The Love Machine #1

Are We Getting Some Good Tweets About Second Life 2.0?

It was a bright, profitable day in San Francisco.

In a posh suite at the Ritz, a throng of high-tech investors and plugged-in analysts gathered for a sneak peek at the next big thing. Non-disclosure agreements were signed and muffins were consumed. Conversation grew to an audible tizzy, accompanied by the clicking of innumerable Blackberries.

Suddenly, a crack team of web-savvy executives strode into the conference room, confidence stitched into every seam of their Armani suits. They gave a brief presentation; it was brilliantly received: the investors opened up their checkbooks, the analysts pronounced the whole thing "webtacular!" and the executive team got back into their magical flying cars and zoomed back to Google.

Meanwhile, several miles away, in an abandoned box factory, some Lindens began to rise from their makeshift beds: cardboard boxes lain across wooden palettes. Around the metal barrel that served as their collective stove, they began to gather, heating tapwater and Sanka in old coffee mugs scavenged off of Craigslist.

"So Talky, what's the word about Second Life 2.0?" asked T Linden, dropping some restaurant sugar into a chipped blue Pets.com mug. "Are we getting some good tweets about that? Got to get some good tweets about that."

"Not really," admitted Talky. "There's more buzz about this 'Botgirl Questi is a guy' thing. The podcasters are particularly upset.

"Who? What?" Philip Linden sputtered. "Nonsense! Listen! We have spent half a year moving everything onto new tabs and renaming the menus. This is a veritable sea change!"

He enacted his metaphor by making swooshing, ocean sounds with his mouth and waving his arms like a surfer. "Surf the information superhighway, Talky. Ride the next wave of innovation and change!" he said, in his best tech guru voice.

"The feedback seems to be that it's, um, too little too late," Talky said. He then stood up straighter, gulped, and continued. "I hate to bring this up again, but you know, I spent years making those helpful videos showing how to use the current interface and if we change that --"

M Linden interrupted. "But we are the first company to ever put the word 'Geek' right on the menu bar. We are programming our contempt for our users directly into the interface. This is groundbreaking stuff. You don't see that in World of WarCraft. Where's the menu bar for 'LAZY SHUT-IN' on your product, Blizzard? Huh?"

"The users are saying it's just a bunch of useless UI tweaks, instead of a true sequel that quantitatively reinvents the game."

Everyone stopped and stared at Talky Linden. "Did you just refer to Second Life as a game?"

"I meant, I meant the world!" Talky said, desperately clutching his scored and pitted Beenz.com mug, his hands shaking. "An actual sequel that changes the world."

There was an ominous silence, and everyone looked to the leader, M Linden.

"Take him to the Love Machine," M Linden said finally, in a quiet, measured voice that augured horror.

Two members of the RESI team seized the sobbing, pleading Talky and dragged him into an old utility room. Moments later, the lights flickered as an ominous crackle, like a giant bug zapper in mid-sizzle, shot through the warehouse. The victim's screams of primal pain rang in their ears like a dentist's drill.

M Linden smiled at the sound, rubbing his hands together, before resuming the meeting. "I do believe the Watermelon has a point, though. Changing the menus around and adding shit to the Website isn't much of an upgrade, T Linden. If that is your real name." He glared at the other executive darkly, with a meaningful glance towards the utility closet.

"Well what do they expect Second Life 2.0 to be?" demanded T Linden. "Some sort of new program with high end graphics, massive concurrent user support, industry standard content creation tools, and breathtakingly realistic avatars? I mean, that's just crazy talk!"

The circle erupted at such a ridiculous notion. "Earth to crazy people! Hello!" laughed M Linden.

"Yeah, what do they think this is, Mars?" said Phillip Linden.

"I know, really! Some kind of Blue Mars!" said T Linden. "As if!"

They stood for a moment, laughing and chuckling, before filing out, one by one, as they did every morning, onto the loading dock where they chained up their old grocery carts overnight.

