Last week I got an email from WordPress.org to say that 3.0 was now on its second Beta. Well, I usually don’t try the betas out — Automattic, the company behind WordPress, tends to innovate little, making sure that as most backwards compatibility is preserved — and just do a “blind update”, crossing my fingers, when the new version comes out.

This time, however, I was a bit bolder. I’ve been frustrated like crazy with WordPress’ lack of proper menu navigation. While I consider myself a fangirl of WP (like I am of Second Life®!), I’m also the first to know its limitations. Menu navigation was at the top of my worries. Oh, yes, the lack of that is so serious that some companies sell plugins to deal with menus — because the free ones, frankly, are pretty much a waste of time. There are a lot of other things that frustrate me, like the lack of areas for “registered users” — you can password-protect articles (I keep forgetting how) and some plugins allow you to force users to log in first to be able to see some areas, but that’s really not the best way. CMS like Joomla deal with that easily and without much configuration: just click on a checkbox.

I’ve also been encouraged to move over to Drupal, which is getting better and better in its complexity. It’s a “serious” CMS for professional programmers, allowing one to create pretty much any kind of website (or portal, or set of websites with the same backend) you want. There are no limitations whatsoever, except your ability to install the appropriate plugins and extensions and programme in it whatever you need.

But I’m lazy. I like WordPress. It does 90% of what a so-called “serious” CMS is supposed to do, but it’s way easier to install, configure, and, more importantly, to get users instantly working with it without having to learn a complex backoffice. The simplicity of blogging is implied in WordPress’ interface — hiding the true power beneath its fully-configurable engine.

So, well, I got to read the two new major features for WP 3.0: menus and integration with WP MU. WP MU, for the ones that are unaware of WP’s “world”, is a WP branch that allows multiple sites to be managed from the same installation and the same database, but each gets their own “admin” user with full access to it… or almost. You can still define what themes are available overall. You can just allow admins a subset of all plugins. And, of course, you can upgrade all sites with a click of a button from the “superadmin” backoffice.

The WP MU team has done a huge effort to keep up with the “normal, single-admin” WP. Still, it was a pain to test new plugins. WP MU, since it has to deal with different configurations per website (imagine a simple plugin for viewing Flickr images: each independent site will have its own configuration), sometimes breaks some outdated plugins, and fixing them is a pain.

On the other hand, BuddyPress, a full social networking solution for WordPress (getting more popular as people start running away from soon-to-become-a-paid-service Ning), as well as some e-commerce solutions, work better under WP MU. This means that it gets hard to keep everything under the same administration backend: you might have a separate install for the main blog or site, several WP MU-created blogs, a BuddyPress install, some e-commerce solutions, and so forth. Wouldn’t it be nice to put them all under the same roof, so to speak?

Well, the good news is that WP 3.0 brings the WP MU branch back into the trunk. Yay! No more fuss with figuring out what plugins will work and what will not! Now it either breaks for 3.0 — and it means the plugin writer will quickly fix it, since there are far more “trunk” installations of WP than of WP MU — or it works flawlessly.

And, of course, we got a menu navigation system. One that works. Really. It’s so good that I can’t believe how I could survive without it before. You have a simple drag-and-drop interface, where indented items show the layout of menus and sub-menus (I don’t know how deep it goes, but it seems unlimited…). You can create menu items for pages or categories… or free-form, e.g. whatever link you wish to place there. Links can point back to your own blog too, of course, giving you the ability of using some nifty tricks. Save the manu, and Bob’s your uncle — hey presto, your blog has a menu!

Of course, it’s not that easy for yours truly, who sadly lacks advanced HTML/CSS skills. By very patiently pushing pixels here and there, I managed to backpatch a clumsy (but effective!) menu on Beta Technologies’ main page. Now finally — finally! — after three years, our clients can see what areas are available on our page, and hopefully find, with a mouseclick, where our contacts are

Thanks to Automattic for doing such a stable Beta. I’m certainly enjoying it very much In two weeks, I hope to tackle my much-tweaked, infinitely-patched personal blog as well…

And it was when I (automatically) downloaded the latest nightly build that a thought occured to me. WordPress is what I call company-directed free and open-source software. What that means is that it isn’t some kind of software where a handful of eager anonymous programmers — here today, gone tomorrow — set a code repository up and start attracting friends to write code for free. No, Automattic runs a business (even though their haiku page seems to indicate otherwise!). And of course they keep strict control over “their” code.

Obviously anyone can download WP, tweak it, and release a “new” WP (as a matter of fact, that’s how WP MU and BuddyPress started). However, that doesn’t happen so often. What most programmers do is contribute code back to the main, or trunk, WordPress — thus benefiting all users, not just the ones that particularly like them This is, in fact, how almost all company-directed FOSS projects work: the company’s role in the project is, beside adding code and fixing bugs, providing direction, establishing deadlines for releases, and doing quality control. Independent programmers can, of course, do that on your own, on their own repositories — but they know that the millions who test and evaluate WP’s code will not look at their code, they will just use the one being under watchful control of Automattic.

I said “almost all”. The biggest exception I’m aware of is… Linden Lab’s Second Life. When the viewer became open source, I was expecting that the same model would be implemented: programmers would contribute code back to LL, LL would check and validate it, and release a new viewer. But this didn’t happen: instead, groups of programmers download the code, set up their own repositories, try to attract a few friends, and release a different viewer. Now this seems to be a waste of time for everybody involved — and it also means that no viewer incorporates all tweaks and bug fixes developed by all programmers.

Why did this happen? The major two reasons are: an insanely slow quality control process (except for emergency security patches, LL usually takes 6-18 months to implement a single-line patch, since their code auditing procedures take insanely long) and a relatively limited margin for adding patches that might be marginally unaligned with LL’s vision. Thus, since LL doesn’t want that users do their own backups, they frown upon any implementation of a backup system. Collecting viewer data and showing it to other users (like Emerald, and more recently Imprudence) are doing might also be something LL doesn’t want on their “main” viewer (or even Snowglobe). “Restrained Life”, a powerful API that allows the viewer to send commands to in-world items (mostly HUDs), providing functionality not possible in plain LSL, is also something which LL prefers to avoid (for security reasons; they’re developing a plugin system for the viewer which should render Restrained Life obsolete — but we don’t know when that will be ready). Other things, however, always baffled me. Why don’t we get a better radar system? Or a fantastic way to search for lost items, like Emerald does? Surely these are relatively peaceful changes that should have been incorporated on the LL viewer eons ago…

Until LL changes their policies on those two issues — faster QA to approve code within days (not months or years!) of its submission, and a clear policy on what kind of features are “peaceful” — it’s hardly likely that programmers will be willing to work for free for LL to submit code to the main viewer. And while this goes on, it means that residents will continue to switch back and forth between different viewers, as they look for the features they need to enjoy their experience in SL. We’ll never have the equivalent of WordPress for SL: a single source, with hundreds of contributing developers, benefiting millions of users.

So it’s not just about increased costs: it’s the very real possibility that external conditions, climatic or otherwise, simply force a conference, meeting, or even a concert, to be postponed.

Not so with virtual worlds. MakeMyWorlds, a German/French Second Life Gold Solution Provider, recently sponsored a meeting in Second Life with a group of people coming from all over Europe — during the period where all flights were cancelled. Unlike the other dozens of thousands of similar meetings that happen every day, this one was not cancelled. This was a pretext for the French TV show La Matinale Canal+ to cover briefly the event and explain how virtual worlds like Second Life can, indeed, successfully be used for business to be accomplished, without fear of disruption, at a much lower cost, and with the convenience of not requiring any physical travel at all, thus reducing the wasted time, as well, of course, as being more ecologically sound.

You’ll need to be fluent in French to follow the 5-minute extract of the show:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks to Clara Young for the heads-up!

The much more interesting announcement, of course, was the ability to directly use your L$ stored in your avatar’s account on XStreetSL, and vice-versa, immediately transferring L$ from XStreetSL to your avatar. It might not seem much (it had been promised since last year), but there is some dramatic magic going on beneath this apparenly simple, yet useful, feature.

Most services that have L$ transactions associated with it — and this is not just XStreetSL; think about web-based rental systems or the many audio/video streaming providers that accept payments in L$, or, of course, the alternate currency exchanges (which offer a far wider range of payment systems beyond LL’s offer of PayPal and credit cards) — have a rather difficult time in swiftly moving L$ between avatars. The main issue is that, although Second Life is by far and large the vastest digital marketplace for virtual goods in the world (yes, it beats Apple’s App Store!), it has a very primitive programming interface to deal with money transactions.

