Merged realities – events and issues for virtual worlds
1. We talk quite a bit about virtual goods and their popularity. MMO Behemoth World of Warcraft proved it in the past week, selling hundreds of thousands of an in-game mount called the Celestial Steed at US$25 a pop. No-one but Blizzard software know how many they sold but given queues exceeded 140,000 at one [...]
Viewer 2.0: after the afterglow
It’s been a couple of weeks since Second Life’s Viewer 2.0 launched, and as always there’s been no shortage of comment. Gauging the balance is always a challenge, but I think it’s fair to say that overall the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The fly in the ointment has been the new search functionality, particularly [...]
Second Life 2.0: sneak peek of the new viewer
Back in June last year, we gave a sneak peek of the Second Life 2.0 viewer. At the time, Linden Lab stated it was only a very early iteration of what would be the final product. The imminent announcement by the Lab of the public beta for Viewer 2 certainly adds weight to that claim, [...]
Avatars United: desire or forced marriage?
Linden Lab, whether by design or by accident, appears to have pulled their usual stunt: Wallace Linden’s post caused panic and disarray, focussed in a misleading direction, and barely hinted at the truth of the matter. Once again, decisions had been finalised even before the post went live. This sort of behaviour does nothing to [...]
Identity: Linden Lab change of heart?
Your identity is defined in part by which pieces of identification you choose to share with a person or group. Every person you know does not have the same information about you as everyone else. What you share with your mother, your boss at work, your bank manager, is different to what you share with [...]
Will the Real You Please Stand Up: precedence in communications
The precedent that has been set by most of the employees permitted to post on the Linden Lab main blog is this: that the issues addressed in the post are close to final or finalised already. The posts are presented as though those commenting on the posts could still have some input, however it’s usually [...]
Merged realities – events and issues for virtual worlds
1. The announcement of Second Life Enterprise has certainly sparked some discussion. There’s some interesting debate here and some barely amusing coverage here – surely the ‘flying penises’ anecdote has been flogged to death a few dozen times by now? Finally, here’s a great example of how the standalone offering is already being used (although [...]
