New World Notes

Fifty Linden Fridays This Weekend: Ice Cream Fans from Astralia & Other Adorable, Sexy, Stylish SL Offers -- Click Here to Shop, Teleport, and BUY

Linden Lab's future may now be up in the air, but the legendary and miraculously sustainable Fifty Linden Fridays for Second Life shoppers goes on. Here's this weekend's offers, starting with this face-punchingly adorable item above: Ice cream fans for the blistering Summer from Astralia -- click here to get them at the store.

Not cute enough for you? Then how about these holdable plushie with a complimentary crown:

This pair from Cosmic Dust: Click here to teleport and shop.

Many more FLF fashion, housewares, and other random coolness offerings below, with teleports to take your consumerist avatar ass there:

The Economics of Fifty Linden Fridays -- Or, Why Dozens of SL Merchants Willingly Sell Items for the L$ Equivalent of Twenty Cents

The legendary Fifty Linden Fridays shopping extravaganza, in which top SL brands offer select items for a mere L$50 (i.e. about 20 cents), has been running since 2009.  But it only just occurred to me recently: How the hell does this even make any economic sense?

Or as regular reader Patchouli Woolhara recently commented:

After the initial costs of tier, tooling, marketing, blogotex access, customer support, and hours worked, the marginal cost of these products is close to zero on the merchant's side if the sale is done purely in-world. 

Probably a lot less than zero, actually -- surely most merchants must lose money from FLF?

Not exactly, according to FLF creator and manager OMGWTF Barbecue (whose avatar name I just goddamn adore).

"Partly, FLF brings people to their mainstores," she tells me via Discord. "People might be discovering their store for the first time, and checking out their other products, which is super valuable! On top of that, it's a little special treat for people who are already your customers, something to look forward to. The creator might reduce the price to L$50, but it's likely they'll be able to sell more based on the co-op nature of the event."

She's talking about the power of cross-promotion across brands:

Fifty Linden Fridays: Coolest Deals & Teleports for Shopping This Weekend!

Here's some select items from this week's legendary Fifty Linden Fridays shopping extravaganza, in which top SL brands offer select items for a mere L$50 (i.e. about 20 cents). Above is a seriously cool working bubble gun from BALACLAVA!! -- click here to teleport there to buy.

A couple more cool featured items and the other FLF store links below:

Second Life Usage Now Higher Than Its 2007 Hype Level Period?

Interesting comment from Amanda Dallin, reflecting on SL's recently reported "pandemic boost": 

If the definition of a monthly active user has remained the same then the comparison to the peak in 2007 is valid. Actually there were likely more than 350,000 new registered users a month in 2007 when SL hit the peak of 1.1 million MAU so the number of returning users could be about the same or higher than in 2007 using your math and logic.

This sounds right. 2007 saw a lot more churn due to massively promoted events like a cross-over experience for the television show CSI, mostly from people who were unable to install the program or get past the orientation. However, the definition of a monthly active user has definitely changed since 2007 -- back then, Linden Lab would mainly refer to "Total Residents", i.e. anyone who signed up for an account, whether or not they even installed the program and went in-world.

The definition that hasn't changed is the amount of concurrent users, and that is indisputably much larger now than it was in 2007:

"Pandemic Boost" Reverses Decline of Second Life Monthly Active Users

Interesting tweet from NBC Senior Business Reporter Ben Popken, citing Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg: Since the pandemic, Second Life has seen monthly active users (or MAU) grow from 700,000 to now 900,000. That's good news for the SL community - but how good depends on the definition of a monthly active user:

"MAU represents all unique users who log in to Second Life in a given month," company spokesman Brett Linden tells me. "This includes newly registered, returning, or reengaged users. Newly registered users who do not log in are not included in our MAU calculation."

 

The surprising thing to me is this: Second Life MAU was at 800,000 in 2017 (also according to Linden Lab), so since then, usage has continued to fall, to beneath 700,000 before the pandemic hit.

 

Also, Second Life has reported attracting 350,000 monthly registrations on average, so that too must be factored into this MAU number:

Now in Sinespace: Adjust Clothing Tint in Real Time With Color Wheel Feature -- Plus Creator Tips from Gaby of PrettyDeceased

The Eris Bodycon is a new strapless leather dress in the shop of Sinespace (an NWN media partner) which includes a new-ish feature -- the ability to adjust the tint of a clothing item in real time to a near infinite degree, using a color wheel user interface. (See above.)

Created by Gaby, owner of the PrettyDeceased brand, the color wheel feature has actually been part of Sinespace for some time.

 “But current clothing isn’t taking advantage of that,” she tells me, “so I decided to make an outfit that is properly set up to fully use the material tinting option.”

She even wrote this tutorial here for other creators to incorporate the existing color wheel option into their own items.

Gaby also sells clothing on the Second Life marketplace under her PrettyDeceased brand, so has some insight on the color change differences from world to world.

“Sinespace does it in a more in-depth way and not just like a surface tinting, as in SL. In SL, you have a texture for your item and the tinting option; now if you try to make it black you will just cover the texture and lose details like shadow etc… 

“If you have a correctly set up item in Sinespace that has a normal map and an ambient occlusion map; the game will respect each map no matter the color. As a matter of fact, except for the pattern options, the tintable dress doesn’t have a texture at all. The final texture, or what you see, it’s brought to you live directly there.”

