Tiny animation film

I blogged, at least I *think* I blogged about Damien Fate's tiny avatars, Loco Pocos a few weeks ago. I'm indebted to Gwyn Llewellyn's blog for news of the first short animation film Tiny Nation produced in SL using these avatars. It's amazing... and when one considers the normal cost of making a short film by other means, must be amazingly cheap!

I thought the company was Lil Clan... but it is actually ill clan... which seems a weird name. No matter, it's an amusing film, and fills one with the feeling of the immense potential in the platform. Not to mention admiration for the avatars and the smooth running of them in world!

Even if cartoons aren't your thang, I'd recommend you see this... it is SFW but has adult themes and so may not be suitable for, or understandable by, children.

OpenSpace announcement due today

In between the excitement of the election, there was a post from Jack Linden on the official Linden blog, a teaser for a new announcement to be made by M. Linden tomorrow, on OpenSpace sims. As it happened, the SLDEV group, which is the group for people who develop professionally in Second Life, were due to have a meeting with Price Jack last night, to discuss the price rises and resultant fall out.

There were surprisingly few people there, but that might have been because some of the SLDEV group and others were misdirected to Jack's office hours on Linden Estate, rather than the SLDEV island. Oclee was originally sent a link for the Linden Estate meeting, where he saw about 60 people waiting to talk to Jack. So, the confusion about location may explain the fact that I didn't see any representatives from the bigger developers - not RiversRunRed, Electric Sheep, NMC etc.

The Linden contingent, Jack, Glenn, Robin and Madhavi, ran the meeting like a town hall despite the fact that there were only around 20 people there. We were asked to funnel our questions through Glenn Linden, but this proved to be rather a frustrating exercise... Jack started to respond to things said in world, and didn't respond to my first questions and so I began to talk in open chat. With so few people you'd think it would have ben possible to have a dialogue without the intervention of a funneller, but we were then exhorted to send questions to Glenn again - which led to a strange question lag, with Jack answering the last but one question, while other questions were being asked in chat, and the person whose question was being answered was responding to what was said.

There was crossover ago-go, and I felt that the intervention of the funneller (although totally NOT Glenn's faut) was actually an obstruction to good and clear debate. I always find it weird that the Lindens collectively are so bad at using their platform for the things it is very good for.

Of course it was a pretty pointless excercise anyway, because Jack wasn't allowed to reveal the contents of the blog post tomorrow - and even indicated that maybe it wasn't a done deal and some discussion might still be going on - and so we weren't able to know whether things will remain the same or change. I told Glenn I thought that it would have made more sense to schedule the event after the announcement to ensure that we were able to discuss the situation as it will be, and not have to guess at what changes may or may not be introduced to the original announcement.

The funnelling of questions allowed Jack to blank any questions he didn't want to answer, including mine asking whether the Lindens had realised what level of response they were going to get from their announcement. I did ask whether they had considered consulting a few devs or moles BEFORE going public with their plans, but he seemed to indicate that this might release sensitive pricing information into the public domain or give the people so informed an unfair advantage over the rest of SL. I wonder though - had he consulted me, for example, on the announcement of the OpenSpaces I would have accurately predicted the outcry, and I could have told him what people were likely to say. Hopefully, if he'd believed me, that would have changed the policy - so simply consulting with some members of the community need not give them any advantage - they would only know what the possible plans were, not what LL had actually decided.

Anyway, it seems possible that they may give on the educational sims, and possible that they are going to develop products which offer different levels of cost for different levels of services, so that those who use the OpenSpace sims as originally intended are not penalised along with those who have "abused" them. Who knows? We shall have to read the blog and find out.

I try to be coherent and have integrity and so I try hard not to say different things in blog posts and on forums from the things that I say to the Lindens directly. It amazes me however, how often it gets to the point of confrontation and other people, who have been just as vociferous, suddenly have nothing to say. In this case it was impossible to know whether that was because people were not telling them what they thought, or because there was a pile of unanswered questions filling up Glenn's IM tabs as the meeting progressed.

One has to wonder about the timing of this new announcement though. If I wanted to lessen the impact of what I had to say, I choose an historic day after an election too. The sad thing is that they will never be able to reverse the damage this has done to the company, in terms of trust and customer support, not even if they reverse the previous announcement and suspend the increases.

Intelligent, London-based technophiles wanted

A friend of a friend contacted me to ask if I knew any intelligent, tech-aware people who would be willing to be interviewed on film about what they wanted from technology. It's always difficult to know whether it is appropriate to hand over the names and contact details for people in these circumstances. It's so easy to get it wrong, and recommend someone who will not only die of embarrassment, but is too timid to say no to the nice film people... or not to recommend someone who would regard it as an honour to notch up five minutes towards their 15 minutes of fame.

This is what Daisy told me:
"I need to find some intelligent, articulate, leading edge, opinionated IT / technology-hungry people to be interviewed for a promotional film to launch a very exciting new cutting edge phone device with improved internet browsing as a key feature.

