Telling: Like it Is

I suppose you've heard of Kitely by now? If not, to learn everything you could want to (short of creating an account), go to this blog by Ener Hax, and this one by Maria Korolov. Both are chock full of replies by the founder of Kitely, Ilan Tochner.

So is this: a follow-up blog by Ener, wherein she meant to gather questions for an email interview, but Ilan jumped in and answered them in the comments (don't know if the interview itself will go forward). The question I posted was very simple; since first learning of it, and what it can and can't do, I've been wondering "What's it for?":

Given that Ilan has promised Facebook will eventually not be the only login path, my biggest question for him is “Who are the target customers?”

Ilan's answer, though no doubt well-meaning, irked me, loaded as it is with buzz phrases and corp-speak:

Hi Lalo,

Our initial target customers are the people who have made virtual worlds their life and work tirelessly to sell others on that vision. We hope that what we bring to market can help people such as yourself sell your VW-based solutions and services to your existing and potential clients.

Going forward we see virtual world and augmented reality based services being more widely accepted by the general public. At which point we believe we will transition to become a mostly transparent utility on top of which people build their value added services. A type of Amazon Web Services for virtual worlds if you will.

Of course, Ilan's completely unaware that I'm not a "solutions and services" kind of guy. Perhaps he should have been, before dropping a pile of boilerplate on me -- "know your customer" and all that. Ilan does know his customer -- the ones he'd like to have, anyway. He can't be expected to know I'm not one of them. In any case, the answer he gave is the one I was expecting. Pardon me for a moment while I invoke the "Immersionist or Augmentationist" dichotomy I had such fun declaring obsolete a while back. Kitely is Virtuality-as-a-tool, not as a place to be in and experience -- most importantly, to share experiences with the other people you find there.

Mind you, on its own merit this is not a bad thing, and I don't have much trouble understanding that there's a niche market within the larger niche market of Virtuality generally -- one which Maria outlined very well in her follow-up blog. Somewhere on the economic spectrum between the people with enough disposable income to pay the likes of Linden Lab or Inworldz for land, and the people with enough savvy and desktop power to self-host their own for free (either as a standalone or hooked to a grid like OSG), there's a group of people who might be attracted to Kitely's pay-as-you-go plan in exchange for the convenience.

[Believe me: I've done the self-hosting thing. I was barely knowledgeable enough to parse the tutorials available a year ago to get the config files right and set up an instance of MySQL to handle assets. 'Twas not for the faint of heart, and I don't expect it's any easier this year than last.]

The other thing that has me irked: Kitely's websites calls the OpenSim regions one creates through their service "worlds". They're absolutely not worlds -- they're tiny walled gardens, an archipelago of private island sims so isolated by the setup that in order to travel between them, you have to quit out of the viewer and log into the next one. Beyond that, they're being touted for their potential as sandboxes and conference centers.

In the immortal words of MPoster Linden: "You can have a meetin' in it!"

Or in Ilan's words, "solutions and services". Srs Bznz.

I'm not being facetious when I wish Ilan good luck with Kitely; neither am I being dismissively cynical in advising "don't quit your day job". The product has limited appeal; don't be surprised if interest plateaus quickly after the current first rush of early adopters. Just do us all a favor, please, and stop calling them "worlds". That's as big a mistake as the one some people still make when talking about "playing Second Life".

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Yes, I bought a new computer* to replace the fried one... I missed my pixellated friends! Twitter, blogs and forums just don't cut it, though they helped immensely to stay in touch.

And by the way, all you "SL goes best with Facebook" advocates -- especially the ones who work for the Lab -- can cram it.

When the previous computer died, I also had to leave this unfinished on the build platform in Falconvale, InWorldz:

A discussion Ali and I had about the differences between "Goth" architectural style and historic Gothic put it in my head to make pointed arches and flying buttresses, so.... there they are. Got a chance to work on it today - all it's missing now is the rose window, and then it goes up on the sales floor.



Should I say anything about (forgive me, Eli...) Hamletgate? Actually, I already have, over on soror's blog from a couple of days ago, which in itself was a follow-up to the brief (and who knows how effective?) #unfollowhamletau campaign on Twitter. You definitely should go read that, but here's the comment I left there:

This is more than a case of the famous xkcd comic: "someone on the Internet is wrong"; this is a case of someone (Hamlet) being demonstratively wrong-headed about how to present his opinion.

Loyalty, like respect, is not purchased; it is earned. I would not give a rat's ass how often another blogger mentioned my work favorably, if they turned around and did something as detrimental to the discussion of a shared passion as Hamlet did. I would dissociate myself from that person -- which, in these times, includes the neologism "unfollow".

For the record: I ceased following New World Notes months prior, when it became clear to me that Mr. Au was engaging in cheap pandering -- the word "sexy" was appearing far too often in his post titles, for one thing, and the (thankfully short-lived) inclusion of Night Flower What's-her-name on the masthead was the final straw. (I didn't need to unfollow him on Twitter, having never followed him in the first place.)

The word "trolling", by the way, is derived first from the fishing term, in which one dangles bait in the water to see what will rise to it and take the hook. It's merely serendipity that it can be altered to "troll" to mean someone who engages in the analogous practice in public discussion -- a practice which has had sometimes catastrophic results through the history of humankind (cf. propaganda).

Apparently, sexual innuendo wasn't sufficiently successful for Mr. Au's page-hit count; he's now stooped to the level of Prokofy.

Disrespect is earned, too.

And this little gem, which I dropped on Miso's blog, pretty much sums up my opinion of Wagner One-Note and his campaign to shove Facebook up the collective ass of everyone in Second Life:

There are more things in heaven and (second) earth than are dreamt of in Hamlet's philosophy, Horatio.

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* Since I've already been asked a couple of times inworld, here's the basics: AMD Athlon II x4 (quad core) at 2.8 GHz; ATI Radeon HD6800 graphics; 4Gb of DDR3 RAM; half a terabyte of hard drive... all for substantially less than the last system, bought two years ago and only a dual-core. (Whose law is that about computing power vs price, over time?) Saved even more by finding a "barebones" at TigerDirect that came without an operating system -- I have a perfectly good copy of Win7 Pro already (it only needed 70 updates since its release, including Service Pack 1...)

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Nine years ago today -- March 13, 2002 -- someone who was not an employee of the fledgling Linden Lab logged in to "Linden World", the alpha version of Second Life, and by doing so became The First Resident:

Legend has it (and I see no reason to doubt) that Steller stayed logged in overnight, building. First to be rezzed, a prim at a time, was this cabin:


Followed by The Beanstalk:


Not bad for a night's work... and it says something important about the user interface's learning curve, too. If you are (as I assume you must be, if you're reading this blog) a current visitor/user/Resident/customer of Second Life, think for a moment about how much more rudimentary (and laggy!) everything was in Linden World than that which we complain about now... and understand that a person inspired by the possibilities could still accomplish all that on her first login!

When Linden World was taken down, replaced by 16 new regions, and renamed Second Life (some time around the end of October, 2002), certain landmark structures were preserved and re-rezzed. Steller's cabin was not among them, but the Beanstalk was... and so was this:


Now known as "The Governor's Mansion", and located above the east coast of Clementina, it was Steller's home in Linden World. It now has a basement level containing a slipshod attempt at a museum, which includes a display of this Linden World screenshot taken during construction (July 2002):


Notice the door in mid-air, in the process of being placed, and the Beanstalk at some indeterminable distance in the background.  I have to guess that the avatar is Steller, and that she captured this image, but I feel my guess is on solid pixel ground, since the hairstyle matches this photo of Steller dancing with some guy at a party at her place after it was finished:


In the comments to the NWN post linked above, brinda Allen mentions that Steller's in-world presence was noted as recently as a year ago.  It's nice to think that the Oldest of the Oldbies still logs in every once in a while...

Happy 9th Rezday, Steller!

(...and, coincidentally, happy ninth anniversary to "user generated content" not created by a Lab employee -- to some, as important a milestone as Steller's first login)

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Note: The Beanstalk, and many other of Steller's early creations, can be found on her land in the center of Welsh. There is also a surprise inclusion of prims she created the same day as the Mansion, as part of a build in Immaculate. The photo of the cabin comes from a web page Steller authored, which is still online. Two instances of the party picture can be found in-world: one is in Steller's Viewmaster on the ground in Welsh; the other is in the museum on I-World Island.

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I've been absent from this blog for far longer than I'd like. No, I haven't died... but my computer did. The results of the autopsy haven't been released, but the likely cause of death was a power surge resulting from a lightning strike during last Sunday's thunderstorms -- which, incidentally, also fried my DSL modem (replaced this past Tuesday, at no charge - thanks AT&T!).

[It may not surprise you that there were tornado warnings in Central Indiana... but, in February???]

It may be too much to hope that the hard drive itself survived, but still... there's a metric ton of photos on it taken in-worlds (SL and IWz both), including more than 50 from last Sunday's 7-hour #sltweetup at Skate Foss' gorgeous Matanzas sim, which I was about to begin editing for posting here.

~sigh~

So, while my formerly "good" computer is now an expensive doorstop, and before I amass a medium-sized wad of cash to drop on its replacement, I'm using this six-year-old Dell [single 2.8GHz P4 CPU, 2Gb RAM, GeForce 6200] that I keep for just such emergencies. It's the one I entered Second Life with, back in '07, but the world and the viewers have changed so that I'm not even going to try, now. I tried two years ago, when the original hard drive in the big box bought the farm... <2 fps on Low graphics with DD at 96m is not my idea of a good time, not after a couple of years of being able to run Ultra at 256 meters (and higher, for taking overview shots of full sims).

It's been a bit of an adventure, taking this old wheezer out of its box and discovering what's on it, and what's not -- the latter including 77 (!!!) updates to Windows XP that have been released since the last time. The photo folders still contain all of my oldest SL shots, from before I even had anything more than integrated graphics... godz, they look awful now! Guess I've learned a thing or three in the interim.

Meanwhile... no Virtuality for Lalo, except from the vicarious vantage of reading my friends' blogs and tweets about it. Speaking of which, you ought to be reading Honour McMillan and Chestnut Rau regularly -- they're both posting prolifically about extremely cool sims they find, and I can't wait to follow the SLurls myself. There's a new exhibit at Originalia, too, including Scottius Polk - after "Metaluna" and "mushROOM", I know it's got to be amazing.

One thing I've been happy to miss direct contact with: Red Zone. It's been around for long enough that perhaps an attempt at scanning me was made while out hunting (yes, I do hunts some times, when Ali IMs me to say there's "guy stuff" as hunt gifts). I say "attempt" because I keep streaming media disabled as a matter of principle, and streaming audio doesn't work in the Imprudence 1.4 Experimental viewer I use, so maybe I've been immune to Red Zone all along.

The latest buzz, as of today, is about the "achievement system" in the new Community Whatsit on SL's website. ~yawn~ If it works as a behavior modification tool there, then more power to it. With extremely rare exceptions, I stayed far away from the previous couple of incarnations of the Flogrums; I'm not about to go there now, and I really don't give a rodent's posterior about an auto-generated email with some Linden's name on it awarding me some bullshit badge.

I can award myself badges for bullshitting, right here ;)

BUT! (minor brag alert)

My weekly stats report from Sitemeter mentioned that I'd passed the 11,000-visit mark, and while looking that up I stumbled across this referral link, by which I'd received a visit or three: a post from Torley Linden on Tumblr. Nice to know that someone at the Lab has noticed, and it's kinda cool that it's the most *ahem* eccentric of the bunch, as well as probably the only one still on-staff who was around back then.

Now that's what I call an achievement badge from a Linden! Friendly greetings backatcha, dude!

Anyway... Keep those blogs and tweets coming, my friends! I miss your pixels terribly (especially Ali's, of course!), but at least I've got your words, and the personalities behind them.

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