• 05Dec

  It’s not for you.

  Musings 5 Comments

  Linden Lab announced yesterday that they’ll be starting Linden Homes a new land program to entice users into upgrading by providing premium users with a free 512 sq.m. mainland plot, including an unfurnished house. There will be some restrictions on the parcel, though: “the house cannot be removed and the parcels cannot be sold, joined, terraformed or divided. Events and classifieds cannot be created for these parcels; only Premium Members can own them, and only one per account.”

  I’ve heard some grumbling from various established Residents, along the lines of, “Why do they think I would want this?” Indeed, it’s a really weak incentive for existing premium users who are already established in Second Life. A small parcel you can’t sell, a house that you can’t change or remove, and no events or classified listings allowed? Pshaw! Who would want that, when you can own your own, fully featured and customizable land?

  Well, to all the people unimpressed with LL’s offering, allow me to point something out: It’s not for you. Or for me, or anyone else who has owned or rented land before.

  The Lindens don’t think we would want this. They probably don’t care much what we think about it. We’re simply not part of the target market for this program. For an established land owner to ask, “Why do they think I would want a Linden Home?”, is like a professional mountain biker scoffing, “Bah! This bike shop sells training wheels! Why do they think I would want training wheels?”

  If you want to evaluate the effectiveness of this plan, you must consider its goals. Jack Linden writes in the announcement:

  A key aim for the beta is to provide easy entry into inworld home ownership (especially for new Residents) while not competing with estate owners. These estates do an amazing job of providing quality experiences for Residents. We want to create an on-ramp so new Resident can learn how valuable and simple owning land can be, but then move naturally on to larger parcels elsewhere.

  The Linden Homes program is the spiritual successor of the ill-fated First Land program of years ago. Jack Linden wrote when the First Land program was discontinued, way back in February 2007:

  The First Land program was put in place to encourage land ownership for those moving up to Premium membership. Increasingly we have found that these cheap L$1 per meter parcels were not benefitting those people as intended. Because of the low price, they were being immediately sold, or bought via alts, purely for profit.

  So, the goals of this plan would seem to be:

  • Entice non-land-owners into upgrading to premium accounts.
  • Introduce more users to the benefits of land ownership.
  • Provide a safe and positive first experience with land ownership.
  • Encourage users to move on to full-fledged land ownership afterwards.
  • Prevent the new land from entering the commercial land market.
  • Avoid directly competing with estate owners and land rental businesses.

  We’ll see whether the plan will actually achieve these goals in the months to come, but I think there’s a very good chance that it will be successful. The Lindens have clearly put thought into this, and learned from the problems of the old First Land program — even the ones they didn’t mention directly, like the unattractive sprawling masses of tightly-packed “shoebox homes” that one would find all over the First Land areas.

  What’s more, there seem to be very few downsides, and few ways in which the plan could seriously backfire. Of course, many estate owners and landlords/ladies will probably stamp their feet and curse Linden Lab for competing with them. The wiser and more far-sighted of them, though, will be pleased that LL is growing a new crop of future customers for them.

  All in all, this is one of the best plans I’ve seen come out of Linden Lab in a long time. Well thought out, well communicated, with their goals and motives laid out in the open. It’s not often I get to say this, but gold star to the Lindens on this one.

  Now, returning to the current premium owners who are bemoaning the fact that this offer is useless to them: notice that none of the goals is “provide an additional incentive for established land owners to keep their premium account”. This plan isn’t about you.

  So when you ask, “Why does Linden Lab think I would want this?”, what you’re really asking is, “Why is Linden Lab paying attention to someone other than me?” Whether we established Residents like it or not, the answer to that question is obvious and simple: Linden Lab is a business, and they have judged that it’s more profitable to put most of their effort attracting new customers, than to spend their days fawning over the ones who keep coming back anyway.

• 15Oct

  What new features would make SL a better machinima platform?

  Musings No Comments

  Tomorrow, October 15 from 3-4 PM SLT, we’ll be having a discussion at UXIG about new features and improvements to the SL viewer that would improve Second Life (and OpenSim) as a platform for creating machinima.

