Your2ndPlace

I'd mentioned it before - a false start - but upgrades are coming to Your2ndPlace.com this Friday. I won't promise much (so I won't be a liar), but I hope to add a lot of much needed functionality while working on the look and feel of the site.

The look and feel requires your input.

Feel free to comment between now and Friday about things you would like to see on Your2ndPlace.com. A few things:

• No forums are really expected, though they can be added at any time. If there is enough interest, we'll try them out.
• The colors will change - should we go outlandish or should we go more 'corporate'? I'm looking for a mix of both, so your input is welcome. We know Sarah will want at least some purple...
• The site will be down at least for an hour, at most for a day, while I get the core functionality reinstated.
• Coffee beans will be killed to assure the sanity of the guy-who-does-stuff. If you are a member of the 'Save the Coffee Beans Foundation', or any associated NGO, please rest assured that the guy-who-does-stuff could care less. :-)

I came across a blog which referenced this article by Ari Kaplan which discusses Second Life in the context of marketing for attorneys (an under-appreciated aspect of modern society, perhaps?). Within the article, I found this:

...Second Life makes people feel as if they have physically met one another, Lieberman says...

Just to clear the air here - I don't feel like I've physically met anyone on my friend list within Second Life. Maybe I have some exotic condition which doesn't permit me to feel that I have physically met people because I've come across a prim-haired digital representation of them, complete with animation overrides that go from the laughable to the grotesque.

Frankly, when I see a rockstar looking male avatar, I think of a balding middle aged man stumbling his way across the keyboard between bites of pizza. And no offense, ladies (those of you that are real), I think the same of all the Ms. Universe pageant entries in Second Life as well.... (I also think that all the women on Gorean sims are just men, which makes the whole thing extremely pathetic). I somehow know that people are not as they represent themselves in Second Life - but that perhaps the way they have themselves represented communicates what they want others to think of them.

Meanwhile, I'm a penguin most of the time. Go figure. I can tell you that in the real world I am not a penguin, and I don't burst into flames and spontaneously do back flips.

I do not think that people whose avatars are furry are really furry in real life. I may revise that opinion the second I encounter a large group of furry folk frolicking in Central Park (without costumes).

But that's what I think.

A while back, I remembered hearing something about Linden Lab's Showcase, and I recall being less than impressed. Initially, I thought that this would be something that would skew inworld businesses to anyone who, for all intents and purposes, is a favorite of a someone at a company which has always been found to be just a little more favorable to those it... likes. Be it a book on the front page of SecondLife.com, or ear-muffs that allow music to be played, or what have you. This, of course, is a travesty to all those many people out there who have never had the good fortune to be on the cover of a magazine, or gain some level of respect and/or notoriety by having a way to put letters together to form words to form sentences on a website.

But I forgot all of that. I logged in with an alternate avatar, and was poking around out of sheer.... boredom. The events list is, as always, clogged with lackluster events. Everyone wants our avatars to join their groups, reminiscent of Facebook. Everyone wants to give away freebies, or even in some cases sell them. The selling of freebies is something no one seems to care about anymore, perhaps because Linden Lab just doesn't... do anything about the DRM of Second Life to assure once something is free, it is always free.

So I looked in search and found the other tab. The one called, "Showcase". Without even thinking about all the stuff I wrote in the first paragraph here, I took a look.

The 'All' link is the default, and had some interesting things there... the other tabs also have some interesting things, and are almost decidedly not inworld business related. Whew. I was wrong. Maybe.

I found it odd that there was fashion listed there. I look up to the right, see the link to fashion and roll my eyes. It's what I thought. Linden Lab is playing fashion police and skewing fashion to the folks it would like to skew fashion toward.

Better late than never! Having just logged into Second Life, I found this in a notecard which is dealing with a performance today:

Date: 09 September 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Maedin Tureaud

Beginning this Friday, September 12, the Second Life Shakespeare Company (SLSC) presents a modern play to open their Autumn 2008 season. The play, One's a Pawn of Time, is a fast-paced and clever one-act play about relationship drama that may arise through hasty time travel. Written by Mike Dederian, the play is directed by Rob Knop (Prospero Frobozz in SL) and will feature the voice actors of Second Life residents Jeremy Jester, Lorne Harlequin, Kinji Lockjaw, and Maedin Tureaud.

