SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

SECOND LIFE, August 21 (Reuters) - Browser-based virtual world Vivaty, currently accessible through Facebook and AOL Instant Messenger will be embeddable by users on blogs and pages throughout the Web within the next two months, CEO Keith McCurdy said this week.

McCurdy also said Vivaty is internally testing the technology on the Firefox web browser, and expects to announce official support for Mozilla’s browser “in the next few weeks.” Presently Vivaty only runs within the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser on Windows.

There’s no timetable at present to extend support for Vivaty to the Macintosh, he said.

While every virtual world is scrambling for users and attention, the competition closest to Vivaty may be Lively by Google. Like Vivaty, Lively is a browser-based virtual world embedded in IE. Google originally invested in McCurdy’s startup, but ultimately Vivaty and Lively launched on the same day.

McCurdy said Google’s presence only validates Vivaty’s idea. “Before we launched, people asked: Why be in the browser?” he said. “After Google launched — or echo-launched — we get almost none of those questions.”

“Their product looks very different. They have a cartoon look, we have more of a Sims look,” he said.

Vivaty’s goal is to allow avatars to create a virtual space that ties into the rest of their web presence. Already users can hang a virtual picture frame on their wall, and have it display images from a Flickr account. Tighter integration between Vivaty and Facebook (already a partner), eBay, and Twitter are all in the works.

“People will have a lot more ability to pull stuff in from the rest of the Internet,” he said. “Brands love that.”

Coke Zero and Target are early Vivaty branding partners. “Second Life has brands coming into Second Life, but then they’re locked in,” McCurdy said. “We turned that inside out.”

Embedding a Vivaty scene on a corporate web site is more attractive to advertisers, he said.

Further expansion of Vivaty Create, a user-generated content tool, is planned. McCurdy doesn’t expect problems with pornography or griefing. “We’ll have people who will check content, and you’ll have the community check content,” he said.

But while McCurdy wants to further open up his virtual world to outside developers and add more avatar customization, he doesn’t see that as Vivaty’s draw.

“We’re not trying to be a 3D modeling program,” he said. “We’re erring on the side of simple, easy-to-use, and mass-market.”

Original post by Eric Reuters

The newest destination for talent scouts looking to sign fresh acts is Second Life.

Boutique label Reality Entertainment has signed popular Second Life musician Von Johin to a record deal. Wagner Jmes Au runs a lengthy interview with Johin, who performs weekly shows in the virtual world.

For the most part, however, he no longer has any interest playing live in person. “This is more fun,” he says, referring to his virtual stage. “No gas costs, no travel, worldwide audience, exciting new people, no smoke, no drunks on the road, no hassles.”

But what does “sign a record deal” really mean in 2008? The Metaverse Journal takes a contrarian approach to the news: “Any individual can now publish their music worldwide on iTunes using services like TuneCore for the princely sum of US $9.99 per year.”

Regardless, any deal can only be seen as encouraging news for Second Life’s burgeoning music scene.

Original post by Eric Reuters

SECOND LIFE, August 12 (Reuters) - Doug Thompson loved Second Life from the start, but there was one aspect he hated — its notoriously clunky user interface.

“The Second Life interface sucks,” he wrote on his blog, recalling his first days. “Which will lead to the next sacred cow, which is that the newbie orientation experience sucks.”

But rather than gripe, Thompson, through his Second Life avatar Dusan Writer, came up with an idea: hold a contest throughout Second Life to see who could figure out how to make the interface better. And to sweeten the pot, he committed L$800,000 of his own money, almost three thousand American dollars, to the three avatars who could come up with the best design.

“I like to think about virtual worlds, what can make them better, how to attract and retain new users. It’s mind candy for me,” Thompson said. “I thought I’d love to see what people mean when they say a simpler interface is better.”

Thompson received six entries for his contest. He assembled a panel of judges, and on Tuesday named avatar Rheta Shan as the first prize winner and recipient of L$500,000 (about US$1,850).

Shan’s proposal was for a series of new layouts and improvements to all of Second Life’s menus. See the winning perspectus here (PDF document).

“The best way to make an interface noob [new user] friendly is to make it intuitive, and consistent,” Shan said. “So that [users] understand what happens when they click something, get an idea of the result, and must not be afraid of causing some kind of damage.”

First runner-up Jacek Antonelli won L$200,000 (about US$740) for her entry (google doc) on a redesign of the menus and a new system of inventory management — long a bane among veteran Second Life users.

But it wasn’t the prize money that brought Antonelli into the contest. “I’m strongly considering recirculating it back into the process — maybe funding another contest, or pay developers to actually implement some of these ideas,” she said.

Second runner-up Roy Cassini proposed integrating the new user experience and help system directly into the interface.

“It takes the first encounter with SL out of the horrors of help island, buggy huds, and overall a poor experience,” he said of his proposal (slideshare presentation).

With three vetted ideas for improving Second Life’s interface, it may be hard to extract the best ideas out of them.

“The thing is every single entry has a good idea or two or three or whatever,” Thompson said. He’s considering a follow-up contest, a “mash-up phase” to combine the best features of the different entries into an integrated software proposal. “Some of the contestants said we should develop a Frankenviewer.”

Original post by Eric Reuters

SLNN.com carries an interview with Linden VP Joe Miller which says the reported “SLim” offering is only weeks away.

Miller, as quoted by SLNN:

We’ll be launching a beta First Look, something we call ‘SLim,’ which is a very thin client that is designed for you to stay in both voice and text contact with your friends list. If you want to participate in a meeting but can’t actually run the SL app to do it, you’ll be able to do that with our thin voice communication client. It will be in First Look in a couple of weeks.

Miller goes on to talk about connecting both individual and group Second Life accounts to external phone numbers, complete with voicemail:

This will work two ways: you’ll be able to sign up for an access number that will give people who are outside of SL (perhaps on a cell phone) the ability to reach you in-world. This is distinctly separate from the ‘SLim’ communication client.

The other capability is the ability to associate a standard telephone number – PSTN number – with a group, and that number can be used by a number of folks to join a group conversation for the purpose of meeting from outside of SL as well.

If you attempt to reach someone who is not in-world, you’ll have the opportunity to leave them a voice message.

While the prospect of SLim coming in a few weeks would be welcome, Miller’s hope for a Second Life to PTSN connection in the “near future” may be a long ways off. In a December 2007 talk in Second Life quoted by Information Week, Miller said Linden hoped to implement voicemail in the first quarter of 2008.

Original post by Eric Reuters

It’s getting to be a familiar story. In June “Jack Linden” said Linden was freezing additions to Second Life’s mainland until July. In July Jack said “the previous decline in average Mainland price per meter has halted,” but that there would be no new land until August. And just last weekend, Jack had this to say:

…after reviewing the current market, we are remaining unchanged on Mainland supply. There will be no new whole regions offered at auction.

Until now, Linden’s business model had been a simple, and profitable, one: An ever-increasing avatar population had an insatiable appetite for land, and the company had both a monopoly on the land supply and charged monthly fees to landowners. The principal challenge for Linden was to figure out the pace at which new land could be introduced, minding both Second Life’s ability to scale and prices in the avatar-to-avatar land aftermarket. When Linden said it was freezing the land supply in January, prices spiked, prompting the company to begin new land rollouts in April, reaffirming the premise of an ever-increasing demand for virtual land.

So what’s going on? A few contributing factors:

• Linden’s customer base has been shrinking for six consecutive months, and the total number of mainland-owning premium accounts is smaller than it was a year ago.
• A migration by Second Life veterans to private islands and budget “Openspace sims”, which takes them out of the mainland market and depresses prices
• OpenSim. OpenSim evangelists insist — sometimes in heated tones — that their project will only bring new interest and users to Second Life. But in the short term, as Second Life’s all-important power users create OpenSim virtual world grids on their home PCs for free, at least some of them may scale back on charge-incurring Second Life land acquisitions.

We’ll be keeping an eye on whether land prices in Second Life begin to tick upwards under Linden’s extended supply freeze. If prices don’t rise, Linden will find it difficult to grow Second Life — or its bottom line.

Original post by Eric Reuters

SECOND LIFE, August 11 (Reuters) - Linden hired former AOL executive Frank Ambrose to oversee work on scalability problems with Second Life, the company announced on Friday.

Ambrose joins the company in a newly created position as Senior VP of Global Technology, and will report directly to company CEO Mark Kingdon.

“Ambrose will oversee the development of new processes, systems and tools to maximize the scalability of Second Life’s network architecture,” the company said.

Scalability problems have plagued Second Life since its beginning. During the heyday of Second Life’s growth in early 2007, Linden frequently halted new user registrations when its servers were unable to meet the load of new signups.

In 2008, growth cooled but Second Life users still complained of a creaky user experience, especially at times of peak usage. Linden last implemented login restrictions in June, though the company says there are “no plans” to do so in the future.

Ambrose’s job will be to ensure that Second Life’s servers can meet the challenge of growing by “several orders of magnitude.”

The new executive spent nine years at AOL as Senior Vice President of Technology for Infrastructure and Network Services. Prior to AOL, Ambrose worked at MCI Communications and served for four years as a commissioned officer in the US Navy.

Original post by Eric Reuters