  We’d especially love to hear from machinimists who are currently working with Second Life:

  • What are the most frustrating or annoying aspects of working with SL to make machinima?
  • What new features would help make SL machinima easier, better quality, or more expressive than it is now?

  The in-world discussion will be tomorrow, October 15 from 3-4 PM SLT (i.e. Pacific time) at Hippotropolis in Second Life. If you can’t attend the in-world discussion, I’d still love to have your comments here on this blog post, on Plurk, or on the SL-UX mailing list!

• 17Sep

  Bypass an Anti-Inspect Shield in 3 Easy Steps

  Gripes, Guides, How-Tos & Tips 8 Comments

  The SL fashion world has spawned a bizarre and mysterious type of device known as the anti-inspect shield. The primary purpose of these devices is to deter other people from checking the names and creators of attachments you are wearing, so that they can’t go and buy the same things you did and copy your “style”. The shields accomplish this by surrounding your avatar in many layers of transparent prims, so that other people can’t right click and Inspect your other attachments — their click will hit the shield instead.

  Anti-inspect shields are a contentious issue for many reasons. Not the least of these is that it deprives designers of the new customers they could have gained from people seeing and admiring your outfit, and finding out who made it. But just as bad is that they severely reduce your framerate and the framerate of everyone around you, as Gabby Panacek has demonstrated.

  Hurting the creators of the items you love, and slashing everyone’s framerates in the process? Well, that’s pretty vain and selfish, but maybe it’s worth it to stop “copycats” from stealing your style? Perhaps it would be, if the shields actually stopped people from inspecting your attachments — but they don’t.

  In fact, there’s an extremely quick and easy way to completely bypass the shields, and you don’t even have to fiddle around trying to get the right camera angle. All it takes is 3 easy steps, which I’ll demonstrate with Caer Balogh’s lovely brown paper bag “Advanced Fashion Shield 1.0″, which Gabby kindly passed on to me. It’s just as useless as the real shields at stopping people from inspecting, but doesn’t hurt your framerate, and is way more stylish.

  

  1. Enable Advanced > Rendering > Hide Selected. (Use Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D to turn on the Advanced menu if you need to.)
  2. Open Edit mode (Ctrl-3) and click on the shield to select it. It will disappear from your view (except for its outline). If the person is wearing multiple shields, you can hold Shift and continue to click them until you have selected (and thus hidden) them all.
  3. Click on the attachment you want to inspect.

  Even the biggest, primmiest, laggiest shield, whether scripted or unscripted, sculpty or nonsculpty, can be bypassed in just a few clicks using this method.

  So if you have a shield, please, take it off. All you’re doing is making SL less enjoyable for yourself and everyone around you.

• 21May

  Permissions and Choices

  Gripes, Musings 7 Comments

  I’ve counted Dusan Writer as a friend (or at least a friendly acquaintance) ever since I met him in the course of his UI design contest a year ago. He’s an interesting personality, and generally an intelligent fellow and a thoughtful writer.

  So, it’s with some disappointment that I read Dusan’s recent post on Second Life’s permission system. His post is prompted by the progress of VWR-8049, a proposal to allow users to choose the default permissions for new objects that they create.

  Dusan comes out strongly against it, and although I’m firmly in favor of it, that’s not the disappointing thing; I don’t mind people disagreeing with me. What disappoints me is that Dusan has bought into the baseless FUD that certain individuals have piled onto the issue.

  Alas, not only does Dusan believe the FUD and let it color his entire analysis of the feature, but he also regurgitates it in a most unsavory and uncharacteristic manner, littered with baseless attacks, ranting nonsequiturs, and flawed thinking. I’m usually content to let this sort of thing lie, but it boggles my mind that FUD of this sort could spread when it has so many holes in it. Continue reading »

• 05May

  Tateru Nino’s Adult Content Poll

  Musings No Comments

  Venerable Second Life journalist and blogger Tateru Nino is running an opinion poll to try to find out how the SL populace really feels about Linden Lab’s upcoming Adult Content policies.

