i blogged about SharesPost back on July 19th and LL was valued at $345 million in the first week of July. then i checked in on that value in mid-August and they had dropped to $271 million

now they are valued at $248 million, oof, that’s gotta hurt!

go ahead and drop me, i have a hard head

last week i mentioned that lots of old in-world stuff had been returned to me from Second Life (mainly from the sims sold last february and also from my dumpy little Linden home)

i downgraded my membership back when Linden Lab fired a third of its work force and had to hassle with Live Chat to be able to downgrade (the website would not allow me to select “basic” and kept giving me an error)

once downgraded and once i had taken out any remaining Linden $, i removed my billing info =)

naturally, i thought everything was fine. i have not logged into SL for 5 months now

but just when i think SL can’t be any more douchie toward me . . .

This email is notification that we were unable to bill your Second Life account on July 28, 2010.

If we are unable to collect the amount due within seven (7) days, your account will be suspended pending payment for an additional thirty (30) days. During that time, you will not be able to log in to Second Life. Failure to resolve this billing issue by the end of the probation period may result in the cancellation of your account.

i think this is billing for land holdings from the Linden home which should have been removed from me when my account was downgraded but probably show as “peak land holdings”. seems like simple app logic in their billing software would go “has Linden home as part of premium membership = yes” and “account downgraded to basic – remove Linden home and land”

if LL wants to cancel me, go for it – like Lalo Telling wrote in this excellent post:  ”. . . or Ener Hax’s dissolution of her holdings last winter. After a while, it just stops making sense to keep paying for the privilege of being shat upon.”

amen Lalo!

have you read Philip’s post yet? i know i am critical of the Lab and can rationalize this to myself

however, i still hold out hope for Second Life to become better. not for the sake of the Lab, but for the residents. it’s a great virtual world filled with so many wonderfully creative people

creation, imo, is the highest goal one can strive for in this mortal life

and Second Life offers a way to create wonderful things that can be shared with 1000s of others. that, to me, is what makes Second Life awesome

okay, now on to my critical side . . .

there are only two points that make me go yawn and one is “First on the list should be a  big attack on lag and crashes”

really??? this is still on the To Do list? LL is 10 years old and SL is 7, so how is this still the number one thing? it’s been the number one thing since at least 2006 but i guess it still gets praise. this reminds me of Jon Stewart on the Daily Show a few weeks back. he showed clips of Obama saying that “we will reduce our dependency on foreign oil”, then he showed clips of Bush Jr, Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, and Carter saying the exact same thing! in 30 years this has never been acted on and i guess it’s always a great sound bite

i don’t know techie stuff very much, but from what i remember in 2006 to what SL looks like in 2010, i don’t see many differences. i think water reflections and better skies came about in mid 2007 but to my eye, that’s all i see. no shadows, no higher poly counts

what is causing all this lag? is it not enough hardware for the number of users? concurrency records have not been broken in about the last two years, so it can’t be that. i don’t know, but it sure seems like seven years of development would have LL beyond lag and crashes

heck, Kaneva is thinking outside the prim with 3D apps that allow “any developer to create their own 3D Applications and 3D social games . . . . opening the door for our community to add new games, like casual games, adventure, mystery, RPG, and puzzle games”. and will be introducing “pets, people, and animated moving objects created by the community. This new feature will allow users to create animated objects for the World of Kaneva. Our designers will be able to make their own 3d objects come alive and move around. These new creations can also be used by developers within their 3D Apps“.

that’s an example of moving forward imo

the second thing was “As a final note, I would note that we are not planning to change Second Life to exclude any categories of users.” that seems true but i wish there was some way they could integrate the Teen Grid and maybe even allow kids under 13 in. Why? because this can be a great educational tool for teachers and parents

right now the K-12 craze is all about 3D projectors. the problem is that they are expensive, even at $500 because  replacement bulbs cost the same as the projector, and they need the goofy glasses, and teachers and students can’t create anything in it. this craze will die out in a few years

virtual worlds can offer a far less expensive solution which allow both teacher and student the ability to create. an entire school district could use one sim with the ed discount and have an immersive lab. it’s hard to claim that you are a great educational tool when you keep out the largest number of learners . . .

