Facebook Chat

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It seems to me Facebook is all about the money and market share. Businesses do have to compete and Facebook is the big kid in the room, king of the mountain so to speak. Lots of people are trying to knock Facebook out of that position. In the latest European battle to be your text messaging service Facebook is shifting tactics.

If you use a mobile app for Facebook, you know it has had a text chat app built in. Now it is being removed. You either download Facebook’s chat app or do without FB chat.

Get the details on what’s happening here: Facebook Is Forcing All Users To Download Messenger By Ripping Chat Out Of Its Main Apps.

When I read Zuckerberg quotes I don’t see concern about FB customers. I get a sense that it is all about maintaining market share. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Businesses do have to compete. But, it is possible to get it wrong.

The quote I’ve seen from Zuckerberg is:

“ And the reason why we’re doing that is we found that having it as a second-class thing inside the Facebook app makes it so there’s more friction to replying to messages, so we would rather have people be using a more focused experience for that.”

The underlining is my emphasis.

I point this out because I am already thinking about what a FB virtual world might be like. I believe that the fundamental nature of any Facebook world is going to be set by Zuckerberg and the Facebook corporations business needs. My thinking is getting the nuances of the nature of both accurate will improve my predictions.

Second Life Avatar Shape

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Loki Eliot has an article up titled: Exploring the future of my Avatars Shape.

The article is a good account of the problems and decisions we must handle when making full avatars and clothes. It is worth the time to read.

[youtube 4TP4L1vHfpk]

We have many considerations related to where the Second Life Avatar is going and how we will work with it. The Lindens see things in terms different from those we see. The Lindens are dealing with programming issues and development costs. Since they seldom make clothes and seldom are involved in fashion the priorities are lopsided toward the technical. Lindens may not change appearance/clothes for years.

Of course the majority of SL users have no idea of the technical complications. But, they are into fashion and may change their appearance several times per week, if not per day. So, the majority of users have priorities lopsided toward the aesthetic side.

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JIRA STORM-1800

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The two big JIRA items relating to the Second Life avatar are STORM-1716 and STORM-1800. 1716 was the Mesh Deformer. It is considered closed with the release of Fitted Mesh. 1800 is the item that deals with the avatar weighting and mesh layout, which many of us still consider a problem.

You can see the partial fix discussed in 1800 in the Singularity Viewer. It uses the adjusted weights recommended as an improvement to the existing avatar we see in the SL Viewer. I’ve added the weight to a couple of versions of the SL Viewer. It helps. But, the patch only affects what I see not others. You can add the fix to your viewer using the file found in the JIRA. 

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Second Life News 2014-15 #2

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Group Ban – Baker Linden is working toward getting Group Ban running grid wide in ADITI (preview/beta grid). He has a handful of small bugs to get fixed. Then he’ll figure out if he is going to be able to go to and RC Viewer or Project Viewer.

If all goes well in ADITI it will soon roll out to AGNI, the main grid, as an RC Server package. At that point people with large groups will be thrilled to get the feature.

Whirly & Jenna @ Server-Scripting UG 2014-15
Whirly & Jenna @ Server-Scripting UG 2014-15

Materials Functions for LSL – We currently cannot script material changes. People have been asking for Linden Scripting Language (LSL) functions to work with materials since before materials were released.

Today in the Server Scripting User Group Simon Linden said getting those functions implemented was pretty high on their to-do list. That still gives us no idea when we might see them, but it does give us hope that it’s going to get done.

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Second Life Bits and Pieces 2014-15

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I posted about Tateru’s marketing post and gave my opinion on why it has changed so much in: Dwell On It: Marketing. Next I see Honour posting about Contrast & Diversity in Second Life. She points to the bias being taught in Mississippi and the ignorance of a woman (girl?) thinking she could only get pregnant if both she and her lover climaxed at the same time. I think both of those show a lack of education… at very different levels.

Honour also has a good post up on changing the appearance of water for photos in Second Life™. See: Playing With Water in Second Life.

Machinmatrix.org, the maker of AvaStar, has a list of their contest winners up: The winners of the Week (29-Mar – 4-Apr 2014). 

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Firestorm Viewer 4.4.0 To Be Blocked

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Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo

 You may remember a time when there were something like 1600 different versions of viewers in Second Life on any given day. The problem with that is it so dilutes crash stats developers are hampered. There isn’t enough data on any single version to provide a developer good information for tracking down a bug.

The Firestorm Team decided they would do something to help their developers. The decision was to limit the number of versions of Firestorm on the grid at any one time to 3. They block their old viewers and prevent users from logging into Second Life with old viewers. I’m not sure if that blocking includes use on other grids.

In this case ‘old’ means not one of the current three newest versions. Currently version 4.4.0 is the fourth running version. The team is announcing that on Thursday they will block that version. There are about 5500 people using that version. They are encouraged to update now rather than wait until they’re blocked on Thursday.

See: Blocking Version 4.4.0 – 33720.