An ongoing investigation by the FBI into gambling in Second Life is believed to be directly related to Linden Lab’s sudden decision to ban all forms of gambling on Second Life. The FBI investigation commenced in April and was considering the legality of online gambling within the virtual world. The US Government prohibits most forms of online gambling. It was unclear at the time of writing whether the FBI would take the matter further, including the possible arrest of Linden Lab directors or the prosecution of individual users. Casinos and gambling have been a prominent part of the Second Life metaverse over the last 2-3 years. Linden Lab will take a financial hit from the decision as casino owners cancel virtual land ownership agreements; top tier casinos contribute large sums in monthly fees to Linden Lab. → Read More
Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, may be extending their crackdown on “Broadly Offensive” behavior to Bestiality, following attempts to remove virtual pedophilia (or Age-Play) from Second Life in March. The Second Life Herald (NSFW) goes on to ask whether consenting adults dressing up like animals and partaking in virtual sex with each other or with human shaped avatars (virtual bestiality) constitutes broadly offensive behavior. “Furries” have a long history in Second Life, and new users are presented with the option of taking an animal form when first setting up their avatars. Second Life fans will argue that sex-based play in Second Life only makes up a small portion of Second Life, but it remains a popular pursuit; the popular destination lists for Second Life regularly feature nightclubs and dedicated sex spots (or as is sometimes the case, nightclubs that are sex spots as well). The arguments for and against this sort of behavior can and does result in heated debate; on one hand what consenting adults do virtually with one and other should be strictly up to them, on the other hand these acts aren’t being done in complete privacy but in a virtual world were others may be exposed to it. → Read More
The LA Times has an interesting article up on the failure of real life businesses in Second Life. The crux of the piece is that despite the hype, real life businesses are closing down their Second Life outposts due to little to no interest in them. The reasons for the failures are open to debate; from firms not engaging Second Life citizens, through to simply a lack of actual people using Second Life (the LA Times says it peaks at 40,000 users at any one given time). Wagner James Au at GigaOm has a set of figures worth looking at. In defending Second Life, Au notes that the visitor rate to corporate installations on Second Life is 0.8-2% vs a CTR rate on standard web advertisements on 0.5-1%. Great, but does a higher CTR really matter? The 5 most popular corporate destinations on Second Life have between 1200 to 10,000 visitors per week. An island on Second Life (a popular choice for corporations) costs $1,675 upfront then $295/ month, and that doesn’t include the cost to actually create structures on the island from one of the various Second Life design firms (cost: approx $5-10,000). So lets do the figures: the most popular corporate destination has 10,000 visitors per week; at $295/ mth in maintenance fees that’s a CPM rate of approx $7.40. The bottom destination of the top 5 has a CPM rate of approx $61. If we apportion the upfront costs of design (say $5,000 although it’s probably higher) and setup ($1675) over 12 months the CPM rates become $21.20 (top) and approx $180 (bottom of the top 5). The CTR rate is irrelevant: the CPM cost for businesses on Second Life is insane: simply even for the very best, the figures don’t add up. Au’s later notes in the same post that Second Life doesn’t rely on corporations for revenue and the decline of corporations on Second Life doesn’t really matter all that much to Linden Lab. Once the last corporation leaves Second Life, the user-generated metavserse will continue, and in some ways may even end up being better off. → Read More
217 million people worldwide play online games, according to new figures released by comScore. The study took into account all sites that provide online or downloadable games but excluded gambling sites. The 217million users account for 28 percent of all people online. Yahoo! Games led the pack, attracting 53 million unique visitors. The fastest-growing Top 10 gaming property was the WildTangent Network. The report appears to count visits to the actual gaming sites as opposed to actual user numbers. Under this methodology, online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft attract a smaller share of the market as many users would not regularly visit a central page (such as with Yahoo Games) but play directly via a desktop client. Notably though, traffic to secondlife.com is surprisingly close to the visitor numbers for worldofwarcraft.com. Full TechCrunch Second Life coverage here. → Read More