  She’s trying to get an accurate sampling of opinions, which means lots of people need to vote, so she’s asking for everybody’s help to spread the word and get votes from as many people as possible. But the idea isn’t to get just the people who feel the same way as you do to stuff the ballot — spread the word in all circles, so we can really find out how people feel.

  So, please give it a vote and spread the word (but considerately — don’t spam). The poll is running until May 12, a week from today.

  • Poll: Adult content – Both sides of the question @ Dwell On It
• 18Oct

  The Plug with a Hole in It

  Musings 7 Comments

  Gwyneth Llewelyn recently offered a proposal to try to plug “the analogue hole” that makes content theft inevitable. Her proposal drew a lot of criticism, particularly from open source developers, and she has since withdrawn it.

  I’m glad to read that she has; I was among those with objections to the proposal. But I’m disappointed by her reaction to the criticism she received:

  The current community of developers — and by that I mean non-LL developers — is absolutely not interested in implementing any sort of content protection schemes.

  … Their argument is that ultimately any measures taken to implement “trusted clients” that connect to LL’s grid will always be defeated since it’s too easy to create a “fake” trusted client. And that the trouble to go the way of trusted clients will, well, “stifle development” by making it harder, and, ultimately, the gain is poor compared to the hassle of going through a certification procedure.

  I won’t fight that argument, since it’s discussing ideologies, not really security. Either the development is made by security-conscious developers, or by people who prefer that content ought to be copied anyway (since you’ll never be able to protect it), and they claim that the focus should be on making development easier, not worrying about how easy content is copied or not.

  … “Technicalities” are just a way to cover their ideology: ultimately, they’re strong believers that content (and that includes development efforts to make Second Life better) ought to be free.

  Despite what Gwyn suggests, one can object to a specific content protection scheme without being an ideological extremist who believes that everything should be free. Yes, there are individuals who take that viewpoint. Many of them are quite vocal, and some are rather arrogant and obnoxious. (I am of the opinion that this latter kind ought to be swatted hard over the head with a rolled-up newspaper. Repeatedly.)

  But to imply that anyone opposing her proposal must be some kind of anticommercial tekkie-hippie is fallacious and juvenile, and just as dismissive as the rudest comments she received. I must admit that I expected better from Gwyn.

  Now then, let me explain my opposition and criticism of the proposal. (This is not criticism of Gwyn as a person, nor of any of her other ideas besides this particular proposal.)

  While I do appreciate and respect the choice to make one’s own efforts open and free, I do not believe everything should be forced to be free, and I did not oppose the proposal based on my views on that topic. I opposed it because I see three major flaws in the proposed system, two of them purely security-related:

  1. the certificates could be easily forged, which defeats the purpose of having them at all
  2. an effective certification system would put an extraordinary burden on developers
  3. the system does not address the most commonly exploited methods of content theft

  I’ll expand on these points so that there can be no confusion about why I objected and still object to such a system. (I’ll give fair warning, though, that this is a rather long and probably dull post by most standards.)

  Continue reading »

• 29Sep

  A New SL Viewer from LL? Don’t Jump to Conclusions

  Musings 1 Comment

  Dusan Writer offers a sensational bit of news:

  Mark Kingdon announced that an outside design firm is hard at work on a new, user-friendly viewer for Second Life.

  I’ve read Kingdon’s post, and I’m afraid Dusan misread it and jumped to the entirely wrong conclusion. Here’s what Kingdon actually wrote (emphasis mine):

  Shortly after I started, we kicked off a project to reinvent what we call the “first hour experience” (our web experience, the viewer, and the way we acclimate and acculturate users inworld) for new users. We’ve made great progress and will be working with an award-winning interactive design firm to help us complete the reinvention and bring it to life. Yes, we are creating a viewer that is new user friendly! Stay tuned for updates.

  That reads pretty clearly to me: they are working on a viewer that is friendly to new users, not a new viewer that is friendly to users. I suppose you could read some meaning into “reinvention” and “creating”, but I don’t see any indication that he means anything other than the renovations already in progress to make the existing viewer more friendly to new users.