Tenderly, they unlocked each and filled them with plastic bags, then fanned out through the city, collecting cans and other recyclables to trade in for precious, precious server money.


It was a bright, profitable day in San Francisco.

Mad Labs

"Blood for the Blood God! Marrow for the Mighty M! Tremble before the spectacle of the Linden who is impossible to name, for to even contemplate his actual epithet with a consciousness and body confined to a mere three dimensions is not possible for meager mortals such as yourselves: to even attempt it is forbidden, lest ye wake things best not disturbed."

- Linden Lab New Employee Orientation Packet

The most disturbing image from the recent vice presidential debate was somebody waving a sign that read, "Dick Cheney in a Dress" -- and this from a supporter of Sarah Palin, mind you. As if that was on any level humanly conceivable a good thing.

While you're meekly pondering the many layers of shivering terror that such a meme conveys, let me sneak in an apology for the lack of blog updates: Between these electoral shenanigans, a stock market collapse, and a new collar around my neck, I haven't had time.

So to keep you entertained, I've reached out to some previous contributors for some fresh articles. First to answer the call was long-time Tiny Dancing contributor, M Linden. Four moons ago, M Linden was a mild-mannered peddler of Internet fruits and vegetables on the aptly-named Organic.com. Then he wrested control of Linden Lab and its wayward band of hippies, neckbeards, and *nix aficionados from a callipygous boy-toy named Phillip Linden.

In this thoughtful retrospective, he reminisces about his first eventful months as the CEO of Linden Lab.

His article has been sitting in my inbox for a while, for which I apologize, and it's possible you may have already seen a later version he posted on the official Second Life blog.

But I still think this early draft shares some surprising insights about the new direction. Enjoy!

~ Kanomi


State of the Lab
by M Linden

My how time flies when you are having fun. In my first four months as your Chief Enablement Officer, our shared social interactive space has been evolving into the new 2.0 ecosystem at netspeed.

During that time, we at the Lab have been busy spearheading new initiatives and breadcrumbing task forces to facilitate positive uptick in your enjoyment matrix.

Here's our progress report.


How are we doing?

We're really getting outside the box on some of our incremental, value add solutions. We just finished up a very proactive third quarter. Yesterday, we hit a peak concurrency of 71,232 ponygirls -- that's an increase of 6% in less than a month. Year-over-year, peak ponygirls concurrency has grown more than 38%.

An even more impressive figure is the number of Gorean Masters who actually logged in and engaged in community-based interactions with their slaves on a peer-to-peer basis this month. Did I say slaves? I'm sorry, I meant differentially-liberated life partner (DLLP).

The big win on this customer flow is that more than 5,942 unique Gorean Masters and their DLLPs logged in and communally leveraged their Excite attachments at some point during the week. That's a big win-win on the consumer satisfaction matrix.

Now you may be querying your knowledge base as to why we're data mining a statistic as granular as that, but it's a product requirement for our segmentation 2.0 campaign. Some major sponsorship partners are already drilling down to core gamer demographic, and we believe the next generation of that wave is to further slice and dice that metric into even more narrowband demos like catgirls and scalies.

Because when I was summoned here, it was to execute this vision. I have that vision. When a PepsiCola says, "We're scaling up a new energy vitalization drink narrow-beamed at online bondage gimps. Where can we bandwidth Power Piss at our key demo?" it's going to be Linden Lab that stands up and says, "Salutations sponsorship prospect! Check out these sims!"


Office Hours

I was power-idling from 1:30 SLT to 1:45 SLT yesterday, October 2nd, inside that big Greek temple conference room, touching base with all of you userbase partners on a micro level. My client timed out, but I had my chat log on, and my executive assistant bullet pointed your grievances on a macro level. I see some black eyes on connectivity still. We're working together for some same page wins on that one.

Remember, you don't need to proactively make an appointment for Office Hours, just touch down for the meet and greet and we'll workshop and do some concepting. You can find my office by engaging my Inventory button, then interacting with my Landmarks folder. If you miss it next time I'll send out a PowerPoint.


Electronic Arts' Spore

I wanted to get our ducks in a row on this one as a competitor threat because I was getting good twitter from some peer group competitors on LinkedIn. So I mandated a threat assessment report from our boots on the ground team of customer satisfaction enablers. Then I interfaced with the e-tainment game client itself. It was sporing. Ha ha!

Take a memo, EA! You may have engaged more potential eyeballs than us right now but they aren't clustering on your site. Our users are 95% stickier than yours -- and if you don't believe me, just check out our Bukkake sims around 2 AM, Berlin time.


What's Next?

With more core competencies and a new client satisfaction matrix, we're going to ramp up our monetization processes.

And if that doesn't uptick some positive outcomes, I'll ask Hank Paulson for a bailout. After all, we have a lot of failed banks in Second Life too.


>:|

Power Idling With M Linden

Commemorate the inauspicious arrival of the next CEO of the metaverse with your very own "Power Idling With M Linden" T-shirt.

Crafted by the award-winning designers of the Tiny Dancing Brand Center, this unique polycotton blend combines the quick-rezzing features of polyester with the sensual feel of virtual cotton.

Celebrate Second Life's diversity by choosing from our broad range of one color and one unisex size.

Perfect for groups who need an inexpensive option for conformity, or to wear for your next session to Linden office hours.

No child labor, bots, or campers were involved in the creation of this product, and to reduce our environmental impact on the metaverse, we will donate one blog post to the promotion of this product.


EDIT: If you do not have an SL Exchange account, you may acquire this t-shirt in-world at the not yet open for business Tiny Branding Dancing Center.

:)

Tiny Dancing Events Calendar For May

As part of our ongoing commitment to bring you the best coverage possible of the metaverse, we are pleased to offer you our editors' choices for the most interesting and most important events for May.

Office Hours

May, TBD, the Organic Temple of Mephisto

New CEO "M Linden" shall briefly dignify the world with his presence when he deigns fit. Although he shall be AFK during this time, your beseeching, lamenting, and teeth-gnashing shall be logged, and one Wish shall be granted to the petitioner who is most humble and pleasing to the infernal majesty of His ears.

Click for SLURL

Cinco de Mayo

May 5, all day, Isla del Sol Sim

To celebrate the young Republic of Mexico's victory over an invading French army at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, avatar Homer Delgado is giving away exploding piñata boobs.

Click for SLURL

Sigmund Freud's Birthday

May 6, all day, Vienna Institute for International Freudianism

Get coked up and come on down! The Institute is submitting free chatbot psychoanalysis all month long, plus complimentary Archetype Pipes for the guys and for you girls, naughty Freudian Slips are half off.

Click for SLURL

"Hill-blazers" Whistle Stop

May 11, 9 PM, Club Cherri Red

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will make a surprise appearance at Club Cherri Red in order to shore up the base among her core constituency: transgendered online prostitutes. Photography will not be permitted except on the provided "shaking hands" poseballs please.

Click for SLURL

Best Catgirl Marathon

May 1 - 31, Black Box Nightclub

The Black Box Nightclub will be holding 744 back-to-back one hour "Best Catgirl" competitions for a grand prize of $500L. Catcalls, caterwauling and catfights will not be permitted except in the specially marked catbox. Mew! ^n_n^

Click for SLURL

^__^

What's Your Take? - New CEO

Linden Labs has announced the hiring of its new CEO, an ad executive from organic.com who will go by the in-world name of "M Linden". What's your take?

Coolguy25 Bling enthusiast	Bunnypet Hugsalot Hair model	Darkchylde Daggerheart Primcock sculptor
I am cautiously optimistic. I ordered some asparagus from organic.com one time, and it arrived crisp and on time.	I have sent "M" a group invite to my Story of O themed bondage simulation.	So they hired somebody with no experience keeping complicated networks with tens of thousands of concurrent users up and running? Great, he'll fit right in.

:o