Linden Lab is in the throes of closing the official Second Life forums and is creating alternative discussion spaces in its Clearspace blog/forum hybrid.

According to previous figures from Linden Lab staff, fewer than 700 of 18.1 million registered Second Life accounts ever participated in the official forums provided by the Lab. The partial closure of many of the most heavily trafficked areas of those forums when Lab announcements were migrated back out to the blog in 2006 did little to boost participation in the official forums.

The official vbulletin-based forums "did not scale" according to Linden Lab and were difficult to maintain, even for such modest usage levels as they experienced.

Continue reading Second Life official forums to be replaced Tuesday

Second Life official forums to be replaced Tuesday originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're going to take a selection of reader questions that we've received in comments and in the virtual mailbag and do our best to offer up some useful answers. Join us as we whirl through the mail.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: Questions from the virtual mailbag

The Virtual Whirl: Questions from the virtual mailbag originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

There's a been talk going around among users that a Linden Dollar bonus made to users that sign up for Second Life premium accounts is not paid to users who are upgrading an account from basic to premium. That is, it was said that only users creating a new premium account got the bonus and users who upgraded did not, despite Linden Lab's advertising material apparently promoting it for both.

A number of you wrote in asking us about that yesterday, and we contacted Linden Lab for you to get an answer one way or another. That line of questioning bore some definitive fruit.

Continue reading Rumor: Bonus payment premium incentive not being paid to upgrading Second Life users? [updated]

Rumor: Bonus payment premium incentive not being paid to upgrading Second Life users? [updated] originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

"Get a life", "Get a first life", and so on, and so forth. If you're involved in virtual environments, you've probably heard this phrase a lot. Wagner James Au of New World Notes suggests that people who use those phrases are among the least likely to 'have a life' themselves.

Well, we'd say he's half right. It's more that the people you hear it from don't really have much of an idea of what life is all about and how it works. It's not an uncommon theme. Botgirl Questi points out that in order to see something more clearly, sometimes you have to look at it from a very different perspective.

This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're going to take a couple perspectives for a spin, and talk about the meaning of life actually is, insofar as the phrase "get a life" is concerned.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: The meaning of life

The Virtual Whirl: The meaning of life originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In a move that will no doubt perplex, flummox and befuddle many media commentators and technology columnists who erroneously believed that Second Life was a Web 2.0 social networking tool, Linden Lab has acquired social networking site, Avatars United (and developers of same, Enemy Unknown AB). This also has the side-effect of shooting down any semblance of Wallace Linden's identity piece last week being an overture of a conversation, instead making it look like the usual introduction to a Linden Lab fait accompli.

We've written about Avatars United on a couple of previous occasions, but never really had much call to get involved ourselves. The social networking tool includes a large number of MMOGs and non-game virtual environments, being best known for it's strong application support of open-ended space-based MMOG, EVE Online.

Continue reading Linden Lab acquires Avatars United, Enemy Unknown AB

Linden Lab acquires Avatars United, Enemy Unknown AB originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Traditionally, Linden Lab's blog communications have seemed to be reserved for things that had been finalized, were being finalized but already set in stone, or may not have been set in stone but gave that appearance by being nearly identical both before and after user-feedback. All this punctuated by a smattering of video tutorials, infomercials and statistics.

Wallace Linden's recent attempt at (what we think might possibly be) a productive conversation on Second Life identification linking looks like a bit of a failure, mostly because it seems to have failed to distinguish itself from these traditional developer/operator communication patterns.

Continue reading Will the real topic please stand up? Anatomy of a community communications breakdown

Will the real topic please stand up? Anatomy of a community communications breakdown originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Come February, Linden Lab is having yet another attempt at enforcing the existing rules for event posting in Second Life. In the past, the Lab's gone at the process in a rather determined fashion on a number of occasions, but its energy each time ran out after only a few weeks of vetting events listings.

One of the matters of concern would be how event rules are actually applied this time around. If we were to divide events listings into quality events and spammy junk, quite a large number of the quality events don't actually comply with the posting rules - usually due to the number of events being held, and limits on the number of listings (or of listing changes) that the events system will tolerate.

