Cory Disavows FIC, then throws it $17K in Business
by Alphaville Herald on 12/07/05 at 2:58 pm
The ever vigilant Zero Grace of the Clickable Culture flog blog is reporting the strange confluence of two proclamations from Cory Linden. The first one is Cory’s claim at the GLS conference that there is no inner core of users with important access to the Lindens, and Cory’s almost simultaneous announcement that a bank has purchased an island and and that, quoting Zero, “a group of users known for outstanding Second Life creations was recommended as potential hires by Linden Lab. The bank paid some or all of this group around $17,000USD to create content for the services project.”
Dang, I must have missed that memo.
Tony Walsh
Jul 12th, 2005
The source of the reports was video captured from the GLS Conference, which is available for viewing here. Cory and James Linden join Prof. Megan Conklin for a talk on the impact of user-created content. The conference took place late last month, and after reviewing only two of the videos available, I’m sorry I missed it. It seems either well worth the $400 price-tag, or well worth trying to sneak onto the presenter’s bill for next year.
Az Czukor
Jul 12th, 2005
Oooof. Can’t say as that looks too good for LL.
The best way to handle that kind of thing would be to have the bank advertise for builders themselves, rather than have LL recommend users. Or better, let LL’s graphics people freelance the gig, I’m sure they could use the money.
This doesn’t just smack of favoritism, it reeks of it.
Tony Walsh
Jul 12th, 2005
At this point, we don’t know the fine details of the deal except for what Cory exposed in the video. He didn’t mention whether or not the bank placed a Wanted ad (where would they do such a thing, really), or how much, specifically, LL had to do with the deal. On the surface, it seems an ill-conceived move on behalf of LL.
I noticed that on the official forums, LL has opened up bids for a contract to build their new Recruitment Center. Of particular interest is that LL didn’t mention what currency would be used for payment. I also wonder if the ramp-up in Linden Employment might be related to outside service work such as this bank deal. Rather than LL giving away business to resident builders, they might make more money acting as a broker–hiring freelancers themselves for development of client (rather than LL) projects. This way, they could pay residents in play-money rather than US dollars, but ghet paid US dollars from clients.
Cocoanut
Jul 12th, 2005
So far this evening, my poll posted something over two hours ago on the SL forums is running 3-1 in favor of SL handing these situations in the same manner as they handled this bank situation:
Cocoanut
Jul 13th, 2005
Late night development:
Robin has announced an e-mail address people can write to if they would like to be considered for things like this.
Additionally, she solicited input regarding the “Developer Program” they have yet to put in place, which is apparently going to apply to situations like this one. I asked where we can find more details about that.
coco