Rippelle

My friend Natacha Haroldsen offered me to test her new product Rippelle, basically a kind of Zapier or IFTTT for the greater Second Life social media outskirts. Rippelle allows you to define several inputs like WordPress, Flickr or - in this case - Blogger, and then crosspost any new posts automatically to an output side. Which this post is trying to do. We will see :-)

Of voids

Do I still have readers after more than 2 months of silence? Two months of silence. Almost 10 weeks of not blogging. That seemed unthinkable a while ago. But I was not only lazy with blogging; I was barely online in SL as well. Having been reliably online daily for the better part of 3 years, nowadays I can only been found in-world once or twice a week. So what happened?

What happened is that I have a new RL job.

"Oh!", you may think now, "This new job keeps you busy and you have to impress your new boss with loads of overtime and 140% commitment!"

No, that is not it. Of course the job keeps me busy, but it does not come with an extra investment in time. What happened however is that this job fills a void that previously got filled by SL.

Regular readers of my ramblings might remember that I often mentioned a certain hardship in my RL. A close family member suffers from a medical condition - which overshadows my life. In addition to that, my (old) RL job has turned into a nightmare during the past three years. I was trapped between a rock and a hard place, and before I found SL I was pretty much depressive. I was on a bad path, and I lacked many, many things in my RL. Respect. Appreciation. Peace. Success. Financial freedom. Companionship. Trust. Tenderness. Love.

I got all this from SL. And plenty of it.

You might think this is pathetic. I tend to think it saved my life one way or the other. For a few hours each day I found what I was craving for. I found peace. I found respect. I enjoyed success and financial freedom. At the same time that my abusive RL boss tried psychological warfare on me and told me how much I suck at what I do - I established and built the leading text service provider in SL. While I got told that the work I did the last 10 years was a piece of shit, that I suck at marketing, that I suck at selling, that I suck at networking - nonetheless I became a boss in SL myself, a business partner of some of the biggest names in SL, got a certain public exposure, got nominated as social butterfly, got nominated twice as Entrepreneur of the Year, became a SL Solution Provider.

Cynics might suggest that I had better invested this energy on my RL job. And maybe they are right. But talk is cheap, and I had the impression I was fighting a losing battle anyways - which got confirmed by friends and family. People, who had no reason to lie to me.

After a specifically abusive incident in late summer 2009 I finally had enough and started looking for a new job. My family situation made me reluctant to give up the security of my old job (as bad as it might have been - it seemed secure). Getting my CV in order and browsing job listings gave me new energy. I became bolder in job applications; I became less intimidated in my old job. And finally I found a new job.

And then something unexpected happened. The significance SL had for my life dropped overnight.

I started my new job - and did not log into SL for almost a week. I was so energized for my new job, and I was so stunned (in a positive way) of the new tasks, the new projects, and the new challenges.... I sat on my couch in the evening, totally exhausted (in a good way), and read, watched TV or played Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe - a vintage computer game.

To be honest, I feared I was addicted to SL. It was both a relieving as well as a strange realization that I am not addicted at all!

Recent research suggests that there is no such thing as addiction. That it is only stimulation and fulfillment of needs, and as soon as the needs get fulfilled in another way, the addiction vanishes. I am a prime example for this. I had the need for a respectful, appreciative environment. I did not get it in my RL, but found it in SL. So I became addicted to SL. Now I work for a company that WANTS me, that CHOSE me out of countless applicants, that NEEDS my skills, that WANTS my creativity, that gives me freedom, recognition and trust - and by this fills the void that SL used to fill.

No, don't worry, this is not another of those "I am leaving SL" posts.

I have no intention to leave SL. I like SL. It is still an environment in which I want to relax (and yes, running two businesses IS relaxing for me) , in which I have friends. However I need to reassess my time - and plan it better. Right now I am thinking of setting aside one evening for my SL-businesses, and another evening for fun, meeting friends, exploring. There are lots of things to do: I want to relocate Babel and create a small creative plaza with my friends Nissa and Ivanova. I want to pick up photography again, and - having worked with digital video some years ago - finally try machinima in SL. I neglected my social life, and I want to WIN Entrepreneur of the Year this time.

It is actually a nice feeling. Now that the subtle pressure of filling a void is gone, I can look at SL from a new angle. SL gave me a lot over the past 3 years, now it is a new chapter in my relationship with SL, and I look forward what it can give me at this stage.

Good hair day

[Safety advisory: those of my readers who are faint of heart - especially the female ones - are advised to be safely seated before proceeding with this post. Please keep a telephone handy for emergency calls. If you need something to calm your nerves - like a glass of eggnog - please take it as a precautionary measure.]

I love my hair! My first hair ever after my newbie hair was "Spike Brown" by Adam'n'Eve, and it took me many weeks until I settled on "Luth" from Elikapeka Tiramisu Designs (ETD). My budget was tight back then, and I only bought a pack of 3 browns, but it was exactly the style I wanted. Short, a little bit messy, youthful. A great style - and it did not bother me that it was marketed for women. No, I actually enjoyed it that it set me apart a bit, being probably the only male avatar wearing it. ETD's "Luth" defined the way my avatar looked since I bought it, and with very few exceptions I wore it all the time since December 2007!

I'm sorry, Ladies, yes, I wear the same hairstyle for 27 months straight

Recently my friends Faerie Hax and Dunan Wilder suggested to me in a kind and subtle (cough) way that my hair is outdated, and as a consequence dragged me through countless hair stores, among others Find Ash, Zero Style, Sadistic Hacker, Truth, Exile, Little Heaven, Novocaine, Tiny Bird and Tukinowagima - I ended up with 27 demos that were considered as finalists! Alas, while there were many nice styles among them, none of them "clicked", and ruefully and under the disapproving gaze of Faerie I returned to ETD's "Luth".

