Nalates' Things & Stuff

Instagram

2014/01/212014/01/21 by Nalates Urriah

This is reportedly the fastest growing social app out there. On the Google Play Store it is described as: Share your photos and videos with friends and followers in a photo feed, or send posts directly to your friends. Instagram is the clear leader in photos and video captured with mobile devices. There is more to it. But, that is the basic idea. It is a free service. Or is it?

Do you remember those apps that used to say free, just give us your email address? If you did, you suddenly found yourself inundated with email spam. How does Instagram pay for the servers and bandwidth to handle 150 million plus users? Why are the Facebook owners willing to pay US$1 billion to buy a company run by a dozen or so employees? (Reference)

For that matter how does Facebook make its money? There is the on-site advertising. Those ads along the right side of the page. Google does something similar. I have Google Ads on this site. They pay for the web site and most of my Internet connection cost. But, is Facebook/Instagram going to make $500+ million per year and up just displaying page ads?

In 2011 85% of their money came from selling advertising. 15% came from ‘payments’. (Reference) Some portion of those ‘payments’ come from phone service providers. AT&T and Verizon need something for you to burn up those data plans. But, how much money is there in those channels?

Second Life News 2014-4

2014/01/21 by Nalates Urriah

Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. day in America. It is a holiday for government and numerous businesses. The Lab considers it a holiday, so the Lab was running on holiday staffing levels. This usually means Tuesday and Wednesday server rolls are skipped or pushed back a day.

This week will be different. Maestro Linden told us last week that a rollout is planned for Tuesday and an RC rollout for Wednesday. We did not have one last week, so may there is a push or they are trying something differently. Whatever, we get rolls Tuesday and Wednesday.

Your View

2014/01/20 by Nalates Urriah

Shug Maitland (post) suggested to Strawberry Singh that she should do a meme on how people view the Second Life world. Meaning mostly a screen capture of your viewer window. I actually had to think about that for a minute. What my viewer looks like really depends on what I’m doing. If I’m exploring, I … Read more

The Dark Metaverse

2014/01/20 by Nalates Urriah

That sort of sounds like a title for a science fiction movie… I think this, Dark Metaverse, is a term coined by Maria Korolov of Hypergrid Business in: Estimate: 50,000 regions in ‘dark metaverse’. Daniel Voyager comments in the article and takes the stats a bit farther in: Updated graphs on the size of SL and OpenSim grids 2014.

The idea behind the name, Dark Metaverse, is that there are more virtual worlds out there than we know about. Those not reporting stats are ‘dark’, meaning we can’t see them. We just barely know they exist. As to how many users and how much use they get, we can only speculate.

In Daniel’s article he makes a statement similar in concept to something we often hear; ‘I do hope for growth in Second Life regions this year or next year because that will be good for the Second Life economy as a whole and good in terms of numbers.

While people leasing more regions is good for Linden Lab, I’m not sure that more regions are good for the virtual world; Second Life. The more room residents have to roam in, the less likely they are to meet others. We have the Chun-Yuen Teng’s and Lada A. Adamic’s published paper: Longevity in Second Life to show player retention is very much a factor of how many interactions a player has.

There is probably some balance point at which more regions decrease player retention and below which crowding causes enough unpleasant interactions to decrease retention. I have yet to find that study. So, we can only speculate. I thing we are most likely above the balance point. So, I am not convinced more regions is a good thing for SL’s player retention.

Second Life Bits and Pieces 2014-4

2014/01/19 by Nalates Urriah

SL Forum

Ciaran Laval has an article up talking about getting the Lab to make a section of the SL Forum for podcasts. See: Should The Second Life Website Have A Category For Podcasts And Inworld Media Shows? The article is more than a question. Ciaran goes into a bit of the history of Second Life™ podcasts.

Quadcopter - image by: John_Biehler - Flickr — Quadcopter – image by:
John_Biehler – Flickr

If you think it is a good idea, post a feature request in the SL JIRA. Remember. There is no ‘Feature Request’ option in the JIRA. Just file a bug report and put the words ‘Feature Request’ in the title. The request is seen and moved to the Lab’s internal feature request list and quickly closed. It isn’t forgotten just because the JIRA item is closed. It lives on in the internal processing of the Lab.

I was having trouble with the JIRA this morning. So, if you have trouble, don’t be surprised and it probably is not you.

Blog Changes

2014/01/19 by Nalates Urriah

I have found some good things and some bad things in this theme. One of them is my fault. The Viewer pages and The Stuff pages are not working. I used custom pages for those. I would need to move those over from my old theme. But, I’ll actually need to rewrite them for the responsive design. So, it is going to take some time to make that fix. You can still get to the articles, just use the categories selector on the right.

I’ve added advertising. I ended up using the Quick Adsense plug-in. I tried All In One Adsense. It did not allow me to use ads in widgets. Quick Adsense does. It was easy to set up once I got past my initial confusion.