New World Notes

Linden Lab Buys User-Made Commerce System Too Valuable to the Second Life Community To Fail

Here's the latest lesson for metaverse platforms:

• If you give your user base incredibly powerful content creation and scripting systems, some of them will create in-world products and services that become so popular with the user community, they'll effectively become integral to the virtual world.* 
• That also means if these user creators were to suddenly quit (boredom, business, sudden death, etc), the entire virtual world economy will feel the shockwaves.
• So, congrats: Your user-made product or service is now an official part of the platform. Get out your checkbook.

Latest example just announced today: Linden Lab acquired Casper Tech, creator of various virtual world commerce services (rental systems, vendors, etc.), run by a mostly-anonymous Second Life user known by his avatar "Casper Warden". (Interview below.)

"My feeling is that this is a risk reduction move," longtime SLer Da5id Kronfeld observes. "So many people rely on Casper that the service suddenly vanishing represents a significant risk to the SL economy."

Variations of this have happened to Second Life before, with (for example) the L$ open exchange system and the SL Marketplace ecommerce website originally starting as user-made platforms.

"I suppose it shows they're still keen to keep Second Life going as a project if they're investing money in some aspects of it," Sler Natalie observes. (Then again, it's probably more cost effective to buy CasperTech rather than hiring 2-3 Linden Lab engineers to recreate its functionality.) Echoing other veterans, she suspects Linden Lab will adding extra costs to use CasperTech's tech: "I can see Caspervend being a subscription thing, maybe bundled into a Creators tier which would be Premium Plus AND Caspervend etc."

All that to one side, it seems like a necessary move (and much congrats to Casper). That said, it does feel like another duct tape fix on top another duct tape fix, with the Second Life platform kept online by successive layers of short-term hacks, since it would be too costly to do what's really necessary: Overhaul the entire thing.

On that front, very longtime Second Life user Allegory Malaprop has an excellent and salty rant:

Virtual Home Decor Ideas from an SL Blog Called... Clique This

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Less Is More is a recent post on Clique This. The title caught my eye first because often less is more, but we seldom see less in a SL decor post. Some rooms are very beautiful but it feels like there is no room for people in them. Not this room. It’s spare without a dozen things on th floor to trip over and to collect dust. I love th art on the wall and clean and simple furnishings. If I were to ever put a television in the bedroom, I guess I would like it in a shelving unit like this on, but I don’t think I would ever want a TV in the bedroom. That’s where I read! 

• Bee Designs – Full Moon Bedroom
• InkMe – Aoki Living Room Set
• Mithral – Philodendron Melanochrysum
• Apple Fall – New York Studio Apartment

For something for the outdoors, click here:

When Second Life Goes Offline, Someone Wears Shrek Ears. Behind the Scenes at Linden Lab With Honeycomb CTO Charity Majors

Pictured: Ms. Majors near Linden Lab's erstwhile Brighton UK office. Yes, her shirt says "Will work for L$"

Charity Majors has an excellent blog post on creating culture and rituals within a tech company's engineering team, and knows whereof she writes. She's CTO and co-founder of Honeycomb, a leading observability provider -- I.E., The service your company uses if it has a highly complex computer network and you want to see in real time across the whole system what's working well and what's not. Charity cut her teeth at Linden Lab -- a company with an insanely, wackily complex computer network -- and shares some of the insider rituals that the Linden engineers practiced, to keep up morale and keep Second Life online and running as smoothly as (relatively) possible.

Which brings us to Shrek Ears:

SHREK EARS

We had a matted green felt headband with ogre ears on it, called the Shrek Ears. The first time an engineer broke production, they would put on the Ears for a day. This might sound unpleasant, like a dunce cap, but no — it was a rite of passage. It was a badge of honor! Everyone breaks production eventually, if they’re working on something meaningful.

If you were wearing the Shrek Ears, people would stop you throughout the day and excitedly ask what happened, and reminisce about the first time they broke production. It became a way for 1) new engineers to meet lots of their teammates, 2) to socialize lots of production wisdom and risk factors, and 3) to normalize the fact that yes, things break sometimes, and it’s okay — nobody is going to yell at you.

So that's an inside insight for Second Life users. Whenever the virtual world was offline or constantly crashing, chances are someone in San Francisco was wandering around the office with green felt ears on their head. Those ears were worn, Charity tells me, "[L]iterally every outage."

But it wasn't a mandatory hazing ritual, she quickly adds: "The spirit of it was always very light hearted and fun. It wasn't to shame people, it was to congratulate people. You took down production? Congratulations, you're finally one of us now. Our thesis was that if you never took down prod, you probably weren't moving fast enough or taking enough risks. (Second Life was a crazy complex distributed system, even by today's standards, at a time before devops or IaaC or any modern tooling. The world was much more fragile one.)" 

I remember Shrek Ears well, because wearing them began as a ritual during my own time at Linden Lab, from 2003-2006. In fact, they matriculated from the engineering team so that random people across the company would wear them after they goofed up in their own department. (I even put them on for awhile after I messed up a New World Notes detail, but I don't think anybody noticed.)

Speaking of Second Life downtimes, Charity told me about some major incidents from her time on the engineering team, from 2004-2010. Strap in, we're getting into the technical weeds, sharing a Shrek Ears photo, and talking about "Transactpocalypse" too:

Second Life for Web / Mobile Indefinitely Delayed Again (Again)

Good SL-for-smartphones and the web scoop from Daniel Voyager, who took furious notes at Linden Lab's recent in-world web user group meeting, where Reed Linden admitted bringing Second Life to the web/mobile is going a lot more glacially than anticipated (watch at around 32:20):

I would say it's coming slowly; there's there's a lot of struggles, but it's not a straightforward project. No, I don't have any hint what it would look like. I mean there's a few that already exist, that are third party implementations. And one of the big struggles that we're having is whether we partner with one of those, or we try to build something in-house, and if we try and build something in-house, will it be as good as you know, these other implementations?