but i guess virtual bopping is more important (it certainly means a big market for Xcite! products)

i am glad that Philip is back at the helm, but fixing lag and making the viewer 2.oh_no better are hardly the stuff creative dreams are made of. that’s like saying we need to make the roof stop leaking

a few emails, some tweets, and a skype with subQuark helped me get centered (read: a firm but loving smack to the head) =D

even though i don’t log into second life anymore, it is a big part of me. after all, i learned a great deal in my three years in it and carry those skills into OpenSim. i also am grateful to Philip Rosedale for putting his passion out there and raising the venture capital to build this kooky thing. in reading Wagner James Au’s The Making of Second Life you see how it must have been tough to be taken seriously. i mean getting people to invest millions of dollars in 1999 on this???

it’s easy to think that it would be easy in hindsight because of the success Second Life has enjoyed

my perspective is kind of my perspective. i can’t truly place myself in other people’s shoes. i can empathize and try to understand, but i can never see the world as someone else does

three years ago, Second Life had this vibe that anything was possible. a lot of that was the media hype and, of course, the message Linden Lab was putting out “Your world. Your imagination.”

all the changes to Openspace pricing, adult issues, XStreetSL, the terms of service, and now the firings at the Lab conflict with what those of us that are a few years old, or older, came to think of Second Life – that it is a place to create in and be happy

and that is a beautiful aspiration

but . . . Linden Lab is a company and whether right or wrong, it can do what it likes. no doubt several people analyzed, scrutinized, bean countinized, and whatever else to come to the point they are at today

while it does matter what you think and it does affect decisions to some extent, Linden Lab will do what some group of people there think is best. at the end of the day, we are customers in their application. they can meet our expectations or we can change our expectations and we make the decision whether Second Life adds to our lives or takes away from our lives

i could no longer keep the iliveisl estate afloat and despite all my clamoring knew that it was up to me to continue to wallow in “holy crap, now what” or “time to move on”

nothing will make me feel better about so many Lindens being let go at once. i empathize with them and worry about how they will pay their bills, feed their families, and sleep at night

but . . . my concern for them won’t change much (both myself and subQuark will gladly write any Linden a LinkedIn recommendation and Pathfinder was clever about this – the day after he was let go he swung into action and offered to write a recommendation for anyone that wrote one for him – and he did not bs, subQuark wrote him one and he took the trouble to look up info about subbie like what conferences he spoke at and what he spoke about)

it is easy to be concerned about a lot of things in life – the oil spill, people canned at Linden, the world soccer cup, hunger in other countries, and so on. it’s easy to be critical and whine and moan

but concern does nothing except stress you out. if you really care, then you would do something that would make you be able to have an impact on those things that concern you

the image below is something that has helped guide me for the last 10 years that subQ told me about. it’s one of those things that just rang true at just the right time in my life

the closer your circle of influence is to your circle of concern, the happier you will be

namas te =)

subbie is my zen master =D

it’s pretty sad when one pink-haired avatar and a lovable poutine eating subQuark beat out a multi-million dollar company on search engine crap

i know i mentioned this a few posts back, but i am so mad at the firings at linden lab and the loss of massive talent and just want to scream

i am the first to say that i don’t know that much, i am not very techie, and it’s all i can do to keep my hair on

just imagine the talent of many of the Lindens that were fired! much smarter people than me for sure

what i do have going for me is a great subQuark who watches my back and does the heavy lifting which allows me to follow my passion and be “real”, i wear my heart on my sleeve and am persistent and actually do care about others – maybe that’s why we rank higher than M Linden’s Second Life today

i believe that Philip cared and was a dreamer – after all, only a dreamer could come up with something like Second Life

i don’t know why he is so absent; maybe burned out, maybe forced out – but i also believe if he came back, second life would explode with renewed hope and clear away this ugly cloud created by the loss of such great talent

i knew George Linden and Blue Linden, they both came in-world to smooth out a real world clusterf*ck with me and did so graciously

i know Whump from twitter and he is a real person and very nice

there is nothing gracious with what is happening right now at Linden Lab and it saddens me so deeply =(

just a stupid pic cuz we try to have a pic in every post . . .

