Yesterday saw record numbers logging into SL with a concurrency of over 66,000 online. While Philip Rosedale gets ready to go before The Congressional Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet and talk about "Applications and Avatars in a User-Generated Medium" we, actually using it, struggle with huge stability issues and stale transactions that have troubled the grid for most of the week. The stability issues have plagued residents to such an extent that after a few hours at peak concurrency the actual users online dropped by more than half as most gave up in sheer frustration.
"Our database has crashed and caused in world services to go down. We expect it will be ten minutes minimum before we are up and running again."
This was the message on the blog followed by yet again "Resolved" which of course did not last long, Logins were problematic as were in world transactions, teleporting, maps, search, attaching objects and of course the support portal (just when you need it most).
Together with the new ToS and branding issues it is becoming obvious that its open for a competitor to step in, in my opinion, if there was another platform out there with similar capabilities most of SecondLife issues would soon clear up as people took a better option.
Yes of course people will still sign up and yes businesses will look at it as an option for their venture into the virtual world, but with all the bad press and Linden Lab doing everything they can to put residents off and now stopping the very people who have promoted them freely, what business will they have to sell in 5 years time? As one resident commented "When somebody steals a texture or build from another resident, LL tells us that it’s got nothing to do with them - but when we use THEIR graphics they suddenly start caring about copyright. Just keep looking after number one, LL - it’s what you do best."
The worst of this new ToS is the manner in which they have yet again failed to deal with the people it affects the most, 'Please check out Brand Center FAQ, if you’ve still got questions, please drop an email to tm-questions@lindenlab.com - note that the trademark team can’t guarantee that they’ll be able to respond personally to all the emails they receive. If your question is urgent, you should contact a trademark attorney.'
Anyone that is not an attorney, and even those that are practiced in trademark law, cannot give a straight answer as the new branding, FAQ and ToS together are confusing and complex even to the point of those legal eagles not being able to agree on what is now allowed and what is not.
I look forward to some clarification from a press release supposedly forthcoming from Linden Research Inc®
sources: SecondLife blog massively
UPDATE: Several In-World Services such as teleporting, map usage, search functionality, IM/chat and image upload failure are being experienced across Second Life. We are working as quickly as possible to resolve these issues. We will update you here as soon as further information is available. Thank you for your continued patience. (unsurprisingly I cannot log in right now getting DNS server errors, NOT mentioned on the list of problems)
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