SecondLifeGrid.net ???

Linden Lab is always up to something, aren't they?

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/09/04/introducing-the-second-life-grid/



What's you take on this development?

My take so far has been to ask others what they make of it!

But lacking any illumination from other quarters, here's what it seems like to me:

LL is saying there are two SL's - the SL the "product" - i.e., the world as we know it; and SL the "grid" - i.e., the real thing, the thing you take seriously.

The world as we know it includes us and everything that has been SL thus far.

The real thing is what LL hopes SL to become, which is a place for "real" people; i.e., businesses, educations, etc.

It's all the same thing, just given different names so everyone can tell the difference between what's "real" and "important" (real world businesses, etc.), and what isn't (us).

Though they say they are still interested in us (their "product", they are differentiating between us and the "real" grid.

I believe this paves the way for better services to be offered (perhaps at a cost) to the "real" people they hope will come. I think it signals a divide between their own staff, where many will fork off to pay attention to the "real" people, and some will still stick around to humor us.

All in all, strikes me as yet another step in the long divorce (the one that has been going on since I joined SL), and indicates there will now be two concurrent worlds: Ours, and the one for the important people.

That's all I can figure, because everything they are saying they are offering as part of the "grid" has always been a part of the "product," after all.

But giving it a different name (i.e., giving the businesses the name "grid" and us the name "product" makes it more clear that the two populations are not to be considered mingled, or of similar importance, and signals more resources going to the more important people in the future.

I would go further, to add that we as the "product" are being offered up to the important corporations, educational institutions, and so forth, for use as they see fit, on "their" grid.

coco

In short, they want to gear big businesses into using SL as a tool in marketing, web meetings, etc and SLG will just that. Intel is already doing that as they bought the rights to the "Intel" surname for their employees. Sad to say SL is just not a game no more, but more for businesses. I believe they are doing this so as more businesses get involved, it will provide a lot more funding to LL. Maybe with the new funding, they can improve the servers and infastructure as that will be needed to be presentable to prospective clients.

Yes. I don't think this is necessarily bad news. There are two types of uses businesses can make of SL:
1. Business-to-business (B2B). Meetings within the corporation or between the corporation and a specific invited audience.
2. Business-to-customer. Marketing 'retail' to the existing SL community (aka, us).

The most successful companies in SL to date have done a lot of B2B. It is easier to get right, but has a lot less revenue potential than Business-to-Customer usages.

Business-to-customer is difficult, inworld tools don't yet exist to do it well, and frankly residents are a diverse lot, and not all that HUGE a population. It will take some time for corporations to figure out how to reach us effectively. But make no mistake, the presence of a big early-adopter audience like us is a SIGNIFICANT value to LL's appeal. In a way, this gives us even more clout en masse; our presence in the world is the biggest differentiator LL will have from its competitors. Better "platforms" will come along, it is the nature of this stage of technology. But SL will be the most mature world.

It sounds to me like they're providing local instances of Second Life for businesses and other organizations to host their own grids separate from the grid we all participate in. A bunch of companies could run their own Second Life Grids and not have to worry about the main grid being down for maintenance or griefing from unauthorized users.

It's like having both an Internet /and/ an intranet.

The first few paragraphs sound like that, and it may be where they eventually go, but the rest of the website makes it clear it is all on the one grid.

I just went and looked at The L Word sims. They're right there on the good ol' main grid..

Do we know there are separate grids?

I don't know about the "Field proven customer service tools"......

Well it is all in the semantics, apparently:

"What is the difference between Second Lifeand the Second Life Grid?

"Second Life is the showcase virtual world WHERE end users can create an infinite variety of content and participate in a robust virtual economy, free of traditional social and technological restrictions. The Second Life Grid is WHAT makes Second Life possible: a service platform that provides scalable server infrastructure, highly detailed and configurable features, field-proven customer service tools, and a massive existing base of end users and user-created content that can be leveraged in your own virtual world offering."

We are end users, I guess. We are WHERE.

The WHAT - what all makes it possible - is something that will be offered to these corporations, rather than to us.

And we are also the PRODUCT - the "massive existing base of end users and user-created content" that can be LEVERAGED by the actual WHAT.

They are offering these corporations, educational institutions, etc., the WHAT. They are not offering us the WHAT. (Whatever the what is.)

We are the WHERE that are being offered to the "real" people who will be using the WHAT.

In other words, we are much more clearly the chopped liver than we were before. All thanks to the magic of semantics.

It remains to be seen how these semantics will work out in practical terms, such as in goodies and services offered to the REAL people on the REAL grid.

coco

P.S. They might even get the simple things like bolding and stuff that we don't, which is making me have to go back and edit all the 's and 's out of this post.

No, we know there is only one grid. From the 'What the Second Life Grid Can Do For You' section of the secondlifegrid.net site:

Create Your World, The Way You Want It
Purchase and develop a "Virtual Land Estate," and become the master of your own virtual world. With powerful Estate management tools, choose to run an Estate for the benefit of just your own customers, employees, or partners - or you can choose to open up your world to all of the users of the Second Life Grid. Fully configurable Estate controls allow you to interact with the virtual world or retain any amount of privacy or security you need.


AND

Reach A Global Audience
Millions of users from over 200 different countries have registered to use the Second Life Grid. Unlike the World Wide Web, where text-based media usually confines users to websites of their own language, the 3-D environment of the Second Life Grid communicates digital culture in a manner that encourages cross-cultural tourism and collaboration.

I don't read it that way. Sounds more like they're saying the grid (old school term) is the showcase for what corporate cash can create using The Grid tech..


