I’ve unfortunately become a member of a litany of social networking sites. Lets see here… Facebook, which seems to be a sort of knob turners dream site of time wasting. Myspace which I signed up for some gawd knows reason - oh yeah, so I could stalk some people more effectively. MyOpera I signed up for - why? Probably because I was bored at the moment. Hmm, oh yeah, I think I was tinkering with synchronization with Opera.

The directory sites like Spock and Wink. Oh, and this sorta strange Plaxo thing.

The micro blogging sites Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku which are all linked together - why three of them - I have no idea, I suppose because I can. At least I was smart enough to have Pownce feed the rest of them. There’s also my BlogHUD thingie which is also kind of a micro blogger, but designed for Second Life.

Now there’s the virtual world social networking sites. I signed up for this Koinup thing, but it seems to be down to it doesn’t like me. SLProfiles.com, which actually seems to be useful, as it fits in with your Second Life profile in world. SLUniverse mostly to be able to bitch about Second Life and tinker around with other things like Snapzilla, which is sort of link BlogHUD. I haven’t done much with Snapzilla lately, mostly because I keep forgetting about it.

But that’s not all… Then there’s some other sites to support this blogging madness… like Del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, Digg, SLTopSites, plus more I’m too tired now to list. (Oh yeah, and Flickr.)

Now some more upstairs Second Life social networks have come along. 2LifePeople and RezzedNet. I’m not sure what I think of the two new ones, mostly they seem to be light on features. I’m also not sure what I’m suppose to do with them. Facebook has an interesting application in it that links Second Life accounts to it and does some other features. Of course Facebook is sort of like this whizzbangy machine that makes a lot of noise, smoke, lights and makes pretty colors but in the end doesn’t really do anything - other than consume a lot of time.

Okay, where was I going? Oh yeah, ummm… Then there’s my blog, which circling back seems to be the root of most (but not all) of the above. Sort of a Ying and Yang - who is feeding who? Oh, and while I’ve been writing this, I’ve been invited to Ning. I’ve also been invited to Orkut a month or two ago, but I resisted… I know where I was going, spreading too thin. It’s getting more and more obvious I’ve got too many things flying around and I can’t keep it all up to date.

-Veyron

I’m behind…  No, not that behind.  I’ve got too many web social thingies going on and I can’t keep up.  Mmmm, and I’m not sure I really want to try to keep up.  Zoe sort of seems to burn out now and then from it.  I’ve been vainly trying to find a way to consolidate it all into something more manageable.  Something I can keep under control and not be a big consumer of time, yet still be fun, and I can actually keep up with.  So far, no luck.  But I might as well keep trying….

I was hoping this new beta service, Twine, might be the solution.   From the descriptions of the thing, it sounded like it might be the answer.  But I still haven’t been able to finagle an invite, and I’m not sure it’s the thing.  In it’s place I’m giving Plaxo a spin.  It has this Plaxo “Pulse” thingie that promises to solve world hunger or something like that.  We’ll see.

The ironic part is that Veyron has a much busier social life than the Narrator does.  Something that was not anticipated when the madness was all started….

-Veyron

Hmmm, no this is not possibly the worst Star Trek episode ever made… it is a new odd search engine called Spock. It’s designed around finding people (and I guess now avatars). I’ve got Vint, Zoe and Codie (and it looks like Timothy) now hooked into this giant machine, you too can join in the madness. My entry can be found on Spock linked to other people. Now the amusing part it you can add tags (and sort of remove tags) and information for other people. Just think of the entries for Dalien, Gideon, Tiessa, and (gasp) Prok! Better get there before someone else creates your entry for you….

-Veyron

Zoe Connolly is now keeping a blog on the Second Life Blogosphere. Should be a good way to keep track of the growing number of Second Life Bloggers. Thanks Zoe!

-Veyron

In addition to seeing Gideon last night, there were a few other interesting people there. TheDiva was there spinning tunes and getting me up to speed on Gideon’s modus operandi. TheDiva has a pretty interesting blog, the Fashion Police, and keeps a pretty interesting blog on The Diva’s Diary.

