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The Virtual Whirl: A brief history of Second Life, 2008-2010 and beyond
This week, we cover the final installment of our summarized history of Second Life and Linden Lab (check out the first installment or the second, if you missed them). It's only possible to cover a tiny fraction of the events that took place in the space we have here, but the highlights paint an interesting picture. We'll be working our way from 2008 to June 2010, and looking at what future directions we expect from there.
The Virtual Whirl: The emperor's new terms
This week The Virtual Whirl virtual mailbag is stuffed to overflowing with queries about the new Second Life Terms Of Service (TOS) that launched slightly behind the new Second Life 2.0 viewer. The new version has grown from 7,500 words to more than 30,000 words across no less than 18 separate documents, all of which you must agree to in order to use the service – and golly, it has raised some questions.
Second Life third-party viewer policies get an update but still fail to do the job
Last week, the promised update of Linden Lab's Third-Party Viewer (TPV) policies crept out onto the Second Life Web-site with little fanfare. After the fuss caused by the tangle of legal incompatibilities, muddled terminology and ambiguous phrasing in the first version, the Lab said it would go back and address the problems, and get the policy document fixed. So, you'd think they'd have gotten it right this time around, right? We certainly did. We were wrong.
Second Life third-party viewer policies not well received
The hallmark of a good license is that it is clear, easy to understand and unambiguous. The gold-standard for a good contract is that it is all of the above and provides all parties with equal amounts of protection. There are bonus points for not conflicting with rights guaranteed by law, or with other prerequisite licenses or agreements. Linden Lab's Third Party Viewer (TPV) policies, as published on Tuesday, regrettably reflect none of these ideals. We'd go so far as to say that it's the worst day's work that we've seen come out of the Lab to-date. So much so that almost immediately after publishing them the Lab has sent them back to legal for both clarification and rewriting.
Linden Lab to raise Xstreet fees, loses vendors, products
This week, Linden Lab announced that it was going to start charging listing fees and minimum commissions on its Second Life Xstreet Web-shopping adjunct in the near future. Within hours, vendors took down thousands of products, many abandoning the service entirely in favor of alternative services. It's unclear just how many vendors have abandoned the Xstreet SL system, but it apparently was enough to temporarily overload the Web-sites of third-party sites such as Slapt.
Linden Lab to disband moribund mentor group
Yesterday at the morning Second Life mentors' meeting, Linden Lab staff announced that Linden Lab's sponsored mentor group, which had been functionally closed (in all but name) for approximately a year now, would finally be disbanded in practice. The move doesn't really come as much of a surprise to observers of the Lab's sponsored volunteer programs over the last eighteen months. Almost immediately more ex-mentor Second Life social groups than we could comfortably count sprang up, as people prepared to maintain their network of contacts without the overarching group umbrella. While there was surprisingly little actual yelling, some members of the organization feel the blame lies squarely at the feet of Linden Lab's CEO Mark Kingdon, though there's not a lot of apparent evidence to justify that.
Linden Lab to alter third-party Second Life viewer policies
Yesterday, Linden Lab made an announcement regarding third-party (or after-market, if you prefer) viewers that has so far elicited a vociferous response from some of the more outspoken Second Life users, and those involved in after-market viewer-development. The announcement largely revolves around upcoming policies that have yet to be decided. This is compounded partly by there being two announcements. One directly emailed out and one on the blog, both of which carry somewhat different information. The announcement is a lead-up to a series of "brown bag" sessions which are advertised to determine the details of the scheme.
Linden Lab rounds up and ejects a bunch of copyright infringers
Now, we must admit that we find this one both amusing and appropriate. In short, Linden Lab has sent 50 or more Second Life users who were using the after-market NeilLife viewer on the spank-bus to ban-town. Not just for using the viewer, but for copying content that they shouldn't ought to have. What's clever is how Linden Lab caught and detected them.
