August 22, 2007 by Nobody Fugazi
Posted in
Interesting headline? Thats what Coldwell Banker's presence in Second Life really is. I've stayed away from writing of it, instead reading what the mainstream media came up with. Articles like Coldwell Banker's Second Life, Coldwell Banker Opens Office in Second Life and even TerraNova's Coldwell Banker selling homes in Second Life missed what should be patently obvious to anyone who has owned land in Second Life.
Funny thing is, I had a phone call earlier this year with a rather sizable competitor of Coldwell Banker, and they were thinking of getting into virtual land services. I laid out the facts. The guy at the holding company, who apparently has a personal site, said - 'that sounds like web hosting!'. Why, yes. Yes it is.
Second Life land is really 3 dimensional web hosting. It isn't the first time I've said anything like that, but lets go over it one more time so everyone is on the same page.
- 'Land' in Second Life exists on servers (computers).
- A price is paid for the land initially by people who buy simulators (hosted on a computer server)
- 'Owners' of land get to pay a monthly fee - tier (monthly hosting cost). Fail to pay it, and Governor Linden will be by to repossess.
- There are standards applied (or not) to your use of the land - and if you are naughty on the grid, it will be repossessed.
- Other people on the same server compete with for the server's resources, such as scripting resources.
Instead of megabytes of storage, you get prims. That is about it.
Let us compare what was written about Coldwell Banker in the August 2007 Second Opinion's Developer Focus:
Coldwell Banker, one of the biggest players in the real-estate industry, has set up shop in Second Life with a virtual office and more than 500 homes on 550,000 square meters in the Ranchero section of the mainland. Coldwell Banker entered Second Life to connect with a younger real world real estate while making certain it could make a positive impact within the metaverse...
There are 65,536 square meters per sim, usually - so that 550,000 square meters equates to about 8.3 simulators. In the grand scheme of things, that isn't much... not much at all.
It is kind of cool to consider that a real estate company is reselling web hosting. Sleight of Mind. :-)
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Host is a Host is a Host
Of course it's like web hosting. Such a model works well for many types of online services that require enough resources to make them unprofitable to provide, to everyone, for free. Some other common types of hosting that is similar to SL's model of handling server costs would be hosting DNS, audio/video streaming services, servers handling heavy use file downloads, Ventrilo hosting, etc.
> "missed what should be patently obvious to anyone who has owned land in Second Life."
Perhaps this parallel wasn't missed at all just deemed too technical and detailed to delve into on articles centered around real estate, social media, virtual tour walk-through and all those other good things the large majority of readers of such news would be interested in. Those who want to learn how LL pays for their server farms can easily find that information out.
> "equates to about 8.3 simulators. In the grand scheme of things, that isn't much... not much at all."
Yup, you're right it isn't. No where near enough to effect the mainland selling market prices or effect those who rent out land from their estate sims. Glad it took only time to quell the fear that Coldwell Banker was in SL to make profit while taking profit from hard working individuals and small business.
>"It is kind of cool to consider that a real estate company is reselling web hosting."
That it is. Happened to be one of the key points for Coldwell Banker's first project in SL. Though what is offered is geared towards newer residents in the world. Anyone who qualifies (over 99% of SL's population) is welcome to rent a 1024sqm themed residential mainland rental (for less than 1USD per week) or purchase up to 2048sqm of mainland.
Chrischun Fassbinder
chrischun@code4software.com
Land isn't Land Isn't Land?
It was missed. Further, there is almost no parallel between real world real estate and Second Life real estate - unless you consider 'flipping' to be the essence of Real Estate.
Now, you can say all of these things now - but the truth of the matter is that it kinda sorta looks a bit silly when you put it into this context - and that is probably why it was avoided.
'A Host is a Host is a Host' is all well and good, but that hasn't been what any of the media has said. No one seemed to make the connection or even tried to. Why? Because it was more profitable not to.
I could call a duck a 'cow', but that doesn't make it a cow. :-)
Incidentally, all those Mr. Lee ads on 16m plots was one of the reasons I left mainland. I hope that those won't be in the Coldwell Banker areas - that would negatively affect their investment., and would be bad for business. Subjective, ain't it? :-)
What point are you trying to make?
> "No one seemed to make the connection or even tried to. Why? Because it was more profitable not to."
What connection? That the rental sims owned by Coldwell Banker are operating on servers like so many services on the Internet do? Of which for 1USD a week interested residents can get their own shared space on the server? How would the technical knowledge of this hurt profit?
Whatever point you are trying to make, it's not very clear how the parallels between shared web hosting and rental sims even relate to each other. Besides both running on a server, many being shared by multiple users. Neither is it clear how these relations can be considered negative or positive. Rather, it just is the way things work for SL and many online services. See reworked points below.
Perhaps you could clarify by continuing to reword the above article or write another piece giving explanation on how failing to delve into the technical workings of land and sims was intentionally avoided "Because it was more profitable not to."
Lets go over it one more time...
* 'Data' on the Internet exists on servers (computers).
* A price is paid for the setup initially by people who buy resources (hosted on a computer server)
* 'Owners' of resources get to pay a recurring fee - bill/invoice, fail to pay it, and service provider will cancel your service.
* There are standards applied (or not) to your use of the services - and if you are naughty on the provider's owned machines, account will be canceled due to service agreement violation.
* Other people on the same server equally share based on their payment plans an amount of resources on that server (compete in SL to unequally share, someday we'll get better control of resources than just prim usage and limited script throttling), such as continually running processes.
> "I hope that those won't be in the Coldwell Banker areas - that would negatively affect their investment., and would be bad for business."
By that, I take it you haven't even visited any of the Coldwell Banker rental sims, for sale properties, office headquarters, rebuild of the one real life house currently on the market or any of the other locations. As nothing more than a friendly suggestion, sounds like you really need to get out more, or at least do some field research before you write. Been open since March. Feel free to stop by during staff hours for a tour. :)
Heh.
Thank you for making my points again.
And, as far as your ads - that was a pretty obvious tweak. You never responded to IMs about your ads, and you deflected here. Well done!
And, as far as my research - hey, I can always do better. Can't you? :-)