Sitearm Madonna has a great set of high-res photos from SLCC 2011, shot by Richard Finkelstein (SL Leko Littlebird), like this one above, with Rod Humble talking about the future of Second Life. One thing you won't see much of in those photos from the Second Life Community Convention: People actually using Second Life. I've been to four SLCCs so far (2005, 2006, 2009, 2011), and this is the first one where I noticed a serious lack of SLCC attendees logged into SL, so they could share the experience with people in-world. In previous conferences, it was pretty typical to see a number of laptops propped open with SL running for this very reason. Maybe it's just me, but this year, I genuinely didn't notice even one of them, certainly not at the major Linden keynotes, where they once were out in force.
What's the deal? My guess: Social media has totally supplanted SL as a communication channel in real world contexts like this. While you didn't see many (or any) SLCC attendees logged into SL, you did see a lot of them using smartphones and tablets to send Tweets and other social media messages about SLCC to other SL users who were also on those networks. If I'm right, I'd interpret this as just an inevitable adjustment, since social media provides an easier, more effective, and more portable many-to-many communication platform. Now that SL's web profiles are easily linked to Twitter, we'll probably this shift even more.
Just my immediate take; would love to get other views from fellow SLCC attendees. And be sure to check out Mr. Littlebird's photos.
Viewer 2 and 3 require a freaking workstation to operate..how many of those did you see being lugged around eh?
people lug around phones and light laptops..neither use SL (anymore for laptops that is)
maybe LL will buy all attendees a 1000 dollar laptop next year so that you can see them in use.
Posted by: bongo | Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 11:08 AM
I dunno, I can run Viewer 2 on my 3 year old craptop with no graphics CPU, at least well enough to chat and IM (which is what people mainly used it for, in past SLCCs.)
Posted by: Hamlet Au | Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 11:29 AM
For how long though? Running SL on my powerful macbook drains the battery in a few hours.
Posted by: Robustus Hax | Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 12:13 PM
Hamlet,
I really wanted to login to SL during SLCC. Here are the main reasons that come to mind why I didn't:
1. Wifi, wifi, wifi, and wifi
a) I didn't have the password at first (and didn't know if it was available to all attendees -- which can be very expensive)
2. I didn't want to overload sims in SL and degrade their experience
3. SL doesn't run that well on less-than-super-highspeed wifi
4. As someone said earlier, not being able to plug into power means your battery is dead fairly quickly.
If we had been given any encouragement to login, I would have made every effort to do so. But I assumed for the reasons above that it might not be that good of an idea!
It was not because I didn't want to -- I certainly did. I thought it was more polite not to, but it's entirely possible I was mistaken. ;-)
Chimera Cosmos (aka Liz Dorland)
Posted by: Chimera Cosmos | Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 12:24 PM
;0 it would be wonderful if there was an additional login option, like 'location' that were 'preferred preferences' - your own personal lowest/med/high that you like to set. and be able to switch between them on the fly, if not only at login...
Posted by: Nyoko Salome | Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 03:26 PM
1. One reason NOT to use SL, when at a live conference, is that, well, it is live and there are lots of things going on to distract and engage you.
2. One reason TO use SL when at a live conference is to oblige your Kind Generous Track Leader *ahem* who asks you to take comments and questions from the SL audience to feed to the RL speaker. I don't want to brag about any one track *COMMERCE&MARKETING* but we had Kind Generous Live Attendees in my room who did that for our speakers and we all appreciated that VERY much.
3. And if you want to reach out with YOUR commentary to your Remote Audience, like Wagner, well, like he said, it's faster and easier to post directly by social media, which usually work OK even on slow hotel public wireless.
Welcome to the expanding set of tools and channels for human creative expression!
Posted by: Sitearm | Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 03:41 PM
All arguments were already mentioned ... it's just not possible anymore to log into SL in such a situation since 2, 3 years.
but as you sneaked around to see what people write on their cellphones :P ... maybe they all were logged into SL with the phone-app !!!!
Posted by: Laro | Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 09:29 PM
A lot of people watched from inworld, and a lot of people spoke and were interviewed from inworld, so, SL was more than utilized.
Posted by: Metacam Oh | Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 05:24 AM
Why were there not more people there? Cost. The recession is a convention killer.
As for craptops? Sims engineered with mesh (really planned and engineered like a video game) will look perfectly fine on most craptops. I am not sure if that will ever happen until a couple years out but it is going to be totally possible.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 07:56 AM
I'm interested in such offer,The sound quality in these podcasts is really poor. I feel bad about complaining about something that is free, but I think it is important.
Posted by: Hermes Birkin | Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 06:15 AM