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.
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 have all the panels pretty much closed. I’ll keep the mini map open. But, if I’m attending a user group meeting, I tend to have chat windows open, sometimes even covering most of the screen. Our I may have the word processor open covering most of the viewer. If I’m working on appearance, I often have the view covered with inventory windows and the outfit window.
I decided that my view ‘of the world’ is mostly my exploring mode. But, that really isn’t how my viewer looks most of the time.
My Screen – January 2014
Above is a screen capture of how my screen generally looks right after I login.
Meanwhile, Strawberry has a new meme up titled: Second Life Helpful Tools Meme. It’s a great meme. She’s using some tools I didn’t even know about. So, that’s the end of this article because I’m off to find some new tools.
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.
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.
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.
New Theme Jan 2014
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.
There is a section in the Second Life™ forum about technology: Tools and Technology. Thursday afternoon (1/16) Linden lab posted article there titled: Raising the Roof: The HTTP Project. The post is about the changes coming to how the SL Viewer and SL servers communicate.
The abbreviated point in the post is: communication between our viewers and the servers is and is going to be better and does and will use less bandwidth. This means fewer problems logging into Second Life. Also, more reliable connections and fewer disconnects. The changes will mean fewer capabilities from routers and gateways will be used, allowing the less expensive routers to handle Second Life better. And in general things will download faster.