sheesh, i do live in my own little world. two days ago i wrote about the Linden Lab layoffs in Singapore, but i must have been really lost in making a coke machine in Reaction Grid to miss this news! Nickola posted a comment here and a quick search verified it! here is the Linden Lab press release:

Linden Lab Restructures to Generate Efficiencies and Support Investment in New Platforms

they are firing 30% of the staff, so that is about 100 people! =(

let’s be honest with our words, these are not layoffs due to slow times, these are real people with families, homes, and dreams that are getting fired

holy crap!!! 30% is a lot because you know that the peeps left behind are gonna be picking up a lot of extra load

this signals big budget issues with Linden Lab

canning people helps you meet budget projections when you can’t meet them otherwise

wow, i am so shocked by this and it really makes me sad to think of some really wonderful people being let go. my first thought was to Torley because he is so visible, but many Lindens work behind the scenes to make Second Life what it is

wow, what else can be said?

good luck to all those being affected, both those leaving and those left behind

sidenote: i just downgraded my account to basic, it was up at month’s end, but maybe if lots of people do this, it will help send a signal that we care

Reading Ener’s recent post prompted me to chime in on Linden Lab, SEO, and social networking.

Virtual Worlds are a tough go and rather niche-based. Look at Habbo Hotel; it started in 2000 and is squarely aimed at teenagers from 13 to 18. It has done very well in the last ten years with Wikipedia stating that 75,000 avatars are created daily. That is something Linden Lab would dearly love.

Why does Habbo do so well?

Their graphics are far cry from what Second Life offers. It’s an isometric world and many people see that as inferior. If eight million monthly visitors is inferior, then I hope to have an inferior endeavor soon! Clearly it is not the graphics that attract people (although, I am a fan of isometric graphics). They have their niche and serve that niche very well. They do one thing very well – cater to teenagers who want to socialize.

Linden Lab seems to still be trying to define their niche. Clearly they are not interested in the teenage demographic – the teen grid is much smaller than the main grid with about 200 sims (half educational, less than ten private sims, and the rest as mainland).

2009 was the “educational” year for Second Life and this year is focused on corporations (their Enterprise solution). Mark Kingdon, CEO of Linden Lab and known as M Linden, stated that his 2010 goals included being tied into more social networks and the purchase of Avatars United indicates that this is indeed a focus. I have not used Avatar United and can’t speculate on its effectiveness. It does not seem to add much value to Linden Lab at the moment because it does not tie into other social networks.

Effective SEO is incredibly simple. It does not take any self-appointed “social guru” or, my favourite, “social ninja” to do well online. A few simple guidelines go a very long way.

The first is to be consistent in as many places as possible. In this case, using the name “Ener Hax” was easy. First, it is a name (albeit an odd one) so it lends itself to being a domain, email address, gravatar, and being used to setup the numerous social networking accounts. Consistency in the words used as tags is also critical – from blog posts to Flickr pics.

The second guideline is to be persistent. Ener is far more OCD and manic than I am and easily blogs daily, adds Flickr pictures steadily, and tweets like a real bird.

Study after study show that two blog posts daily creates the most “online authority”. That does not mean that the author is an authority, it simply means that they have enough passion to cause them to take the time to blog twice daily and to establish a certain “online reach”. There are some exceptions to this, of course, with Guy Kawasaki coming to mind. One daily blog post is sufficient because of his topics and the caliber of his writing. Dooce.com is another who pulls in about $40,000 per month on one post daily, however, she does incredible photography which adds richness to her blog.

The third guideline is to experiment. Initially, iliveisl was the focus of the “strategy” for online awareness. This was setup to help iliveisl be found in Second Life as a desirable private estate.

