So far I only have bits and pieces of Second Life™ news.
On the technical side Oz Linden announced the closing of the codereview.secondlife.com instance of ‘reviewboard’. The same code review work is done using the JIRA and the bitbucket.org repositories. This only matters to those building viewers and/or submitting viewer code.
VR Glossary Explained
Hypergrid Business has an article explaining the Virtual World (VR) terms being thrown around by bloggers. See: Virtual reality: 5 terms you need to know.
Maria Korolov says you can order a Rift (the developer kit). But, I hear they are out of stock.
Whatever, Maria does a good job of explaining the terms.
Second Life Advertising
Jo Yardley, of 1920’s Berlin creativity, is on about the ads the Lab is running for Second Life. See: Second Life advertising hits new low.
She makes some good points about how the Lab portrays Second Life. That is not really news. She makes a good point about how the Lab is failing to promote the other aspects of Second Life, other than sex that is. She isn’t being a 1920 prude. Sex in advertising works and that is not a problem for her.
I suppose the Lab has stats on which banner ads get the most clicks, such stats are a part of any AdSense campaign. So, they choose to run ads that annoy Jo and which she sees as self defeating or at least counterproductive.
When was the last time you saw an ad for a museum or some other artistic thing and clicked on it? What about a sexy looking hunk promoting something or a sexy dress? Sexy CFM shoes do it for me.
So, we have to decide if the point is: to change the impression 6+ billion people have of SL, or get as many people into SL as possible? And with limited advertising dollars which ads are the most effective in accomplishing that goal? I’ll bet the Lab has excellent stats on which ads are working. Working as in generating signups. Stats are never the whole story, unless you are an accountant.
So, unless we can change the STATS the Lab sees, I doubt they will be changing their strategy. I do agree with Jo, a broader ad campaign would seem to be a good thing, at least from our perspective. But, I’m not sure we can sell the Lab on the idea.
One of the problems not considered in Jo’s thinking is Google’s AdSense. Google is building profiles of people for targeting ads. Want to see it in action? Search on something like Dragon Naturally speaking. You’ll see the ads displayed on this blog magically change.
The Google profile for those searching on computer game related things or visiting game related sites (like mine) that have Google ads. I suspect Google is probably pretty chauvinistic. But, they have found out that works. When it comes to being PC or profitable, profitable wins.
SL Share Blocked by Facebook
There is a post on the SL Blog: SL Share’s Photo Upload Feature is Temporarily Down, talking about Facebook blocking the SL Share feature. Status Update and Check-In features still work. But, no photo sharing with SLURL’s.
The Lab is trying to work something out with Facebook.
Group Chat
There is work ongoing on group chat. Simon Linden is working on the backend side of chat. He says he has cleaned up some inefficient parts of the code and added metrics (performance logging) code. He hopes things will be better. But, he can’t guess how much more or less at this point.
If all went well with Thursday’s testing from the Beta Server UG then we will likely see the testing move to the main grid.
Servers
No word on what server releases may arrive next week. Or whether there will be anything rolling next week.
Viewers
Lots of viewer versions stacking up at the Lab. So, we may see a main viewer update tomorrow… or not.
Also, I have not been able to repeat the viewer crashing with Firestorm 4.6.1. So, it was not my Fitted Mesh that was a problem. At least it wasn’t crashing me today. I’ll be playing more with Firestorm in the coming days.
Inara has a transcript and overview of the latest Firestorm Q&A. See: March 15 Firestorm meeting: video, transcript and notes. There is some news for FS users. No good news for the Mac users. That has to be frustrating. But, at least the FS Team is considering leaving the 4.4.2 version online and not blocking it on their normal schedule.
A new version of Oculus Rift development is available, but I wonder if it’s not more interesting to wait for public release which should be HD 1080 p
Are you saying there is a third version of the dev’s kit?
I prefer to wait for the retail release. That may be a better choice, or may be not. Waiting for release 2.0 might be an even better one. No way to know…
re. Advertising SL:
The problem is that “clicks” do not reflect people who download the client and actually enter SL; and even that does not reflect those who stay and become active. I suspect the most important point Jo is making is that LL needs to better advertise to those who count in the long run. I am fairly confident there are not many good metrics for measuring that or LL would be advertising differently (unless I completely misunderstand the whole thing and sex is the most effective gateway to long term residents).
Very well said…