  Improving new users experience has been a recurring theme at Resident Experience (Rx) office hours, and is clearly one of LL’s primary obsessions. And as it happens, Linden Lab contracted Vectorform, an award-winning interactive design firm, for what is known as the Landmarks & Navigation project. This is no great secret. Vectorform attended the Rx office hours on April 17 & 24 to gather information, and then presented the L&N project concept on May 29. There were also emails to the SLDev mailing list in April and May, around the same time as the office hours. The L&N project has been underway since then, and is now nearing completion (as much has been said at Rx office hours in recent weeks).

  So, sorry to burst any bubbles, but unless LL contracted another award-winning interactive design firm to work in secret on a whole new viewer, and the timing of that project just happened to coincide exactly with the timing of the Landmarks & Navigation project… well, I’ll let you jump to your own conclusion.

• 21Sep

  Tools, Avatars, and the Self

  Musings 4 Comments

  Tateru Nino poses an intriguing question about why disabled users often become quite attached and identify with their avatars, more so than able-bodied people do:

  To many such physically impaired users, the body is no more nor less a tool than an online avatar, and the latter (despite lag, occasional inventory loss, network problems and all the other hurly-burly of a virtual environment) is the more reliable, expressive and liberating, allowing more ability to contribute, work, play and socialize.

  Why then, do the able-bodied among us tend to see so much more distinction between our bodies in the physical world and our digital representations? Is that distinction merely an artificial one, a handicap brought about by our able-bodied perspective?

  I suspect it’s a matter of the strength of the connection between thought, action, results, and feedback.

  For a perfectly able-bodied person, the mind directs the body smoothly, precisely, and effortlessly. Thought easily translates into action, and the feedback — sensory input confirming the results — reinforces the mind-body connection. As a result, your body starts to feel like part of your “self”, rather than an external thing.

  But for an able-bodied person using an awkward tool or interface, the translation from thought to action is not nearly so effortless, the feedback is not as rewarding, and thus the connection is not as strong. As a result, the person feels less in control, and more conscious of manipulating an unwilling external object. Continue reading »

• 22Jul

  The Lost Mythos of Second Life

  Musings 3 Comments

  IYan Writer made an interesting post about (among other things) the lack of a mythos of Second Life.

  In the days of my newbiehood, I heard tell of the legend of Gridnor and the coming of Lagnarok. But even in those days, the old stories were all but forgotten, and only the elders spoke of them.

  In those days, the Linden gods stopped walking freely among us. The most ungrateful Residents would spurn the Linden gods and curse their names, just as they do today. Only the stalwart Liasons — who were half god, half mortal — mingled among us.

  But those days were the days of legend, of the rise of new heroes and villains!

  Starax the magician and his wand of infinite wonder, who left our world but was reborn. Anshe the merchant-queen, shrewd and cunning, with an unquenchable thirst for riches. Tateru the goddess and overseer, who even now walks among us, bestowing her wisdom on all who will listen. Gene Replacement the trickster, who stole from the gods the gift of megaprims, but paid for his sins with eternal banishment. Ordinal the inventor, who then, as now, crafted marvels for the delight of young and old.

  There are many, many others legends; too many to recall every one. IYan refers you to the book of Hamlet for more stories of the old days. (Hamlet himself being one of the legends of those and earlier days.)

  But, just as with the legends of Gridnor and Lagnarok, these stories now fade into history. The elders move on to other worlds without ceremony, and the young remain ignorant of our heritage. The old heroes are no longer revered, and the new heroes are too often missed, being but tiny gemstones in a vast desert of sand.

  Or perhaps I have merely become one of the elders, who speak in longful whispers of the legends of their youth, being set in our ways and unable to see the next generation of legends unfolding beneath our very noses.

• 18Jun

  Early Adopters, Pessimists, and Patriots

  LL policy woes, Musings, Passions 10 Comments

  I received an interesting comment from someone last night. He said that his first impression of me, from reading this blog, was that I was an “angry SL pessimist”. You know the type: no matter what happens in SL, they’ll bitch and moan about it. Continue reading »

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