And then, a few days ago, I saw the advert for Truth Hawks' new style "Peta". (As a sidenote, don't ever try to google for "peta truth" - it gets hundreds of results - none of which is relevant to SL hairstyles). "Peta" immediately clicked. I could immediately see me wearing it and got the demo. I wore the demo for two days, and asked my friends what they think of it. All of them loved it. All of them said it is the right successor for my old hair - similar in style, but more modern in appearance. So finally, after more than two years, I changed my hair.

Copybutt

I experience weird graphics card glitches quite often, and seeing part of my body-texture plastered all across my body in a WRONG way is not unusual. But seeing my eyeballs on my lower body was actually the weirdest and grossest glitch so far.

So, yeah, it's my copybutt :-)

200,000 Banner Impressions on XStreet SL

My translation agency is recognized as Official SL Solution Provider by Linden Lab since March 2009. During a promotion for solution providers I recently got 200,000 free banner impressions on XStreet SL. This means my banner would be shown 200,000 times - not necessarily to 200,000 different people. Excited about this opportunity I submit my banner and the link to Kimmora Linden, and a little later my banner went live.

One question was where I would like the banner to link? I checked out some banners and saw they mostly link to an XStreet item, some to an external website, and some to a SLURL. I asked on Plurk for feedback on banner ads, and most people reported they never click on banners at all. In the end I decided to link it to one of my free promotional offers on XStreet itself, so I can track if the banner ad made a difference.

I had no idea what to expect, or how long those impressions would last. Two hundred thousand sounded like a large number to me, but I could not estimate what kind of visitor traffic XStreet SL would receive. A banner on XStreet SL changes whenever you come to a new page. So if you look at 3 products, you will see 4 randomly selected banners (including the front page banner).

I was rather surprised how quickly the impressions got used up. Only a few hours after the banner went live, the first 10,000 impressions were gone already. In the end, the 200,000 impressions lasted about 3 days. Of course I was curious to see the results.

The XStreet backend gives a nice realtime overview about the status of a campaign. In the end my banner received 58 clicks - this means out of 200,000 times the graphic was displayed, only 58 people (0.029%) clicked on it. This is somewhat sobering, but then again I offer niche services only suitable for a small fraction of residents.

Of course, those 58 clicks might have resulted in additional exposure and business opportunities. The linked product - my Language Kiosk - is a useful tool and free of charge. Surely those people who clicked my banner should consider my kiosk an interesting thing and "buy" it.

Alas, it does not seem like this. While there is definitely an increased exposure - those 58 clicks really end up on the product page - it does not seem to result in an increased attractivity of the kiosk. The number of purchases stays in the range of sales outside the advertised period.

Conclusions

Without doubt, a timeframe of 3 days is way too short to draw any generally valid conclusions. My product is pretty niche - a service offering rather than a retail product. Nevertheless the pricetag for those 200,000 impressions would be 7,999 L$ - had I actually paid for them I would have been extremely disappointed. To cover a full week I would have needed 500,000 impressions at least, at a whopping 17,499 L$.

• To get a better impression, a merchant is well advised to do A/B testing with 2-3 different banners. My banner was static - the majority of banners is animated to overcome the "banner blindness" of most shoppers. A proper test would consist of various versions of the banner, animated and static, with different wording as well.
  
• One of the biggest problems I see is that the banners are not context sensitive. A merchant books 200k, 500k or 2 million impressions, and the ads get randomly displayed. It would make much more sense to ask for a list of keywords and/or categories, and only show the banners relevant to XStreet products of a certain category or keyword.
  
• A by definition intangible and immeasurable effect is exposure. My banner got shown 200,000 times, so a lot of people have supposedly seen it and might remember it in the future.

Still this has been a very interesting experiment, and I thank Linden Lab to give me this opportunity. I would be interested in hearing feedback both from merchants who use banner ads, as well as from shoppers who click or not click on them.

Have you clicked on a banner before? If yes, did you buy the product? If no, why not? Did you buy banner advertising before and where you happy with the results?

I look forward to hear your feedback!

Potential RL-identity exploit with Avatars United

For those of you using their RL-email for their SL-avatar, using the default settings of Avatars United might pose a risk of unintentional exposing the address!

Snickers Snook posted an insightful article about "Spam via Avatars United", where she explained that since joining AU she receives significantly more spam on her supposedly undisclosed email address. She dug a bit into the settings and found that the default is that even non-installed AU-widgets can access certain data and send emails.

While Snickers primarily saw the spam problem, my friend Zonja Capalini pointed out that while being spammed is a nuisance, the bigger threat lies in the unsolicited disclosure of a potential RL email address and thus disclosure of the RL identity.

So if this concerns you, do two things:

1. Read Snickers article and adjust your Avatars United settings
2. Go and finally get a GMail/Yahoo/Hotmail/whatever address for your avatar

The 2500 prim skeleton

Approximately 2500 prims were used for the huge Leviathan skeleton on the new Ahab's Haunt sim. Of those 2500 prims, quite literally only a handful are sculpts. All the other prims are regular prims. Not a single prim I found is larger than 10x10x10 meters or - in other words - this humongous build was constructed without a single megaprim.

The skeleton was built by "moles" - content creators contracted by Linden Lab. It is a safe assumption that the moles know what megaprims are, and how to use them. At the same time finding a Linden build (or Linden contracted build) that uses megaprims is like searching a needle in a haystack.

I am not a pro builder, but my guess is that the leviathan skeleton could probably be built with 75% less prims if megaprims could have been used. And probably with 90% less prims if sculpted megaprims would have been an option. This means the asset browser, the SL databases and the viewers of everybody coming close to that island would only need to store, transmit and render about 250-350 prims, instead of 2500.

