With each update, the course of SL is becoming clearer.

With each update, the road the Lindens have laid before Second Life is becoming clearer and clearer.

I think they are shifting their focus off of mainland land owners and towards island owners, plain and simple. Sure, the mainland land owners will always exist, but new mainland land -- when needed -- will be bought by large island owners in lots of 40-50 sims at a time, cut up, sold -- rinse, repeat.

With the Land Store and the introduction of the new estate tools in 1.9, it's obvious that LL is trying to automate island purchasing, ownership and maintenance as much as possible, or at the very least, take the burden of doing any work to justify the high costs of islands off of Linden shoulders.

Linden Labs is constanly introducing new "features" and "community leadership opportunities" that are, in reality, simply means to alleviate their workload, because they are shifting themselves into the wholesale island business.

Wholesalers don't have time for the retail, micro-management of businesses. They provide the product or service to resellers, and its the resellers who are responsible for providing support, not the wholesaler.

There could be some positives to this... IF the Lindens use their lessed workload to create Second Life 2.0 -- which they have to soon, because we're at 1.9 now, unless 3 years from now we'll all be using version 1.9.9.34.999.32345.32b RC2 -- and totally revolutionize the streaming world they've created, because, frankly, its getting stagnant.

Yeah, we can now better control the camera behind the cars and plans we build. Well, maybe they should work on figuring out how to get those cars and planes to cross sim borders without flying into a billion pieces, driving into the ground or vanishing altogether as if they never existed. Or maybe they should use this time they no longer have to dedicated to placing islands on the grid to implement some of the growing list of vaporwares they've been touting since I joined almost 2 years ago. (Havok 2, I mean 3, or is it up to 4 yet(?), comes to mind.)

Every beta or experiment that LL has introduced for the past year has been geared towards wholesale island sales, management, etc. I think this will be the trend in the months to come, I just hope they take time to get the technology working, or the retail customers at the bottom of the food chain will be the ones hurting.

The new sim-crossing and asset communication code they just worked into 1.9 should help this

Its alot smoother IMO, have you tried the 1.9 preview?
==Chris

I don't know about any of that stuff. I just wish I could change my panties without having to put on a different pair of shoes. Lets look at the priorities.

Why do you say that?

Excellent observation.

I think this is a necessary goal of Linden Lab, since it emulates how the real Internet works - people own their own servers.

I've been looking at sim crossingly pretty intently, because of the Dominus Shadow project.

My observations are that sim crossings in vehicles are no better than they used to be, sim crossings with avatars (walking/flying across a border) are worse, and teleporting between points is much much faster.

I've given up on waiting for sim crossings to improve, and I've implemented my own sim crossing handlers.

I like this guys approach, I think it's hi-larious

http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=64148

I wonder how well it works with the new camera functionality.

Who owns a server in SL?

Yep.

The problem, and why we haven't seen distributed servers (nor probably will) is also very clear -- Second Life maintains a closed economy. As long as that persists, we won't be seeing much more control than LL-branded "buy it now, we'll fix it later."

Until that's addressed in an effective manner, all of these issues are more or less moot.

Explain the "closed economy" concept please? Or point to a resource where I can do some reading on that? I am interested in learning about that economic system.

Thank you.

Isn't this what the goal has always been?

I headed out to Abbot's right after the Grid returned, and there was no noticeable improvement for aircraft.

I bet that 1.10.0 comes after 1.9

The only continuing trend I can see is that every 'update' degrades the performance of SL still further.

I'm getting really, really, really fed up with it.

I can put up with a lot of the other bugs and crap, but standing in my wholly owned mainland sim (where I have total control of content and NOTHING has changed since 1.6 after this latest 'update' and seeing my fps at half what it was under 1.68 is incredibly depressing.

Even more so when I reflect that I have upgraded CPU, motherboard and graphics card since 1.68. I can't get a faster graphics card than I have. I'm now running an 64bit Athlon 4000+ instead of my old P4 3.2, yet my fps is crippled compared to 1.68

When I.7 happened and a raft of kludges made it barely usable, I expressed concern in the forums that performance would never again reach pre-1.7 levels and that by subjecting us to the diabolical performance of 1.7, LL was going to 'accustom' us to a greatly reduced performance - and it looks very much as if I was right...

I don't know what LL thinks it's doing. But I DO know I'm eagerly awaiting the competition...