Linden Lab is also considering a streaming solution (a la the late lamented OnLive), but, says Reed, "you're paying by the hour with those, so there's just a lot out to work out there".

Reed mentions an official version "might" look like Lumiya, the extremely popular third party Android app that was published about a decade ago. The entire answer seems so preliminary that it seems like little substantial has been done to bring Second Life to the web/mobile, nearly a year after an iOS implementation was put on pause. It's pretty mind boggling. 

Daniel's take:

Linden Lab Bringing Back Second Life Cloud Streaming for the Web?

What would you do if you could run #SecondLife in a browser?

— AlexaLinden (@AlexaLindenLL) July 18, 2022

Alexa Linden, director of Product at Linden Lab, just posted this casual but tantalizing question to Twitter: "What would you do if you could run #SecondLife in a browser?"

Which is a great and highly specific question to ask!

Second Life has actually done at least two official trials running Second Life through cloud streaming -- first to the web in 2010, via Gaikai, and then (in a very ambitious rollout) in 2014, with OnLive. Look:

SLer Survey: Will You Upgrade Your Account to Premium Plus?

Note: For best results, take survey on a laptop/desktop!

Now that we've had a week to digest the new Premium Plus offering (details infograpic-ed below), here's a survey for the money question: Will you as an SL user actually upgrade?

Angry Second Life Creator Offers Free "My Body My Choice" Tattoo to Feminist Avatars

Now available for free in Second Life thanks to Edyn Starlight -- an abortion rights avatar tattoo. Edyn writes:

I don't typically like to get political, not on the best or even the worst of days, but Roe vs. Wade being overturned is fucking ridiculous... In support of those affected by this, I'm releasing this tattoo as a free gift, and it will remain free forever. I'm not a US resident, but I have so many friends whom have been there for my entire life that are affected by this decision.

Click here to teleport to Edyn's mainstore in Hamamura to get a copy.

Are there other abortion rights events and content in Second Life -- especially those which benefit real life orgs and women/girls impacted by the end of Roe? Please post details in Comments, and I'll highlight some in another post.

By the way, I've also asked Linden Lab if the company plans to make any policy announcement around the gutting of Roe and the coming of anti-abortion laws throughout much of the US. Specifically:

Coming Soon to Second Life: "Premium Plus" Subscriptions Offering Free Texture Uploads, Expanded Land Tier/Group Limits, Much More. Watch Here!

Starting at around 24.00, Linden Lab's VP of Product, known in-world as Patch Linden, teased out a new Second Life product offering coming (hopefully) on SL's 19 anniversary of June 23: Premium Plus.

Offerings for the monthly subscription include:

• Texture upload fees eliminated
• Land tier expanded to 2048 square meters
• Up to 140 groups
• L$3000 sign-up bonus, L$650 regular stipend
• Special support phone line
• Group creation fees reduced from L$100 to L$10

All yours with a special introductory offer of $24.99, then moving to $29.99/month or $249/year. A pretty solid offer for core content creators, who end up paying quite a lot to Linden Lab.

Gorgeous Aurelia has a good comparison explainer here, with an infographic to boot. The full interview with Saffia Widdershins includes some interesting tidbits beyond that, including:

Linden Lab Hires First CMO. Is It Good or Bad That He Has Little or No Metaverse-Related Experience?

This is the biggest executive move by Linden Lab since Philip Rosedale returned as an advisor last January:

Second Life hired its first-ever CMO as the race for the metaverse heats up...

Linden Research, Inc., the developer of pioneering metaverse Second Life and parent company of the newly launched virtual economy payment processing platform Tilia, announced the expansion of its leadership team with two key C-suite hires. Steven Feuling, a more than 30 year senior marketing veteran, has joined as Linden's first Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Peter Capraro, who's held security and IT roles across his 25 year career, has joined as the company's first Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)...

Feuling has worked with and for some of the world's best known brands including Microsoft, Bloomberg LLC, The Walt Disney Company, 20th Century Fox, E*Trade and General Motors as well as several successful start-ups. 

Business Insider story here (reg req.), full PR here. As that passage above and his own LinkedIn profile suggests, Feuling has quite a lot of experience in media and adtech firms.... but little or no direct experience working on metaverse platforms, games, virtual worlds, or other related technology.

Not necessarily a criticism! I'd weigh the pros and cons this way:

Second Life Finally Adds Game-Like Achievement Scores -- And E-mails Them to Users!

Apparently it's my 16th Rez Day in Second Life today, because I just got this nice e-mail from Linden Lab:

Second Life is fun, weird, and always evolving, but the magic ingredient is YOU. The vibrant worlds you build and the sense of community you provide for others is simply priceless. Here's to another year of imagination and experiencing the impossible. -The Second Life Team

Even more notable, however, is the infographic at the bottom of that e-mail -- see at upper right, click to embiggenate.

Yes: User achievement scores. Comparing my usage milestones in terms of total log-ins, teleports taken, and days logged in within the last year, to that of the average SL user.

Or to put all that in virtual world terminology: Game mechanics.

Not sure when Linden Lab started sending these e-mails out, but this is something I've been writing about and advocating, for well-over a decade: Game mechanics that subtly nudge players to be more regularly active in the virtual world. I just mentioned this today to Parmy Olson of Bloomberg as a feature that Second Life sorely needed (but didn't yet have) to grow out of its niche.

This is a solid first step, and "Regions visited" and "Teleports" are great metrics to start with, as they'll encourage SLers to explore the world more. (Most long-time users don't even do that much anymore.)

Next updates to this? A couple jump right out at me: