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If you realise that Second Life's economy isn't the only economy that's a pyramid scheme benefitting above all the Guys at the top of the pyramid, and combine that with John Perkins story about how the super rich manage to rape the poorest people on the world, you get a little worried, so you begin to follow the money.

Then, in a hunch, you decide to follow Hitler's money and discover a clear and credible link between the Nazi's and Al-Qaida. A few more steps and reality makes your worst nightmares look like a walk in the park.

-- Multatuli --

http://valleywag.com/tech/second-life/virtual-worlds-supposed-economy-is-a-pyramid-scheme-230813.php

Any group of guys who could completely sanitize all references to the recent Jeff Gerstmann scandal from both the Gamespot and Kane & Lynch wikipedia entries (and keep them that way) have to be the envy of all historical revisionists.

Other publications have noted it was number 3, too.

DT

... according to ValleyWag.

Can't you just buy one?

API. While privacy advocates have been concerned about Google for the past several years, most of us are just beginning to comprehend Facebook's growing impact on who, when, what and how we connect with friends

Especially since we just learned that Facebook considers it a "perk" to allow their employees to surf people's profiles, read their email (which they're pushing HARD to get people to use as a sort of bastardized webmail) and see their "private" photos and such.

Oh yeah, and get your password, log in to your account, and upload explicit photos.

Maybe the reason Pogue was so quick to retract is that he was unlikely to get any paid cruises or book deals from a 3rd-tier discount telephone operator. Unlike the moolah stemming from, for instance, a fellatrice-like relationship with Apple. Mossberg or Levy wouldn't have made that mistake - they're old enough to work the Apple line almost exclusively.

Angry mob gathers outside sf datacenter! http://valleywag.com/tech/breaking/angry-mob-gathe rs-outside-sf-datacenter-282053.php

It's not the same. It's not a case of bloggers putting Microsoft ads in their blogs.

It's a case of getting paid for letting Microsoft quote them saying the "people ready" slogan.

See this link.

> Google Wins Nude Thumbnail Legal Battle

Just in time for Sergei Brin's wedding!
http://valleywag.com/tech/wedding-announcements/se rgey-brin-and-anne-wojcicki-260039.php

This is a product that hasn't launched yet, hasn't been seen in the wild, and only demo'd under controlled circumstances. Yet we've had his illustrious personage repeatedly tell us that this phone is going to be a bust.

If it's such a dead-certain bust, why is he constantly mentioning it in the media ? Surely shome mishtake ? The fact is that he's terrified Apple are going to repeat their success with the iPod, and it shows.

Simon.

It seems that the April Fool's 2.0 strategy is to launch the joke a day early.

Linden seem to be masters of manipulating the media to the point where major companies think its smart to be involved in a game that actaully has very few players relative to other MMOs. I don't even know anyone who plays Second Life or has ever played it.

An interesting read on the subject:

Here

The article basically points out that when Linden says they have 4 million "residents" they mean 4 million avatars have been created. This number isn't even directly related to the number of people who regularly play the game in any measurable way -- but its a safe bet that the actual number of regular users is probably in the hundreds of thousands at the most. That may be bigger than some games, but compared to a monster like World of Warcraft, which easily musters 20 times as many regular users, it's really not that many.

From Valleywag.

Now that Linden is publishing actual user numbers, we can see that the Residents figure, as expected, is a big overcount over actual people (about 50% inflation, in fact, accounting for over a million ersatz users). Second Life doesn't have two million users. They have had two million users over the life of the service, and they've lost most of them. Of those users, the majority -- something like 5 out of 6 -- bailed in the first month.

* You can earn a lot of Linden dollars in SL, in fact fairly rapidly sometimes, but...

* If you can actually collect your SLLs from your counterparty - which turns out to be an enormous problem - you can't cash them out for USD easily or profitably.

It turns out that inside the game, counterparty risk is tremendous. In fact, entire banks will suddenly disappear. Or banks will simply renege on obligations without recourse. Worse yet, the very people who provide the source of nearly all demand-liquidity within Second Life, those guys at the top of the virtual playpen pyramid, are the same ones who effectively set the SLL/USD exchange rate. Mid-2006, they even owned the only practical exchange market, a fact which I believe is even more true today. (The company run exchange turns out to be impractical for real trades of any volume. It is more of an open currency auction than a spot market.)

What should have been a relatively small SLL/USD exchange trades given media claims about millions of dollars flying around per week in 2006, in reality caused the exchange markets to distort tremendously. We could not effectively move sums of more than a couple thousand dollars out of SL without the exchange market confiscating most of our returns (through rate reflectivity). Example: in July 2006 USD/SLL was 293.0/279.2 bid/ask on the primary open exchange. Our attempts to trade resulted in settlement bids of more than 350. Interestingly, these trades tended to net returns of right around 4%, which was the prevailing dollar deposit rate.

Second Life is making people money...the people at Linden Labs, who happen to be the ones who set the USD/SLL exchange rate. Then there are a handfull of virtual millionares, (in which it's debatable if they can actually cash out). And then there is you, the sucker who pays $10 for a pair of virtual sunglasses.