"The film is predominantly for the internal and trade press and will be shown on all mediums [Internal Live Events, Intranet, Internet and In-store] apart from TV and Cinema for a two year period.

"My remit is to find a small handful of 'tech leaders' (as the company brands these types of people) who can intelligently and competently talk about new technologies and what they want / expect / need from new technology and the internet, from a personal perspective, that will enhance and better their working, resting and playing lives.

"They should have some clout and standing within the new technologies world.

"We would need to meet you briefly to record a small excerpt of you on tape to present to client and then, if you fit the bill, we would need to have a morning or afternoon of your time sometime during next Mon/Tues/Weds or Thurs 10-13 November.

"Shooting is all in locations around the central London area and featured individuals would be required to give up a morning or afternoon of their precious time between the hours of 0800hrs and 2200hrs. You will be remunerated for this sacrifice!

"If you have any further questions or think you are interested and have availability, please contact me at: Daisy_Graham@jackmorton.co.uk.

"Check out our website: www.jackmorton.co.uk
Many thanks, DG"

I don't know if anyone other than my follower and my mother reads this blog... but if you do and you think you fit the bill, please drop Daisy a line.

And it just goes on and on and on

Another discussion on the Concierge List about the OpenSpace Sims (OSSs). It's always the same thing... one person berating the others for not reading the documentation on the website about the appropriate uses of OSSs, another group saying that it is perfectly obvious that Linden Lab had been relaxing the rules about what could be included on an OSS.

It seems to me that all this discussion is pointless... Linden Lab are really dreadful at keeping the documentation on their website up to date, and always have been. When I first joined in early 2004, there was still all the documentation about prim tax, which had been their first idea for controlling the use of prims in world. I was terrified to get things out of my inventory in case I was taxed on them. By then, they had changed to the current system that the size of the parcel of land that you owned dictated how many objects you could have out on the parcel, but all the documentation I was reading on the website and in world, talked about taxation.

So... they have been uniformly unreliable in keeping their documentation up to date, and they have clearly allowed people to use the OpenSpace sims for purposes far wider than their original intention of water spaces and parkland. People are spending an inrordinate time arguing about how many prims/scripts/people you can have on OSSs before it becomes overuse.

Oclee tells me that the overhead of having 16 simulators on one server is probably too much anyway - the stress is running that number of sims on the server, and although obviously things don't improve if you then stuff the sim full of scripts and prims and people, the problem is there *whatever* you have on your OSS, in all probability.

I don't know if that is the case, and whether the Lindens actually know this to be true. The fact is that their solution - to try to price as many people out of the market - is no solution at all.

It's a solution that ignores the human impact of what they are doing, and the impact upon community in SL. People felt affection for their homes, set up on the private islands. Arguing about whether it was/was not apparent that homes and shops on OSS were an inappropriate use has the community tearing itself to shreds.

Oclee is selling up two full sims and abandoning the OpenSpace sim we had... so the net result for our estate is that LL are losing from us both the $75 per month that we paid for the OSS AND the tier for the islands. Assuming those are bought, I suppose they will continue to receive the tier for them from someone, but it means that Oclee's stake in the world has reduced. I wonder if they really understand the impact of what they have done? Actually, I don't think they do. Yet.

The OSS debacle: turning loyal customers into detractors

I've often said that Linden Lab don't appreciate the vast reservoir of goodwill which they have in their residents of Second Life (TM copyright all that stuff). Maybe because they are at the sharp end of a lot of criticism from residents all the time: in a complex virtual world there's a lot to go wrong, and in a successful virtual world there are a lot of people to complain about anything and everything that may have gone wrong.

But sometimes I just want to knock heads together! Some days ago Linden Lab announced on their blog that OpenSpace Sims (OSS) were taking up too many resources and costing them more money than they expected as a result, and so they were raising the tier fee (the monthly maintenance fee which landowners must pay) from $75 US to $125 US with effect from January 1.

Now, no one likes to hear that their bills are going to go up, but in the case of these sims, many people had bought them because they couldn't afford to buy a full island ($1000 purchase and $295 a month tier fee). For many of them the OSS was the fulfilment of a dream to own an island in Second Life. There are 199 pages of replies on the thread started on the SL forums and many more responses on other threads.

OpenSpace Sims were originally offered to people who already had a full island, as a way to offer extra open space (hence the name) to beautify the areas around full sims. On full private island sims, there is water all around an island, but it isn't usable outside the border of the sim. If you add an openspace sim with water you can sail or swim in it. At that stage landowners had to buy four OSS and had to have a full island to attach them to.