Originally, I can very well believe that LL didn’t even intend to make “money transfers” more widespread. After all, just the ability to allow an item to sell itself, or sell its contents, was more than appropriate in the very early days of the SL economy; everything else could simply be transferring L$ by paying avatars directly (or from their profiles). Looking at the protocol that implements money transfers between avatars (you can look at the code yourself and correct me if I’m wrong ), at the early days this was simply a modified Instant Message with a “special status” flagging it as a payment — IMs in SL can be used for far more interesting things than merely sending text to other avatars; inventory offers and similar things also use the IM system.

At some point in time, however, I can imagine that LSL programmers asked LL to allow them to get them an event to tell the script that some money was paid to the object, and to transfer L$ from the object’s owner to another avatar. This would allow the creation of the ubiquitous “multivendor” — a device with few prims that would display textures for different items, allowing the user to select the one they wished to buy, and pay the device to get that item delivered to inventory. The major reason for having these functions was that each item would have a different price, and a way was needed to make sure that people paid the correct amount and got a refund if they made a silly mistake.

This interface is, though, particularly primitive. There are no guarantees that you actually get the event to be fired when an avatar pays the object — which might happen on an insanely laggy sim. If the script is rendered inactive for some reason (because it crashed), someone might pay to it but the script will never detect the transaction — which will make the buyer very unhappy. Both cases are very rare these days, but there are still no guarantees that this will work all the time.

Sending money from an object to another avatar is even more tricky. It requires the avatar owning the object to specifically give the item permissions to debit from their L$ account — a very reasonable demand, to avoid scamming (imagine an item that gets attached to you and sends L$ to someone else without you knowing about it!). But this also means that if a sim gets rebooted and is in a strange state (e.g. “forgetting” about what state each and every script is in), those scripts might have resetted and now require the object owners to manually log in, give the items permission to debit again, and fix things that way. While this manual step is not taken, residents will find that their money transactions are not being delivered.

To make things even worse, if the object owner doesn’t have enough L$ in their account, this function to send L$ to someone else fails silently. Neither the owner, nor the recipient, get any warning. In fact, even if the transaction is successful, nobody gets a confirmation message. To be very honest, this is at least — ridiculous. Even the most primitive form of “wire transfers” in, uh, 1830 or so, would require an operator to manually send a confirmation back to the sender. But in the strange, anachronistic world of SL money transactions, this was never implemented. The ever-resourceful Jacek Antonelli has contributed some code to implement at least a label for the transaction, so that it shows what the payment was for. This allows people to at least catch a successful L$ transfer on their Transaction History.

Before June 2004, communication in-and-out of world was only possible with email messages; June 2004 allowed at least XML-RPC calls to be made from outside the world to in-world objects. This was what permitted things like the Gaming Open Market (a currency exchange that pre-dated LL’s LindeX) and the SL Exchange (today known as XStreetSL, which was bought by LL) to be launched. Since these require L$ transactions between avatars to be automated (and bots didn’t exist in 2004!), designing such a gateway to the L$ money transaction infrastructure required a lot of patience — and redundancy. It also introduced the concept of the in-world ATM: a device that would accept a payment from an avatar, catch the payment (most of the time) in LSL, send an email message to an external server logging the transaction, and then flag an in-world object (in the case of XStreetSL, a box containing items) to do something.

So many things can fail along this complex route… the original payment might not have been catched. The email message might never get sent by LL because their email servers might have been down or too slow. If it is sent, it might never be received. If it is received, the external server might correctly process the transaction, but flagging the in-world object via XML-RPC (or email!) might fail, because LL’s XML-RPC servers might be down or slow, or the sim where the object is might be down… or the object might have crashed and is not accepting any external messages anyway. With such a long list of points of failures, it’s actually a huge surprise how we have developed this incredible economy of micropayments with such loose foundations!

These days, at least external communications are a bit easier, thanks to the LSL HTTP interface. Although messages are seriously limited in size, and there is a cap to the amount of messages you can send and receive per minute, this at least properly implements two-way communication via HTTP to an external server with a reasonably amount of confirmation. Most modern gateway systems using ATMs or “item boxes” to allow users to “deposit” L$ or “pay L$” to make a payment (for a service, like a rental facility or leasing an audio stream) or buy an item via a website use this method. You can add some redundancy having several objects scattered across the grid — the probability that all your objects on all the sims are down simultaneously would be very, very low (unless the whole grid crashes, but, in that case, you’d not need to transfer L$ anyway ). These communications can be encrypted, too, for added security. So at least on that side things have progressed well in the past 5 years.

Even more modern generations of payment gateways use bots. Bots will at least get alerted when money comes in, and this allows the programmers to act upon it immediately — and bots, of course, are not limited to the amount of HTTP requests they make or the size of the messages sent, since they’re not really running on the sims. Real life companies, like Multibanco and PayShop in my country, process L$ sales that way (article in Portuguese only, sorry). Still, bots can crash, or might be shut out of the grid for some silly reason, so this is not a 100% safe way to implement money transactions. And, of course, they’re also harder to programme, which means that the overall solution might be more expensive to develop…

But the actual money transaction is still at the same stage as early 2004 Linden Lab developers are fondly quoted (or misquoted) as having claimed that “it’s too difficult to implement” or “people really don’t need this”, or, well, “it’s a nice idea, but our transaction system doesn’t support it, and very likely never will — so use what we have today, but caveat utilitor“.

True or false, there seems to be hope on the horizon. Somehow, as if by magic, XStreetSL is now able to process instant L$ transfers between avatars without requiring an object as an intermediate step. Now, we might exclude the case that XStreetSL is directly interfacing with the LL central databases to do that (it would be a huge security risk!). It’s far more reasonable to expect that they have developed an internal API to allow quick, easy, and safe L$ transactions which come from a “trusted site”. If that’s the case, the question is only: when will this API be released to the public?

If you have never developed an interface to a payment gateway — be it PayPal or a myriad of gateways out there — you might not realise how important this is. General-purpose payment gateways are not easy to create for Second Life’s microcurrency. But it’s child’s play to add a donation button for PayPal — and it will take an experienced programmer an hour or so to quickly set up a shopping cart using any of the most popular payment gateways out there. The real world, once it implemented easy payments on the Web — since the early days of Digital River, who at some point dealt with almost all software sales via the Web — allowed for the web-based economy to be so commonplace that we don’t think twice about it any more. eBay or Amazon.com would have never existed if they had to process payments manually!

Some analysts predict that 2010 will be the year of premium content on the Web. It seems that finally the lessons learned during the dot-com bubble — “everything is for free” (and so companies never managed to get a return on investment and catastrophically failed) — is slowly being replaced by “everything should be incredibly cheap”. Major content from reputable sources like the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Medline, or the IEEE have always sported premium content — it just gets cheaper over time. The model was sort of abandoned for several years because it was not successful in extracting enough money from the readers, and advertising was seen as a better way to cover the costs. But for 2010 this might change: some people think that if content is really very, very cheap, it might be far more successful than ads. After all, ad networks (like Google AdSense) are paying less and less, even though the model is still quite worthwhile for the sites with tremendous amount of traffic.

But imagine that you’d be able to pay just a cent per month to read, say, Massively. Massively has enough viewers to make this profitable enough to pay for their journalists. The question is, would you be willing to pay for that?

And the answer, not surprisingly, is “no”. Why not? Because no matter if it’s a cent or US$100, it means registering, putting your credit card there, and get charged for it every time. Credit card gateways are not targeted for micropayments, they have too high fees; even PayPal frowns at transactions of merely a few cents (I have tried that!). And, frankly, it’s a mess to set this up — not to mention that many people don’t really go through the whole routine. It’s far easier to look for some content or information that is free than to pay for high-quality premium content that costs a cent a month, just because it’s a pain to register. And what if you don’t have a credit card or mistrust PayPal or any of the other payment gateways? Micropayments never became ubiquitous.

Except in Second Life.