So, for now away, it's largely a marketing thing?

That's my takeaway as well. I see no actually new services on the website. However, I do think they are positioning themselves for a later partitioning of the grid, and eventually for selling the platform itself for companies to run their own internal grids.

These internal grids would probably have the ability to federate with the existing grid. Federation might also be a solution to the gambling issue.

Well, that makes a sort of sence, Nika.

coco

Yeah it SEEMS to indicate that yuo can create your own invisible grid ala the teen grid for your own company but reading into it and looking at everything (Everything LL writes is so fuzzy and indistinct) it looks like there is very very little new here, just a re-marketing effort at the buuisness sector and a couple of small new features.

I do not read that in the end that it will allow much more than what we have now (private estates) but with a special signup to tp into your estates initially and nothing to prevent said estates from appearing on the map or for "your" users to have access to the rest of the grid as normal.

I can see a lot of utility in setting up private grids invisible to the rest of the universe (like the teen grid) but there is nothing that clearly spells out that ability here.

Hope this wasn't the big suprise they hinted at a while back , seems kinda dull & boring to me, it's just a website advert as far as I can tell

The 'message' I read, is the forerunner to the open source server code. To be at the front of the 3D web, it has to be the way to go.

Then we shall see more and more 'classes' of server supporting various companies, with the 'lower classes' trying to do their thing on a shoe string server. LL will provide the links for chat, inventory, accounts loggin etc under license. The micro-economy will evolve into the use of RL CC's, or in the form of the EGG card (which has already happened in SL recently).

Whats particularily appealing is the limitations for the servers will almost dissapear for the ones that can afford to be able offer almost unlimited prims, scripts etc.. and no doubt introduce greater flexibility in the features, when they provide their own client pluggin or branded client to go with.

On the downside... those companies/individuals that run successful business now in SL, that do not have the budgets to support their own servers, may find themselves on some shared VPN with much lower functionality (as SL is now). For the time being, those established already in SL, simply exist alongside the corporates, where big budgets don't really count for popularity, until the open source server code becomes a reality.

For the time being, until the 3D web explosion happens, what really counts within SL, is the social interaction between company owners and their customers, a business can succeed or fail greatly, just by simply not having the social skills, that brings a 'face' to the buying public. It won't be long, before that 'face' becomes blurred into the same genure of the 2D internet.

Enjoy this 'pond seclusion' while we can.

I think the SL Grid may be a way to make SL accessible to people who fine the learning curve very steep in terms of understanding what a virtual world is. Making the assumption that most of us residents took to SL like ducks to water, it might be hard for us to understand how difficult is for many people to "see" or "get" SL. Though you may have had, like I have had, the experience of telling a friend or co worker about it only to have them log on and just freeze.

I think the Grid is a way of allowing the "institutional" mind set a way of understanding and becoming involved in SL in a way that feels safe and understandable.

My analogy would be what happens when people move from a more uptight part of town to the more artistic and free neighborhood I live in. For the first year they are stiff and reserved but after awhile the hair and clothes get more casual and before you you know it, they are body pressing comfortably like the rest of us as they shop in our great Italian veggie stores.

I think SL is highly contagious and will tend to loosen up any of those who enter through those portals who explore.

How will we know? They will start posting on these forums protesting at something or other!

I think if it goes that way, I would explore taking my sims onto my own servers. I wonder if SL would help us migrate the sims we have? I'm not sure of the logistics of it but I think it would be cool to do it that way.

LL is just trying to get more big users on so they can go on to be the 3D net platform before someone else jumps in. While it may happen in the future, the current announcement isn't talking about separate servers or grids.

Now IMHO it's all a good thing if it works. If there are a bunch of large companies around, LL will have some incentive to actually fix stuff since a company representing a serious chunk of change has a lot more clout than a resident paying 10 bucks a month. If LL actually fixes stuff for the companies, the residents also get the benefits.

From what I've seen on the open source mailing list, the sim code isn't something we can expect any time soon.. I haven't read every word of what's been said but the words I did read from LL we not encouraging.


Unlimited prims? /me slowly backs away from the ISP bill..

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/09/04/introducing-the-second-life-grid/#comment-465268


So, as speculated above, it's sorta repackaging of their marketing material. /me has no problems with that if it gets more money into LL without detracting from our wild-west grid.

I just have to laugh at the grid-is-not-the-grid part. It's always been the grid, and it will always be the grid. That's all there is to say. See you on the grid!

With any announcement from companies, it is fair to assume they will not tell you everything in one go... when you do an overview of the prolifercation of 'messages' released, you can sometimes see the direction they are heading. To be honest, IF LL aren't considering releasing the serverside code, then from a business point, it's difficult to see how they can survive the future. I think if you read more of the announcements, you will find LL stating that they do not see themselves as a server farm/data center in the future.


LOL... I inserted the word 'almost' into the sentence. Imagine a corporation like IBM, who have some of the most powerful computer systems in the world, getting their hands on the serverside code to host their own sims.... do you think they would limit their work to a poltry 1,000+ prims?

Don't get me wrong - I'd love to play around in a sim being hosted on some monster machine.

Maybe.. I think sims are more network bound than compute bound - it's a question of getting all the data to users more than it is keeping track of what's what.

Read somewhere recently, Zero Linden's office transcript maybe, that the 15k prim limit per sim was decided based on communication costs, not processing costs. Also, read somewhere else, that one of the most expesive tasks that a sim has is generating the map picture..

They needen't go open source to back away from being the service provider, merely sell the executable or even license the source to specific companies.