Second Life in a box, now in preliminary beta
by Tateru Nino 
Apr 6th 2009 at 11:00AM
Filed under: Business models, New titles, Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds
After Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon's announcement of a standalone virtual world product (essentially Second Life, but able to be run on private servers and with no connection to Linden Lab's virtual world) at the last Virtual Worlds London, the Lab's new director of enterprise marketing, Amanda Van Nuys has followed that up with an announcement that the product (codenamed Nebraska) is now in preliminary testing by a number of organizations.
The beta test (Linden Lab calls it an alpha test, but there's no denying that it is a preliminary beta) is being conducted by such organizations as IBM, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), the New Media Consortium (NMC), Intel, and Northrop Grumman.
For widespread adoption, however, branding will be critical. While the name "Second Life" is certainly a widely recognized brand in some quarters, incorporating that brand-name into Nebraska doesn't seem like a winning proposition. Firstly, the brand name itself doesn't really bear much relation to the existing product, and seems like it will bear even less to a standalone enterprise virtual world solution.
Slapping the Second Life name on the box (if indeed there's actually a box per se) seems like a blurring of an already unfocused brand-name. Maybe the Lab can go back to Lindenworld. Linden Lab branding would certainly be a much stronger proposition for the product.
As yet, the Lab is not yet ready to provide any additional information about the product, other than there will be an expanded closed beta sometime in Q2/Q3, and "general availability" later this year (presumably Q4, though it is not at all clear what general availability actually means in this context).
[As for the box, we whipped that up in Second Life. No such box exists, and you'd be foolish to think that we were misusing the Lab's trademarks]
 |
Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop. |
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Loki said on 12:20PM 4-06-2009
Funny this, i was only just last week discussing with a friend the fact that your second life is not really a second life anymore after the push to break down anonymity through various means such as age verification and voice chat.
Possible new Brand names?......
Mirror Life
World Of Clones
facebook3D
Copy Bot
Phillips Utopia Life
Marks Business Park Life
Jacks Restricted Homestead life
Drama Land
Bloody Expensive Life
No quite working still after 5 years of development life
ok im bored now...
Reply
Jacek Antonelli said on 1:14PM 4-06-2009
Most of the appeal of the name "Second Life" is the idea of escaping the dullness of your real life circumstances. So naturally, the enterprise version should be called: "Your Boring Job, But Virtual This Time".
Reply
Skate Foss said on 3:49PM 4-06-2009
Now thats funny, because its true!
Dude said on 1:42PM 4-06-2009
The Matrix has you.
Reply
Sansarya said on 2:19PM 4-06-2009
Life in a Box
Reply
jo_auto said on 3:28PM 4-06-2009
The problem with not being connected to the Second Life backbone is that you have to put up with the default clothes, skins, shapes, etc. It's about as exciting as the Moscone Center.
Reply
Zonja Capalini said on 4:59PM 4-06-2009
Well now the Lindens own XStreetSL. It would be quite trivial to implement some changes to make it work for the SL-in-a-box version. Indeed I think that's one of the reasons why LL bought XStreet.
As an aside, my guess is that the box will be physical, like the Google appliance or the Google mini, to dispell merchant's fears about inventories and assets being hacked.
Reply
Tateru Nino said on 9:08PM 4-06-2009
Not so trivial, I'd think. XStreet delivers from scripted objects on the main grid. None of which Nebraska has access to. Nor does it have access to any asset that the main grid has (and vice versa - the main grid has no access to a Nebraska installation... which is a large part of the point of the setup).
Doubledown Tandino said on 12:18AM 4-07-2009
I like how it's codename "Nebraska" .... as in...
hey, Nebraska is just now getting internet technology so they have no clue that SL is already free and downloadable. We can sell this box at WalMarts everywhere in the midwest!
Reply
Tateru Nino said on 12:22AM 4-07-2009
I don't get the reference, actually, but to me, Nebraska is the name of a state on a map on the other side of the world. From this far away, there's little or no difference between one US State and another.
Nadine Neddings said on 11:12AM 4-07-2009
I'm assuming that's said in jest, Doubledown. Nebraska is home to a number of technology companies, not to mention one of the most successful investment firms the world has ever seen: Berkshire Hathaway.
If you were to look at the Great Plains' states, from North Dakota to Texas, we actually have given birth to an amazing assortment of technologies. So the hillbilly references are not appreciated. ;)
Connie Sec said on 8:33AM 4-07-2009
Simcrash in a box
Reply
Doubledown Tandino said on 7:43PM 4-07-2009
Alls I'mz saying is that if a savvy San Fran wanted to pull a dooping campaign aimed at stupid people, I could see why they would call it codename: Nebraska.
I'm not trying to attack Nebraska.
Reply
Iian Beaumont said on 8:31PM 4-10-2009
With the recent work of Tom Grimshaw to the Open Sim project - why anyone would want a LL product like this is beyond me. Tom managed to FIX THE TEXTURE LOAD BORK that LL has been ignoring (or to incompetent to fix) for YEARS. Apparently, the result is over a 200% increase in texture loads, a dramatic reduction in per client connection, and other dramatic improvements. You can read about it here:http://dusanwriter.com/index.php/2009/04/10/opensim-and-rezzing-textures-200-increase-in-load-speeds/
Ever since user Ballpien Hammerer proved that Linden Lag was conducting a massive DOS attack on it's own servers, LL has done nothing to fix the texture problem with even Linden coders admitting that the majority of textures were taking 30 seconds or more to load.
Now someone has demonstrated that it is indeed fixable, and it does indeed show that all of the Linden claims of Island overuse were based on faulty data and were due to Linden's own broken code.
When Open Sim is free and it works - while LL is expensive and causes a DOS attack on servers by your own users . . . explain to me again why it it is better?
Reply
vrdeity's said on 6:20PM 4-11-2009
Open Sim is a useful product, but it still lacks many important features offered by Second Life and I would not use it for an enterprise level deployment. 1) stability - I have a number of open sim servers running for testing purposes and they need a lot of care and feeding. 2) the reason for my instability is poor exception handling and high external comm traffic to mySQL driving inworld objects with external simulators. The Open Sim code is still fragile and has inadequate exception handling. For example if an inventory server fails during a transfer, it brings down the rest of the services. 3) poor linden scripting language support. The api is incomplete and in some cases methods have been created that are syntactically different than Linden's. This creates portability issues.
Nebraska is simply a product designed for corporate users who want to leverage the power of the Second Life environment, but not expose sensitive data to the open Internet.
Reply