Gaby started creating content for Sinespace earlier this year, and has tips and insights for other SL content creators who might want to try their hand on the Unity-based platform:

Racist Slurs Being Used as Search Tags by Some SL Marketplace Vendors; Linden Lab Investigating

New World Notes contributor Cajsa Lilliehook just pointed me to this Second Life forum thread of users complaining that the SL Marketplace allows racist slurs to be used as product tags -- and that some vendors are taking advantage of that to advertise virtual world content promoting racial stereotypes. I've been able to confirm this is indeed happening; an extremely unpleasant thing to research, especially now. (Screengrab below the break, with obvious content warnings.)

This should not be the case, as original poster Aemeth Lysette puts it:

Little by little, SL has changed for the better, but I still see racist slurs used as tags on Marketplace for various products. This should be stated in the TOS as being disallowed, so we can report items that return when you search these tags. Second Life should not be a place that operates on any facet of hate. Not even for the sake of "free speech". This isn't a country--it's a virtual world run by a corporation.

She wrote that last Sunday. Just a few hours ago, a Linden Lab staffer responded in the same thread:

Second Life's Virtual World Unable to Grow Further, For Now -- Pandemic & Cloud Migration to Blame, Says Linden Lab

SL land grid circa 2018, photo by Daniel Voyager

There once was a virtual world that kept growing and growing (and often shrinking along the way), with dozens of new islands and continents suddenly emerging, seemingly from the digital ocean, every month. But then in the real world, a global pandemic caused many to seriously reconsider how they spent their leisure time, and return their attention to that aging virtual world. Which in the meantime, was moving away from the old way of existing, on a network of thousands of connected servers, and go instead into the cloud.  And then those two factors coming together at once caused a major interruption, and stopped the world from growing. (For now.)

Or as Linden Lab just put it:

Second Life is in the process of migrating from our existing dedicated servers to a cloud hosting service. That migration has already moved a number of the most important services and databases, but we are not quite ready to host simulators in the cloud. We have a crack team working on that and are making lots of progress, but there are significant changes needed to make sure that we can provide the performance, stability, and security required. When that process is complete we will have a nearly unlimited region capacity, but until then we are constrained by the size of our existing server fleet.

While our migration project has been underway for some time, even our most optimistic business projections did not anticipate a surge of the magnitude we have seen in recent weeks for additional regions. While we planned for growth driven by improvements to Second Life and other factors, we didn't expect demand to be created by a global pandemic.

As a result, we are in the unfortunate position of hitting the maximum capacity of our “old” servers until the “new” cloud servers are fully operational.

And so if you want new land, Linden Lab recommends renting it from an SL land baron -- or renting mainland territory from Linden Lab itself.  In any case, it is an unfortunate hiccup for Second Life's prospects, which was starting to see more usage and land ownership in the wake of the pandemic:

Linden Lab "Very Profitable Company" With Sansar Gone, CEO Tells Engadget, Says Cloud Deployment & Other Improvements to Second Life Still in Works

Good long Engadget interview with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg just posted, who addresses much (if not all) the speculation around the recent acquisition of Sansar by an unknown company called Wookey, and how it will affect the future of Second Life. I've heard much Internet chatter that Linden Lab or even SL itself is now facing dire times, but in contradiction to that, Ebbe is ebullient:

With Sansar off its books, Linden Lab is now "a very profitable company," according to Altberg. "Second Life is an older, very established cash machine that works really well, and right now, we're seeing some tremendous growth happening as we speak. Whereas Sansar is a VC, more long term, need-more-investment-type-of-thing. Mixing those two within one small studio like Linden Lab was kind of tricky, so it was easier to have them go separate."

...  Linden Lab, meanwhile, is going to double down on Second Life. The company is currently in the middle of moving its cloud-based infrastructure to a third-party platform. "Instead of having to nurture and build and maintain our own infrastructure for a lot of things, we're going to be able to rely on someone else doing it for us," Altberg explained. Linden Lab is also working on a number of user-facing improvements, such as the ability to customise worlds and "trade environments in ways they haven't been able to do before."

Good to know the cloud deployment of SL is still happening, though kind of odd that it's moving to an unspecified "third-party platform", when the project was originally specified as going to Amazon Web Services.

As for Wookey, the mystery of what it is and how it will turn Sansar into "a new generation of online AR/VR experiences" (Linden Lab's words) remains, though I suppose Ebbe drops a few hints there:

Flickr Forbids Free Account Users From Promoting Any Commercial Activity -- Including Virtual World Commerce from Second Life

We talked about how Flickr has been pushing its users to go Pro to stay in business, and now the company is apparently stepping up that pressure, forbidding free users from posting images which promote any commercial activity -- not just real world commerce, but virtual world commerce too. That move has roiled the huge community of Second Life users who rely on Flickr for sharing their virtual world screenshots, much of which feature SL fashion. 

"For free accounts," as a Flickr representative recently informed an SL content creator (see screengrab), "linking to a store in Second Life is considered commercial activity. Linking to a blog that links to a store is also considered commercial activity."

Many SLers are upgrading to Pro accounts while grumbling; others are vowing to no longer include any links in their Second Life fashion images on Flickr, and just list store names in the credits. Some leading fashion brands in SL, which typically offer free content to bloggers who feature their works, are no longer stipulating that their blog images be posted to Flickr.

Whether this is a good way for Flickr to stay afloat is subject to debate, but it's notable that the Second Life community is large enough on the image sharing platform that the company is actively setting policy around virtual world commerce: