Archives for second-life category
You don’t see nearly the amount of coverage of Second Life (or as we call it in these parts, PlayStation Home’s creepy, aggressively pornographic uncle) these days as you used to, and BBC did a little digging to find out why. Their discovery? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but Second Life sucks. It’s overly complicated to control, it’s full of some truly horrific human beings, there are many better social networking hubs and (perhaps most importantly) companies that sunk a bunch of money into it rarely got their investments back.
What the BBC seems to be implying is that Second Life was largely a media-created phenomenon, with journalists and public figures so smitten by the idea of a virtual world, no one stopped to notice that it was a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Besides, everybody knows that HiPiHi is where it’s at.
BBC asks: What happened to Second Life? originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 20th, 2009 at 11:59pm by Justin McElroy
Filed Under: bbc, linden-lab, mmo, second-life
This week, Linden Lab announced that it was going to start charging listing fees and minimum commissions on its Second Life Xstreet Web-shopping adjunct in the near future. Within hours, vendors took down thousands of products, many abandoning the service entirely in favor of alternative services.
It’s unclear just how many vendors have abandoned the Xstreet SL system, but it apparently was enough to temporarily overload the Web-sites of third-party sites such as Slapt.
Continue reading Linden Lab to raise Xstreet fees, loses vendors, products
Filed under: Business models, Culture, Economy, News items, Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds
Linden Lab to raise Xstreet fees, loses vendors, products originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 20th, 2009 at 5:00pm by Tateru Nino
Filed Under: business-models, culture, economy, linden-dollars, linden-lab, opinion, second-life, sl-policy, slapt, virtual-worlds, xstreet, xstreet-sl
Yesterday at the morning Second Life mentors’ meeting, Linden Lab staff announced that Linden Lab’s sponsored mentor group, which had been functionally closed (in all but name) for approximately a year now, would finally be disbanded in practice. The move doesn’t really come as much of a surprise to observers of the Lab’s sponsored volunteer programs over the last eighteen months.
Almost immediately more ex-mentor Second Life social groups than we could comfortably count sprang up, as people prepared to maintain their network of contacts without the overarching group umbrella. While there was surprisingly little actual yelling, some members of the organization feel the blame lies squarely at the feet of Linden Lab’s CEO Mark Kingdon, though there’s not a lot of apparent evidence to justify that.
Continue reading Linden Lab to disband moribund mentor group
Filed under: Culture, Guilds, News items, Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds
Linden Lab to disband moribund mentor group originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 19th, 2009 at 12:00pm by Tateru Nino
Filed Under: linden-lab, m-linden, mark-kingdon, mentors, opinion, second-life, second-life-answers, second-life-mentors, second-life-volunteers, sl-community-translation, sl-policy, sl-resident-help-network, volunteers
Filed under: Business models, MMO industry, News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds
Virtual environment operator Linden Lab has partnered up with 888 Holdings plc’s Gisland/Dragonfish division to provide payment processing for non-US Second Life customers.
A spokesperson for Linden Lab told us, “We’re working together with Gisland on a cashier interface and other tools that will give Residents more payment options and make it easier for Residents to pay in a wider range of native currencies than they can now. Gisland will also help Linden Lab implement appropriate anti-fraud measures as we expand these payment options. In addition, Gisland will assist Residents directly with payment-related issues, including failed transactions.”
That last part is fascinating, as that would be something of a first insofar as Second Life payments processing goes, as is the tantalizing hint of expanded payment options – something that is of considerable interest to users outside North America.
Continue reading Linden Lab partners with Dragonfish for non-US payments processing
Linden Lab partners with Dragonfish for non-US payments processing originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 18th, 2009 at 9:00pm by Tateru Nino
Filed Under: 888-holdings-plc, business-models, dragonfish, gambling, gisland, linden-lab, m-linden, mark-kingdon, mmo-industry, second-life, virtual-worlds
Filed under: Business models, News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds
Telstra BigPond (a major Australian Internet Service Provider, with an approximate 50% market-share) has had one of the most popular corporate presences in the virtual environment of Second Life, even including a customer service center staffed eleven hours per day, five days per week. In a nation with expensively metered bandwidth, BigPond even refrained from metering a portion of the data sent to its customers from Second Life. All of this for what has basically been an experiment.
That, however, appears to be coming to a close. BigPond intends to shutter its Second Life presence on 16 December.
Continue reading Telstra BigPond to shutter Second Life presence in December
Telstra BigPond to shutter Second Life presence in December originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 17th, 2009 at 12:00pm by Tateru Nino
Filed Under: australia, bigpond, business-models, craig-middleton, second-life, telstra, virtual-worlds