Another pair of celebrities at the party were Daphne Abernathy and Tamara Kirshner of the blog and podcast Going Broke with Daphne and Tamara. I’ve been listening to the two of them for their first couple of podcasts, and they’re pretty good. They’re giving out some good fashion advice and some interesting interviews with the designers in Second Life.

I might have missed a few other people there, as I came late. Oh, and the contest for the L$500,000 is also pretty interesting. You just have to submit an idea. They have some concepts on the Coke pavilion to get you started.

-Veyron

Coming in at #95 is a Second Life girl on their Hot 100. Interestingly the Second Life girl avoided Hottest Cartoon Babes. Who said it was cartoon love?

The model is Callie Cline. They omitted her name from the posting, probably to keep her from being blitzed with proposals, both decent and indecent….

I was listening to Second Cast this morning on the drive into work. About in the middle of Episode #60, I about drove off the road. It turns out that Steve Coulson is the man of my dreams or at least his Avatar is. He is also the man behind the YesButNoButYes insanity.

::sigh:: Gideon has not returned my email, but I see that I might be able to stalk him Wednesday night at the Coca-Cola event. Oh, and Coke has a contest in which they are giving away L$500,000….

-Veyron

So, after all these years I finally acquired an iPod a few months ago. I found to to be a far better device that I was expecting and I found that iTunes works pretty good. Okay, so I’m behind the times in this area….

Anyway I started playing with podcasts for my drive to and from work. I found one that is pretty good. Nice and short. It’s geared more towards n00bs, but it still has some interesting information. The Traveling Avatar has all sorts of tips and has some humor as well. The also have a transcript of the podcast on the website if you don’t want to listen to it. This post on the “Drama” is pretty amusing… especially after the credits have played (which is not in the transcript).

There’s an interesting new service out there for owners of land that have griefing problems - Banlink. It is sort of a group ban list that can be shared between other groups. It’s probably a good idea, but there are the usual concerns about who is banning who and if you get banned from one place, you might find yourself banned from a lot of places.

It is interesting that you can lookup your avatars’ “rap sheet” on the site. Some places on the grid are already using Banlink. Even the griefers do not seem to be happy about it, which is probably a good thing. My only concern is how you might appeal any sort of banning that might happen. The grid is pretty large now and it gives griefers lots of targets to work on before they get banned from SL (if ever). The positive part of it is that griefers may not be able to escape generating a rap sheet that other land owners can use.

Rumor has it that since ratings have been removed that Banlink or some sort of API for it to use will be intergrated into the Second Life client in the near future.

I found an interesting and useful website today… Avatar Toolbox. It is a useful site of basic and not so basic things most Avatars will want to do. I was looking for a way to make an invisible prim in Second Life. Every prim I tried to make invisible had this outline to it. Avatar Toolbox has a script that will make the prim invisible - very invisible - you can’t find with with show transparent.

The items talked about in the web pages are mostly freebies from the author. It also has some articles and links on prim hair, prim clothes and prim shoes.

Useful site.

-Veyron

Every now and then I tinker a bit with Linden Scripting Language aka LSL. Nothing spectacular - just a bits here and there to see what can be done. A great reference source for scripting information is the LSL Wiki.

LSL is a simple and reasonably powerful event driven language. It has some limitations on what you can do, some of which are pretty significant. But since a LSL script can communicate with the outside world, via HTTP (web) and email requests, you could offload a lot of functionality to another non-second life server.

An example of that would be the TrustNet system I blogged about a few days ago. The HUD runs the LSL scripts that communicate back to TrustNet servers where the database is and I’m sure some processing is done.

-Veyron

Yes, this is mostly unrelated to Second Life, but it seemed to useful not to blog. I always have a hard time remembering where I posted a comment on a blog or seeing when someone followed up on it. This apparently new service, co.mments.com looks to solve that problem. You sign up for a quick account, and then you can add pages where you comment to (they have a button you can add to Firefox or I.E.). Then you can subscribe to another feed that will show updates to those threads you have commented on. Neat.

-Veyron

I took Vint down to Phreeq Malt Shoppe in the Ride Sim the other day. I was going to do some rah rah for OMG Magazine, for who I model for from time to time. I am Miss April in the 2007 Fantasy Garage Calendar, and you can find a picture of me in the current issue of OMG with Mistina Vavoom on the cover. It is fun to model now and then and I like to work with Korbin.

Anyway…. I dragged Vint (she really struggled) down to the Malt Shoppe to see the car show contest and take some pictures of her own. The show was fun, and Vint had a good time taking pictures of me and someone else I posed with, Vincent. Who I think she expressed some interesting adjectives about, but I let her speak for herself.

Korbin has some of the pictures he took up on his OMG blog and I suspect Vint is hard at work slaving away to do her usual magic in Photoshop.

Vint has taken some really excellent shots of me before for a contest - I was made up to be a vampire of sorts. I think she got some pretty good shots, so I’m anxious to see the final versions.

-Veyron

In the past eighteen months, Second Life has expanded, growing from a small community of early adopters to a platform supporting millions of users. Linden Lab has created a world that inspires a deep level of passion in its users and provides unprecedented opportunities to share creatively, socially, and financially.

With explosive levels of growth often come unexpected problems. In keeping with your company’s policy and rich history of resident involvement, we the undersigned would like to take this opportunity to address some concerns that we feel have gone unanswered for too long.

There are some consistent, ongoing problems that are getting worse under heavy load, not better, and are not simply irritants but problems that are causing financial loss in some cases, which is unacceptable. Here is a brief list of the main concerns:

* Inventory loss - this is a devastating problem that is worsening. We have no ability to protect our own inventories through backups, and are trusting you to protect that data. This is the highest priority. Sensible inventory limits (on non-verified accounts only), combined with better management tools and ways to protect our inventory ourselves would help to mitigate the problem as well. Regardless, this cannot continue - we will not accept financial loss as a feature of Second Life. It is your responsibility as service provider to ensure our data is not lost, and you are failing us.

* Problems with Find and Friends List - we continue to see search outages on a far too regular basis. It is bad enough trying to get anywhere without being able to use search, but many users are also paying money for classified ads. Our friends lists just do not work reliably any longer, after years without an issue with them. If America Online/MSN/Yahoo can provide presence information for hundreds of millions of users, surely there is a way to make our friends lists work again.

* Grid stability and performance - teleports fail quite regularly, especially under heavy load. Attachments end up in places they did not start out in, and sim performance varies wildly. None of this makes for a very pleasant experience for users. Long promised improvement to physics and scripting would help dramatically to reduce these problems, but there are a lot of other scalability issues as well. It often feels like the grid is coming apart at the seams. The promised use of limiting logins of non-verified accounts during peak load has been severely lacking. This would be an effective interim solution to load issues, but Linden Lab seems unwilling to use it.

* Build tool problems - the importance of build tools that actually work as promised cannot be overstated enough - we rely on them to create content. Prim drift, disappearing prims, imprecise placement, problems with linking and other issues with the tools need to be addressed. Too much time is being spent trying to work around the problems.

* Transaction problems - inventory deliveries are failing with an alarming (and annoying) frequency, leaving merchants with the burden of replacing missing content and having to try to confim the transaction in the first place. We trust that our L$ balances are accurate, but given recent problems, that is a cause for concern as well, and one we place our full trust in you to ensure its accuracy.

We remain fully supportive of Second Life and are more than willing to continue doing our part to help, but our confidence is steadily being eroded due to a general lack of communication and the apparent failure to successfully address the many issues detailed above. What we are asking for is that these problems are addressed immediately, ahead of new features, and that we are able to see tangible improvements. We accept that this will not happen overnight but it also cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely either.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Linden Labs needs to fix the serious problems with Second Life if things are going to continue. The last post about Koz loosing his inventory is just one of many symptoms of what is going wrong. Rather than adding goofy things like voice, wouldn’t you like to actually be able to use a vehicle? Not worry about your inventory? Have more people in a Sim? Stop doing the lag dance?

I could go on and on… but here’s an open letter Cristiano Midnight of SLUniverse is putting together to Linden Labs to get Second Life fixed. If you care about the world we play in, please sign it. We can get Linden Labs to pay attention.

-Veyron