Further addendum: Am I the only one infuriated that Catherine Linden threw in her two cents only ONCE in the comments that followed the posting of this issue? These people need to take communication classes – preferably from Sidewinder Linden. Ignoring all other comments and the hundred that followed, Catherine instead responded only to Ciaran (kudos! woot!):
“Hey Ciaran, in answer to your specific question about timing, we are actually providing plenty of time — 90 days — to get your questions answered and let the community start using the inSL logo. We anticipate there will be lots of questions and we’ll do our best to answer Thanks for the comments everyone.”
90 days notice to undo, um, how many YEARS of having guidelines that a community of fans was following? Give me a break.
Linden Labs sent out a Trojan horse into the community – a spiffy (and useless) new logo, perhaps thinking bloggers, content creators, educators and businesses wouldn’t notice the fine print which many are speculating is all prelude to an IPO.
I find myself increasingly furious. I suppose Philip is way too busy interviewing new CEOs to take the time to review substantial policy changes and branding decisions, but if that’s true then WHO IS MAKING THESE DECISIONS?
Didn’t they have any idea that following all the speculation on Philip’s vacating the CEO position that tightening up trademark issues right on the heels of the announcement is a sure-fire way to fuel speculation that the company is either priming to go public, or is currently in its own DUE DILIGENCE in preparation for a sale?
Did they think through any of the implications to companies who, often without any profit motive at all, or without teams of editors and designers will need to redirect domains, proof blogs, add disclaimers – the list goes on.
Now, the bloggers are either brushing off the latest policy change as yet another misguided effort by its lawyers to plug loopholes (which will later be generally ignored by front-line staffers, with different divisions doing different things, a la age verification)…or as a slap in the face to the community.
If the former, it’s just another misguided attempt by Linden to get its house in order for the outside legal and venture folks, while Philip whistles quietly to himself in the corner, dreaming of a metaverse nirvana while becoming increasingly disconnected and obscure.
Gwyneth Llewelyn has taken up the mantle and is threatening a blog boycott and shut-down unless Linden provides clarification (I’d direct link to the posting, but it seems to redirect back on itself or something):
“We would thus kindly request that you clarify your position regarding the usage of the trademarks Second Life® and the logo on all fansites, blogs, forums, or other 3rd party websites offering products and services related to Second Life®. This clarification should be as easy to follow as your previous policies on the usage of those trademarks. They should make clear that all people intending to promote your product and raise your brand awareness are not facing lawsuits because they have faithfully used your trademarks using the old policy, and wish to continue to do so in the future.
We consider that an appropriate response should be forthcoming in the next few days, or we will be forced to shut down our own blogs, websites, forums, community portals, and other 3rd party sites to avoid litigation — and thus deprieving Linden Lab® from the traffic generated by millions of direct links and millions of viewers that learn first about Second Life® through all those sites.
This is a broader issue than just protecting the Linden trademarks. It’s an issue of communication and synching itself to its ecosystem of users, creators, and partners.
As it happens, I read ESC’s blog this morning, which basically seems to be their acknowledgment that they are (mostly) throwing in the towel on Second Life, and while my initial reaction was negative, I’m now quickly sliding over to strongly agreeing based on this latest fiasco:
Perhaps it is very self-serving but I have always believed that Linden Lab’s strength would lie in enabling a deep and wide ecosystem of 3rd party developers. This requires both fostering that ecosystem and creating a robust and open technical platform for those developers to work upon. Linden Lab has been well-meaning with the former, but has fallen down on the latter. It has moved in inches, rather than miles, and been afraid to cannibalize its existing community and economy. Not surprisingly, many 3rd party developers have lost patience and shifted to OpenSim and Multiverse or shifted back to Flash and the Web browser. I would think that once OpenSim is able to create its own viewer from scratch and break free from the SL GPL license, it too will split from Second Life compatibility.
Fostering the ecosystem includes that of the bloggers, content creators, companies, and the community of users.
I may not be out the door yet, but I’ve got my coat on.
ESC is not totally throwing in the towel, no. I think that there are some situations where SL can be compelling. But yes, we think there can be compelling, immersive uses of Flash & papervision to offer virtual world experiences to a much bigger audience than has the computing requirements and fortitude for SL. I am sure there will still be marketing efforts to the SL community as mark of broader campaigns.
The dynamics are very different for community members and content creators. It is in their interests that SL provide a certain level of feature stability (don’t break my stuff!) and preserve the economy. There are not really a lot of places to go that offer such an economy — OpenSim, which lacks a permissions system, would totally remake the economy.
My perception is that Linden Lab has chosen their existing community (and opening their arms to collaboration/education experimentation) rather than risk too much pushing to be an open platform. It certainly protects their cash flow, which is understandable. But it slows down and reduces their chances of being the next big thing. But they are not out of the running. Time will tell!
IMO, most of us still have this early-adopter mentality which seems to assume that the two biggest draws, the killer app’s, of SL are first, the ability to create within it and make your own virtual place and second to mess around with the code that drives it, for fair means or foul. We’ve been driven this far by creatives and codeheads – they’ve achieved amazing things and could continue to do so but there’s something important that’s missing – the audience.
I suspect that many of the 95% of new-users who don’t stay were expecting Facebook 2 or MySpace Plus but instead found themselves dropped into Maya for Beginners. I would never want to see the creative side of SL in any way limited – just the opposite, for me it IS the biggest draw – but I think we have to recognise the mainstream user will (mostly) only come for the fun and not the work of virtual worlds.
Thanks Giff and Eris. I think I was being, um, dramatic.
Any talk of interoperability and relationships with 3d party developers (publishing some sort of forward-looking plan that developers can, well, PLAN against would be a nice start) and you end up sounding like you mean that the “walled garden” needs to come down. As I say in my profile, our focus is on vertical integration across platforms – not because different platforms need to integrate with each other, so much, but rather because when you go to create an experience you want to bring the right tools at the right time to the right person.
This might be a quick Papervision experience, a mini-game (Metaplace anyone?), a VIR-Tools environment, or an immersive sim. Within this range of experiences and then the communities around them, there is a role for a place like Second Life in facilitating game economies, avatar representation, and shared/co-created environments. Their protection of their brand, I believe, is an important part of protecting a “good housekeeping seal of approval” on the experience that they provide.
But they’d better make sure that the much protected seal of approval is sealing something of which we approve.
As you pointed out Giff, the platform doesn’t support its full promise, which is what I mean by ‘throwing in the towel’. The full experience, as initially envisioned (I imagine) by the CSI build, was meant to be mostly in-world (with Web and media outlets as the point of attraction). But SL can’t ‘bear the load’ of these kinds of concepts – full immersion, branded, cross-platform. Which is fine – SL wasn’t ready yet, as the Lindens then said (in retrospect).
So where does that leave us? Well, I won’t contribute to the stability discussion…but rather the discussion of experiences. And because Linden isn’t in the content creation business, they need to rely on others to do that part for them. And as the options increase, they need to realize that it’s Pro/Am time: if they don’t attract the right mix of pros and combine them with the vibrant community of amateur creators (many of whom are trying to BECOME pro), then they’ll lose both to other platforms.
And pros expect certain things. They don’t need source code but they need pipelines. They need to know that if they’re creating an experience that they can build it once and then place the same ‘objects’ within SL, and inside PaperVision, and maybe in a Vir-Tools demo room or an True Space gallery.
Lacking clear direction and poor developer relations, (I’m still waiting on replies to 3 e-mails through “The Grid”) they then put salt on the wounds of the “Amateur” part of the equation, sending little tremors and shocks, lacking a clear explanation of whether their crackdown on branding is an “Intel Inside” strategy, “Due Dilligence” ahead of a sale, simple house cleaning, or a well thought out desire to “brand” the future open architecture project.
As far as Maya for beginners, have a look at 3DVIA shape, sometime, for what a real Maya for beginners looks like – and frankly, in my early days of SL I would have welcomed an application like it – as user friendly as you can possibly get for a newbie to 3D modeling. They should do a deal with those guys and have an optional external building program!
So where does it leave us – they haven’t attracted the “Pros”. They’ve upset the amateurs (again). And they’re protecting a logo which has less and less value as a brand, because its associated with a lack of clarity (hey! Why just settle on one logo! Maybe if we have 3 or 4 we’ll confuse people and they’ll stop associating us with flying genitalia!), and their “fanzines” have been pretty much given 90 days to comply or … or what? They’ll shut down the people who are tirelessly advocating and promoting SL and who, ironically, don’t even work for Linden Labs.
I never believed I could have a Second Life. So maybe Fitzgerald’s adage isn’t true…”There are no second acts, but in Second Life’s case we’ll hope this isn’t true.”
Dusan – Thank you for your kind words about 3DVIA Shape…you’ve got exactly the right idea – it’s an attempt to expand the accesibilty for creating 3D content.
Also, very intereting times in the metaverse for SL and many of the other worlds. We’re looking to expand the software and our 3D modeling community to support virtual worlds more effectively. I would love to get your thoughts on how we could help. Drop me an email when you get a chance.
(Wonders when a Linden last posted on a blog and fires up his e-mail).
“…the discussion of experiences…”
That’s the head of the nail. It’s not about the technical challenges LL face, those will just have to be dealt with, that’s a given. It’s actually about what people do when they get here (into SL) and i think the way forward is to adopt a more web-like model.
When you sign up for MySpace you’re not handed a book of html and a text editor to go write your own website – you’re given check-boxes to check and text-fields to fill with some details of yourself – all of which add up to your presence on MySpace.
Your equivalent presence in SL is your avatar. The first user experience in SL should be creating that avatar presence, then moving it out into the wider SL world then, at a later date if you want, you should be introduced to building and creating within SL. The point isn’t to make the 3D creation tools in SL more user-friendly (altho we need that too!) it’s to realise that many (possibly even most) people arriving in SL don’t particularly want to use them! They want a virtual world presence and the opportunity to explore, socialise and have fun within it – why aren’t we giving them that?
It struck me earlier that this concept is about to be put to a very good test – Sony’s Home on the PS3 is, rumoured at least, about to open for Public Beta in April. Their concept is very like this – a virtual presence with little or no creation tools – and it’ll be fascinating to see if it captures the imagination of PS3 users. Be very interesting to see what Sony have come up with after about 3 years development too…
[...] Dusan Writer is strongly in the anti-policy camp: Linden Labs sent out a Trojan horse into the community – a spiffy (and useless) new logo, perhaps thinking bloggers, content creators, educators and businesses wouldn’t notice the fine print which many are speculating is all prelude to an IPO. [...]
[...] of rules for residents and other people on the use of the company’s trademarks earlier this week. Much-lauded by numerous blogs, Linden Lab’s move highlights the company’s strong commitment to its [...]
The Cult of the Professional, always speaking for the amateur…
The SLLU open letter to the TOS is on http://www.slleftunity.com.