Oh, and the most famous "virtual millionare" of all, Anshe Chung? She started her Second Life career as a virtual prostitute, and previously made her living goldfarming other MMO's.

Hopefully the opening the source to Second Life's client can result in a standalone Second Life server, so people who would rather just create things can figure out a way to escape from the rapidly escallating stupidity that is the main grid.

1. 1/6 staying is bad. It indicates a big barrier to entry that needs to be lowered (say by providing a web client instead of requiring a big install, or by making it easier to get around and find people/interesting things which isn't easy yet). On the other hand, it also means there is a ton of room to grow.

It also means that the current technology is terrible. Terrible. Forget web client. You need a mainframe. 2. Many new entries is a positive sign, unless there is some sinister data I don't know about that would normally be called effective PR or a growth curve.

Yes, there is. Try this article.

4. As for the overall context of this thread, this does not mean it is a pyramid scheme at all, simply that SL is enjoying lots of new entries at the moment, and has a lot of work to do.

Wrong. Because as even the most diehard SL fans have pointed out, much of the attraction of Second Life is pure hyperbole.

5. In addition I wouldn't say it depends on newbies but rather that the temporary statistic is that most people have joined in the past 4 months. And at what point do they stop being newbies? Isn't 4 months online not a newbie anymore for a community like this?

See the shirkly link. Those numbers are incredibly inflated even BEFORE you consider the 1/6 return ratio. Plus they don't include alternate accounts. A better explanation for what happened is that the news media reported on Second Life, people decided to sign up in droves, hated it, and never came back. Look, if the New York Times featured www.randomtoysite.com on their front page it would have more than a few million visitors from that coverage that day. If the site sucked, and most never bought anything, it would drop off the page. With SL, the site sucked, and most never bought anything, but it CONTINUES to be news.

6. I say temporary because obviously an exponential trend in new members is unsustainable. Either most people will no longer be newbies, and a stable membership will exist at some point due to improved content and services, or for some reason the current 2.9 million users will dry up and Linden won't be able to pay their bills. I'd need to see more info on what's happened to the 1 million people who logged in over the past 2 months. I see 20,000 people online now at about 9pm EST on Thursday which doesn't sound too great.. and I wonder where they all are. I think they need more transparency about that. Is that 20,000 developers building great stuff or 20,000 newbies bumbling around?

FYI, 20000 concurrent users is the most they've ever had online, and it completely destroys the game in terms of lag. It's almost literally unplayable. It's a lot of newbies, and it's a lot of people playing a dark, seedy side of the game that no one ever reports on.

I'm beginning to think that some media conglomerates must hold a stake in Second Life, and that's why we keep reading/hearing "news" on it.

It's more due to the fact that Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life) hired a really good PR agency that packaged the story up with a bow for reporters.

Is anyone else a bit weirded out by the massive incentives the local governments have offered. I know this is nothing new, and the locals hope that these will spur further high-tech development in the area, but let's examine these cases:

San Antonio (Microsoft): No property taxes for 10 years. A $5.2 mil grant from the CPS Energy economic development fund to pay for the electrical infrastructure to build the site.

South Carolina (Google): No property taxes for 30 years (essentially, for the life of the site). The 150-acre site was granted to them, and the state government has granted about $5 mil, too. Google has been incentivized to the tune of about $100 million.

Some of the structural construction will undoubtedly be done by locals. The technical work of building the data center (installing servers, wiring everything together) is probably outside of a local construction company's expertise. The real bulk of all those hundreds of millions of dollars goes to purchasing the actual computer equipment, none of which is local. A handful of the most-well-educated locals could be employees, but most employees will be transplanted. In less than 10 years, both sites will probably be obsolete (or, worse, axed as excess capacity). As the article on Google's site notes, the obscene incentives equate to "a $500,000 sweetener for each of the 200 jobs Google will create."

For half a million dollars, I'm sure the local economy could get more bang for its buck than just one Google employee. What exactly are these local governments getting in return for their obsequiousness and prostration?

*There are no links in TFA, even where the author makes references to outside content*
**Here's the Clay Shirky article being discussed**