To understand the (I assume deliberate) decision to not use megaprims, we need to take a step back. Megaprims were never regularly available in Second Life. Initially, the SL viewer limited the maximum size of a prim, and some clever person managed to circumvent this restriction and injected the first batch of megaprims which then got handed down from builder to builder. As a result, the check for the prim dimension was included in the server side, and megaprims could not be generated anymore. A while ago, a bug in the server code made the creation of megaprims possible again, and the second wave of prims became available. At the time of this writing, there are about 36,000 megaprims known and available in SL.

There is all kinds of rumours regarding megaprims. They allegedly cause lag. They allegedly steal sim resources. They allegedly influence the physics model badly. They allegedly are illegal and can get you banned using them. Indeed, the status of megaprims is a fuzzy one. Linden Lab never outright forbid their use. Neither did they take technical steps to restrict the usage. But also they never gave the "green light" for their usage. Megaprims are tolerated, but not loved. And because of this, Linden Lab will be careful not to set a precedent and use these prims in their own builds.

Update February 8:

[11:24] Silent Mole: It's true! Mole builds don't use megaprims.
[11:26] Peter Stindberg: Thanks! Can I quote this?
[11:27] Silent Mole: Yep.
[11:29] Silent Mole: Andrew Linden is the company expert on megaprims. His office hours are at Denby (213/45/34) 11:00 - 12:00 Tuesdays and 16:00 - 17:00 Fridays.

Top 5 Requested Second Life Features

Caleb Booker is a metaverse developer and a professional writer on the topic of virtual worlds. I stumbled across a guest post of his on Hypergrid Business, which was originally published on his own blog. Caleb claims that in discussions with business/educational clients, the following 5 things were repeated over and over as the most urgently missing ones in Second Life:

1. A collaborative whiteboard
2. A PA-System for voice chat to assign an "open mic" to persons
3. Separate voice-channels in different floors of a building
4. Realnames for avatars
5. File Transfer between avatars

The thing with these 5 requests is that they are highly biased towards a specific purpose. I personally know of a handful of whiteboard applications. I think voice conferencing is best realized with 3rd-party-offworld tools. As is file transfer. And as far as realnames are concerned, I recently stumbled across Xerox' SL presence and they use names along the lines of "FirstnameLastname Xerox". But I digress.

While I am sure those 5 might definitely be pressing issues from a business point of view, I can't accept them in their absolute approach as THE 5 most requested features for SL. In my point of view, the 5 most urgent things are:

1. Inventory Loss
   It is an unacceptable situation that inventory gets lost in the first place. And the reports of lost inventory and the Lab's reaction to it - which almost come at a weekly basis - are plainly said a disgrace. I really can't understand why inventory gets lost at all. But if it happens, I can't understand why the Lab is not able to restore it easily. I have seen people leave SL over losing their entire inventory. I have friends who experienced multiple inventory losses. I have friends who followed the knowledge base steps meticulously, only to hear from the Lab they should in the knowledge base upon which the support person simply closed the ticket. Inventory not only has a monetary value (in many cases substantial) but also a commemorative value. WHY DOES INVENTORY GETS LOST AT ALL?
2. Teleport
   Why do teleports fail? Why do they sometimes fail so drastically that you crash? Why do I appear perfectly ok to my friends after a teleport for up to minutes, while on my end still the odometer bar crouches slowly? Why am I sometimes completely immobile after a TP? Why do I sometimes need to do a 3-way-teleport to reach my destination? Why can't I sometimes not teleport at all to a destination, but a log-off with subsequent log-in to the very place works?
3. Scalability
   The landlady of my home sim built a club there a while ago. Unfortunately it is very successful. Which means that when there is an event going on, the rest of the sim lags horribly. Which is annoying when you try to build or have a business meeting. Prims won't rez, scripts crouch. And we're only talking about 25 people on the sim. The adjacent sim is usually empty. Why do empty sims not contribute their resources to full sims? Why do 25 avatars throttle a sim down, why do 40 avatars turn a sim into syrup? Why can't we have 100 or 200 avatars on a sim AND have smooth motion and quick rezzing? Why is a sim limited to a processor core, instead of requesting as much processing power from the SL grid as it needs?
4. Prim Sizes
   I want to make prims in any arbitrary size. Allowing sizes larger than 10m - with full support - would make building so much easier and efficient. It would be so much more efficient for the prim economy too. It would even reduce load on the asset servers.
5. IM Subsystem and Inventory Transaction
   As I wrote back in November, almost every inventory action results in an IM behind the scene, and this is the reason inventory transactions routinely fail. Besides that, the current IM/chat system has a whole lot of issues annoying residents on a daily basis.
   

Yes, I am aware that this is probably not the top 5 requested features, but rather the top 5 requested remedies.

What are your top-5 requested features or bugfixes?

Avatars United - where is the beef?

In a surprising move Linden Lab has bought the web portal "Avatars United". In April 2008 now retired blogger Vint Falken presented Avatars United (AU) as "Facebook for virtual personas". While I never was much of a fan of Facebook - and the current (and repeating) controversies about privacy concerns prove me right - I do use the social business networks Xing and LinkedIn with good success. A social network for avatars that bridges te gap between purely in-world presence, blogs and email was an intriguing thought so I signed up.

Avatars United never really fulfilled my vision and expectations. There were certainly a lot of good ideas, but at the same time they fell short in many aspects. The site used to be slow, features were not intuitive or buggy. Also - despite Vint's call for action to SL avatars to become the largest group in AU - it never reached a critical mass.

Other services stepped in. Flickr holds now the largest community of SL avatars for photo sharing, despite efforts of Koinup and Snapzilla to offer more SL centric services. Blogger and Wordpress hosts the majority of SL centric blogs, Twitter and Plurk have huge communities of SL avatars despite more specialized latforms like Ning or even SL centric platforms like rezzed.net (defunct), moolto (a Ning site) or ProfilesLive (aka SLProfiles) offering better tailored services. There are avatars on Xing, LinkedIn and even on Facebook, who is currently undergoing the second wave of ethnic cleansing regarding digital personas.

Avatars United - forgotten by many and dwarfed in usage compared to any of the other sites above - now got the huge boost from Linden Lab. The cards have been reshuffled, the game is open again.

What does Avatars United offer today:

1. Microblogging
   The "Shoutbox" allows you to publish short blurps of thoughts which can be seen by your contacts or everybody else seeing your public page.
   Who else offers it: Twitter and Plurk are the platforms used most by SL avatars, but also avatar forums on Ning, rezzed.net, moolto and others offer this.
   AU implementation: Solid, but lacks cross-connectivity into other services like ping.fm
   Killer feature: no
2. Photo Sharing
   You can create albums and upload photos to it. Other users can comment on the photos and "like" them.
   Who else offers it: Flickr is the "mother of photo sharing services", Google has Picasa as probably #2 in the market. Koinup offers specialized services for SL avatars and has a nice followership. Snapzilla is specialized on SL avatars as well and is widely used.
   AU implementation: slow and offering no advantage I can see compared to other sites.
   Killer feature: no
3. Blog
   AU allows you to create your own blog entries, as well as to subscribe to other's blogs and to comment and "star" posts.
   Who else offers it: Wordpress and Blogger as the most popular services, but also communities like Ning.
   AU implementation: straightforward and spartanic, but missing again important connectivity features.
   Killer feature: no
4. Feed Reader
   The opposite of the AU-blogs is the function to aggregate blog sources you read in a web based feed reader. With the idea of AU as dashboard, you could read all your favourite blogs from within the AU page.
   Who else offers it: ther eis a plethora of standalone feed readers - as web service Google Reader is probably the largest one
   AU implementation: extremely slow and buggy, claiming perfectly validating feeds as not being proper ones
   Killer feature: no
5. Plugins and Gadgets
   AU offers the functionality to include 3rd party plugins into your page, adding more functionality. Right now the number of plugins is small, but since AO offers support for Google's OpenSocial standard, there will soon be more.
   Who else offers it: Facebook, LinkedIn and Xing all offer plugins, there is also a number of plugins available for the iGoogle homepage. Ning offers plugins to a certain extent.
   AU implementation: I have not tested this yet
   Killer feature: maybe - no other SL/avatar centric platform offers this functionality. It depends on how this feature gets adopted by the community, but this could be a winner.
6. Currency model
   While the basic functionality is free, certain features need to purchased with AU "coins", where 500 coins equal roughly 5 US$ or about 1500 L$. It seems that 3rd party plugin developers can charge "coins" for these too.
   Who else offers it: Google Apps offers commercial widgets for one time or repeat charges. No SL oriented site I know offers this.
   Killer feature: maybe - for social websites it is the clearest revenue model I saw so far, and it depends on the attractiveness of the offered features. And of course with the new owner Linden Lab, an integration of the "coins" with L$ would facilitate the success.

Bottom line

Where is the beef? Right now I don't see it. While I definitely will continue to use AU, right now I see no compelling reason to prefer it over my usage of iGoogle, Blogger, Plurk, Twitter and Flickr. However AU is in a great starting position now. With a more responsive server platform, and with essential cross-connectivity features added, it might become a true dashboard for avatars. Let us pipe in our photos from Flickr and Koinup. Let us mirror our blogposts from Wordpress and Blogger. Let us Tweet and Plurk from the AU interface or get support for ping.fm. Let us rate XStreetSL items within AU and create wishlists. Let us mirror our in-world friendship relations in AU and see who's online. Add a landmark sharing service.

The opportunities are exciting for sure. Now it comes to show the SL residents the beef.

Watch your avatar name with Google Alerts

Everybody has "googled" their avatar name before, and the more vocal ones of us have certainly found a mentioning here and there. But did you know you can automate this process? Google Alerts is a nifty little gadget that allows you to store Google queries within the search engine itself, and get an email report (or a personalized feed) as soon as one of your searches gets a new result.

I am using Google Alerts both for my SL avatar as well as for my RL person, and it has become an essential tool for me. However the other day I read an article by metaverse consultant Ener Hax and realized that probably not everybody knows about Google Alerts. You might notice that against my usual practice I did not link to Ener's article. The reason is that Ener writes she has - just like me - set up extensive Google Alerts "so if someone mentions me, i wanna say hello back". I hope Ener Hax shows up in the comment then to prove the effectiveness :-)

As you can see from the screenshot I have set up Google Alerts for my name and the name of my businesses and the projects I am involved in. In my particular case I have also set up Alerts for the common misspellings - some people never get my name right. Basically you can set up Alerts for every valid Google query. The "link:" queries you see in the image for example fire if someone links to my blog.

Admittedly I have edited the screenshot. I have also set up Alerts for my avatar name in conjunction with my real name - I want to know right away should they ever appear in the same context. I have also set up Alerts for my competitors so I can keep an eye on them.

I hope this helps you keep a better eye on your online persona - and of course these things apply to your RL identity too.

Winning a photo/story contest

A few weeks ago my dear friend Zippora Zabelin contacted me with the suggestion to cooperate on a contest for a "Royal Photograph" for the Companion sim. The contest was aimed to create portraits of "missing relatives" of a royal bloodline, to be displayed in a gallery in the castle. Zippora sent me the draft of her story describing the sad fate of the King's firstborn daughter - the Ice Princess.

My task was to come up with the visual interpretation of her story. Thankfully there were still some wintery sims around, among others Oubliette in which I took a similar themed photo of my friend Quaintly some time ago.

