The Big Chill (RL)

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In Southern California winter we are wearing T-shirts, shorts or mini-skirts and working on our tan. Really. In Florida, even farther south than San Diego (500 miles/800km north of Miami latitude-wise), they are buying parkas. In Australia they are setting record high temperatures and in the Antarctic mid-summer; ice-breakers are getting stuck in 10+ ft (3m) of ice . It seems the climate is changing. Well, surprise, surprize. That is what AGW skeptics have been saying for decades.

Jet Stream Map - by: Intellicast
Jet Stream Map – by: Intellicast

When we look at what is causing the US West Coast a warm winter and the East Coast an exceptionally cold one, we see the Jet Stream has moved. My parents tell me they used to call such changes in the Jet Stream the Polar Express and something that happened most winters when they were kids. When I hear the term Polar Express I tend to think of the Tom Hanks’ movie of 2004. The previous generation tends to think the movie took its name from this weather phenomenon. At least my parents make that association.

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Instagram

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Instagram Permissions
Instagram Permissions

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?

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Second Life News 2014-4

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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.

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Your View

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 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
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 Dark Metaverse

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Daniel's Stats
Daniel’s Stats

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. 

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Second Life Bits and Pieces 2014-4

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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.

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