Grid Issues: Old IMs Reappearing in Chat

We have had reports of old IMs, some as old as 2 months, reappearing in chat as if they were just resent. We want to assure residents we believe this is a technical problem and not associated with anything intentional or malicious. We are investigating the cause and if you wish to send in a support ticket with your experience we will pass that information on to the investigative team.

Posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 6:11 AM on Grid Status Report.

This bit of news was already known to some, judging by the chatter in some groups, "You mean they just noticed that?" One lady claimed to have gotten someone's reply to a question a little late, five months late.

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Stability, a real boon

It is funny how one thing has changed over the last year. Not so long ago, you would hardly see 40000 people online, perhaps on a good day. Nowadays, it is common to see from 60000 to 80000 people online on a regular basis.

What happened? It looks like the Lindens' efforts to make the Second Life grid more stable have paid off. Gone are the days when you would have to wrestle with your client and connection just to log in. Unexpected grid crashes, unplanned restarts and downtime are now few and far between.

It was annoying for grid residents to deal with a grid that wouldn't let them get in or would kick them out at any time because it couldn't withstand large-scale traffic. This made people delay projects, lose sales, and miss events.

Stability is a real boon but let it be clear that all challenges did not find their solutions. If SL wants to "make it big", it has to be adapted for mass-scale use.

In RL, you can get thousands of people in a sports stadium. The only real limit to the number of people you can squeeze somewhere is actual size. In SL, a sim usually slows down when 40 to 50 people are around. Avatar rendering costs play a role in this, so do textures and "physical" objects that interact the everything around them.

People with more technological knowledge than me would say that SL has to be scalable. If works nicely when few users are around one particular place. But if you try to squeeze 100 avatars or more around a sim, the experience is atrocious.

This might even be the biggest challenge for Linden Lab. You can make the grid as huge as you want, but if you cannot concentrate avatars in one place for a special event, you lose much appeal. And we have yet to see real progress towards that.

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Will Linden Lab pull an AOL?

Given that Linden Lab did not send one of its representatives to discuss the matter with us when we requested a forum on the topic, I feel it is about time that I "columnize" about it.

I want to underline an important aspect of the future for virtual worlds. I believe that in the long run, Linden Lab is doomed to become marginalized. Forget our usual gripes about the way LL runs Second Life. There are deeper reasons than that.

The most important thing to keep in mind is how technology revolutions often get out of control for the pioneers who made them popular. The best example to illustrate my vision is how the World Wide Web was created.

When it "hit the streets" in the mid-1990's, the Web had a major player in the United States. It was called AOL. It was hugely popular as an access provider and had its own, closed system of sites to access with keywords. Many companies had chosen to use AOL's site system instead of the Web.

Over time, however, these pesky things such as standards came in full force. The Web, with its HTTP protocol and worldwide accessibility with national control for domain names, became the standard way to publish sites.

I see the same thing happening with virtual worlds. Instead of having an AOL-like closed grid where content in Second Life cannot be exported anywhere, I believe that virtual worlds will standardize and boost creative freedom.

It's rather simple. Grid standards could develop as protocols did on the Web. People could have sims just as they currently have sites with Web hosts. Software companies could release clients as they do with browsers today.

When you think of it, this long term evolution only makes sense. How do you see one company controlling a worldwide grid all alone with millions of avatars online simultaneously? LL has problems running a grid on which only 50000 or 60000 are connected at the same time.

I love Second Life and LL currently is a leader in virtual worlds. But that won't last forever.

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