The photoshoot proved difficult with extreme slow sim performance and both me and Zippora crashing. Post processing of the images took several days, with drafts going back and forth between Zippora and me many times until we were both happy.

Last night we got contacted by the contests organizer Frigg Ragu with the great news that we are in fact one of the winners and our contribution will be exhibited in the castle. This was actually the first time I won a contest in SL (except from some "Best in ..." party contests), and it was an extremely pleasing experience.

Make sure you read Zippora's wonderful story as well - the image and the story really go hand in hand with each other.

The many faces of Peter Stindberg across the grids

Beauty is only skin deep - and nowhere this saying is more true than in virtual worlds. The appearance of our digital identity - the avatar - consists of a handful of sliders for the shape and the skin that is pulled across it.

I recently spent more time again on OpenSim based grids, and you will likely see more posts about that topic in the future. A year ago I took my first glimpse into opensim grids - and was quickly sobered due to the quickness and bad performance of those alternatives. But things have changed over the past year. Stability has become much better. Newer viewers offer features addressing the issue of accessing various grids. And so exploring new frontiers outside of SL becomes a less frustrating and more exciting endeavour.

Over the three years I have spent in SL, I have subtly tweaked my avatar many times. I am quite happy with the (preliminary) end result. Peter Stindberg is a male, without doubt, but not one of the stereotype males featuring a barrel chest, no neck and ridiculous proportions that more remind of the incredible hulk than a human being. I am rather short for a guy (still transformed to atomic world sizes my avatar is 2.15m tall), slender with a hint of adrogynity. Above all, my avatar is proportioned, with legs and arms and torso in the right lengths and widths. The slight unshaven look, the curious eyes and the not-too-toned look comes from Hart Larssons wonderful PXL Jude skin. And my signature haircut is Luth from ETD - an older style but I like the messy look.

It's only natural that I want to take this appearance with me into other grids. Of those I tested only Reaction Grid gives you a halfway decent avatar (with halfway decent prim hair and AO) to start with - the other grids give you the standard Ruth female avatar.

Transferring my shape was the easiest task. The Imprudence viewer allows you to export your shape into a XML file (provided you have the necessary rights to the shape), and reimport it again. This was a quick task, and after a few minutes my 4 personas in other grids had the same body like my SL avatar.

Skin and hair however proved to be difficult. Except for the Rezzable grid (which is basically only a playground/testing-grid) I found some freebie shops in all the other grids, usually providing me with Eloh Eliot skins which - in doubt - I could upload myself too since Eloh hands out the Photoshop files. However, while Eloh's skins are nice, it is not what I wanted. And it is even sadder with hair, because what you find in the freebie boxes in terms of male hair is rather pitiful.

So I contacted Hart Larsson of PXL Creations and Elikapeka Tiramisu of ETD and explained my situation and asked for a license to use their creations in another grid:

Lately I am exploring more and more 3rd party grids, and of course I want to have a consistent appearance across grids. Therefore I would like to ask you for the terms and conditions of a license that would allow me to use .... in other grids too.

I know from a content creator perspective this is a touchy issue. What I am asking for is a license tied to my person only - I operate by the same name in all other grids. I don't expect to get this license for free either. In terms of security I can only offer you my public reputation though.

[... Explanation how it could be done from a technical point of view ...]

I understand fully that this might be quite a tough request for you, but I ask you to think about it with an open mind. Please let me know if there are any additional questions you might have, I am more than willing to answer them.

Hart Larsson got back to me a day later. He has already investigated a bit into 3rd party grids but is rather reluctant. The surprising argument was that he fears more theft in these grids compared to the Second Life grid. His argumentation was along the lines that in those 3rd party grids good content is rare, so someone who comes there wearing a good skin is more likely to get copybotted than in SL. I personally think that a copybotter would rather go into SL to "harvest" and then upload the items into a 3rd party grid, but I have to accept Hart's concerns. He promised me to think about it - I have not yet contacted him again.

ETD's store assistant contacted me a little later. She thanked me for the notecard and the extensive explanation, and was glad I liked the ETD hair so much. However she said that a request like mine is out of her room for decision, and that Elikapeka is on an extended hiatus from SL. She promised me to pass my request along, but also mentioned I should not set too high hopes into a positive answer.

A look into the future

When I look into my crystal ball, I see that some time in the next 18 to 24 months we will be able to freely travel with our Second Life avatars into 3rd party grids. Probably only a few at first - most likely the academical Reaction Grid - but it will become more and more. Initially we will be able to travel into those grids with our appearance only - shape, skin and the items we wear. Eventually the rest of our inventory will follow and we will be able to change clothing or rez furniture in a foreign grid. It is inevitable, and content creators will not be able to prevent this.

I expect there are more people like me who want to explore 3rd party grids already today, and who want to do so in style using an as close as possible replica of their SL avatars. And who are honest enough to want to do this officially.

There is a window of opportunity here for content creators to branch out. The opensim based grid InWorldz has a currency model and an inworld economy already, where 500 IZ$ equal 1 US$. Other opensim grids plan to introduce an economy in the near future. Those content creators who will adopt grids outside of SL first, will be the ones who become successful there.

My advice for content creators is:

• Grant your customers licenses to use your creations in other grids
• Open stores in the more prominent 3rd party grids to establish a presence
• Team up with other designers and buy a sim in the more popular other grids
• For grids without an economy, offer your customers to pay you inside SL with L$ and deliver your items to them in the other grids

There is a market out there you are missing out on. Adopt the diversity and branch out to have success in the future.

