First peek at Hangout

Last week I wrote a first piece about the new 3D environment called Hangout, on hangout.net which currently is in Private Beta. Fortunately I have received an invite for private Beta testing.

Step 1 is registering and creating your avatar. It's pretty sleek, flash based and has a limited set of options right now, so could not make an exact replica of the mighty handsome VeeJay Burns that walks Second Life, but this'll do for the time being.

Step 2 is to download a 400Kb app installer to render your room. This is the amazing Unity webplayer, amazingly small, yet powerfull and full of potential.

Step 3 is to log in and get going. However, something went wrong and I crashed about six times

My Hangout

What I intended to show you was a 3D embedded version of my hangout. Something went wrong there. I'll keep you posted

What you see now is a snapshot of my Hangout... Well, I still have a lot of decorating to do. If you want to see the real thing, you'll have to add 3D to your browser.

Geek Meet - the Celeb Edition?

Another Geekmeet Friday with a show packed with Second Life goodies went down at Dr. Dobbs island again. Tonight's lineup:

• MSo Lambert and Sensual Casanove from Synthetic speaking on the Subscribe-O-Matic.
• Navillus Batra, aka Jacob Sullivan of i3D demonstrating the brand new LSL unit testing tech that Linden Lab commisioned his company to build.
• Felix Wakmann and Diva Canto of the SLBrowser giving a demo of the new 2.0 version.

Since this was a first (full) voice edition, it was a bloggersnightmare, but a great show once more.

The Subscribe-O-Matic is basically tying to work about a couple of problems business owners face when trying to use groups to stay in touch with their customers, or potential customers. It is a networked system of devices that sellers can use in their shops, which customers can simply touch to "subscribe" to their Subscribe-O-Matic list

The best way to say something on the Unit Testing done by i3D is by giving a quote from Metaversed:

"Scriptors will be able to plug individual units of code into the system and stress test and debug with verbose reporting. They'll even be able to track individual functions performance within different units, helping to narrow down bug hunts, and tune performance of complex apps. "

read full piece here

The final stand was made by Felix Wakmann on the SL Browser, which is to some extend a mash-up of the Metamart hud and the Electric Sheep Search Engine.

Perhaps due to the talks on i3D's testing unit the Geekmeet turned out to almost being a celeb-edition with several Linden employees attending and also Aimee Weber was sighted.

Aric Linden, Linden Labs' QA has enjoyed working with i3D pretty much:

"We've really enjoyed working with them and we're very excited to be able to collaborate with folks. We hope to be doing more of it in the future."

Aimee has told me a few weeks ago that she was too busy to keep up with stuff, but has been meaning to come to one of these events for some time now. This time she finally found some time to squeeze it in her busy schedule.

Mystical Benchmarking

Mystical Cookie, creator of Mystitool, "your Swiss Army knife for Second Life", brings a new cool app for Second Life; Benchmarking Server Performance

NickWilson, at Metaversed wrote this:
"A new tool, released just hours ago, aims to benchmark the performance of Second Life servers by running resource intensive scripts within a region, allowing residents to compare performance statistics before shelling out hard earnede Linden dollars on a new home. Mystical Cookie, creator of Second Life's favorite swiss army knife utility, the MystiTool, today released her "benchmark sim tester", that once rezzed, will perform a number of tests upon the island it inhabits, producing a score that can be comared against other islands."

Below you'll see Nick in awe

Performance is a well known issue in Second Life, and Linden Labs themselves are trying to find ways to pull together the ultimate performance testing strategy. However, it's hard to get 3.000 people to jump on one sim for stress testing. Professionally speaking that would costs thousands of dollars for a single stress test.

Will this new app be the desired tooling? Or will it 'just' be a gadget?

I put it to the test and had a Sr. Test Engineer from Sogeti's Expertunit "Process of Automating Quality Assurance and Testing" (PAQT) have a look at it.

"It is a nice tool for users who want to have some quick info on their sim, see if it's up to speed. In no way it is a performance testing tool. In performance testing we look as much as possible to realistic usage. During testing we monitor various systemresources of several servers. This can't be done with this tool (yet), but it's worth to have a look at it and see how it develops."

Sofar, a gadget, but with the right progging it might evolve

Pownce Review

Here's a short review on Pownce, the new IM social networking thing from the States. We've had Twitter and Jaiku and suddenly there is Pownce.

Pownce launched on june 26th into Alpha testing. So after barely one week of existence it is a little short to draw conclusions. Too early to tell if Pownce will be the next killer app or will be doomed before it leaves alpha or beta testing.

In my twittergroup it kinda hyped and everyone was screaming for invites. Why? I think two reasons:

1. One of the makers of Pownce is KevinRose (from Digg) and
2. Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) is on it as well.

The early signs were promising, but over the weekend Pownce saw an onrush of new users resulting in scalability and stability problems. The slick looking Adobe AIR driven client crashed several times.

There are a number of features on Pownce which I really like.

The screen below is the webinterface. Pownce has a number of very nice features, when compared to Twitter or Jaiku.

1. You can reply to messages (and rate them)
2. You can send files and plan events
3. You can divide your friends in various subsets (see last pic)

Off course, there's always a downside. The first two "weak points" may not be that bad at all though, depends on how you look at the world of Ol' Bill's Crap.

1. Not every setting works when changed in IE, works fine in Firefox though ;)
2. My current templates works with alphachannels and transparency. Doesn't work in IE6, so the background of white text becoms white, ergo non readable.
3. After the sudden onrush of new twitter-seasoned folks it seems as if Pownce is experiencing some problems with scalability.
4. There's no support for mobile messaging

Finally there's some points that the lot of them (Pownce, Jaiku and Twitter) could take notice of: In this day and age of social networks and metaverses we all know eachother by different names, our real name, our social name, our metaverse name and what have you got. An extensive addressbook would come in handy.

Anyway, here's a few other blogposts

• Tao Takashi: Introducing pownce, the new twitter
• Leah Culver: Pownce
• Eric Rice: Twitter gets pwnced, Jaiku readies torpedoes
• Robert Scoble: Another twitter competitor

Worth mentioning is Tao Takashi's notes on the lack of mobile support and RSS:

"What Pownce is missing is the mobile side of things. You cannot yet send or receive posts via SMS and additionally only one RSS feed is there right now which is the feed of your and your friend’s posts but not the one of the main timeline. Moreover an API seems to be there as they created an external application using AIR themselves and somebody made a Facebook application but it’s not open or documented it seems."

Pushing the Limit on SL

Most sims I've visited are maxed out on say what... 50 visitors? Something close to that. Why? If it gets above that Second Life gets slooooooooow, al those textures to be streamed to your client and all those prims. Wait a second, prims? Prims are the things you build, not the things you wear, right? Well partly.


Okay, here's a short short version to Second Life noobs [skip if you're well metaversed].

An island is a server, with server space and capacity. If you build things (buildings) on the island, you build them on the server. For building you use the Second Life building blocks called prims and you create objects. These objects are stored onto the server (with a usual max of 15.000 prims / building blocks), but the textures on the island/server/sim are stored in a central database or asset server. Both are streamed to your desktop as you come to the sim. Avatars (your virtual YOU) aren't made of prims but do use textures for clothing, which need to be uploaded to your desktop as well. Now there's one thing more. Quite a few residents of Second Life have tailored hairdo's, wigs that are made from prims, sometimes even upto 500 prims for a good looking hairdo.

So if everything has to be transferred to your client, you can imagine that 50 visitors bring more textures to stream than 25. If it's getting too much to load, Second Life becomes laggy. Which means you'll see gray people, your movement is slow etcetera.

All in all, I've been told that 99 people was an absolute max. Well it isn't. I just came across the island of mediascape, home to TJ's Icepalace, a danceclub and noticed there were 103 people present. Absolutely undoable I thought, since I've been at several sims wtih 50 people present and that was really laggy. This one wasn't! How do they do it?

It's a proper build, landscaped, buildings, boats, terraces etcetera... so how do they do it?

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/mediascape/110/144/22

Dutch get a Testlife

Friday the Testlife sim opened up for public. For once there's a test intitiative that's not been initiated by Sogeti's TMAP, but this comes from the testers Four Oaks in Arnhem

This is somewhat an a-typical sim, as it absolutely has no explicit branding except for the four oaks dominating the foresty sim. It's a paintball area where testers can meet and community-build in a fun environment.

The builders are the Dutch DNBMedia corp who're also working hard in the 0031 area.

User Acceptance in a Virtual Environment

FYI

I just ran into an interesting report on User Acceptance in a virtual environment:
http://www.fetscherin.com/UserAcceptanceVirtualWorlds.htm

Linden gets a grip

Last week saw Linden's response to the Project Open Letter. Their statement that they are devoting more people to solving scaling and stability. Their statement was received with certain scepticism. In this blog I was a little critical as well.

Nonetheless there are a few things in Second Life that have to be noted at this point. Last month Second Life became slow and unstable when the online resident count reached about 37.000. This week saw a steady rise to 41.000 simultaneous logins without notable disturbance to stability or lag.

As Second Life gains momentum, Linden Lab itself is growing as well. In the past week I have had several discussions with Linden employees. They are working hard on Quality Assurance and getting a structured test approach up and running to avoid more ineffective patches.

I still like to see some big improvement in certain areas, but have to say that indeed they are working on it. Second Life's growth does require a revision of Linden's Tao.

Virtual World, Real life Governance

Project Open Letter update

This weeks Town Hall meeting waspretty much all about the Project Open Letter. The POL has been signed by many respected virtual residents and is about one of the first complaints that's been taking serious by Linden Labs. The wrap up is that we're worried, and they're worried.

The POL names a few problems that need to be fixed and Linden addressed a few problems (here's A detailed response to the open letter ). They're gonna sort out the Inventory backup issue and devote 3/4 of their DEVmembers to scaling and stability.

The thing that bothers me is we're talking about issues, Linden is talking about bug fixes and patches (which don't always work - Perhaps Linden should call us for a little advice on how to perform structured testing (TMAP)) but no one is talking IT Governance here. Have we rooted out the source of these nuisances and is there an alternative to patching?

Some new and noteworthy tidbits are that Linden is considering opening up a server park somewhere in Europe to spread the residential load and segragation between basic and premium account members.