Second Life: Hype vs. Anti-Hype vs. Anti-Anti-Hype
By Wagner James Au

Clay Shirky is a brilliant analyst of the digital era, and if there's anybody who could implode the media vortex currently surrounding Second Life , it would have to be someone of his caliber. He attempted that last week with "Second Life: A Story Too Good to Check", a Valleywag /Corante post that was subsequently Boing Boinged . As someone who contracted with Linden Lab as their "embedded reporter " for near three years, and still has a substantial interest in the world they created-- consider that both full disclosure, and plug -- I actually found his post something of a relief. Attention around SL has been growing at such a heart-throttling pace (total registered accounts were under 100,000 only a year ago, and just blew past 2 million), you begin to hope for something, /anything/, which will slow growth to a more manageable clip. But is Clay's analysis correct? Yes and no. The very topic came up at a GigaOM staff meeting recently, and when a couple staffers suggested Second Life is over-hyped, I blurted out what is, I think, a far more accurate assessment: "It's too hyped- and it's not hyped enough." After break, some reasons for both designations, as reflected through Shirky's polemic. What Clay Gets Right Where Shirky scores undisputedly is against the breathless media reports that proclaim "two million users in Second Life!" This number repeats the total registered accounts listed somewhat confusingly as "Total Residents" on the SL homepage , which are not truly reflective of users who actually spend time in-world on a regular basis. "Resident" has always been Linden's official name for any person with a valid SL account, but it's easy for the uninitiated to also infer the word's literal meaning, of "living in a place for some length of time." Which two million account holders are, plainly, not. As he notes, that number is not even the nearly 800,000 or so who've "Logged In Last 60 Days" (another SL homepage metric that confounds more than enlightens), since most of that includes those who've tried Second Life within that time--but never returned. He estimates the churn rate of One Try Then Bye Bye at 85%, and by Linden's own measure, that turns out to be, to his enormous credit, pretty much on target. When last month my blog's demographitrix Tateru Nino wrote a story discussing Second Life's churn rate, Linden CEO Philip Rosedale suggested retention was 10%-- a percentage so low, it shocked me. ("[A]bout 10% of newly created residents are still logging into Second Life weekly, 3 months later.") When I checked with Linden Lab last week, Philip and Marketing Director Catherine Smith reported back a slightly higher percentage, this one gauged by returning users from over the last 30 days (but not those who created an account within that period)-- "12-15% and has remained steady over the last year... we know churn will be high, but the difference is a network effect and constantly /changing/ content that people do come back to see. " So this, as it turns out, is where to set the Second Life bar: of the 2,000,000+ registered accounts now, roughly 240,000-300,000 are regular users, residents in both the colloquial and literal sense. Clay is right to call for the media to stop reporting that very top number without caveat. (Then again, the sharper tech reporters, like Dan Terdiman of News.com , already proceed with such caution.) Shirky is further correct to wonder if all the big companies recently promoting their brands in Second Life (NBC ! American Apparel ! Adidas and Toyota! , etc.) counts as news, since it's not clear if this is just a gimmick, or that they're actually getting any measurable return from their promotion dollars. The truth i

Brad - the writer of this memo - was rumoured to leave Yahoo for Myspace. He's supposed to be a disgruntled man for a long time - and this memo could be one of those angy outbursts. Not that what he wrote is not right, but for sure there's more to it than just plain loyalty thing.

Read http://www.valleywag.com/tech/top/yahoos-brad-garl inghouse-will-defect-to-myspace-157314.php or Google on this guy.

See post
here.

Excerpt:
It's traditional for an exiting Gawker Media editor to write a farewell post. I don't have anything to get across, other than that I'm free for lunch and gig offers for the next few weeks, so I'll just thank the people who, as my friend Paul put it, "write Valleywag for free."

There's a few factors which have made myspace a cesspool spawning marketing and advertising demons left and right.

Might also have something to do with the fact that the founders don't exactly have a problem with it seeing as how MySpace was founded by spammers, not Tom. Tom is just the pretty wholesome face they put on there to get peopel to join.

Check out a timely article, posted on digg itself, that gives the skinny on how it works there.

Actually, they're trying to beat Digg to that market. http://www.valleywag.com/tech/digg/scoop-exclusive -screenshots-reveal-digg-v3-will-cover-all-news-18 0760.php

No Web 2.0 comments section is complete without a link to the classic Web 2.0 beatdown that El Reg ran last year. Love that tag cloud.

Whatever it is Web 2.0 is made of, John Battelle will have an ad running on it someplace.

Even valleywag now seems to concede that this rumour is false. It was fun while it lasted.

Gotta love that it's a rumor site, but according to Valleywag, Greylock Ventures, the guys that just gave them $25 million, actually valued them at $525 million, which is not really that close to the $2 billion that they were rumored to be looking for.

Under the table: Greylock thinks Facebook's worth $525 million

Gotta love that it's a rumor site, but according to Valleywag, Greylock Ventures, the guys that just gave them $25 million, actually valued them at $525 million, which is not really that close to the $2 billion that they were rumored to be looking for.

Under the table: Greylock thinks Facebook's worth $525 million

re:"I've been living in San Francisco for going on two years now and have yet to meet anyone who is working in a "Web" or "e-commerce" job up here"

Don't know what part of SF you're in - but in SOMA and Mission Bay you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a dot-commer or overhearing a dot-com conversation.

Where are you - the Tenderloin? Seriously I think the new economy is ditching you. Cheese it - it's Yeechang! Everyone stop doing dot-com work!

Check out Valleywag for a small indicator of SF tech businesses - and I can vouch that my contracting with start-ups indicates that this map is very much out of date:

http://www.valleywag.com/tech/google-maps/index.ph p

Getting paid to do nothing? Hey, it works for Eric Schmidt

Who says Apple won't switch chips again? The current relationship isn't all roses, despite all we have heard. Apple won't put those retarded "Intel inside" stickers on their products.

And, it would seem, the Intel core duo is full of serious bugs which Intel doesn't really care about.