Let’s face it, the whole economy of Second Life is based on micropayments, and has always been so for at least 6 years and a half. It’s not a small market — worth US$ 0.6 billion, annually. It already reaches 18 million registered users, who might not use SL much, but who have a L$ account that can be used at any time. Yes, registration is a pain; but the point is, those 18 million users have been, at some point, exposed to a micropayment-based premium content economy. A million and a half are quite familiar, on a daily basis, with that model. Tens of thousands of content suppliers — we call them creators or designers! — make a living (or part of a living at least) by providing premium content using a micropayment economy. The model works. We have proved it works

Now imagine the next step: LL announcing their “money transaction API” to the public, allowing anyone, anywhere to transfer L$ between their avatar account and any other, without fuss or mess, and with true transactions, with all checks and confirmations — just like any other payment gateway. Unlike PayPal or other payment gateways, where you have only a single source of converting your credit card balance into “electronic money” (so you have to implicitly trust the company operating the gateway), Linden Lab allows anyone to create their currency exchange (and offers two of their own, the LindeX — and XStreetSL, which also has a currency exchange with better rates and less limits than the LindeX). They just act as a L$ broker, pushing L$ from an account into another.

So giving the above example again… no, you might not go through the whole registration procedure to get your credit card billed every month for a cent, but if you already have a SL account, you might be quite willing to pay one L$ to read, say, New World Notes, the SL section of Massively, or the Alphaville Herald. You might be happy to pay L$ 1 to get the PDF for this month’s issue of the Second Style magazine. And — why not? — WSJ and FT might set up some avatars in SL, and you might also be willing to pay L$1 to get access to their articles, too. What does it hurt, if it’s just clicking a button away? L$1 is something anyone can afford — except, of course, current payment gateways which charge insane rates for micropayments. But Linden Lab doesn’t!

Current micropayment gateways all lack a user base. Lots have been started and closed as the model was shown not to be worth the trouble. I can very well believe that content producers on the Web might see 2010 as the year of premium content — they just need to look at the Apple iTunes and App Store to see how well it works financially for Apple (and, if they’re bold, they’ll see how Second Life beats Apple’s transactions) to see that the model, well implemented, actually works. The trouble is to pick, among a selection of many, which one to support. Premium content producers trying to avoid credit card payments will have to support a plethora of gateways, as their clients will not use a single source. Each will require separate contracts, agreements, and expensive transaction fees — as well as licensing costs. And, of course, each will require specific programming. I find all of this too cumbersome.

But Second Life as a micropayment gateway has far more impressive credentials. Linden Lab, after a decade of operation, is not a start-up that is here one day, gone the next. Second Life is already the largest premium content marketplace with a working microcurrency, offering billions and billions of items for sale (let’s forget if they’re prims and clothes; who cares, so long as people are willing to pay for them? After all, an MP3 file downloaded from the Web is just bits and nothing else; but prims, textures, and music are nevertheless created by artists that love to get paid for their work, even if it’s just a few cents). It has been in operation for over 6 years using this model. It’s a profitable, successful company. 18 million residents have opened an account on SL, and over a million use it very regularly.

No other micropayment gateway in existence offers similar conditions, nor has the same reputation, nor a valid business model. Second Life has it all.

So, Linden Lab, what are you waiting for?

[UPDATE: There was a stupid mistake re: the GOM, which I've corrected. Thanks, Troy!]

There.com, unlike many other virtual worlds who were just a passing fad (like Metaverse!), also had a solid business model — so solid, in fact, that they managed to split off the “technology” part of There.com and resell the VW engine as a separate product (OLIVE) under a different company, Forterra, which has been quite successful, selling licenses to the US Army and government, and satrted to diverge from the original product very quickly. Ironically, Forterra now sold OLIVE to SAIC.

There.com’s future started to become cloudy once several programmers and the original founder, Will Harvey, left There.com to found IMVU, which continues to be a huge success, has twice the number of registered users than Second Life, and the last time I checked, almost as many items for sale on their web-based content shop as LL’s XStreetSL (which, as we all know, only shows a very small amount of all content available for sale in SL). Still, I incorrectly predicted that There.com would “live forever”, the major reasoning behind my claims being that their subscription-based model would allow There.com to operate indefinitely thanks to their very loyal customer base. The theory worked for almost four years. There.com didn’t grow in size, but it also didn’t grow in costs. It remained a niche VW, but that’s fine — it’s far better to have a financially sound business model behind a niche market than to expand to the mainstream and utterly fail.

Loyalty, however, seemed not to be enough. Unlike my most optimistic predictions, There.com announced that it would close operations on March 9th, 2010. Ironically, except for the odd SL blogger, the news of the end of There.com seemed to spark some activity mentioning that VW all over the VW blogosphere…

Personally, I’m sorry to see There.com go. I always liked their attitude and stance in general; I remember how their management teams and developers were quite happy to come to discuss things in Second Life, on roundtables and public meetings. This is not really very common in the tough and competitive market of virtual worlds And when the Electric Sheep Company announced that MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach would be implemented in There.com and not Second Life, mostly because of Linden Lab’s lack of commitment to allow a stronger enforcement against griefers and pirated content, most SL residents actually backed that decision and agreed with it. It’s also ironic that Linden Lab has only recently announced the SL Enterprise product which is addressing what MTV wanted in 2006…

The OLIVE team, however, will most certainly continue this spirit of “cooperative competition”. They’re also part of the IETF group pushing for interoperability. While I’m quite sure things won’t be rosy, at least it’s nice to see a competing technology that is willing at least to talk with their competitors.

So while I failed yet another prediction, I’m still bold enough to stick to my more dramatic one: virtual worlds will come and go, as money runs out and companies fail to attract funders, but Second Life will remain. Even if it’s not Linden Lab’s Second Life but a spin-off encompassing OpenSimulator, realXtend, OLIVE, and several other technologies that, unlike all others, are working hard to interoperate with each other, and whose work, albeit at a very slow pace, is going ahead. It’s a relatively safe bet that after 2011, to survive, a virtual world platform will have to be part of the MMOX group.

In the mean time, Frenzoo, a virtual world with user-generated content which currently in beta, is extending a nice gift to all former There.com users: a free lifetime pass if they’re willing to move over to Frenzoo.

Click here to view the embedded video.

To the best of my knowledge, this viewer was the result of over a year and a half of coding and testing. The overall layout was designed by Big Spaceship, the company that Linden Lab has outsourced their Web redesign — and the in-world viewer too. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the new viewer looks slightly like a web browser

As with all changes released by Linden Lab, this will split users in the usual two groups: the ones that are immediately fascinated by the new look, and the ones that will hate it with bitterness to the point of despair. There is no accounting for taste; expect many old-timers to write long posts about all the things they hate about SL 2.0. And, of course, for many, the hype and expectation was so great that they will feel disappointed. They might expect much more and blame LL for falling short on expectations. Again, this kind of reaction is unavoidable.

There will be hordes loving the new viewer, and furiously attacking the nay-sayers and the old-timers publicly on forums, blogs, and in-world events. There will be Emerald die-hard fanatics that will simply refuse to even consider downloading the new viewer. Even though the 1.X generation of viewers will be discontinued when 2.1 comes out (due in the summer), a large proportion of residents will simply refuse to learn how to use the new viewer and continue to use the old ones. I’m quite sure that the next few months will introduce heavy flame wars all over the SLogosphere, and we ought to be ready for it.

Why? Just because the new SL 2.0 viewer is so different. All the features of 1.X are there, and a lot of new ones have been scattered around the new user interface, but it requires relearning. It’s like someone finally switching from Windows to Mac OS X: it works pretty much in the same way, and you can do everything on a Mac that you can do on Windows, but the interface is utterly different. Even the argument that “it is much more logical, rational, and user-friendly” has failed to move more people to Mac OS X, so it’s naive to think that these very same arguments will convince every die-hard SL 1.X lover to switch to 2.0.

Ultimately, however, they won’t have a choice (at least until the released open source code gets incorporated on the third-party viewers, something that will take some time). And here’s why.

Goodbye invisiprims!

If we downplay the issue of the completely revamped user interface (more on that later), SL 2.0 actually just introduces two new technologies (a third one is expected to be released with SL 2.1, which will probably happen around the summer or so). Both address the way content is created in SL, although they’re quite different.

Eons ago, you could upload a fully transparent texture to your skin, and your avatar would disappear. Why was that a good idea? Since the avatar mesh is fixed (even though you can deform it, you cannot easily create a non-human avatar), this would allow avatar creators to simply “delete” the avatar mesh and work with attachments instead to create the shape you wished. This, of course, allowed invisible avatars to move around, which was a source of griefing, so not only LL made that a bannable offence, but they also changed the viewer not to render avatars invisible.