Performed in Second Life, most of the shows will be free to attend, and audience members will be required to turn on the voice feature in order to hear the dialogue, though microphones must be strictly turned off. Two of the shows, promoted as "very low-lag", will require a ticket fee to limit the audience size. Set in the confluence of 4 island simulators, the SL Globe theatre is ideally situated to accommodate large audiences and stage performances that are as low-lag as possible. In keeping with SLSC convention, the set, costumes, and avatars are custom-made for the play. Ina Centaur, artistic director at SLSC, confirms the tailoring of details: "The set for the production continues the RL tradition of preserving the structure of the Globe stage in set design and also our SL tradition of extravagance in visuals."

While I've been testing and playing with Metaplace by learning to build KnowProSE_World (I'm reading up on LUA and scripted objects now), I haven't been logging into Second Life - but I've been keeping an eye on things.

I came across this video featuring Drew Carey:

It is a fairly realistic account of Second Life. But I have to wonder why I keep seeing/hearing the same people over and over and over and over and over again. It's not that I don't want to hear what these folks have to say - but honestly, can't someone actually bypass the usual suspects and get a more lucid account of Second Life? Maybe go talk to some people camping out? Or finding some new folk?

I also wonder if the whole 'moving lips' thing might be building inappropriate expectations. Avatars don't do that out of the box, and they also don't mouth words very well. How many people will think avatars can actually move their lips in synch with speech when, realistically, they can't?

I like Drew Carey. I'm a little more ambivalent about SecondLife these days, but I still like the premise of it (no matter how far people drift from it). But come on - with so many people in world, with such a rich user created environment, can't we do better than dragging the usual suspects out for a lineup?

After about 2 months without broadband and, therefore, access to Second Life in any meaningful way - I'm back. And I've been wandering around, bouncing from server to server even as network issues anchored me here and there. The client crashing, too, made me feel right at home. It was almost as though I had never left. In fact, it was exactly as if I never left. If sims were programmed to have tumbleweed blowing through when nothing is happening on it, I'm sure I would have seen lots of tumbleweed.

Mainland land prices are so low that I actually bought a 512 m² parcel yesterday just so I'd have a place to rez things - it cost me 2500 Linden. I was pleased to see that land prices are even lower today (1950 Linden dollars for the same size parcel). Behold the power of the Second Life land economy - better known as 'virtually gone'. I lost 2 bucks in one day and I didn't even invest in an Exchange... if anything, the land market is more of a ponzi scheme than anything that Linden Lab has banned - but it's a 'free market'. Funny, that.

So I wandered around. A Brazilian avatar with a translator accosted me as I found an avatar I liked (Brain from 'Pinky and the Brain') and asked me where to find employment. While tempted to tell him that the door next to his computer might be a good place to start, I told him to use the search button. He then tried to sell me a Dodge Viper for 190 Linden. I suppose I would have felt more inclined to help the guy out if his avatar didn't look like it got teleported in from Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.

Though I read the announcement on this last night, I held off on writing it for a couple of reasons:

1. I wanted to get a few questions answered.
2. I actually have stuff to do in RL which takes me outside and away from virtual worlds.

That said, I asked Bogart Beck more about the why of this. The truth is that the last time I checked (which was a while ago), Bogart Beck already had a very respectable share of SLCapex related things, so why take it further?

The answers were pretty solid. One reason is that Scott Nestler and Bogart Beck are so invested in SLCapEx that they wanted more control of the platform - and it follows that they want to make sure that SLCapEx maintains a steady keel in the long haul. All good reasons - it really is a vote of faith in SLCapEx, as well as SLWallet which may now have the finance to come to completion.

This is a pretty bold move - which is simply putting it mildly. The good news for investors is that this will also help alleviate SLCapEx debt and therefore share value.

Since I've been out of the loop for a while, I'm not sure what to think of this. On the surface, it looks good and perhaps even overdue. Yet it's the unexpected twists and turns of the metaverse - via policy and lack of it - that makes the virtual world exchanges such an interesting place.

Time always tells, and time moves faster in virtual worlds. Ask anyone who has run into a landbot. ;-)