I wrote about just this topic on my blog yesterday

Closed in the sense of using their own currency to facilitate transactions, nevermind the current impetus on land to buy from the mother company exclusively.

Unless LL wished to shoot themselves in the foot over the matter, it's quite unlikely they'll move in the direction of open server spaces at this point. I would honestly love to be wrong on that, though.

Love your blog Moopf.

There are a few things I think some of you haven't considered in reference to "privatized" servers. If LL were to offer servers up for sale/rental to allow people to run their own instance of SL... how can they be sure that the quality of service provided will live up to their standards? The individual running the privatized server would be the one handling abuse reports, land management, etc... etc. And... if someone were to violate one law or another... who gets the bad reputation? SL and LL.

Personally, I am somewhat disheartened with the level of animosity shown by some of you towards LL. Basically... it boils down to this. SecondLife is a business. LindenLabs will continue down the path towards profit, like any other business, and most of you. They will do so while attempting to meet the desires of their clientbase. It is what it is.

And in reference to updates and bug fixes... I think many of you are forgetting the gravity of making changes to a client/server environment on a scale as large as this. We're not talking about changing the way your avatar zones from one spot to another in EQ2 or WoW... we are talking about a much more complex and infinately larger environment. A major rework to how something passes from one sim to another would need to be done in phases. How items and agents move and communicate through the sims effect and are effected by a whole variety of systems... and each one needs to be modified and tested extensively before the final features can be introduced. You're not going to get exactly what you want, when you want it... and for 2 reasons...

1) Reworking a large scale client/server environment is a HUGE ordeal.

2) For every item 1 person wants... there are 1000 other people who want something entirely different.

Let us also remember... feedback presented as feedback, not ranting gripes, will be listened to with a more open and receptive ear.

Just my 2 cents, take it for what it is.

Well lets see.... support people who pay nothing or 10 dollars a month....

or support people who gave you 1250 for virtual land and pay 125 a month.

YOU do the math. Just sounds like a good business decision to me.

I agree 100%. I have been in SL for six months now and with very few exceptions (techincal threats for one) the forums seem to be nothing more that people, griping, complaining, and slamming each other and calling each other names).. I agree constructive feedback is what is listened too. I know, I know, I have heard that all forums are the same way regardless what they are....however...if we really want to be heard and have actions taken it really needs to be constructive in nature and not all this name calling and flaming each other. There should be another avenue for that type of stuff, not here in the forums. I love the tech stuff, it teaches me a lot about SL and the requested features are great but the rest needs to be put to a stop.

Has it occured to anyone that LL might be automating the island sales functions to reduce their workload, which will allow them more research and development resources? If there is less work to do with island sales... there is more time to develop and streamline everything else.

Just a thought.

so when a website has low quality... the user blames apache, netscape, or whoever wrote the server code?

SecondLife is not a website.

If someone has illegal content, or handles customer service poorly, and those servers are hosted by LindenLabs... LL will assume the majority of the bad reputation. The average person isn't going to know the difference.

Besides... even with web hosting, if someone puts illegal/objectionable content on the internet... the hosting company they choose has a legal obligation to get involved in removing/reporting the content to the authorities... or potentially face legal issues.

ah...

but if ll is moving towards primarily private island model... they may say, "what happens on private islands is the owner's responsibility, ll will deal with technical issues, and legal and contractual obligations, but nothing else." and basically taking on an isp/hosting/domain-name-service-provider role - without all the social engineering headache.

most of what that would take is a change in the tos - a pi tos versus a mainland tos.

I don't remember seeing anything about LL moving towards a mostly private island model... just some new estate management tools and sales automation for private islands. That's just streamlining one aspect of the business.

As for the idea that LL might simply become a "land hosting company"... I have yet to see a web hosting company that didn't have a TOS and the legal obligation to ensure illegal content isn't hosted on their servers.

It would be one hell of a headache to hand over the reigns of TOS governance to private individuals with the hope those individuals won't damage the SL or LL reputation... or get them into legal troubles.

But until I see a press release / official announcement from Linden Labs that their business model and focus for SecondLife is shifting... I will continue to avoid worrying over conjecture and rumor. No sense in getting the pitchforks and torches until you know it's a monster in the courtyard... might just be some of the neighbors kids playing on your fears.