Soon, however, someone (allegedly Beatfox Xevious) found out a neat trick. A special, undocumented kind of texture could be programatically applied to a prim and render it not only transparent, but invisible (from the perspective of the renderer), and, when attached to an avatar, it would “delete” a part of its mesh and show what’s behind it. Dubbed invisiprims, these “magic prims” would not only be invisible, but render things behind them invisible as well. As we all know, these are invaluable for content creators to get properly shaped primmed/sculptied shoes (because Linden avatars have awful feet!), as well as allowing for some very creative non-human avatars to be created. Since invisiprims are not “perfect”, in the sense that they will behave strangely with alpha’ed textures showing behind them, the illusion of invisibility is not 100% accurate. It’s good enough for most purposes, though; while at the same time it doesn’t allow 100% invisible avatars, which apparently was enough for LL to allow them to exist. Invisiprims are, to a degree, slightly similar to the chameleon suit of the Predator movie series: they seem to “bend light” in a way that it appears to be invisible, but you can still notice that there is something there.

With SL 2.0, LL gave up on trying to prevent people from creating invisible avatars. I guess that the reasoning is that griefing happens nevertheless; and since invisiprims are useful, but not perfect, LL opted instead for creating a new “alpha layer” for avatars, where you can selectively “edit out” whatever parts of your avatar mesh you don’t wish to see… or make them slightly translucent instead.

Here is an image of myself without the alpha layer:

And here with a fully transparent avatar mesh:

That was easy and fun to do!

So what this mostly means is that content creators — think shoe designers and non-human avatar creators, and possibly even hair stylists — will very quickly get rid of the nasty invisiprims and just adopt this new technique. Just edit out our feet and you can fit any shoe to it No more fiddling with special sizes or shapes. And, more important than that, this technique with the alpha layer will really work on top of every other alpha’ed texture. No more Predator-like shoes!

Just for this feature, LL will probably push a lot of new users to SL 2.0, as shoe designers all over the place are very likely starting to play around with their next-generation shoes, and require residents to use SL 2.0 to be able to use the new shoes. I can imagine designers to be even more excited than me

Linden Lab also added another layer for tattoos. This was something asked for years. It’s not just because of tattoos — it’s mostly for the ability to mix’n'match skins, tattoos, and makeup, which is hard to do today. Usually, skin creators will give you different choices, but you can’t mix’n'match them all; also, tattoos would have to be moved to a different layer (and hope that your favourite clothes designer offers you outfits on different layers too, so you can wear tattoos and your clothes). The new tattoo layer will simplify everything. While not so drastic as the alpha layer in terms of new impact, it means that rather a lot more choices will become available very quickly.

Both changes are interesting because they will work on 1.X viewers too. The wearer will need to use SL 2.0, but everybody around them with 1.X or third-party viewers will see the avatar properly “baked”. This will mean that you will be able to become the envy of the next meeting or party you go to, showing off new content, and just shrug away the envious looks by saying “I’m using the new viewer, that’s why I look so good”. Yes, I’m quite sure this is pretty much what LL had in mind… Another interesting side-effect is that, at least for a while, copybot-enabled malicious viewers will be unable to copy and reproduce avatars using SL 2.0 with the extra layers (granted, as the piracy arms race gets up to speed with the new code, this “protection” will be temporary). This will mean that content designers using those two new layers will, for a while, be able to sell a lot of new. redesigned content without fear of piracy. Even when copybotters will eventually figure out how to grab the whole SL 2.0 textured avatar, they will have no way to get at the individual layers.

Since the new features will be viewable by everyone, this will mean that there is little risk for content creators to heavily invest in them, as everybody will be able to see them in action. But of course the buyers will have to use SL 2.0 for being able to use them. This will push more residents to the new viewer without the fear of looking “ugly” to other residents that dislike 2.0 and don’t want to use it.

The new generation of interactive content

But of course the biggest revolution won’t come from those two avatar layers, but from the much-awaited Media On A Prim (MOAP) implementation. To give you an idea on how long we’ve waited for it, I’ll tell you a personal story. In late 2004 and early 2005, I was part of an educational project in SL which, at some point, really required information to be easily manipulated on a web server and streamed into SL. In January 2005 we contacted one person of the LL management team and explained that our project truly required HTML pages to be viewable in-world. We were told by that representative, and I quote: “This isn’t public yet, but we ought to have it working in six weeks… but don’t quote me on that”

Well, I can quote them now It took not six weeks, but five years. Sure, we had a stop-gap solution with the µBrowser project, which displayed HTML and Javascript in-world on a static prim, using the Gecko engine (the one developed by the Mozilla Foundation and used by Firefox). While this certainly worked as a primitive way to render some Web content in-world, it wasn’t interactive. Flash was never implemented, leaving the whole range of videos out there impossible to show, and limiting us to watch QuickTime movies, which are rare to find (except on mobile applications). And worst of all, you were limited to one “media stream” per parcel, which could only be set by the parcel owner or by a complex setup of a group-deeded object.

The current implementation is short of a miracle. Goodbye Gecko, and hello WebKit — the same rendering engine that was originally behind the Linux Konqueror browser and currently powers Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome. It’s one of the only rendering engines that passes the very rigorous ACID3 test of standards compliance (Opera’s engine is the other one). It’s blindingly fast, too — mostly because Javascript is implemented quite differently than on older engines. It fully supports Flash. And, the most surprising feature of all that is that LL’s implementation gave us a fully interactive viewer: not only can you click on links and scroll the scrollbars, but you can fully edit text, too.

In fact, you have to test it to believe it. Even my short YouTube video above doesn’t convey the sense of wowness that you’ll get when using this for the first time!

MOAP is not tied to parcels at all, but to prim faces. So you can set any (or many!) prim faces to a web page; you can restrict the URLs that are viewable (so that residents cannot change it); and you can have multiple pages in the same parcel, all viewable and editable by all residents. MOAP doesn’t lag the sim at all — it happens client-side, and it’s as “efficient” as, say, opening multiple pages on your favourite web browser. My own tests showed that LL’s WebKit renderer is slower than, say, Safari or Chrome, but that might not be due to WebKit itself, but just the way the renderer has to place the output on a “distorted” surface via OpenGL. Then again, I might just be wildly speculating

Now, what will people do with it? Prokofy fears that now everybody will start placing Flickr streams and YouTube videos on their homes and just increase the noise and confusion, and that this will just lead to a “MySpacification” of SL. I’m sure that this will happen too, just like it does on the few VWs out there that allow HTML pages on a surface.

But the real revolution will be on the complete change of the interactive content inside SL. It’s not just about the ability to put web pages and Flash videos everywhere — a boon to educators, corporate meetings, and any kind of virtual presence that requires dynamic information to be displayed. It’s even more than that. All of a sudden, complex prim-based interfaces, for HUDs or interactive in-world devices, will disappear overnight. These interfaces are very hard to design properly, and even harder to debug; only a handful of talented programmers (which also have to double as designers!) in SL are really good at doing this kind of devices, and there is simply too much that cannot be done — like the ability to properly present dynamic text in-world (or on a HUD).

All these will be replaced by MOAP. Better than that: with proper web design, you can create HUDs that are really virtually undistiguishable from the UI (more and more parts of the viewer’s UI are HTML anyway). The font used on the new viewer is free and open source, so everybody will be allowed to use it and display pages that look exactly like an UI “extension”. Some of the most complex interactive elements that have driven programmers to despair now become a child’s play — like the Twitter-on-a-HUD shown on the picture, which took me all of 5 minutes (most of it spent in logging in!), but which is fully functional and allows me to post my tweets immediately by just clicking on the input box and typing away!

Now imagine all the lovely HUDs that have driven you to despair. I’m thinking of the most complex ones I’ve encountered, like Animation Overriders, or fitting my lovely BAX boots, or configuring Francis Chung’s series of fantastic vehicles. Not to mention the huge metaHUD from metaLife. All these will just take a good webdesigner, some clever Javascript programming, and a back-end server. Goodbye versioning — just send users a new webpage when you’re ready to update the HUD. Goodbye weeks after weeks positioning prims that pop up, slide up and down, disappear never to return, until your HUD is fully debugged. You just use standard web development skills and tools to get the page just right.

