avs. Nevertheless I was sufficiently impressed to drop a notecard to the designer, Kobanishu Yifu, along with a snapshot of myself wearing the item and an enquiry regarding any plans she might have to make more items like it.

The following day I attempted to teleport back to the via Manzoni sim only to find it blocked. I guess my communication only served to let them know there was an oversight in the permissions on their sim.

However, the incident leads me to believe that Armani might have been considering an official release of clothing in SL but that they abandoned the idea because they too were disappointed by the results. And I don't doubt that American Apparel closed down for similar reasons.

* See: /327/0a/308780/1.html

** Did I slight you, Bradley Bracken, with my unconscious use of your byline or am I just another unimaginative dork like yourself?

I still use AOL for my main email.

And his eyes are too close together. Untrustworthy!



Luddite!

But you have other email accounts too. Because AOL did not manage to fill all of your needs. How many of AOL's services do you currently use exclusively?

AOL keeps going, chugging along, because its familiar to you, because you've used it for so long and its comfortable. You may always use it, as long as the company stays viable. But if AOL folded tomorrow, you wouldn't stop using email; you'd just go someplace else.

"Second Life is my main virtual platform but I have an OSGrid account too. I can even import/export my own creations from one grid to the other so I don't have to lose anything I've made when I jump back and forth between the two."

The Internet didn't die, it was sliced up into a bazillion parts, each one making AOL's slice of the pie smaller and smaller. You can enjoy the internet without ever having to touch AOL. One would imagine that's not what AOL hoped for in it's infancy.

And you will be able to enjoy virtual world platforms that function and provide the same sort of service Second Life currently has the biggest name in providing, without ever touching Second Life. It won't kill Second Life, it will only give you more options.

The SL/AOL comparison rings very true imo. SL will be just another virtual world platform and LL just another provider, one that people may giggle at you for using in the future, the way that thinking of someone using AOL for anything makes me giggle.

...not with a bang, but a whimper... That's how worlds end, right?

You're implying that at some time AOL didn't suck?

That's crazy talk.

Though I'm one of the ones who think the end is soon near for Second Life (near for me being still a year or two down the road), targeting educational institutions is a potentially good strategy for Linden Lab to keep Second Life running.

Corporations and universities have different expectations regarding their investments, and different criteria for evaluating them. Corporations need to see some sort of indication that the investment will lead eventually to profit. Universities just need to see that the investment leads to "learning."

Universities typically run these projects on specific grants (whether a government program grant, or a grant from a private source). It's money that no one is ever expecting to see again. So the project just has to be a good idea in theory, with no pressure on how it is in practice.

That works well for Second Life- which seems to be a great idea that is poorly executed in practice.

The money to purchase and operate a sim is small in terms of the many grant-funded projects a university would undertake. Universities can use students- free labor- to do the work for which a corporation would have to pay someone.

Where Linden Lab could really profit from the university projects is not so much the tier money. Where Linden Lab could really profit is if some of these universities would work on projects that could advance the technology of Second Life. Essentially, instead of paying more computer techs to solve Second Life's myriad problems, get some free work from top students at good universities.

If the university interest keeps the Second Life brand going, and Linden Lab capitalizes off the university projects to advance Second Life, Linden Lab could eventually turn that success back into attracting corporate interest once again.

I don't know if Linden Lab will actually turn the university interest into a success. It already has a good history of taking great ideas and going nowhere with them. But theoretically, the university interest could be used to keep Second Life viable.

Actually, no, I don't.

Brenda, Brenda, Brenda.......come here and rub my arse, Darling, while we have a long talk.

A dream finally realized.

It's neither corporations nor universities that are important to SL. It's residents.

I use Internet Explorer , too. So there. *Nya nya.*

WINNER!

IM IN UR BROWSER LOGGIN UR KEYSTROKES

Normally I'd laugh this off as hysteria, but now I've joined the hyserical.

YES! YES!! YES!!!