Online presence, SEO, social networking, or whatever bs name we want to use, boils down to real people sitting at their computers, using mobile devices in the train or bus, wanting to connect with other people. Different groups gravitate to different social networks. Through some experimentation, you will find a mix that is easy for you to use and beneficial for the people you are reaching out to.

Even when researching a new whatever to buy, we tend to seek out reviews done by real people, to help us decide if that new whatever is the one for us.

Experimenting, for iliveisl, meant throwing lots of pasta on the wall. That included a Cafepress store (still there, but on the back burner for now), Flickr, YouTube, blip.tv, Yahoo and Google profiles, a Google Group, a Ning Network, Gravatar, Threadless Tees, Snorg Tees, LinkedIn, Yahoo 360, Blogger, WordPress.com, Urban Dictionary, and other networks.

Time sorted out what worked for Ener and that turned out to be blogging, Flickr, and Twitter (for me it’s video, conferences, and webinars).

This brings me to the last part of the trilogy – social networking.

Social networking has come to mean Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, and many other “networks”. It’s just a way to connect. Even if some of those connections are superficial and even a stranger helping you get more chickens in Farmville.

Social networking is part of what Second Life is missing, or at least falling a bit short in. Certainly, once in-world, you can connect very well and closely with others. I like that aspect very much – the closeness and trust you can feel for someone else, even as just avatars. In my experience it is more profound than anything in Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.

What is the ultimate secret for good social networking (thus good SEO)?

Actually caring. This is why Ener was able to boast that this blog has better SEO practices than secondlife.com (according to HubSpot). Ener answers all tweet replies, comments back on comments here, comments on other people’s blogs, and uses Google Alerts to try to acknowledge any other mentions. Ener even posted a response on a Swedish blog last week! (I have my own Google Alerts running as well!) ;)

Social networking is meant to be social. Sounds stupid to say, but many companies, like Linden Lab see it as a marketing channel. It can be both! Ener really did try to get a peep out of M Linden in Twitter. And tried in a polite and respectful way for a month, including engaging on Twitter with Wallace Linden, the Conversation Manager for Linden Lab.

But no tweet.

My take on that (and I am highly biased toward Ener) is that Mark Kingdon is an incredibly rude person. When you have a customer like Ener Hax who had a real investment in Second Life in both money and time as a Mentor, plus the added bonus of a person that is going nuts online with how great Second Life is, you could at least get your minion (conversation manager) to pretend to be you and simply say hello. Losing Ener as an estate owner and now as a premium member is a shameful example of how Linden Lab feels about its customers. Don’t get me started on their inexcusable treatment of Jokay – as a fellow educator and eLearning speaker, I have a deep felt respect for the amount of work she does on her Education Wiki and for her conferences teaching teachers about the benefits of Second Life.

Let’s make social networking social – the rest will fall into place.

I read about a new service being offered that allows you to “analyze, listen, and engage” your social networking efforts. I am all for analysis, some of us like looking at the numbers and it helps guide others (even if they are stubborn pink-haired avatars) to use those channels that reach people in a more meaningful manner.

What I object to is the use of a tool to listen and engage with consumers. We all consume, just reading this blog is consumption – but do you really need a tool to listen and engage?

That is where Ener shines with all of this – by listening and “engaging”. You don’t need a tool for that. M Linden could have tweeted a hello to Ener quite easily.

If you are a company, you have the resources to listen and engage in Facebook and Twitter very easily. You can easily address 50 Facebook wall posts and 50 Twitter replies in less than 30 minutes. You don’t need software to do that. Log in and read!

If you think you need software to listen to a real person and answer them, then you really don’t have an interest in that person as a human being, only as a consumer.

Ener has 20,000 Twitter followers because – surprise – the haxter understands that they are real people and talks to the ones that want to talk. That’s one avatar that does this just for fun.

Thanks for the prompt Ener, this was a nice break from writing curricula and science activities! See you in-world! =)

Habbo Hotel (from Ener's post on the need of a universal avatar)

or so i would like to think. not really though. i kind of stumbled into Second Life thanks to subQuark and fell in love with being able to build things

at first i was all “bah, this blows” because i was used to the graphics you can make in Blender 3D. i was all “eww, you can see the polys” and “how do you fine tune meshes”

but what Second Life was lacking in 3D detail, it more than made up for with being able to work with others. in Blender or Maya, you work alone. in virtual worlds you can work with people all over the world. on one big project, i was working with a lady in japan, a guy in spain, two people from england and we were creating a campus for a french university!

that, to me, is the strongest point of Second Life

so it made me sad to read this link forwarded by our own Nickola about the downsizing of Linden Lab

http://www.massively.com/2010/06/07/linden-lab-laying-off-staff-closing-singapore-office/

it mentions the enterprise team being riffed and that is no surprise. paying $55K per year does not make sense if you are going to be firewalled. you can get better service and higher performance for that type of use by going OpenSim with Reaction Grid for $5000 a year!

Tateru also mentions that Linden Lab has been trying to get more visitors to their site. this is where i wag my finger at them and my only real complaint with Linden Lab

they crap on their biggest evangelists rather than fostering them. look at Jokay. LL even told her that she had an awesome online resource. Jokay is the real deal. she has four sims isl and has helped 1000s of educators learn more about sl. but LL later dumped on her with a Take Down notice. nice eh?

so she expanded to Reaction Grid and now has like 4 sims on the public grid and a private 9 sim grid

of course, they lost me partly because of their lack of respect for subQuark. i was all nuts for promoting second life like a lot of people are. you can’t beat word of mouth advertising from real clients. and while i never expected any money or discount from LL, an occasional shout out would have been nice. i spent a month trying to get M Linden to just say hello to me on twitter

don’t get a twitter account unless you are going to talk to the little people. at the time, i was a $3K month customer. that does not make me better than anyone else, but i would think i could get a “hai, wazzup my biach” or something?

to toot my own horn (subQ’s too, he set all this up) – having little people like me out there saying SL is great has value. this blog ranked higher than secondlife.com this morning. we scored a 99.1% in websitegrader.com versus SL’s 98.4%. all that means is that LL has an opportunity to embrace the people that love it and get real value back

i loved being an SL Mentor. it was a volunteer thing, the only perks you got were to go to some islands that only Mentors could go to. but LL did away with that. i know there are always issues when you have 3000 volunteers, but you also get a lot of love back

it’s too bad that LL turned what used to basically be a lovefest for them into making many residents feel alienated, but they have to answer to making a profit and i guess if that means dumping on residents and laying off staff, so be it

my thoughts go to those that have been fired by Linden Lab =(

woohoo! croaking is what frogs do and i know because i am as froggy as they get =)

i enjoy reading many blogs and one of those, who write very much from the heart, is Virtual 52 1/2 by Cristopher Lefavre. first, English is not his native tongue, so i can identify with him on writing a blog in English. secondly, he is passionate about virtual worlds, and thirdly he does both Second Life and Reaction Grid where he has his own sim

it’s one thing to blog about virtual worlds, but it’s another when you have skin in the game by owning sims. it’s just a slightly different perspective. not better, not worse, just diff

he had mentioned a past post where i had said

because LL is shifting does not mean it is evil

i was talking about their shift away from educators (it was a stated main focus for 2009), the firing of Pathfinder, the pooping on Jokay and her incredibly valuable ed wiki, and their new focus of business with their Enterprise solution

he added to this that comment above

because competition grows in virtual worlds does not mean SL will not be able to compete in lots of areas.

which i wholeheartedly agree with (and as i often do, i chided in with a comment that then becomes this post!) =p