But in-world objects will naturally also benefit from MOAP. Games and interactive infodisplays are the obvious target, but just think of the possibilities of using them for in-world vendors. These days, most vendors are just single prims (because you need to have a lot of them!) pasted on a wall which contain the item for sale. Since you can directly buy content from a prim, this saves scripts (and lags far less than “multivendors”), even though the only way to track down sales is via the web-based Dashboard provided by LL. But the worst thing is that they expose content for the more sophisticated copybotters — these can grab content (at least clothes and skins) directly from the inside of single-prim vendors.

Now replace your vendor with a web page. It can show not only pictures of your clothes, but allow interactive selection to mix’n'match separates to create your own unique outfit, and sell them at a touch of a button — and show a few videos too. Does it sound too far-fetched? Not really. Just take a look at H&M’s Virtual Studio. A simplified version of that fantastic idea can be done with relative ease and be on display on a prim inside a shop. Then you just pay the vendor and you get the outfit delivered to you. But the beauty of all this is that it only requires a very simple script (to handle the payment and send it to an external web server) which will be inactive most of the time — handling the whole display happens between your viewer and the remote web server and effectively generates zero lag on the sim. No more texture loading and eternally waiting for them to appear. And, more important than that, there will be no items inside the vendor for content pirates to copy!

Add these two things together — the inability to copy an outfit directly from an avatar using SL 2.0, and the inability to copy items from inside an “item-less” vendor — and you can guess how quickly all shop owners and designers will jump on the SL 2.0 bandwagon. They will do so very, very quickly.

So forget about residents being “reluctant” to abandon their favourite old viewers or third-party viewers and be slow adopters. The drive will come from content creators, which will start designing a completely new experience for SL — one that the nearest competitor, Blue Mars, cannot even begin to imagine how to reproduce Content creators might not be too “excited” about abstract cool features, but they will immediately understand the potential in terms of privacy, protection, low-lag solutions, and having an edge by making their shopping experience easier and way more fun — and they’ll just shun the non-SL 2.0 residents after a while, correctly assuming that anyone not wishing to buy from their SL 2.0-optimised shop are, well, at the very least, “suspect”. And even if you don’t like SL 2.0 at all, you’ll use it to shop at the top fashion designers, even if afterwards you’ll not use it for everyday use — but, over time, even this childish reaction of refusing to move ahead with the times will fade and disappear.

SL 2.0 is not (yet) for everybody?

Every time something changes dramatically at the user interface level, people will complain, and that is unvoidable. One should remember that SL 2.0 was carefully designed and reviewed by hundreds of beta testers, but there are still many bugs to fix (I’m personally surprised at how few I found), and some usability problems to deal with (my favourite bug right now is being ejected 500 m up in the air when standing up from a chair ). Many features are “incomplete” — there are some severe limitations on the way you can drag and drop items from inventory to avatar profiles (or other inventory folders), for instance; and the group tools are clumsy at best. While SL 2.0 shines at chat, there are still some improvements that can be done. The rest is mostly getting used to a brand new conceptual interface, which has all the “old” tools (and quite a lot of new ones!) at different, not-obvious-for-veterans places. Obviously not everybody will have patience to learn a brand new interface. And some will simply hate it — like people refusing to use, say, MySpace or Facebook, because they hate their interfaces. These limitations are all unavoidable, and while LL can fix bugs and improve usability and functionality, when it comes to personal taste, they cannot work miracles. There is simply no way you can please everybody.

However, in the short term, I’m quite sure that it will be the content creators that will drive SL 2.0 into mass adoption. Some obvious use cases will immediately profit from it: corporate and academical use of SL cannot live longer without MOAP, and so all their users will change over almost overnight, since it doesn’t make any sense to keep using textures on slideshow presentations, when you can simply stream something like SlideShare instead. All kinds of virtual presences that require professional display of highly interactive, media-rich content will simply forget that 1.X exists — the few residents that refuse to switch over will be simply ignored. Voice support has also dramatically improved, with more echo cancellation, and a way to deal with natural pauses during a conversation that might make push-to-talk obsolete. Role-players will naturally want a much more feature-rich HUD environment which will finally allow them to put all the extra stats and skills very easily on the interface, and make SL look much more like a commercial MMORPG. Furry communities, or any other community that has very intricate avatar designs, will love the new alpha layer and definitely require members to use SL 2.0 and take advantage of the new avatars that will soon be available and very popular. The rest of the world, of course, might delay their switch to 2.0.

On the medium term, since Linden Lab already released their source code, the more reputable third-party viewers will slowly start to incorporate the radical new features, while possibly keeping a different interface for the old-timers. I have obviously no way to know how much code LL has changed from 1.X to 2.0, and how this will affect the adoption of the new key features on the alternative viewers. But the good news is that LL will implement a series of new resolutions regarding the use and distribution of third-party viewers, and I quote:

To apply to add a viewer to the Viewer Directory, the software developer must be a Resident in good standing, and self-certify that the viewer complies with the Policy on Third-Party Viewers, which prohibits griefing, fraud, theft of passwords, and infringement of intellectual property.It is important to note that we will not tolerate malicious viewers that violate our policies.

This is a first step to limit the damage created by the easy piracy used by some of those viewers; of course it will not utterly prevent them, just make them harder to find and to use without fearing to get banned.

To make it even harder… we’ll have to wait until SL 2.1 is released This might happen around the summer, at which time the 1.X series will be unofficially unsupported by LL. It contains an even more niftier feature, which, as a side effect, will render piracy of some content utterly impossible. And unfortunately I cannot say more about it — except that if there are good reasons to get familiar with SL 2.0, it is now the time for doing so, while it’s still in Beta and LL is open to suggestions to improve its usability.

For me personally, the only point where SL 2.0 did not exceed expectations (which it did in every other aspect) is on helping new users to get familiar with SL more quickly. I think that chat, voice, and landmarks will certainly be very easy now to use on SL 2.0, even for someone that has never logged in before. Inventory needs a lot of small fixes to become as easy to use; groups even more so. Building, at least for me, became harder — yes, the options are all there, and some are more cleverly designed, but I don’t think it’s simpler. As for the daily tasks of a self-proclaimed “power user” like myself, they will just take some rethinking to remember where the options are (and use right-click on the user interface much more, where all those new nifty features have been “hidden”!). But I’m used to changes of interface. Others will be more reluctant to change, even if it’s for something better designed, just because they’re attached to something familiar, and the first impression on SL 2.0 is a feeling of being utterly lost. This will change quickly as you start using it. Enjoy the experience of being a newbie again, and, within a week, you’ll be totally unable to go back to the “old” viewer

That’s what happened to me when I finally got used to the way the Mac OS X user interface works Once you get used to it, you’ll never want anything else again…

The year was mid-2004. For anyone who had just registered and joined, it looked like a wonderful, pretty world. Avatars were less cartoonish than, say, on There.com, and with some tweaking they would even look minimally decent.

Well… honestly, that’s how I looked like back then:

All right, I know — you’re not impressed! But this picture shows my own shape, created on my very first day, and the standard, ugly, Linden-created rubber skin. We all were ugly back then, so although this picture gives me the creeps these days, we thought it was actually pretty good, compared to other virtual worlds!

Then in early 2004, people like Namssor Daguerre thought about this very seriously and wondered if there was no way to change the default skin. At that time, remember, all they had to work with was a 2D “clothes template”. If you have seen the ones that Linden Lab publishes, you will quickly see that it’s not obvious where exactly each pixel will ultimately appear. And even if you figure it out, it’s not easy to do a whole skin. Back in 2004, we all thought that it would be “easy” to get some RL pictures of someone and just “distort” them properly so tha they “fit” on the 2D template somehow. Believe me, I’ve tried that; it simply is impossible to do it correctly. In real life, 3D artists would probably project a 2D picture on top of a 3D mesh, and then extract the appropriate 2D map (also called an “UV map”). But, alas, in 2004, Linden Lab did not release the 3D avatar mesh, so this approach was out.

Instead, 3D skin designers would have to do all the work manually. Yes, that’s right: the whole skin had to be carefully painted, pixel by pixel, on top of the template, taking into account that the avatar mesh has a lot more polygons on the face than, say, on hands and feet — which would have “stretched” bits if this wasn’t correctly done. Hand-painting a realistic texture was not for the faint of heart!

