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16 Comments

  1. I have been in Inworldz for over a month now and really like the change from Second Life.

    People on the Inworldz grid are much more friendly and mature than the people who I have come across in Second Life.

    I do use both grids. Inworldz I have my island that gives me more at a tiny fraction of the price that Linden Labs charges for an estate in Second Life. To me I consider it to be foolish to keep spending a lot of money on tier or rent when there is a much cheaper option on the Inworldz grid. Plus I have not heard anyone say anything about their island vanishing after paying tier or rent like I have heard many times in Second life. Plus with many Second life stores opening up business in Inworldz, I have every comfort that Second life offers without wasting money on over priced tier or land rentals.

    For socializing I go to Second Life. If my friends and I wish to get away from the rat race on the Second Life grid, we log into my Inworldz Island. To me this is just like one of the many crashes while teleporting that happen in Second Life. Except when I log back in, it is on the Inworldz grid.

    Now I have the best of both worlds.

  2. seanf@tig.com.au'

    Thanks for the extended reply. It was very helpful.

    "I strongly believe that having lots of different OpenSim providers competing on price, on service, on stability, on scalability, on security, on community, will in the end create a much better virtual environment overall."

    Yes, of course, this is the beauty of OpenSim and it's emerging web-like model of providing solutions to suit everyone (as opposed to Linden Labs problematic attempts to try and please everyone). It's horses for courses.

    I just had a defensive reacton to media-on-a-prim being described as "shiny", as I think it's one of the best things that have happened to Second Life. I went off half-cocked. Sorry about that.

  3. seanf@tig.com.au'

    “And as far as media-on-a-prim, it’s another shiny [thing] that, right now, is not necessary,”

    Shiny thing? Tell that to educators, who think it’s a boon. Probably business too. Way to go to exclude a whole market with a narrow vision.

    I stopped reading after I read no OAR or IAR backups.

  4. Author

    Sean —

    I’d recommend that businesses and educators set up their own mini-grids. That way, they’d get full user controls, full control over their assets, no outside terms of service to deal with, and they can run the latest OpenSim. ReactionGrid specializes in doing this for education customers. In addition, SimHost and Dreamland Metaverse also have excellent track records with customer service — and all are at a better price than InWorldz for a moderate-use region. Today, it is as easy to get a mini-grid set up as it is to get a region from a commercial grid like InWorldz, and ReactionGrid, SimHost and Dreamland Metaverse have easy web-based management panels to save and restore regions, add new users, restart regions, and do other administrative tasks, without having to wait for someone to do it for you.

    However, if you are a merchant looking to sell your products into a controlled environment, then a grid like InWorldz is a nice place to go. (You can still have your own private mini-grid for building, development, warehousing, etc… — with full backups. Then upload your products to InWorldz, SpotOn3D, Second Life, and other closed grids to sell them.)

    InWorldz and SpotOn3D (the two have similar policies with regard to backups) are also nice, supportive communities for people looking for a cozy social environment. There are no griefers teleporting in from other grids, since hypergrid teleports are turned off, for example.

    Closed grids also provide a nice, controlled environment for role playing, or can enable a grid to offer adult activities that might not be suitable for a general audience. Or they can do the opposite — have a safe environment for children, with no worries about people bringing in X-rated content from other grids, or teleporting in and causing trouble for everyone.

    For people less concerned about safety and security but who still want to be on a grid for the social and community aspects, OSGrid, GermanGrid, FrancoGrid, AlphaTowne and many other open grids allow hypergrid teleports — you can travel all over to visit friends, attend events, or go shopping.

    — Maria

  5. Author

    Oh, I should add a disclaimer to the above note: AlphaTowne and Dreamland Metaverse are current advertisers of Hypergrid Business, and SimHost is a former advertiser.

    That doesn’t keep us from running juicy, negative stories when the hosting companies have problems (see our story on how SimHost lost someone’s region due to problems with their backup process, for example).

    So if any of our readers have a problem with any hosting provider — bad service, copyright infringement issues, stability, or anything else — contact us right away.

    Our policy is that by exposing problems, it makes hosting providers work harder to make sure that they don’t happen again. For example, after SimHost lost the Aesthetica region, all the other hosting providers took a good hard look at their backup policies — internal backups, off-site backups, and OAR backups sent to their users — and upgraded all their processes.

