(From a purely personal standpoint, “giddyap” looks weird. I’d go with “giddyup” myself.)

I imagine even if it makes it out of beta it’ll be subject to being abandoned eventually. Long duration marketing spends are rare, ‘specially one with as apparent a financial bleed as purchasing ad impressions.

It’d be reasonable to believe the limits of this beta were just limits specific to the beta if they didn’t at all map perfectly to how Gaikai advertises their services.

There’s two ways for example to try and make sense of the 60 minute time limit and guest account requirements:

1. They’re convenient for the beta as it limits the amount of time one person can try it in order to give another person a fair amount of time as well, without loading up the usual 50,000 item inventories or worrying about asset transfers at this point in the beta.

or

2. Gaikai spells it out quite clearly that their service is for trials and demos, not THE play experience. For a game that’d sell on Steam, the ROI is evident, so long as the average amount of minutes purchased from Gaikai before a single box sale doesn’t cut too deeply into the profit margin of that sale, the ROI is there. Linden Lab need only do a little more math and probably already have a formula as to what 1 new resident means on average for Linden purchases.

Skylight is cool and all albeit I don’t see the problem that it solves unless sign ups have slowed this year and this could reverse that trend. But this doesn’t tackle the problem of retention by giving preexisting residents the option of doing things like experiencing Second Life on their iPad. This is a pretty big far cry from what Blue Mars is doing and OnLive has done, i.e. cloud rendering as THE medium, not just a marketing tool for trial accounts.

IMO the biggest asset LL has is the engagement time of its consumers
(Gary’s Social Media Count click on the Games tab & select a duration in the widget http://ow.ly/3axht )

I believe with a browser based viewer & massive eyes on power of Second Life, LL are looking to tap into the greatest source of web revenue, advertising.
If as I asked above the browser based viewer allows for the massive “live experience” alluded to by Phillip, the potential revenues could be enormous.

For those of you saying your limited on bandwidth.. a little tip.. contact your isp and tell them you want business services… its a little more a month.. but they don’t usually put caps on them.

I’m trying to get better, the counsellor has told me when ever Linden Lab announce something i should think of something pleasant from my early days in SL and try and associate that with the Lab in order to feel calm.

Im also constantly told to ignore whats going to happen in the future and concentrate on what i already have in SL. So no browser viewer, no shadow and lighting, no mesh, no group chat.

Let me start again…… no, actually,….. i got work to do

A part of the Second Life new users left after a quick preview, during which they couldn’t find anything interesting. A web viewer may make the discovery process easier.

Just two of the reasons why I think a Second Life web viewer may be a great thing.

Other, even more interesting, related thoughts by Grace McDunnough:
http://phasinggrace.blogspot.com/2010/10/second-life-skylight-browser-based.html
http://phasinggrace.blogspot.com/2010/06/observations-from-linden-lab-layoffs.html (ignore stuff about M Linden, scroll to the ‘VURL’ part)

[as a side note, there are some really venomous spiders here. Make me uncomfortable. Almost made me run away]

So after reading the comments here, this browser viewer seems nothing more than a glorified advert for Newbs to open up from an advert in a youtube side bar and sample a tiny piece of SL. Ok that might work, thats kinda kool.

But i still want to login to SL on my iPad to quickly visit my friends, see whats going on. To send my mates links for them to quickly loginworld to visit a live music event, or watch a race or show.

I still dont see that happening any time soon.

Question I have is does a service like this get around the problem of scalability that SL currently suffers from, only several 10′s of avatars & huge lag in a region. Could a service like this allow for tens of hundreds of avatars at an event with good frame rates for all?
Is this the “live experience” Philip alludes to in his TIME 100 Roundtables ( http://ow.ly/3ar8i ) answer to “What people will pay for”?

If this is really going to work the way it seems to be thus far (60 minute time limit guest account, after that, get a full account and download the client), it comes off a bit bait and switch to the exact same trouble area Second Life has always been in.