A case of alleged copyright infringement in Second Life is heading to court. According to Reuters, Second Life entrepreneur Kevin Alderman, the owner of Eros LLC, a company that makes virtual sex beds, filed the “Eros LLC vs John Doe” lawsuit on Tuesday. Second Life user Volkov Catteneo is alleged to have copied and distributed the “SexGen Bed”, an item that sells for L$12,000 ($45.11). The lawsuit seeks to force Linden Lab to disclose Catteneo’s real-world identity, as well as asking Catteneo for damages. The case, the first of its kind for Second Life, will be interesting from a legal perspective. There is no legal precedent for the case, and as Stanford University’s Lauren Gelman said in a Four Corners report earlier this year, the concept of virtual property ownership is vexed: “All of this is virtual bits and bytes, ones and zeros that are sitting on the servers at Second Life’s headquarters and the server farms they have around the world…how much can you own something that’s really under the control and domain of another party, this is really where the law is being tested to see how they’re going to figure that out.” On the surface it also seems a little strange that Linden Lab has not already dealt with it; Second Life has strict rules in relation to copyright infringement and has previously acted in favor of in-world copyright owners. → Read More
The FBI has visited Linden Lab and their Second Life casinos in order to figure out just what that giant teddy bear — really a Japanese exchange student — and the fat man in Spokane who looks like a Suicide Girl and calls himself Wendy Wild are doing over at the roulette table. Yes. friends, some FBI agents want to know how online gambling in Second Life works and they won’t give up until they figure out how to get off the damn orientation island and customize their avatar. “We have invited the FBI several times to take a look around in Second Life and raise any concerns they would like, and we know of at least one instance that federal agents did look around in a virtual casino,” said Ginsu Yoon, until recently Linden Lab’s general counsel and currently vice president for business affairs. … Yoon said the company was seeking guidance on virtual gaming activity in Second Life but had not yet received clear rules from U.S. authorities. Dear FBI: There are more compelling places to look for criminal behavior than LuLu’s Kasino next to Wally’s House of Furry Fun. FBI checks out gambling in ‘Second Life’ via CrunchGear → Read More
Kaneva is a new social network that extends the concept of MySpace into a virtual world. Although you’ve been able to sign up for a 2D profile on Kaneva they recently opened the doors to their 3D world. The idea is that users can create personal profile pages in the 2D space, like MySpace, but also carry out the same personalization to their virtual world apartments. The social networking site is chock full of all of MySpace’s main features: friends, photos, videos, messages, groups, and personal blogs. Kaneva also gives you control over what your home site and profile look like, using an AJAX editor to drop modules into the page. If you really feel like replicating your MySpace’s horrid layout, you can also dress your profile in straight CSS. Here’s and example profile. Unlike MySpace, Kaneva also includes a voting system, called “raves”, to mark the best profiles, groups, photos, and videos. The virtual world has a kind of Sims or There.com look to it. The architecture of the world is based on warping to different public locations (mall, club…) and your personal apartment. Goods are purchased with a virtual currency. The site gives you some basic hair, color, body, and shape customizations for you avatar, but still has a way to go in order to catch up with the more established SecondLife and There. Your personal apartment serves as your “3D profile”, which you can decorate and use to host parties. However, the really interesting part is how Kaneva ties together their 2D and 3D worlds. Users can not only decorate their apartment with TVs and photo frames, but also fill those items with content from the site so that you could have your virtual friends over to watch your favorite viral video (click on the screen shot above and note the music video playing in the background). Groups created on Kaneva’s site can carry their meetings out in the virtual world. Kaneva is also working on a quest engine to incorporate games into the world, which will be essential to its success. Currently you can only chat, dress up, and do some basic animations, which is not enough to contend with the alternatives of just chatting online or the more complex game of dress-up SecondLife suppots. Kaneva gives a good twist on social networking, drawing in the younger, non-gamer MySpace crowd into virtual worlds. However, they still → Read More
Second Life has had music, but has otherwise been rather mute. That’s all soon to change when Linden Lab rolls out a beta test for person-to-person speech. Like a lot of other in-game speech systems, you’ll need a headset, but Second Life will provide a different peer-to-peer chat experience than those World of Warcraft conversational gems. The new system will mimic speech in the real world, adjusting the volume of voices relative to you based on the distance and direction of speaker. Like other products, voice will only be active on certain digital geographies, but private island owners will have the option to enable voice on their own land, depending on the terms of their subscription. Up to 100 people will be able to chat on the same connection at a time. If talking to everyone or just anyone is too much to handle, you can hold group conferences across geographical boundaries or talk one-to-one as well. The whole system is powered by a technological collaboration between the voice chat technologies of Vivox and 3D voice tech from DiamondWare. The initial beta will be for 1,000 residents (apply by emailing 3dvoice@lindenlab.com), broader beta in March, with a formal launch virtual world wide scheduled for Q2, 2007. → Read More
Darren Barefoot voices his dismay over all the Second Life hype by creating a very, very funny parody site called “Get a First Life.” The site describes itself as a “3D analog world” and suggests you “access your closet to build your First Life look.” My favorite line is “Fornicate using your actual genitals.” Hilarious. No comment from Second Life at this point. → Read More
Second Life made their client software open source today, sparking near rapture among its hard core users (see comments to their blog post). The first two paragraphs of the announcement talk a lot about about the inevitability of destiny. And they mention Second Life in the same breath as Mosaic and Mozilla. I’m a Second Life fan, but sometimes the hype gets to be a little too much. At any given time up to 20,000 or so people are logged in to the service. That’s not enough adoption to justify putting Second Life in the same sentence as Mosaic and Mozilla just yet. Today, it’s the playground for just a few hard core users who can live with an annoying server lag and who, apparently, spend at least some of their time gleefully throwing penises at others. Second Life is a really fancy hosting business, since their main revenue source is renting servers for people who buy islands and other real estate. At current growth trends, though, SL could be a real economic force in a few years. When things really start to hop, SL will look more like it’s own private Internet. Or a privately held virtual nation. At the point that millions of people spend most or all of their waking hours within the SL world, we’ll know this has happened. I think people (and governments) will start to get a little nervous at that point. It will be impossible for SL to put both its shareholders and users first, and history suggests that users will get the shaft. I can image the most bizarre anti-trust lawsuits in history being fought in courtrooms around the world. What might make more sense in the long run is more of a Wikipedia-like approach to Second Life. A non profit organization running open source software where people can add their own island just by plugging in a server in their living room or the hosting provider of their choice. Whoever builds that and provides a serious alternative to the SL experience could help the world at least as much as Wikipedia has. I’m a big fan of private enterprise, but when it comes to creating the next world, perhaps the interests of shareholders should come second to those of its actual residents. And since virtual worlds have many of the attributes of a natural monopoly, running them via a non profit → Read More
This new trend of announcing news in Second Life is generally pissing off journalists, who don’t have a lot of time to waste. But Dell is apparently going ahead with plans to host an invite-only press event inside of Second Life on Tuesday morning at 10:15 AM PST to announce that they’ll have an ongoing presence within the virtual world. The virtual event is under heavy embargo with a select few journalists (we weren’t invited), but one journalist, annoyed that he is being forced to create a Second Life account and log in to see what the announcement is, decided to just pass it on to us to break the news. There aren’t many details as to exactly what’s being announced, but our guess is that they are launching a virtual, configurable computer store that’s gamer-focused, or something similar. This isn’t to take away from what Second Life is accomplishing – but Dell should be focused on gaining user trust by building reliable computers (and batteries), not wasting people’s time with this kind of non-news. Update: They’ve got a new Second Life island where you can buy a virtual or a real PC. Virtual PCs get paid for with Lindens and real PCs get paid for with US dollars and you can order them to your house. The first person to order a computer in Second Life will get it free. → Read More
Virtual reality service SecondLife must be loving all of the positive press it’s receiving lately. After raising another $11 million in funding earlier this year (bringing their total to $19 million), they celebrated their third birthday and recently announced their 1,000,000th user registration. Putting the recent database hack aside, SecondLife is clearly hitting its stride. A robust virtual economy has blossomed on SecondLife as well. At least three thousand users make at least $20,000 per year on SecondLife, selling everything from clothes to body parts to real estate. The economy of SecondLife has been estimated to be $64 million per year. Real world businesses are sniffing around the service as well. Wells Fargo, for example, has created its own branded island in Second Life. SecondLife puts current statistics right up on the home page (stats as on 1:30 pm on Sunday October 22 are to left). Nearly half a million users have logged on in the last 60 days, and $441,948 has been spent in the last 24 hours. With all of this real money floating around the SecondLife economy, look for more businesses to set up shop. And look for other companies to be selling advice to these new businesses. Crayon is launching later this week, claiming to be the first company to be launched in SecondLife. They will be a virtual consulting firm, facilitating “conversation and transformation above communication. Our value proposition is designed to activate passions, enthusiasm, organic dialogue and no-strings-attached referrals and recommendations.” If Crayon can turn that marketing-speak into understandable advice and guidance to companies looking to leverage SecondLife as a marketing or sales channel, they may find being one of the first to set up shop is a big advantage. More on this as details emerge. Crayon says they’ll launch this Thursday, October 26. → Read More
High profile virtual reality game Second Life reported today that one of its databases containing unencrypted user information was breached two days ago. The company confirmed that this is the first time user data has been breached since the service opened for public use in 2003. The database did not include customer credit card numbers, a requirement to register for the game (correction, that’s not the case anymore), as they were kept in a different database. The breached database did include unencrypted names and addresses, and the encrypted passwords and encrypted payment information of all Second Life users. A company representative wouldn’t tell me whether behavioral or attention data tied to users was exposed in the breach, but did say that to the best of their knowledge none of that data had been captured. Such data could include information about embarrassing activities in Second Life that users may not like to have tied to their real life selves. There’s a lot of very cool things that go on in Second Life, but there’s also a lot of sex and gambling. Update: Vladimir Cole at AOL’s gamer blog, Joystiq, a better authority on the particulars here than me – concurs (emphasis mine). “To put a finer point on it,” he writes, “what happens when archived MMOG chat logs are breached? It’s going to be ugly, like AOL ugly: ‘I swear honey, that Furry [avatar] meant nothing to me. It was totally just research for my new book. I’ll sell the teledildonics equipment on eBay first thing tomorrow.’” Virtual worlds are big, they’re going to get bigger, and we should be demanding protection of user data from those worlds now. There’s already one politician said to be a possible US Presidential contender campaigning in Second Life, you can participate in American Cancer Society fund raisers, hang with the American Library Association or participate in substantial daily commerce. There are major corporations launching advertising initiatives in Second Life and consultancies forming to facilitate such activities. Acts of violence in a game that prohibits it are being reported with increasing frequency. This is serious stuff. Apparently our Second Lives aren’t as separate from the rest of the world as we might have liked to think. Obviously no company is immune from such security attacks, but there’s something about the supposed freedom from consequences in Second Life that this calls into question. It’s been a → Read More
Though a pile of recent mainstream media coverage and a Jeff Bezos round of investment may have turned many readers on to the virtual world of Second Life only recently, it (like many parts of the Web 2.0 world) is not entirely new. The virtual world is celebrating it’s third birthday starting today. According to the Second Life history wiki, the world’s creators Linden Lab took the project public on June 23rd, 2003. At an exchange rate of roughly 250 Linden Dollars to the US Dollar, the Second Life economy offers as as many goods for sale as four Walmart stores. Linden Lab reports that the Second Life economy is on a pace to hit $60 million in user-to-user transactions this year and is growing at a rate of 15%. From the American Cancer Society to Wells Fargo Bank, a wide variety of organizations have opened virtual offices in Second Life. Even TechCrunch is a part of the action. If you can’t make it in person to tomorrow night’s SuperNova Connected Innovators event, cohosted by TechCrunch and Yahoo!, you can join us at a Second Life simulcast from 6:00PM – 8:00PM PST. Thanks to Wagner James Au for his excellent Second Life news coverage. → Read More
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