This is the result, one month after that other picture, when I bought Namssor Daguerre’s first-generation skin:

Wow, what an improvement! Well, I know this is not an image good enough for 2010 (you can just look at the low quality of the top I’m wearing!) But you can see how the shape did not change. SL didn’t change either, it wasn’t some sudden feature improvement overnight (you can see that on the background). Notice, however, how the face doesn’t look like “rubber” any more. It looks like skin, as it should! There is some detail lacking (specially on the arms) but far, far better than the Linden skin… even for 2005!

Of course we all know that Second Life has improved fantastically (yes, really!) over the years. So the last picture, which is quite recent (from today!), shows Namssor Daguerre’s third and latest generation skin.

Well, of course this is five years later… so no wonder it looks much better It is, after all, a new renderer; a new lighting system; and, of course — far better accessories (like prim hair!!) which have been designed for realism…

Now the surprising revelation: I’m wearing the exact shape I had in early August 2004 on all these pictures! Oh yes! Well, there have been two tweaks — a very minor one on my nose, and, after tons of complains, I reduced my, mmh, bra size… lol. But the rest is pretty much the same! Specially when you compare with the first picture, you’ll see the amazing difference, which is almost unbelievable…

That’s the kind of magic that a skin makes in Second Life. And you’re welcome to look at Namssor Daguerre’s current offerings at his shop on the Beta Business Park, which launches today with a Grand Opening which will last several hours, with models showing off the many choices on the catwalk, nice music, and a friendly environment

Sooner or later — often sooner! — a new user will know that they need money. They might have read magazine ads telling them how successful business in Second Life® is. They might have browsed through blogs and forums, catching numbers here and there, on how much money is being transacted in SL, and how some content creators and live music performers make a living here. They might even have come to a conference or two at the Beta Business Park and listened to people talking about their business experience in SL. Or they just looked up on the top of the screen where it says “L$0″ and wondered how to get more.

No matter what the reason was, usually rather early in the process of getting acquainted with Second Life, one of the very, very first questions asked is how to make money in SL (often seconded by “will you give me some L$?”). Unless, of course, you just came in for the dating

Traditionally, the usual answer you give to an intelligent new user is that it’s “as hard as to make money in the real world”, and follow that up with a comparison with making money from Web design. Some helpers just take the trouble to describe what you can create, from buildings to clothes, from scripting to animations, and patiently explain how you develop a brand in SL, make it a successful, and retire on a Caribbean island (even a virtual one!).

The casual user, however, is not interested in how to make money that way. They want to make money fast. They know they’re unskilled, so they hardly expect to become the next super-architect or boots designer in SL, but they still want money. Quickly. Painlessly. Without an effort.

At this point, most helpers just shake their heads and sigh.

Making money in SL’s remote past

A few years ago, it was far easier to “make money fast”. All you needed was a Basic account and to log in for a few minutes: you’d get L$50 every week that way. If you wanted a bit more, you could just join one of the hundreds of daily contests that were sponsored by Linden Lab, and they would give you, say, L$500 — if you won. But you could always participate on a different contest.

The economy ceased to be subsidised several years ago, and thus making money fast became far less easy. Gambling in Second Life, outlawed in August 2007 (except for the immensely popular Zyngo, that Aargle Zymurgy for mysterious reasons is still allowed to run), used to be a major way to make money — or, more likely, lose it very quickly. Unless, of course, you set up your own casino The politically-correctly named “escort service” was another way to get some money at the very beginning, and with luck, your “sponsor” would possibly pay for your initial set of clothes and an “appropriate” Animation Overrider. But besides that, making money didn’t seem to be very easy…

Enter camping. In the past, Linden Lab would pay land owners for the ability to drive traffic to their locations. The very naive concept behind this was simply that “cool places” would be popular, thus making residents happy, and this should be rewarded with a financial incentive in the form of a lower monthly tier payment. Thus, land owners quickly found out that they could set up chairs on their location that would pay any resident sitting on it a small fee per minute (or per hour) — artificially driving up their traffic, and ensuring a higher return on the monthly “incentive payments”. Camping chairs were born, and some of those were quite ingenious, like the “camping dance poles”, where attractive avatars would just sit inside a “dating parlour” and let their avatar be animated with sexy poses or dances. My favourite ones were animations cleaning building façades or lawn mowing

Linden Lab then removed the financial incentives for higher traffic. For a while, the impact of this measure was not unduly felt, since higher traffic still meant higher ranking on the internal search engine, and camping chairs were still useful for that. But then “camping bots” were invented — they would be much cheaper to maintain and guaranteed to attract an artificial crowd that could be “sitting” for any amount of time desired. Bots became the bane of Second Life, since they are so easy to setup, require almost zero maintenance, never leave their place, and naturally enough, do not require any payment. Camping chairs for human avatars became less popular.

Of course, the next predictable step by Linden Lab was to consider any measures to artificially increase traffic to a location illegal — specifically, camping bots, but also camping chairs or their more exquisite alternatives — and even go so far as to require users to flag their avatars as bots or humans. Using any of those systems became a bannable offense, and for a while, the reduction of the number of simultaneous users by 15-20% was attributed to the removal of dozens of thousands of bots grid-wide. They’re not all gone, since LL is unable to catch them all. And, since high traffic still gives an advantage on the search engine ranking, some locations continue to have variants of camping chairs for humans: in some cases, avatars actually have to stand up and walk a bit around the place to ensure that, if the land owner is reported, they can prove that their campers are not just sitting in the same place for hours and hours.

No matter how successful those techniques were (or still are), the point is that paying people to simply come to your place have become less popular. Without gambling variants, you wouldn’t be able to provide entertainment that would give L$ to unskilled people — and skill games are far less attractive than unskilled ones (for a new user). The notion of just paying people to sit on a bench and stay there disappeared. So there were no more easy ways to make money in Second Life.

The new generation of money-making schemes

In the real world, there are a lot of methods for unskilled people to make money — not much money, but at least something that is worth the time spent. Possibly the oldest of those methods comes from market analysis: it’s popular to give a small gift if you fill up a form or reply to an interview regarding a product’s perceived brand awareness. It’s just to thank you for your time. Lots of sites actually list events and things that give out free gifts or even some money in return for your time; some people spend all their (real world) time just looking for those — which can quickly turn into a full-time job! — and do little else besides searching for “free money” or “free gifts”.

But I still think that the best model is something automated… like Google AdSense. Google turned the common user into a billboard for advertising services — not a novel idea, but they definitely do it massively. The idea is simple: you’re already driving traffic to your website. Ad sponsors want that traffic. Google acts as the middleman putting both in touch and charges a percentage (how much, we don’t know; but it definitely accounts for billions of US$ in annual income for Google!). Anyone can set up a website in minutes and place a Google Ad on it, and immediately start making a few cents. Work harder to get more traffic, and Google pays you more. It’s simple to setup, simple to understand — although very hard to make a living of it (my other blog barely pays for the annual hosting expenses with the income I get from the ads!).

The whole idea is, however, easy to understand, and a few variations are naturally possible. Market analysis, for instance, can send you a gift if you fill up an online form — a gift which could be, say, a Google AdSense voucher, or a voucher for Amazon.com or eBay. In the not-so-distant past, people were paid to click on links, just to drive traffic to websites. Charities very often have links where you can click, and they’ll send some money to feed people all over the world, for example. The notion that a micropayment is more than adequate for people to do very simple tasks online is quite popular, and many variations exist.

Needless to say, clever Second Life entrepreneurs have figured that they could do the same. Billboards in Second Life never catched on, except perhaps on the mainland, since hiring spots to place ads was too expensive for the little traffic they guaranteed (if you had a spot already with a lot of traffic, why bother with placing a board there?) Metrics were also inadequately supplied. The same problem exists with billboards in real life, too: if you have a board on a location that is “seen by 100,000 people every day”, how many of those did actually buy your product? Unless you have a way to measure the return, this is usually dealt with heuristics — and some follow-up questionnaires.

Second Life, however, allows for something much cleverer: interactive billboards. A sign on the board can invite the user to click on it, and when the avatar does so, they could typically receive a landmark and/or a notecard, but also a tiny monetary incentive — say, L$1. The land owner setting up the billboard might get another L$1 (think of it as “rent”). And the advertiser would pay L$3/click.

Several variations on the theme exist. SLBiz2Life is a typical example of an operator providing those kinds of services, one of them called “Ad-Fusion Network” which is just a system like the one described.

Clicking on ads inside SL might be the most basic way of getting some awareness, but there are more alternatives. Shop owners have long since created groups to promote their products: join the group, and you get some free items once in a while; Fashion Consolidated offers a “meta-group” where thousands of content creators routinely make their announcements and send their freebies to dozens of thousands of eager residents; kiosks on the designers’ shops allow people to automatically register to the group. Subscribe-o-Matic is one of the most popular automated systems to do the same thing that doesn’t even require people to join any SL group; Jacek Antonelli’s Deliverator is a similar tool. An alternative to attracting people to your shop is just to set up a device that gives free gifts: Lucky Chairs are a popular method of doing so. The disadvantage of those tools is that you have to know beforehand where to go to get some free items (or free L$ to spend on a shop).

More innovative solutions exist. For instance, you can get paid to list a shop on your picks list. Variations, like paying you for joining a group, or list an URL or something on your profile, also exist. These days, as it’s easy to retrieve information from within SL, almost anything on your profile can be scanned and validated to see if you’re still being a good, walking ad — and if so, some L$ love will be sent your way!

What about finding new places to visit, where content merchants with their ready vendors anxiously await new customers? The above methods most rely on people finding locations first, and then joining a group (or tweaking their profiles) to get some L$ or freebies. ConeNet from Bletaverse works from the reverse approach. You can think of it as an evolutionary approach to the old camping chairs. Instead of a chair, however, you place a special Traffic Cone on your shop. You pay a certain amount to it. Now everybody that finds a Cone somewhere on the grid can click to teleport to a random location; if they arrive at yours, you’ll get debited L$2 which will go to the visitor, and an additional L$2 to ConeNet. Visitors to your location have to stay in the same area for 11 minutes to get some payment — this will obviously increase traffic, so even if they don’t buy anything, you’ll at least get a bit more traffic for your rankings. The system is quite democratic: it doesn’t matter if you invest a lot or little, you’ll still get visitors randomly allocated to your place (I’ve tried it out on my always-empty and never-visited shop in Io and got 20 or so visits in 24 hours). You can also control your campaign very carefully: no money will be debited from your account beyond what you’ve initially set up. Some cleverly simple anti-bot measures are in place to prevent bots to use the system and deplete your L$ account. An alternative, which is HUD-based and gives higher payouts (but also requires advertisers to spend more), is Pay4Visit from Earn2Life.

More complex systems exist. Knowing that people have little patience to travel around in search for new items — specially free or very cheap ones — companies like Robbie Kiama’s metaLife offer a full range of devices to facilitate capturing visitors to your location or sell them items. These involve HUDs and in-world kiosks; they add social networking and a way for people to tell friends what interesting things they found. Of course, reading Fabulously Free in Second Life is an alternative

If all else fails, well, there is no other option but to get a job. SL Job Finder from Indusgeeks is probably the longest-running job advertisement website for Second Life; another option would be the jobs page on SL profiles. However, don’t expect much from these sites: word-of-mouth is still the best way to find reputable, skilled workers in Second Life.

Last but not least, you can always search for the myriad sites out there offering L$ payment services in exchange for some kind of advertising or marketing campaign.

In conclusion: yes, you can make money in L$ without being skilled. All it takes is some time  to watch some ads.

I guess that we will only have a definitive answer to that when Linden Lab reveals the transaction data for December 2009, and compares it to last year. My guess is that the difference will be small — enough for Linden Lab to tell everybody that the economy is growing as usual (or as predicted), but it won’t be growing 900% a year, like it did from 2006 to 2007. If it grew 9% this year, it would already be quite nice.

There is, however, something that seems not to be growing at all: the number of residents that remain in Second Life. We are still getting the usual number of signups, close to 10.000 per day. It’s not exactly zero growth! But… none of them stay long enough to make a difference in the number of active users. Linden Lab, for the past few months, have dropped the number of registered users from the statistics and just announce the number of active ones: around a million these days, although I have seen lower figures quoted. The number of users on the login database, however, probably reach 17 million or so, but that’s just my guesstimate.

Where do all those 10.000 users-per-day go? Why don’t we see them around? Why do they leave, often merely minutes after they’ve registered? What’s so fundamentally wrong with Second Life that scares so many users away?

In my previous line of business, I used to manage an Internet Service Provider. In the mid-1990s, it was routinely accepted that around 6-9% of all new users would leave before the month’s end. It was the acceptable rate. When that number rose to 10%, something was seriously wrong, and we would all try to figure out what was going on. Was our connection too slow? The setup was too hard? The prices too high? Something would have to be very wrong for losing a customer out of ten; and there is always the old adage that says that a happy customer will tell five others about their good experience, but an unhappy one will tell 50…

Second Life has probably close to a 99% churn rate, and possibly more than that. This means that at most one per hundred residents actually stays longer than a month in SL. I have no idea how many stay longer than an hour… or longer than 15 minutes. Very likely I’d be shocked to know the numbers. The only thing I can see, from the vantage point of the Beta Business Park Orientation Area, which draws about 1% of all new residents, what is actually happening during that extremely critical “first hour”.

If you haven’t registered recently an avatar for Second Life, be prepared for some differences. It takes about five web pages to finally get started. It starts with a huge roadblock: you type your first name, and the system will try to assign a last name which is free. This is a blessing for LL (no need for users to do repeated searches; users tend to use more appropriate names, instead of the dreaded AOL and MMORPG monikers like “jerk2865287″) but might be the first hurdle in this virtual world, which allegedly was all about self-expression and fully personalised content — but right from the start you have no choice over your full name.

Still on the same page, you can pick one of 12 “starting avatars”, generously donated by residents. While they’re much better-looking than the 2003 batch, and LL tells you that you can fully personalise them later in-world, even Blue Mars now allows a further range of personalisation right from the start. It’s highly likely that you won’t find a “look” that is remotely appealing to you; and since people have no way of knowing how deep that personalisation goes, that’s all you have to evaluate your “new look”.

The next step (if you’re not using Google Chrome which will utterly break!) is to click the yellow button and wait for the confirmation email to arrive. A link to it will then show you a split screen: to the left, you’ll go through the regular orientation area (which is not the 2004 one!! I just added the picture on the first page for nostalgia’s sake), and from there, you jump directly into one of the infohubs (there are no Help Islands any more). If you click on the Community Gateways page, you’ll get the full list of gateways to select one (they’re randomly sorted to ensure fairness), and your experience begins there. All Community Gateways require Linden pre-approval, so they will have at the very least an “orientation area” too and very likely a crowd of greeters/helpers to help you along. Most are themed or targeted to a specific language; Beta Technologies has created a specific business-oriented orientation area inside its Beta Business Park.

This all takes about 5 minutes, if at all — probably less. What happens next mostly depends on what you’ve chosen. I’m quite interested to see the retention rate of residents coming through community gateways vs. infohubs. Some infohubs are just “newbie traps”: after being left on your own on a Linden orientation area (with luck you might figure out what it’s used for…), you’ll be “met” by a crowd of griefer wannabes that will have a laugh at your expense. Fortunately, not all are that bad: a few are organised (like Ross) and sometimes even have a staff of volunteers to really help out.

The problem begins after that phase. Some newbies might successfully avoid their “blood baptism” with the griefers and just fly away; others might have been lucky and might even have asked the three most important questions for them: “how do I make money?”, “how do I get a date?”, and “what do I do now?”.

Indeed, what comes next?

We have to turn back the clock a few years, to the time Linden Lab introduced the stipends. Every Basic Account used to get L$50 every week they’ve logged in; Premium Accounts got L$500 every week, no matter if they logged in or not.

This set the reference for the price of things in Second Life: content creators targeting newbies (who would start as Basic Accounts) would know that if they priced it from L$0-50, they would get newbies to buy their content. If they wished to go upscale and sell to Premium Accounts, up to L$500 would mean that they’d get a sale per week. That’s why the first generation of outfits (usually just two pieces!) would cost up to L$500, since you expected residents to buy one per week (hopefully!). Skins, or other items that wouldn’t be bought every other week, like vehicles or animation overriders, would cost around L$2000, since you wouldn’t expect them to buy a new one very often. So that’s why things cost what they do

When GOM first introduced their currency exchange for Second Life, a similar question was asked: what would be the “fair” price to charge, in US$, for a handful of L$? Again, we needed a reference. Since the easiest way to get L$ in-world was by being a Premium Account, and that costed US$9.99/month (less if you paid annually!), and this got you L$2000/month, it meant that LL “valued” (indirectly) L$200 to be worth 1 US dollar. Well, almost: since the cheapest way to get L$ was to pay an annual fee — for US$72 — this meant that you could get L$333 for 1 US$. There’s your range — from L$200 to 333. Average it, and you get L$266/US$. Now you know why the L$/US$ ratio has been floating around that “magic” value for so long

Finally, land is also valued used similar baselines, although here the concepts of “speculation” and “location” play a huger role! Still, like in real life, you can see that the cost of land can be compared to the “base welfare stipend” (the original L$2000/month) which included 512 m² of tier on the mainland. The value of land overall is tied to this and is not totally arbitrary.