Linden Lab explanation alienates educators
When news broke about Linden Lab sending a takedown notice to the core Second Life education community Web-site, our colleagues over at the Metaverse Journal put a number of questions about the matter to Linden Lab. The Linden Lab response to those questions yesterday seems to have generated a reaction among educators akin to pouring gasoline on a blaze, coupled with a vigorous fish-slapping. While there's a undeniably a spectrum of reaction to the Lab's response, most of what we've seen seems to cluster around the livid end.
Second Life community standards updated
There are several sets of rules for users of Second Life. The Terms of Service (TOS) and Community Standards (CS) which combined form your explicit service-contract with Linden Lab, and assorted implicit ones, like following any additional conditions the owner of whatever land-parcel that you are currently on may have chosen to impose. Well, the Linden Lab have updated the Community Standards for the first time in, well, perhaps forever. While the Lab has said that it has updated them in the past, the document has remained unaltered since at least 2005. What's new, however, isn't necessarily as interesting as what's missing.
Second Life traffic gaming: A chat with a bot-operator, and dire portents for Lucky Chairs
The store is a fairly ordinary store in Second Life terms, except that it appears to sell objects that are mostly available for free elsewhere in the virtual environment. Reselling 'freebies' in Second Life is generally considered to be a reprehensible practice, but it does happen. This particular store is one of the places we routinely check out to evaluate the effectiveness of Linden Lab's harder-line policies on gaming traffic (and thus search-rankings) within Second Life. In front of us are a row of 53 avatars, camping out. The provision of such camping facilities being one of the things that are prohibited under the new policy. We tried for a little while to get the attention of one of the camping avatars to see what they might think, and finally succeeded. As it happens, the avatar who responded was a bot – actually one of 70 bots being controlled by a single user who declined to give us a name. The bot-operator was, however, happy to answer a few questions for us, through the remotely-controlled avatar.
Linden Lab expands Second Life traffic gaming policy
Linden Lab, as you probably already know, has started to take action against the use of bots to game Second Life traffic (which is still the most influential of the sorting criteria in in-world search results), although with somewhat lackluster results so far. Yesterday, it was indicated that the action would be extended to other means of artificially boosting traffic figures, such as camping-chair installations.
Adult content changes for Second Life part of a larger phased deployment
Linden Lab held a "PG definition reach-out" session on Monday morning, as a part of its ongoing refit of content ratings in Second Life, the addition of an adult rating and an adult continent and so forth. One of the more curious things about the session is that no discussion of the definition of PG actually took place. Maybe the title of the session was just misleading, or we were just a bit optimistic. A large chunk of the discussion involved basics that have been rehashed over and over. Skins don't count as photorealistic nudity, for example, but there are a few interesting takeaways, nonetheless.
What do Second Life's new content ratings actually mean?
That's the question we've been getting asked since the announcement of the new definitions of PG, Mature, and Adults-Only content for Linden Lab's Second Life. We've been working on that question ever since. Interestingly, the new published definitions allow some content that was previously expressly forbidden. According to Linden Lab, "Real-life images, avatar portrayals, and other depiction of sexual or lewd acts involving or appearing to involve children or minors; real-life images, avatar portrayals, and other depictions of sexual violence including rape, real-life images, avatar portrayals, and other depictions of extreme or graphic violence, and other broadly offensive content are never allowed or tolerated within Second Life." Well, until now.
Linden Lab changes course for Second Life's mature content
Linden Lab is making an announcement today about a key change in the way content will be handled on the Second Life virtual environment in future. (There isn't a link to their announcement quite yet, but we'll fill it in when there is). [update: Linden Lab's announcement is now available] What we seem to be seeing at the moment is a segregation of Linden Lab's adult virtual environment that goes beyond the simplistic systems of the past where regions were divided into 'PG' (the equivalent of a film-and-television G rating) and 'Mature' (F&TV PG ratings or higher). We're talking about the formation of an actual adult-content continent and the wholesale relocation of content.