A look into the even further future

In 5-7 years from now, Second Life will be the backbone of the Metaverse, providing an infrastructure with protocols, storage databases and API's. Individuals and corporations host their own sims on their servers. Similar to renting webspace today, you can rent simspace in the future, in datacenters connected to the SL backbone. But if you so desire you can also host your sim on your home machine and connect it to the SL grid. The currency of the Metaverse is the L$ - the money transactions handled by Linden Lab which acts as the bank of the metaverse. Linden Lab offers a credit card that taps into your L$ balance and with which you can make purchases in the atomic world. For these services, Linden Lab asks the usual charges banks ask for transaction. However the L$ will become the first truly globally accepted micropayment system, obsoleting PayPal. Not only will you be able to load books on your ebook reader and pay for them with L$, you will also be able to download video on demand or music with L$ and you can seamlessly watch them either on your internet enabled TV or your sim in the Metaverse.

Web based Megaprim Search Engine

A few days ago I was talking with Katharine Berry and a person whose name I forgot about Megaprims and the SALT HUD when I mentioned that a web based solution to "order" megaprims would be nice since it could offer a graphical preview. Katharine liked the idea and started to code and in only two days finished megaprim.sl - a full featured graphical web based megaprim search engine.
On the first screen you enter the desired dimensions for the megaprim with the option to search for prims with exact matching dimensions, or megas that are smaller or larger. You can also account for a certain flexibility in the results. The permutation setting allows you to search for prims that match the query by means of rotating it - this is useful in some cases but needs to be switched off in cases where you want to convert the prim type to e.g. cylinder or where the center of the prim would be outside your parcel.


After submitting your query the website displays a list of matching prims. Via "get it" you can have the prim delivered to you. In order to prevent spamming/abuse, the in-world server sends you a confirmation link first - once per session (i.e. as long as you don't close your browser session).

Megaprim.sl is a fast and efficient way to get megaprims delivered, and has many advantages over the SALT HUD. For feedback and suggestions please comment on Katharines blogpost.

The model railroad that is SL

Maybe December and the time around Christmas is when the children of all ages dream of model railroads. In a rather insightful post a few weeks ago, my dear and close friend Zippora compared being in SL to playing with trains:

"But wait... did I just mention "Second Life" and "model railroad" in one line of thought? Suddenly something became clear to me: SL is simply the contemporary equivalent of building model railroads! [...] We don't want to make our hands dirty any more and hide safely behind our computer instead. But the crafting virus is inevitable and we start building our little dream world there: on our screen. Instead of gypsum and glue we use prims and to make things move the electric circuits are replaced by scripts. Basically it is all the same."

Zippora is on to something here. What is definitely one of the major success factors of SL is the ability to - literally - build your own world, and collaborate in buildings. There has been social media interaction before (chatrooms, IRC), there have been 3D worlds before (Myst or any other 3D game), there has been the ability to create before (Photoshop, Blender), there have been online games/worlds before. Only SL brought it all together, brought it all in one place, provides a world that the inhabitants build themselves, and where everybody can see and share what the others did.

I know a few people working on model railroads, and usually it is a lonely task. Those railroads are not for playing - they are for being watched in awe. Often the builders are organized in clubs, but the worlds they build are their own. The world we build in SL is open to everybody. The social interaction, based around - and even inside - our own creations, makes this fascination. The comparatively crude building tools level the playing field. Everybody can build, everybody can contribute, the starting threshold is small. If you feel your creativity flow, you rez a prim and simply start. That is the magic of SL!

And that is the reason I see newer virtual worlds like Blue Mars critically. Yes, Blue Mars looks fancier, way fancier. Yes, Blue Mars is faster. But Blue Mars is not a world built by the residents. Blue Mars is a world built by an elite, and our role is to admire (and eventually pay) for it.

SL might seem crude. SL might seem full of horrible (and sometimes perceived as inappropriate) content. But it is us who build it! And if I want to go and redefine "ugly" by building an abomination of a statue, I can.

And that is freedom.

New neighbours

There has been quite some reshuffling of sims close to my mooring place at Sailor's Rest, due to the arrival of the SS Galaxy and the opening of the dearly missed Treasure Cove passage, connection the Sailor's Cove sims in the East to the Blake Sea in the West without the need of doing a large detour northwards.

All this new land messed the Artificial Isle sims northeast of me up - Gulliver Airport is still not fully recovered. In all this transition the peaceful slip for my boat got a new neighbour - a (military) airport by all means.

My boat is my refuge as well. I often come there just to get some rest. But this airport has a severe impact on the peacefulness and quiet of that place. I have paid my slip 6 weeks in advance - time enough o find a new place to anchor.

Update: I checked out quite a few potential marinas in the United Sailing Sims (USS), the New England sims and other sailing sims around the Blake Sea. all of them are rather large marinas, busy with boats, not really what I want. One spot was quite nice, only that it was a caribbean island and those are so ubiquitous in SL that I rather avoid them. The good news is that my rent paid is good for all the USS slips and can be transfered.

Diversity

Ten of my female friends, posing naked for my camera. Not only 10 different shapes, but also different skins, expressions and attitudes. This is just a glance at the rich diversity Second Life has to offer!

The "Diversity" project was inspired by a RL project I saw on Tumblr a while ago. Ten women, naked, showing the variation nature has in stock for female bodies. In SL we tweak our own shapes, select our own skin, and create our own appearance. I chose 10 of my friends for their unique way of appearance. All 10 of them defined femininity for themselves - making it very diverse to look at.

All women were asked to pose topless, but other than that, no requests were made. They should use whatever accessories, hair, tattoos or jewellery they feel most at home with. Ten poses were created for the shot, loosely inspired by the poses of the RL photo, and I selected the pose fitting the model best. Some poses look a bit shy, others show very self secure femininity and nakedness.

I took about 20 photos of each avatar with different lighting settings and arranged them in a hopefully harmonic way. Countless times I shuffled the single photos until a balanced collage was achieved. I only did very subtle post processing on the images, mostly smoothing edges where the SL mesh did not have enough nodes for pleasing stretching of the skin.

I am showing you some diversity. And this is just a glimpse. There is so much beautiful diversity to be found in SL. So many people living their dreams and fantasies. Go and find out for yourself!

My thanks to (in alphabetical order): Chav, Jenn, Lectra, Marx, Natsumi, Nissa, Quest, Trinity, Uccello and Zippora

Nautical rules

[8:00] Peter Stindberg: Well, there's a rule for female guests on my boat though
[8:03] Vextra Messing: what's the rule?
[8:05] Peter Stindberg: Bikini(-top) is strictly enforced - taking it off in mid-cruise is encouraged
[8:07] Vextra Messing: hehe, that's a cute rule, I suppose it improves aerodynamics
[8:07] Peter Stindberg: oh, absolutely!
[8:07] Vextra Messing: They put tits on the front of ships for good reasons.
[8:08] Peter Stindberg: yep, knowledge of the elders

A short history of copying

[This is a post I made for Rez Magazine in July 2009. Since Rez Magazine is closing down, I saved the post for my own blog.]

Copying is a fact. Copying has happened over the millenia. The first cavemen copied fire from lava flows or burning trees. Cultural advancements were based on copying. Things like a number system and written language got copied. Copying helped win wars. Copying helps fighting AIDS in Africa. Copying comes with a whole variety of names like "learning" or "inspiration". Babies copy their parent's behaviour when growing up. Copying is deeply ingrained in the human nature.

I am not saying copying is right. People spend a lot of time and effort into creating things for commercial gain. Those people have all the rights to be extremely pissed if someone copies them and threatens their business model. Again it is not as black and white as it seems, when it comes to cases were the copy is superior to the original, or where the original is so simple that it could be considered as public domain, but that is a different blog post altogether. Someone whose fruits of labor get copied should have a way to seek compensation, and most countries have legislation in place where this can be achieved. The machinery grinds a bit when it becomes international or when different standards come into play, but basically it works.

Exact digital copies change the game

Admittedly, the digital technology we have since the Seventies/Eighties makes copying extremely easy. While copying a painting by a Dutch Master took the contemporaries an equal, if not longer amount of time and work, copying a DVD in 2009 is a matter of 30 minutes instead of the 15 months the movie making needed, not to mention the cost. If you look at copying as an arms race, the side of the copiers has quite an advantage nowadays.

The answer to this is Digital Rights Management - DRM. It's the technological answer to the technological reality of exact digital copies. But DRM is nothing more than an illusion of security. DRM puts up a huge smokescreen and repeats the mantra "You are safe, you are safe" over and over. It's the 21st Centuries equivalent of dried frog pills and love potions. If digital content is to be consumed by humans apart from being encoded digitally it needs to be decoded again. And the decoding process can be reverse engineered, and sooner or later will be reverse engineered. So while DRM does not discourage the determined, it does however annoy the compliant customers by limiting their experience.

What is the best protection?

What is your best protection against being copied? Innovation! Let's take the fashion industry - a prime target of copying not only in the atomic world but also in Second Life. What Diesel or Armani or Calvin Klein or Gucci show on the catwalks in Milan and Paris will flood the trash boutiques on High Street all over the world a few months later as copies "inspired by...". The large labels are definitely not thrilled about that, but do they call for "Design Rights Management"? Do they ask that at airports or railway stations or in police controls, women get stripped who wear copied dresses? No. Do they demand show trials where women who bought copycatted dresses get charged for thousand times the worth of the dress? No! They do two things:

1. From the commercial side they make their initial, innovative releases incredibly expensive. This enables the folks who can afford them to feel part of a rich elite, as well as as cover the design and production cost plus a hefty margin.
   Or they may take the approach of going for the masses, showing their new creations on the catwalk only to sell it by the millions themselves as long as they have the head start.
   


2. While the copycats pick up on the new releases and the sales of the old collection starts to dwindle, they are already busy making the next collection, working on new designs, only to surprise the fashion world with their new creations in Milan or Paris again. They either sell few for high prices, or many for low prices, they collect their margin, eventually they get copied but by then they have their next collection in the works already. Lather, rinse, repeat.

From the atomic to the virtual world

Let's finally come to Second Life, a world with a DRM system weaved into the very fabric of the system. The DRM system was certainly part of the success of SL, since for a while it gave content creators security and a commercial model that allowed them to receive economic gain for their work. I do not blame anybody for believing this system was foolproof. Not everybody is technically interested, and the advocates of DRM never stop claiming that DRM is safe and the answer to all problems.

However it was only a matter of time until the inherent vulnerabilities got exploited. Intercepting the the OpenGL protocol to retrieve textures was the first step, working on the viewer protocol to retrieve prim parameters and other attributes only the second step. Rika Watanabe made a short but drastic summary what can be copied and what can not be copied. It should be mandatory to read for every content creator.

Was it foreseeable that copying happened? Yes. Could it have been prevented? No. The way Second Life works is that your viewer gets a kind of blueprint, and recreates what your avatar sees locally on your computer. And for that, all parameters and all textures need to be transferred to you. The only way to prevent this would be if the Second Life servers would transfer only frames of a kind of movie to you - every action would happen inside the server. And this is simply not feasible.

Accepting copying as inevitable is one thing. Making it too easy is another thing. Burglary is as inevitable, but you don't leave your door open to make it easier for the thief. So when earlier this week UK-based metaverse development company Rezzable announced the release of BuilderBot, a tool that could copy a whole sim regardless who owns the items on it, emotions ran high. Rezzable back paddled two days later, announcing it will keep the source code of the program under tabs and implement DRM conformity. The discussion is the same since over a year ago the tool "Second Inventory" was released. In its first versions, "Second Inventory" did not bother as well who the creator of items was. Quickly, the author was convinced to include DRM checks as well.