Linden Lab is a big company that is worth millions. to get to that size means lots of decisions, many of which seem wacky to us. but they do have a mission, they do employ like 300 people, and are the “real deal” (meaning employees, brick and mortar office, hardware, etc – see brick and mortar pics below)

it is easy for me to complain and whine and say i know better, but i don’t (snap! there go my plans for world domination – Planet Ener had a nice ring to it) =D

if i actually did know better, then their would be “Poutine Life” or “Ener Land” or something that was bigger and better than Second Life and i would be a zillionaire hanging out with Lady Gaga

so it’s good to dissent and offer constructive criticism and LL does hear some of it and act on it, but without being the head of Linden Lab and seeing their business course from their perspective – what the heck do i or anyone else know? (shoot, another blow – i thought i knew it all, another wrinkle in my world domination plan, ugh) =D

it’s all just feedback and no one actually knows better, they (me too) just like to moan and groan and pick

so unless you are an actual company bigger and more successful than Linden Lab, your (mine too) words are merely words (regardless of how eloquent or elementary)

actions speak the loudest and LL will likely survive and find their niche

even though virtual worlds are a decade old, they are still relatively young and have some significant hurdles to overcome before being mainstream

as much as i like to love to hate sl (i don’t really hate it at all) it’s pretty darn good

competition is coming and OpenSim is growing fast, but it still is not as good as Second Life for most people

linden lab on battery street

used to be a manufacturing building

someone's eyeball in a hand

the lobby & wall of avatars

very hard to reach wall of peeps

some short frogs have to tippy toe to reach

brinda Allen (she has a nice blog btw) commented on the iliveisl blog post about what a membership is worth and brought up an interesting perspective. it’s probably obvious to many, but it was a different thought to me. basically (i think) what brinda was saying is that you can’t gauge what Linden Lab is working on as far as performance goes. oh sure, viewer releases do address specific bugs and introduce new features, like the internet on a prim thing, but what about other areas?

as i said before, i don’t see a big diff in performance today compared to three years ago

sim crossings still suck hard

i much prefer the way they work in Reaction Grid. you hit the sim border and bump against it till you can cross over. so you don’t end up way far away and i have yet to ever fail at a sim crossing (now it’s hard to judge because subQuark has 16 private sims and there are only 5 of us working on it and it’s not loaded with scripts)

i did see some nice changes in SL  like being able to link further prims together, but i have not seen any performance gains in three years that made me go “wow”. or even any significant changes that made me notice much. i am sure that zillions of little bugs have been fixed, but those were bugs

i know that it’s all still pretty new and all you have to do is look at OpenSim which is still in Beta

BUT . . . Linden Lab has like 300 paid employees to work on the overall experience (i know it’s not all developers, but still, 300 is a lot!). when i think of that and then that there are only 3 people running Reaction Grid, suddenly it seems that SL is severely lacking in being that much better

now Second Life is better in many ways over OpenSim, but when you take into account 300 versus 3 employees and $295 versus $25 for a sim, well the diff in performance and features is not directly proportional. second life is good, but it’s not 100 times or even 10 times better. and remember that OpenSim is mainly worked on by volunteers and that anything OpenSim does can be used by Linden Lab (personally, i think the performance in reaction grid is better and i don’t care about no in-world money and i like that it can be used by little kids in school) =)

the internet on a prim has been in the works in both for a while now and OpenSim already has some of the things working that LL has talked about, like facebook login into a grid. and Kyle at Reaction Grid should have a very nice mobile client out this year

so back to what brinda was saying – you can’t really tell what LL is doing as far as behind-the-scenes hardware and so on (thus the phrase behind-the-scenes!). when LL was ramping up to launch Second Life, the cash expenditure must have been huge! buying hundreds of servers, setting up all the logistical parts, hiring new employees, and so on (is that called burn rate? the spending rate of the $$$)

since LL is private, they don’t need to disclose this info

non-adult Ener

so are they still investing at a similar rate into the things that will improve performance? or are they doing things that are highly visible, like the website redesign, which has no impact on existing residents and in-world performance? (and evidently, they think only white women are the worthwhile demographic!)

during this past year, it’s easy to justify trying to survive and LL has been expending money on the website redesign and in buying XStreetSOL
(i am so sophomoric! SOL!!!)  =p

doing the Linden Homes seems like a lateral type thing. it doesn’t help in-world performance and since i can’t seem to ever hit my home sim, i am kind of assuming that the overall experience may be pretty sketchy (read: FAIL)

oh, and it cost LL some serious paper when they put the Adult policy in place. what a support nightmare that must have been in moving all those people!