New World Notes

Best Days & Times to Publish Blog Posts: Between Tuesday-Friday, 1-3pm & 5-7pm! (Which Means Pithy is Best)

Since Friday is the day I devote (most) New World Notes blog coverage to Second Life bloggers, here's some good general blogging advice: According to my pal Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb (which gets massive traffic) the best times and days to publish posts for generating the most page views and reader discussion is between 1pm-3pm PST and 5pm-7pm PST, between Tuesday and Friday, with Thursday the best day. (With Monday and the weekend a relative dead zone.) Basically, blogs are most read when people in the US are on their lunch break at work, or when they're just winding down their work day. This time frame should also be a reference for the kind of posts that are most likely to be read and discussed: Pithy and bite-sized, appropriate for short downtimes, as opposed to verbose and wordy. I notice many Second Life bloggers post on the weekend, with some going way over a thousand words. But the longer a blog post is, the less impact and readers it's likely to have. And when one posts on the weekend, as Marshall puts it, "nobody cares." 

But what if you can only blog on the weekend, or you have a lengthy post you're dying to write? My takeaway advice:

SL's Famed Crooked House Saved by Silent Benefactor

[Click here to teleport to the Crooked House's new location in SL]

The Crooked House, the brilliant Second Life creation of Seifert Surface, a Stanford-trained mathematician inspired by Robert Heinlein's classic short story about a house that exists in four dimensions (or a "tesseract"), has been saved from imminent removal. Citing SL's high tier fees, Seifert had planned to remove the sim which housed the House next month, but a benefactor who is an educator in SL quietly stepped in and found a place where it could be moved. Now the House lives on here.

Why did Seifert's anonymous supporter step in?

When Will We Get Cloud Deployment of 3D Worlds? When Gaikai & OnLive Get Big (If They Ever Do)

Gaikai, the game demo cloud-streaming service, just entered into a major deal with Walmart, the gargantuan retail chain, which is good news for anyone waiting for virtual worlds on the cloud. Last November, Linden Lab tested Second Life deployed on Gaikai (screencap above) shortly after Blue Mars did a similar cloud-streaming demo using another service. Since then, however, we haven't heard much about cloud deployment from this space, even though it's a great solution to 3D worlds' high barriers to entry (hardware, installation, etc.)

So when will we get immersive 3D worlds on the cloud? I haven't heard anything official from either Linden Lab or Blue Mars' Avatar Reality since then, but I have talked with a lot of techs who know way more about cloud streaming than me. Based on those conversations, my thinking is this:

Cloud deployment is currently too expensive to use for a free-to-play 3D world, and so the service will first need to gain a larger audience, which will in turn drive per-user deployment costs down.

That's why Gaikai's Walmart deal is so significant. Up until now, while the tech industry has shown a lot of enthusiasm for cloud computing in general, the two major consumer-level services, Gaikai and OnLive, haven't shown much traction. Check out this Google Trends chart, tracking "Gaikai" and "OnLive", versus "cloud computing":

Thursday Machinima: Broadway Showtune Meets Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

Broadway showtunes are charming and all, but Aposiopesis Fullstop apparently thought, "You know what this song needs? More flesh-eating zombies and radioactive fallout." Here's the result:

Now that's some Broadway I can get into. As you probably guessed already, Fullstop shot it in The Wastelands, Second Life's large post-apocalyptic community, for a Wastelands machinima contest put on by NeoBokrug Elytis -- see all the entries here. The winner is Steveke Wulluf's "The Last Seed: A Mutant Talks to the Plants", also worth a watch. "Somewhere That's Green" is a song from "Little Shop of Horrors", a show which was fairly warped to begin with, but I love how Aposiopesis Fullstop gives it a new after-life in Second Life. I bet Matt Stone and Trey Parker would love it too.

Duran Duran's Official Island in Second Life Finally Opens

[Click here to teleport to Duran Duran's island Azizi in Second Life]

Duran Duran's island in Second Life is now open as promised last week, and on a quick visit -- that's me above hovering, on the right -- it looks pretty cool: An island of four regions, there's a skyscraper the shape of lipstick, ski lifts and trams, and a traveling blimp bearing the band's Rio cover on the side. Created back in 2006, but never opened back then for mysterious reasons, you can indeed see signs of ancient (by Second Life standards) building styles. An even bigger mystery: No audio stream of Duran Duran music! But maybe that'll come later. In any case, after years of many fans waiting, the 80's pop band now has an official presence in Second Life. Which goes to show too: Empires of Apollo and Crete may fall, but unexpected things can still happen in an extraordinary world.