Continue reading Linden Lab to crack down on events listing spam. Again

Linden Lab to crack down on events listing spam. Again originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Welcome to The Virtual Whirl, a new weekly Massively column covering virtual environments generally. The term 'virtual world' is slowly seeing less use, being supplanted by the more general 'virtual environment', but the world term still has a fair bit of life left in it.

Virtual environments covers a whole lot of ground. From William Crowther's original efforts in 1976 that based a game in a virtual version of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, virtual environments have been a part of gaming, artificial intelligence and behavioral research, modeling, telemetry and process control and more.

Nowadays we're seeing Second Life, Blue Mars, There.com, IMVU and others trying to find places in non-game contexts, like content-development and prototyping, publishing and performance, entertainment and social, education and business; efforts that are met with varying amounts of success.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: Community guide to Virtual Worlds

The Virtual Whirl: Community guide to Virtual Worlds originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Registrations are presently open for SL Pro! a two day conference being run by Linden Lab for 'serious' professional Second Life content-creators to take place in late February this year, in Second Life itself, with a bit of help from NMC (the New Media Consortium).

Unfortunately, it's a conference with more than one track, where the two tracks generally have a fair bit of overlap, so that's a bit of an issue. The two tracks are building and scripting, each with eight sessions.

Continue reading Registrations open for SL Pro! conference, February

Registrations open for SL Pro! conference, February originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 23 Jan 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab says it hopes to have a public beta of the Second Life 2.0 viewer in February, presumably targeting an official release in March. Given that the Lab wants to move forward with quarterly planned viewer releases, this means that the current Second Life 1.23 viewer will lose official support at approximately the end of June.

Linden Lab says it has already finalized features and the user-interface at this stage, and is not planning on making any substantive changes between now and release. Any work beyond bug-fixes and stabilization for the viewer is to be deferred to the mid-year 2.1 release.

Continue reading Second Life 2.0 viewer for February/March

Second Life 2.0 viewer for February/March originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

This week Linden Lab published a set of economic data for Q4 2009, and for 2009 as a whole. After going through the data in detail, and discovering at least one important typo and one important calculation error, it looked like we were going to have to recheck every figure before presenting them.

That's a lot of work, especially as the data published in the quarterly/annual reports doesn't follow the same definitions as the ongoing statistical feeds or is not represented in them.

So we thought, well sod that for a game of soldiers. Instead, let's talk about the report's claim that the Second Life economy has grown 65% in 2009 over 2008, and why that's just rubbish.

Continue reading That's not the Second Life economy!

That's not the Second Life economy! originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab's last CFO (Chief Financial Officer), John Zdanowski oversaw one of the largest growth periods in the history of Second Life. That growth came to a bit of a shuddering halt around the time of his departure last March, though we think that's just coincidental [We'll be looking closer at the 2009 Second Life metrics later this week].

Throughout the comparatively flat second, third and fourth quarters of 2009, the CFO's chair has remained unwarmed, but Linden Lab announced today that the position has now finally been filled by Bob Komin.

Continue reading Linden Lab appoints new CFO

Linden Lab appoints new CFO originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Just lately, over the last month and a half or so, regular Second Life users will have spotted an increase in subsystem outages, including transaction failures, object and teleportation problems, and just general weirdness. Systems seem to be experiencing trouble that you could just about set a watch by.

Linden Lab's Frank Ambrose explains that that is to be expected and there's some more to come as some of the oldest pieces of the Second Life infrastructure are ripped out for replacement or relocation from their original site at the San Francisco data-center.

Continue reading Second Life grid flutters to flutter a while longer

Second Life grid flutters to flutter a while longer originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

So, as you may recall last week Linden Lab responded about what appeared to be Second Life advertisements that capitalized on the recently-released James Cameron film, Avatar.

Linden Lab implied (though didn't actually state plainly) that the advertisements were not intended to cause confusion between Second Life and Avatar.

Since about Christmas (just after previews showing the blue-skinned Na'vi began to become available to the general public) IMVU started running some blue-skinned ads of its own.

It was when we saw the blue-avatared IMVU advertisement that sprung up during the same period that we inevitably started thinking about Sea Monkeys.

There's more similarities going on here than just the visible, so let's rummage around and see if we can't find one of the old advertisements in our files.

Continue reading The Sea Monkey experience of avatars

The Sea Monkey experience of avatars originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Well, it's been a long time in coming, but it is finally just around the corner. Back in October, Linden Lab added a facility where Second Life users could flag the accounts of their scripted agents (commonly called 'bots'). That was in October and the flag itself has had no effect so far.

However, along with the search update on Wednesday, 20 January, user accounts (whether they are actually scripted agents or not) who have chosen to turn the flag on for their account will no longer count towards the per-parcel traffic data generated by the system.

Continue reading Second Life scripted agents to be exempted from traffic this month

Second Life scripted agents to be exempted from traffic this month originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Second Life user-concurrency and user-to-user transaction figures took a bit of an unexpected jump this week, rising sharply after a year of relatively little motion. Through 2009, user-concurrency has been on a slight, though not terribly significant decline, while user-to-user transactions remained flat and rather unexciting.

The sudden rise coincided with an advertising campaign by Linden Lab, where James Cameron's Avatar and Second Life were rather strongly linked in a series of banner advertisements run on YouTube and as a part of Linden Lab's affiliate program.

Continue reading Avatars blue, Second Life concurrency and transactions rise

Avatars blue, Second Life concurrency and transactions rise originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

There's no doubt in our minds that virtual environments are here to stay, for a significant fraction of the foreseeable forever. Love them or loathe them they're in their third decade now, and like the Web, it's now more a matter of how they fit in to the rest of the world, rather than if they do.

In education, virtual environments are now a part of an educator's toolbox and as education continues to combine, refine, and recombine tools, virtual environments will find increasingly better, more effective uses in education. There's no doubt about that among educators, even if the technologies aren't ready for widespread educational uses today.

Continue reading Educators find common ground in Second Life, for now

Educators find common ground in Second Life, for now originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab's systems administrator, Charity Majors has been with the company for a while - since 2004, in fact - but we've not heard much from Majors previously. That's a shame, because Majors' latest post detailing the process behind the recent Second Life central database upgrade is a real treat. We've not seen its like for a couple of years, sadly.

The story of the recent database upgrade (which was originally attempted in 2007, with less than stellar results) is frank, detailed and informative.

It's really rather a pity that Majors isn't writing blog posts on policy and economic metrics, because Majors puts almost all the other Linden Lab bloggers to shame for precision and clarity.

Continue reading The story behind the Second Life central database upgrade

The story behind the Second Life central database upgrade originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

It's always enlightening to hear from Frank Ambrose at Linden Lab. His posts about Second Life architecture, when they appear, are generally packed with information about upcoming plans, pending architecture changes and more. Clear, to the point and generally very few signs of spin (although a bit of distressing a tendency to type 'LAG' in all-caps). Overall, it's what we like to see more of.

In a similar vein, there's a notice from Liana Linden about some late-January upgrades to the Google appliances that handle much of Second Life's search infrastructure. There's a few additional benefits in the wings there, to be sure, and well laid-out.

Continue reading Second Life search upgrades in late January

Second Life search upgrades in late January originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

It's comments about the Second Life being "deserted" or "a ghost town" that really throw muddy thinking into sharp relief. Specifically the muddy thinking of the people who tend to use these sorts phrases in connection with Second Life.

On one hand, they tell us that Second Life users are lifeless shut-ins who are wasting their lives online in Linden Lab's virtual environment, and then on the other tell us that the place is a deserted ghost-town that nobody's using. Well, you can't have it both ways. Fact is, neither statement is true, so it really isn't either way.

Continue reading The Second Life "ghost town"

The Second Life "ghost town" originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.