    As a result, I haven’t heard of any customers losing regions since then.

    Even the recent DDOS attack on InWorldz, which shut the entire grid down for a couple of days and took down about two dozen regions, didn’t do any permanent damage and the staff was able to restore everything just as it was before the attack.

    I strongly believe that having lots of different OpenSim providers competing on price, on service, on stability, on scalability, on security, on community, will in the end create a much better virtual environment overall.

    InWorldz and SpotOn3D lean towards the security and stability side, and that’s fine. There are people who need that more than they need backups and media-on-a-prim.

    — Maria

  6. You quoted Bob Sadler as saying "I grew tired of Linden Lab … especially when they decided that they owned everything I created or uploaded [into Second Life]. As a content creator from day one in Second Life, I refuse to let someone just steal from me."

    I don't know where he gets that idea. The current Second Life Terms of Service, Section 7 details copyrights and licensing. It opens with part 7.1:

    "7.1 You retain any and all Intellectual Property Rights in Content you submit to the Service."

    That seems fairly clear to me.

    Linden Lab just gets a license to host and display your content to others, as is required for them to provide the SL service. InWorldz needs a similar license, whether it's in their terms of service or not. Indeed, any web service where people can submit their own (copyright protected) content, requires such a license: YouTube, Google Docs, Flickr, Facebook, whatever…

    In my opinion, InWorlds is a flash in the pan. The main reason I think that is that they forked their code from OpenSim and now they're stuck maintaining / improving a codebase with what, two developers? Compare that to the nine or so developers working on OpenSim.

    The InWorldz attitude towards OpenSim and the OpenSim developers has been one of put-downs and disdain. I find that attitude arrogant, disrespectful, and unprofessional. OpenSim provided the foundations for InWorldz: they should be thankful!

    In the future, when comparing Second Life to InWorldz, please include comparisons of things like maximum concurrency and number of unique users in the past 60 days. These numbers are what let business people gauge the potential market size.

    (Analogy: Netflix didn't come to Canada until last week. Why? Canada's population is one tenth that of the USA.)

  7. I had a very large and popular business in SL for many years and recently closed it down and moved it into Inworldz. LL had made doing business in SL a joke anymore. They changed there search and a lot of businesses looked like they were no longer around anymore and this caused many (like myself) to loose sales drastically with no fix in sight except to close down the store and move everything to there Media market place where they make money off of every single merchant that sells stuff in there. I got tired of the greed of LL and moved on. They used to call it "Your world Your dream" but it is more like "Our world your wallet" The things I create and build are to make everyone's life a little nicer in a virtual world. I am not in it for the money but I am in it just to make things nicer for everyone. If I had been doing this for money I would have been starved by now lol but I refuse to do business in a place that constantly looks for ways to empty every users pockets and then totally ignore them.

    My friend Bob Sadler told me about IW and I couldn't be happier! It is just like what SL USED to be like along time ago…you have a sense of belonging there

  8. Author

    Sean — I love media-on-a-prim, too. Right now, we’re running 0.6.9 on our company grid, so that we can teleport back and forth to OSGrid, and we’re making do. To collaborate on project plans, we use Google Drawing — which can produce a Web-based graphic file, which we then, through a script, apply to a prim surface. It’s almost like real-time white boarding! (The script refreshes each time the prim is touched, so that we can see changes immediately.)

    We also have a script that converts any web page to an image, and then applies that to a prim surface. Handy for giving presentations stored on the Web, or displaying project management dashboards — but it requires that the documents all be public.

    With media-on-a-prim, we’ll be able to have true in-world collaboration. Desktop sharing. Stream in video. All without having to figure out how parcel media works or use clumsy work-arounds.

    We have one test region up now on 0.7.1 and it’s fantastic.

    OSGrid is taking its time upgrading, though — there are still some bugs to be worked out. Also, the only viewer that can handle media-on-a-prim right now is SL Viewer 2. So that sucks for a lot of people.

    And SL viewers are tricky to configure for OpenSim grids. You have to edit the shortcut path, instead of simply picking a new grid from the grid list on the login screen.

    I’ve had to get used to SL Viewer 2 because there’s a group in Second Life that’s standardized on it, and I’ve got four meetings with them each week, so I figure I’d switch over. But I’m still more comfortable with the Hippo-Imprudence viewers.

    I’m thinking I’ll upgrade our company grid within a couple of weeks at most, or earlier if the viewer teams come out with media-on-a-prim support — or OSGrid upgrades.

    — Maria

  9. enerhax@yahoo.com'

    imo, InWorldz does well with the Second Life group because it is similar to Second Life. even their TOS is very similar and their is nothing i find fault with

    for people looking for an experience that is similar to what Second Life seemed to be promising a few years ago, InWorldz clearly is the choice. my only criteria for making that statement is their numbers and their growth

    i have never logged in and can't speak to it in that regard, but if they have the stability i see in OpenSim, then what's not to love?

    i find OpenSim (with our current host, not our previous one) to be just an enjoyable to wotk in as Second Life was. i certainly would love to see InWorldz be open to the rest of the grid via HG some day =)

  10. iggyono@gmail.com'

    Inworldz will be great for social users who want the pleasures of SL without Linden Lab’s opaque management.

    I am not so sure that educators like me can use it, since I’m already enjoying the thrill of building, exporting, and importing my OARs. So while I’ll explore this grid, I don’t think it’s where I’d build a project for students if I cannot export what I create.

    In fact, as many educators have complained about SL, exported backups are required by many granting agencies…so no export/backup, no deal for that grid.

  11. Inworldz shows there true hate to competition By  having a Inworldz sponsored event  and allowing a private inworldz avi ban  designers show. So why even bring your product there if you know the founders are backing one  a one horse show. sad day to see the many designers ban from a show because the person running the show is the founders best friend.
    makes you think why invest in it.
    think about it  you have a  designer put a show on sponsored by IW and allow that allure  company to ban there competition and rivals from the show
     yes the virtual world at it’s finest.

  12. As someone who attempted to use the existing OpenSim code to create DaseinWorld, I can say that InWorldz has overcome a huge number of problems and created a far more stable platform that the public OS code. Unfortunately I cant say the same for their mainland, which is small, not very interesting, and surrounded by private islands so it can never expand. Despite this, I really like InWorldz and after six years in SL I am moving my group, Spiritual Arts Growth and Enlightenment Society (S.A.G.E.S.) there. The best thing about InWorldz are the prices and the generous prim allowances (30,000 to 45,000 prims per full sim versus 15,000 in SL). Membership is free. in IW I plan to have one full sim and three scenic sims. In SL this would cost me $680 a month. In IW it is $135 a month. Ive been wandering around IW for a while now and a lot of the best content creators are setting up shop in IW, so you dont need to create all your own content, although of course the choices are not as extensive as in SL and the marketplace is a bit of a pain. Unfortunately, IW’s customer service is unresponsive, but at least they are not rude and condescending like SL. I know several people are moving from SL to IW. IW feels more like the old SL. I think IW has a great future.

    1. trrlynn73@gmail.com'

      Tho this is an old article, mostly outdated, and many of the players are no longer around, you may have missed the innovative tech that http://www.kitely.com/ uses.

      Hopefully you have not wasted to much time in yet another restrictive environment, because in Kitely you have innovation, more prims and regions for the buck, by far, and region backups to your own computer, and a ton of other features inwz does not have, and will likely never have.

      It would behoove you to look into them before putting to much money down…Kitely is the goto commercial grid now.

      Up to you, of course, but if commercial grids are your thing, Kitely is where to be….

    2. joeybhyx@gmail.com'

      I have to agree, if like you said you been in SL for some time Inworldz does follow SL’s design which in fact made them #1. I’m sure that many great creators have left SL to have there main store in inworldz or at least a satellite store. If I was a major grid owner I would really study why SL is the biggest in every aspect that matters. And try to follow there business template as much as can be allowed. That would be the secret to success.

      1. I like to think of it as more like the early days of the Web. All the commercial activity and success was on AOL. And a bunch of ISP’s tried to emulate AOL’s business model because that’s where the money was. There was no money to be made on the Web. But a few companies decided to start up businesses online anyway, with open access for everyone — Google, Yahoo, Amazon…

        I think a few companies might make a living emulating SL, at least for a little while, but it might not be the best possible long-term bet.

        1. joeybhyx@gmail.com'

          Exactly 🙂 That’s why the change is in place in SL, Focusing towards the gamer not so much the land barons.

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