As of today, copying of all content from Second Life (with few exception - see Rika's article linked above) is possible for everyone. However, special technical understanding is required not many people possess. Tools like "Second Inventory", export features like included in the Gemini Viewer or BuilderBot, aimed for the masses, limit copyable content to content you created yourself or where you have full modify rights for. And I think this is good as it is. You can't prevent the determined from copying, but that does not mean to make the technology available to all.

Getting copied sucks. Getting copied hurts. Getting copied wants you make to drop everything and go lick your wounds. But it is a fact, and throwing technology at the problem will not prevent it from happening, but make life more difficult for the legitimate users. If you got copied, by all means, report the person and seek legal action if possible. But stop asking for a technical solution, because there can't be a technical solution!

Copybotters don't innovate! Copybotters can only feed on what actually exists. Beat them with what you can best: create! Create amazing content for Second Life! Refine your skills. Don't waste energy on worrying about being copied. Use the energy to innovate. Be ahead of the copybotters. Don't focus on people who don't buy in your shop anyways (those who buy copied content), focus on the people who are willing to spend money! Don't let the copybotters win. Show them you are better, faster, more innovative.

Stop worrying now. Start creating now!

Web marketplaces side by side comparison

A lot of people have written about alternatives to XStreet SL in the past weeks, most notably my friend Eloise Pasteur in her review series. There is also a good series of posts by Allegory Malaprop.What was lacking so far is a side-by-side comparison, so I took the effort of listing all of my 5 items on each of the available platforms. I focused on several aspects:

1. Storefront
   This is the personalized page that only shows your items in an overview. Many merchants link to the storefront from their blogs. The more options the storefront offers, the better for marketing purposes.
   
   
2. Individual item
   My item "Plywood Man" displayed in all available platforms. Please note that I tried to keep the same 1024-pixel window for all items. Screenshots that are larger had a horizontal scrollbar.
   
   
3. Merchant backend overview
   This is the dashboard where you see all your items as a seller, and from where you can ideally make some adjustments already.
   
   
4. Single item edit
   The edit page for a single item, showing all the available editing options
   
   
5. Seller statistics
   What kind of logs and statistics are available to merchants.

Apez.biz
This site has been around for quite some time. Apez is probably best known for their vendor system, which offers comparable (and in some aspects superior) functionality to the popular Hippo system. The technology of Apez is from what I can tell very advanced, their marketing however leaves a lot to be desired. The webpage is basically unchanged for a year now, despite the fact that the Apez team intended to relaunch it shortly after LL acquired OnRez and XStreet SL. Among the almost unknown features of Apez is the fact that you can build your own personalized storefront with them, or that you can use it to schedule payments to any avatar. Eloise's report on Apez.biz.



meta-LIFE
Meta-LIFE is a strange mixture of affiliate vending system, vendor supplier, web shopping portal and community portal. One of the most interesting features is the ability to create a "meta brand" where more than one merchant participates. Meta-LIFE also offers an in-world HUD that not only facilitates shopping, but also has social community features and allows to recommend places and people. Eloise's report on meta-LIFE.






Metaverse Exchange (MVX)
The claim to fame for this platform is that they not only serve Second Life but also the Opensim-based alternative grid "Legend City Online (LCO)". However, none of the listed terminal locations in LCO could be found, and also LCO strikes me as a bit deserted right now. While setting up the MVX account was easy enough, the concept that item photo and price are separated from item description and category is something one needs to get used to. I also did not find where to edit the listing of an already established account. Read what Eloise had to tell about Metaverse Exchange.



MySLMarket
This platform comes from German developers and offers you to add listings in English and German. However the English translation of the site is - despite the operators claim it has been cross-checked by native speakers - a little bit odd. To add a listing you need to select "Insert announcement" - which kept me quite some time to figure out. What is interesting is the idea of a "flea market", where single used items can be sold. Eloise's post on MySLMarket.



slapt.me
Among all of the alternatives to XStreet SL, slapt.me is probably the youngest, but at the same time the most vocal one. I was unable to find a proper storefront link, but all the other essentials were there. During the time I listed items on slapt.me I had to manually update my dropbox three times. While this was annoying to a certain extent, it also shows the platform is actively maintained. My personal impression is that slapt.me will be the most likely candidate for leading competitor to XStreet SL. Eloise had some not so good initial experiences, but posted an update.



Vitty
Vitty is a platform originating from Japan, which makes it an interesting option for getting a foot into the (huge) Japanese market. The English translation is remarkably good, so the usage for non-Japanese shoppers and merchants is possible. Vitty allows you to submit listings in two languages, where you can decide what languages they are. For serious merchants I suggest to make the primary listing in Japanese though. I did not had a good start with Vitty as it did not want to send me the dropbox first, but that got resolved eventually. Eloise had the same problem, so no extensive review yet.



XStreet SL
We all know XStreet SL, so just for comparison purposes the same screenshots as for the other platforms:



What else?
Apart of those 6 alternatives, a 7th is about to launch mid December. Cariama has a pleasing webpage design, but so far one can not say a lot of things. It has yet to be seen how it will work.

My personal impression is that the three most interesting platforms are Apez.biz, meta-LIFE and slapt.me. I doubt a single one of them will "make it" and obsolete the others. All have different concepts and strenghts and weaknesses. Apez definitely lacks on the marketing side - something slapt.me is agressively pushing. If you want to tap into the Japanese market, Vitty is your best bet so far, but Japanese translation is a must (and incidentally I know a good translation agency :-).

I assume merchants will need to live with maintaining multiple platforms, and need to develop strategies and maybe even tools to update listings on all of them. Definitely there are good platforms that allow you to address a broad audience and not have your eggs all in one basket.