SecondLifeGrid.net ???

For the most part, there are two groups of different minded people in SL. SL is differentiating between the two and are implementing different marketing approaches to both.

In Short;

The Grid: The real world business platform. Conferences, meetings, definitely pro-voice, techies, education. The "this is the real me I don't RP" people. Very few AVI's in this group will be intricately fleshed out. They will, for the most part, not be far removed in appearance from the average "newbie" look. Their interest will not be so much to develop and/or clothe their AVI's in the latest SL fashions and go to clubs to socialize and dance with friends, as it will be to simply get in-world and network, make contacts, build projects, conduct business.

SL World: The Game. Go Shopping, develop your AVI, go to clubs, dance, socialize with friends. Immersionists. Role Players. The "I don't mix my RL with SL" people. More apt to be anti-voice. In it for the fun crowd.

It sounds to me as though they're just rephrasing what they've already said - we have this grid, come play in it.

However, now that about two million actual people have come to play in it (the rest seem to be either people who try it once and leave, or griefer alts), they can now market this pool of collected humanity as a market for advertisers, and as a platform for business development. I think this new web site and a new approach for raising corporate awareness of Second Life as a platform is all about that.

Most real world businesses that use Second Life are doing so as an extension, rather than as a foundation, of their companies. I think this is probably where the real money in Second Life is likely to be coming in terms of where Linden Labs wants to be in the next two or three years.

Of course, this is all my opinion as an SL citizen - I don't work for Linden Lab, nor do I run a company that uses SL as part of its business strategy.

I think I tend to agree...though, as is usually the case with my opinions, they are based more on gut-level knee-jerks than on any compilation of facts and numbers..it just feels right. I also think that this is, perhaps, a means for Linden to be able to better-tailor their technical and marketing messages to more folks needs, as I (and others) had been yelling about some weeks/months back.

This way, instead of one published blog/message needing to be all things to all people, they can write two messages, one for the "grid" (hardcore techies, developers, corporates) and one for the "SL-resident" (your Shopper/clubber/dancer/friend/immersionists). And for those of us that are like me (striving to have toes dipped in both pools at same time), we can read the resident/"Second Life" messages, then go to the techie/corporate "grid" message and (if you're like me) struggle to make sense of that, as well.

Otherwise, being sensitive to (and satisfying) everyone's needs was bound to be an ongoing and extremely time/resource-intensive nightmare.

What I find particularly appealing about open-sourcing both the UI and (evenutally) the server coding:

1) For those who are just never ever happy with anything, and who always have a better way to manage the client experience, and have access to high-end network resources/servers...well, now, heh, they can put their money where their mouths are...run their own SL-dedicated (?) servers their own way, make the fixes they've always wanted to see made to the server/UI system, and, for the first time, provide LL with some real competitive incentive to accelerate optimization of *their* resources;

and 2) Being on a shoestring SL budget myself, and knowing that if I am in the right place at the right time, I just might score an older-class server of my own that would be functionally compatible with SL/LL, albeit, perhaps, a bit clunkier...but this DOES give folks the potential to do more differently.

My Op-Ed: I know there are those of you that will scoff at this last, but hey, how much front end performance would each of us be willing to give up to: a)have a server that we never had to wait to have rolled back or reset? b)that we could just walk over to and re-start instead of waiting hours? c)and never have to pay tier to use, and d) on which we could effectively set AND ENFORCE, reasonably adult-like TOS and AR rules? The answer will be different for each of us, and until now, with LL holding all the resource cards...the answer has been that my questions are irrelevant...well now, they are not!

Well, there's a whole huge group of people left out of this scenario - and that is the group of people who built the world in the first place. It includes all those who spend their time on SL building objects and providing services for use by other residents within SL, either for profit or not.

In other words, the SL business people. Who, like as not, also have a "life" on SL, just like the casual players.

So there aren't just two groups: (1) the "real" people, representing real-world businesses, and (2) the casual players playing a game, buying clothes, going to clubs, etc.

But I'm afraid that LL has also forgotten the very real business people already here, just because our business is in serving other avatars. They seem to be looking at all residents now as mere chum for real-world business advertisements.

Within-SL businesses got pretty big play from LL for a long time, too, but apparently aren't very important anymore.

coco

That would be certain death in the longterm for LL... as we have all experienced, one of the weakness's of LL is running the data center.. they have admitted that they see themselves as the 'service provider' from a software development perspective.

If they 'sold off' the hardware element, under the licensing deal for the host software, the revenues would be huge, allowing them to develop the serverside software.. its the same business model for the ilkes of Microsoft... they don't provide systems/hardware as an only provider, their core business is to allow you to choose the hardware and carry those overheads, they provide the means for that hardware to actually mean something.

As connection speeds grow, the internet will resemble, in todays terms' a Intranet style connection, negating the distance issues between core servers that form the SL network. In its current form, whilst LL may internally be able to support connections between its servers, it already has taken the first steps towards enlarging that inter-connection, by resiting some of its servers in other states, and comtemplating a European server setup... all this is the forerunner to the growing development of servers running SL across the world via the internet.

Bill Gates, going back on his previous statement of the internet just being a passing phase, said in a press conference, that Vista now stretched the once thought of boudaries of the company Intranet, to encompass the world wide web as a secure form of company interconnectivity.. in essence the internet is now being considered the 'broad intranet' by corporates.