So knowing the base metrics that define why things cost what they do in Second Life, we can ask ourselves next: what will be considered a good, successful SL-based business? And what will distort the market? And this will finally let us ask us the last question: should Linden lab attempt to “regulate” the market (in the good, European sense of the word) or just let it do whatever it pleases and whatever the results are (in the American sense of the word)?

How to make money out of digital content sales

3D content creators that are used to sell content on Renderosity are close to a “pure” market. Buyers and sellers sort of agree to what is “reasonable” to pay for a meshed object that buyers can then use as often as they like (there are no technical restrictions, just merely licensing agreements that most poor digital content creators are rarely able to enforce). It’s an “opportunity” market; since 3D object meshes are available completely for free on popular sites like the Google 3D Warehouse, it’s hard to tag a huge price on a model, since the higher it will be, the more likely someone simply uploads it to one of those “free 3D models” sites and just lets it stay there for anyone to copy. Sure, you can DMCA them out of those sites, but there are simply too many to track, and no overall organisation to remove stolen content.

3D modellers are thus familiar with this business model, which, in a sense, is not unlike indie music creators who sell online. The “impulse buyer” will be willing to spend a few US$ on digital content, if they need it for a project that requires proof of purchase; if the model is too expensive, and not worth the trouble (say, for making a quick movie or even a still image to illustrate something) they will just look elsewhere for a free model instead. I have recently been at a conference where academic researchers, encouraging the audience to participate in virtual worlds, explained that 3D virtual worlds are actually very easy and insanely cheap to create in a learning environment “because of all the free content that is available”. They definitely undervalued the role of the content creator by saying that 3D meshes, being so widespreadly copied and archived with relatively good search engines, are basically ubiquitous — hiring a 3D modeller is only wise when you need very specific content targeted to a special environment (say, recreating an exact replica of an existing building that nobody has created yet).

So, 3D modellers mostly work with content-as-a-service. They get hired to do specific models, but generic ones are not “sellable”. They might be posted on Renderosity and similar sites to give them some exposure and give potential buyers of 3D content a taste of the kind of 3D models they’re able to create. In a sense, this is not unlike semi-professional photographers that post their pictures on Flickr or Stock Exchange but might sell them (very cheaply) on Fotolia. It’s a way to build up a portfolio, get some exposure, but the real money will come from getting a contract to take some special pictures of an event or a person. Granted, the long tail will help to make a small income out of selling a few pictures from those very-low-cost sites.

In a sense, the overall trend is that anything digital is next-to-free on the Internet — music, videos (think YouTube!), pictures, and 3D meshes — since it’s impossible to prevent copy, and amateurs flood the market with free content for anyone to download. Very cheap and free content allow digital creators to get some exposure to (hopefully!) attract the attention of someone who might be willing to hire them to provide services. That’s how it works.

No wonder, then, that the amount of money made directly from selling digital content on the Internet is not a huge market, even though the few sites selling cheap digital content still make enough to cover the costs of archival and storage — typical examples are Magnatune (or even Apple Store!) or Getty Images. But there is not much room at the top of the pyramid.

This is no mean feat. Obviously there is still some way to go to beat Steve Jobs’ keynote speeches once or twice a year. But nevertheless I believe it was a huge success (Amanda Linden calls it the largest promotional event ever run by Linden Lab in their decade of existence) — it’s no mean feat to have a product launch with 3,000 users. In real life, on a “traditional” product presentation with a press conference, getting 3,000 people to attend is quite rare! It’s also true that huge countries like the US will attract more people — I’m sure that any product launch by, say, Microsoft, will probably feature a similar amount of viewers — but I’m more used to audiences of 30-300 (and the latter number for Fortune 500 product launches!) for a new product. Your experience might be different, but in any case, we’re contrasting the launch from a relatively small company to a big, huge launch by a Fortune 500 company, which is a bit unfair to Linden Lab

Another surprise (for me at least) was the incredibly positive feedback throughout the SL community. I expected that most residents would frown at this, shrugging it off as merely hype, or irrelevant to SL (since LL admits that there are really only 1,400 organisations — corporate, academical, or otherwise — in SL), or simply something no worth wasting any time over: a gadget, a gimmick, another cool thing from the cool kids in the ‘Lab, but too expensive to make a difference, and too limited for anyone’s purpose (more on that in a minute). Actually, however, although some people questioned the business model behind Second Life Enterprise, overall, with the possible exception of Prokofy Neva (who complains mostly about the SL Work Marketplace anyway, which hasn’t been brought up yet, and not about the Second Life Enterprise solution), most residents are happy or at least intrigued by this new product. I think, once more, that this is quite a good sign — on one hand, Linden Lab’s Enterprise team did a thorough job in putting the product out; and on the other hand, residents view it as a sign that Second Life really starts to be taken more seriously outside the sphere of the “early adopters” and spills over to the mainstream — in this case, the corporate mainstream — which will make all our hours spent in-world much more worthwhile.

What is Second Life Enterprise?

But let’s unravel first what Second Life Enterprise actually is, and what it will be used for. There are always the inevitable rumours and plain misunderstanding around anything that Linden Lab launches. The most vocal residents come from different backgrounds, often without any business experience (or rather, lacking the experience on how corporations evaluate and buy technology for their workplace) or technical experience, or having only one of those, and this makes them misunderstand the purpose of such a product. We also project expectations upon things that are told us, and based on those expectations, we create a mental image on what we think it is, instead of understanding what it really is. I would say that’s unavoidable, it’s part of human nature. Amanda Linden and her team can only go so far to explain things properly to her target audience: corporate CIOs and MIS who will be evaluating products for their workplace.

Second Life Enterprise is the equivalent of a company’s intranet. It is supposed to work in complete isolation from the outside (virtual) world, and be used only for the workplace. The “behind-the-firewall” description is sometimes misleading, as many people imagined that what this means is that somehow your region would be more protected from the menaces of the Second Life Grid. This description is, indeed, misleading. Second Life Enterprise is not connected to the SL Grid; it doesn’t even share the same set of asset servers.

Instead, it’s a physical box, shipped to a customer’s office, including two servers, which have higher specifications that the current grid servers. One server is a voice server; the other, with 2 GBytes of RAM and 8 cores, will run 8 regions (sims) and have its own set of central servers, where the customer will be able to create their own avatar names (up to 100 on the standard package, which is the one that costs US$55,000 for the first year; subsequent years will apparently be charged at US$150/avatar, but this is not quite clear to me yet). The software is still closed and proprietary, and the regions share exactly the same specifications as the ones you get on the Second Life Grid: regions are still 256x256m with 15,000 prims and allow a maximum of 100 avatars in it, for instance. You cannot change those settings even though you “own” the box

In a sense, the best equivalent of the Second Life Enterprise box is a product by Google called the Google Search Appliance. Google is the world’s leading Web search engine developer, as everybody knows. Now imagine you’re a corporation with a lot of information in your enterprise — for instance, product and specification data — and would love to make it searchable. Publishing it to the Web and letting Google index it is out of the question: these are private documents that are not supposed to leave the corporate network. The solution that Google has been selling for a few years now is simply to put their search engine inside a box and ship it to you, so you can set it up inside your network, behind the corporate firewall, and only let employees use it. It’s not connected to the outside world (unless you wish so, of course). Although it uses the very same technology that Google employs on their publicly-accessible search engine, it has no connection to it — your documents’ indexed data won’t “mysteriously” be shown on the public engine. They will remain just inside the GSA and never leave it.

That’s the model Linden Lab has used for their Second Life Enterprise box. They pretty much copied Google’s own example. That shouldn’t be very surprising: after all, if you haven’t noticed, the in-world Search engine that you use every day on the SL Viewer is actually powered by a Google Search Appliance as well