Originally you got a small prim - or object - allowance with the sims of 1875, which was certainly more than enough to put out a few trees and rocks to fill in the open space. Of course, people being people, they started to put houses, shops and clubs on OSS. Now the Lindens claim that they didn't foresee this, and it wasn't allowed by the rules of OSSs, but it is clear that a number of landowners had checked whether it was allowed beore they bought... Garth Fairchang for example has posted in the forum that he checked with Jack Linden (now forever known as "Price" Jack in the SL Herald) that this was allowed and he OKd it.

In any case, it seemed likely that the Lindens were pragmatic about the uses that people were putting the OSSs to, as they raised the prim allowance to 3750 and the rule that you should buy 4 was dropped. The price went down at some stage. Of course there was an explosion of interest. Many people were able to just afford the OSS and made sacrifices to do so.

I am infuriated with Linden Lab once again for handling things so badly. It seems to me that as they have given two months notice of the price increases, they could instead have flagged up the fact that there were problems, and that they were looking at them. They could have explained the problems and asked for help and ideas from the residents in dealing with them.

The residents would have made a lot of noise, but the difference in this approach is that they would have had notice that there *was* a problem - which came out of the blue for them. It would not have devalued their asset or made them feel that they had to abandon their sims. The difference is that they would have asked for information, would have wanted to know how they could avoid causing problems, which would have required LL to know the answer to that question.

Maybe they do know, maybe they don't. If they don't, it would be sensible of them to say that they are looking at it, evaluating it, trying to work it out. Well maybe not now... because instead of putting the residents on warning that there were problems with OSS, they simply announced the price increase.

The effect of this anouncment was to devalue, instantly, the asset that so many people had bought. You can't give away OSSs now, and people are abandoning them to avoid having to pay any more tier fee on something that they are going to have to abandon on January 1 anyway, when the new tier price goes into effect.

In an instant LL turned all those OSS owners who had felt at home in SL, and were making financial sacrifices to pay for their precious OSS, into people with no stake in the world, and a big grudge. Instead of carrying the renters and owners of OSS with them, they kicked them out to a place where quite frankly my dear they don't give a damn about SL or LL. What a waste!

Instead of carrying the residents with them, explaining the problem, asking for solutions - and the SL community is vast and intelligent and full of creativity- they seem to have taken a cynical decision to drop those people. Either that or they simply didn't understand the impact that their announcement would have. Both seem ludicrously reckless to me.

I love SL. I build there, have friendships and relationships there, I love the people I know there, I love building and being there. I love the fact that people there are kinder and more generous than people in real life appear to be. I love the chance that SL gave me to experiment and try things I would never have done in real life - the people I have met that I would never have had a chance to meet in real life.

I love the well of affection that we all have for the world and for our second lives. I just wish Linden Lab would learn to harness that for their own good, and not lay waste to it.

Ajax arena for sale

My SL partner, Oclee Hornet, has put the Ajax Arena sim up for sale. Originally built for streaming the Dutch football league to fans, the sim is a detailed replica of the Ajax Arena in Amsterdam.

The build has attracted a lot of interest over the past few months, and I am sure it would make a striking backdrop to all kinds of events. There are screens above the pitch and in the sky box, and the sim is suitable for a wide range of events.

He has posted the sale to the SL forums with a few good pictures of the Arena, which you can find here. It's a full sim, which means $295 US tier fee.

There is no way that pictures can adequately convey how big and well made the Arena is, so go there, using this SLURL.

Shopping: LeeZu Baxter

I'm feeling a bit guilty about posting this, because I fear for the linden balances of all who read it. I hate the current buzzword reporting about the financial chaos which is afflicting the markets around the world, not least because it gives the impression that some alien being is in charge of our economic destiny, instead of ourselves... but it is a hard fact that the number of islands for sale reflects the pressure that people are currently experiencing. Do not go to this shop if you need to conserve your lindens!

I went to the Wall performance and after-show party last night, and while there saw an avatar who had the most extraordinary clothes on - better than anything I have seen before. Being an experienced avatar I knew how to right click the person and choose more and then inspect, to find out who made the outfit (so much easier than real life lol!) and after I had taken a few dozen pictures of the party and the particle effects, I looked in search for the avatar named as creator of the clothes, and teleported away to To The Nines, LeeZu Baxter's island.

Reader, I am someone who enjoys creating things, but also buying things in SL. I have shopped in all the well-known shops, I have clicked on avatars all over SL to find out what they were wearing and gone to the shops to look at the items myself. I was bowled over by this shop, the detail, the beauty of the clothes, and the way that they made use of the things which SL does well.

Most of the outfits are a combination of clothing that is worn by the avatar and flexi attachments, so it is layered and possible to wear in a variety of ways. I combined items from a number of outfits to make what you see me wearing in the picture. I had SUCH fun, and found it difficult to choose what to buy and what to wear.

Much of the time, I find that what I wear in SL is a compromise between what I can imagine and what I can make or buy. This isn't like that. If it isn't overstating it, I feel that I have moved into haute couture, buying the things here. I must remember to go back to the shop and put it into my picks. It's that good.