Sim Deathwatch: Minoan Empire, Another Featured Second Life Sim, Destined to Disappear July 6th

Click here to teleport to the Minoan Empire in Second Life (by July 6)

The Minoan Empire, a beautiful, relatively accurate historic Second Life recreation of the ancient civilization of Crete, will no longer exist in Second Life on July 6. As with the Lost Gardens of Apollo, which is also set to soon close, the Minoan Empire is a featured site in Linden Lab's Destination Guide, and I imagine, a very valuable potential resource for educators.

I recently confirmed this news with the sim's creator, Aeneas Anthony, who told me that the cost of supporting the sim and its monthly tier payments are no longer sustainable. He actually preferred I not blog about the end of the Minoan Empire at all, but in this case, I believe the news value is crucial, because it again emphasizes the hard reality of virtual reality:

Second Life's current land-based revenue model is not sustainable, and without serious changes to it or the overall health of the in-world economy (including new user growth), more sims like this will continue going away. I've heard the argument that sim owners should simply figure out ways to better monetize their estates, but that only points to another problem: Second Life's internal user-to-user Linden Dollar economy is not growing, so even sims with a solid revenue model are in danger. (And the lack of economic growth means competition between sim owners will grow ever more fierce and socially fractious, as they knife fight each other over the same consumers.)

Much thanks to Melissa Yeuxdoux for the tip, however unfortunate it may be. Another fan of the sim, Tikaf Viper, created this pretty beautiful machinima tribute to the region that will soon go away. Watch above.

Come See Me Speak About Facebook Credits at SF's All Facebook Conference - Here's a Discount Code!

Next week in San Francisco I'll be at the All Facebook Expo talking about Facebook Credits, the largest virtual currency in the world that's soon getting larger. Specifically, as it's listed in the program, "Facebook Credits: New Opportunities for Developers".

Get your boss to pay for it, and tell her you have a discount code to save 15%: Enter "AFESPKR" when you register. Hope to see you there!

Second Life Concurrency Represented in Real Time on 3D Globe; So WTF's Happening Off Madagascar? (UPDATED)

On my visit last Friday to Linden Lab's foyer, I noticed a spinning 3D globe on the wall, and I asked Peter Linden what it was, while I got a better look:

What it is, he told me, is a real time representation of Second Life concurrency throughout the globe. It's one of the coolest ways I've ever seen to show the truly global nature of SL's virtual community, and I suggested to Pete that they should release a version of it to the userbase. (He non-noncommittally said maybe, someday.) As you can see, you not only see Second Life's current concurrency (updated every hour), but the relative number of users logging in from various parts of the globe, with the blue dots represented as some users, and 3D lines of various size, as those numbers increase.

And then I noticed something odd, and said so:

High-Profile Performance Art in Second Life Subverted by Emergent Community, Force Field Drama, Robert Redford

Indie pioneer in film Bob Redford boggles at indie art pioneer in Second Life

In 2008, I wrote about "Invisible Threads: Sweatshop Jean Factory in Second Life", a mixed reality performance art project featured at the famed Sundance Film Festival. In it, two artists created a textile factory in Second Life, dubbed it Double Happiness Jeans, then invited Residents to roleplay as low wage, poorly-treated employees working on the line, while a foreman in a 19th century top hat oversaw them. At the time, I thought it was clever if overly-obvious satire of post-industrial capitalism in the digital age, somewhat at the expense of Second Life users. (I.E., "Haha you silly losers, willing to work in a virtual sweatshop for less than $1 an hour.") Now a recent talk in Brooklyn by one of the artists, Jeff Crouse, just uploaded by The Story Collider, gives us the rest of the story, and it's fascinating, surprising, and turns out much differently than what Crouse expected.

Set aside 15 minutes and watch below:

In essence, here's what happened:

What's Linden Lab Working on Beyond Its Peaceful Foyer?

Last Friday my friend the lovely and talented metaverse developer Ana Alves flew in from Portugal for a brief San Francisco visit, so we took some time to stop by the main office of Linden Lab, on Battery Street. Linden spokesman Peter Gray (pictured with Ana below) very generously arranged a last-minute meeting with Ana and I, on the proviso that we could not go beyond Linden Lab's entrance foyer. Which could have just meant the place was a mess and not ready for visitors, though I got the impression they were up there -- and down there, note the basement level -- cooking up some Awesome New Features. Which would be consistent with what I've heard from other Lindens in the last couple months: Big Things Are Coming.

Question is, what? I'm open to speculations. Also note that Peter Gray, whose avatar usually sports a giant fro, rocks a real life hairstyle that is remarkably and mysteriously slicked back: