Yesterday at the morning Second Life mentors' meeting, Linden Lab staff announced that Linden Lab's sponsored mentor group, which had been functionally closed (in all but name) for approximately a year now, would finally be disbanded in practice. The move doesn't really come as much of a surprise to observers of the Lab's sponsored volunteer programs over the last eighteen months.
» Read More 

Virtual environment operator Linden Lab has partnered up with 888 Holdings plc's Gisland/Dragonfish division to provide payment processing for non-US Second Life customers.
» Read More 

Telstra BigPond (a major Australian Internet Service Provider, with an approximate 50% market-share) has had one of the most popular corporate presences in the virtual environment of Second Life, even including a customer service center staffed eleven hours per day, five days per week. In a nation with expensively metered bandwidth, BigPond even refrained from metering a portion of the data sent to its customers from Second Life. All of this for what has basically been an experiment.

That, however, appears to be coming to a close. BigPond intends to shutter its Second Life presence on 16 December.
» Read More 

Linden Lab has released the figures for the third-quarter performance of Second Life.

If you want the short version, it wasn't a growth quarter. Q3 2009 figures were not really very distinguishable from Q2 2009. There's actually nothing wrong with that. Growth plateaus are occasional and inevitable and generally represent a good opportunity for engineering and support to catch up a little with the service.
» Read More 

Yesterday, Linden Lab made an announcement regarding third-party (or after-market, if you prefer) viewers that has so far elicited a vociferous response from some of the more outspoken Second Life users, and those involved in after-market viewer-development. The announcement largely revolves around upcoming policies that have yet to be decided.
» Read More 

The Imprudence project has released the next beta in this release cycle for their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of Massively's favorite after-market Second Life viewers (and just about the only one whose licensing status they've been able to verify with confidence).
» Read More 

"Games have traditionally been a relatively sex free scene but that is all changing with the recent explosion in explicit MMOs. You can engage in various kinky acts and indulge your most secret fantasies online with lots of like minded strangers. Would you like to know more?"

If you are like me, you definitely want to know more.

As technology improves, the quality of this content will improve along with it. Whether it is simply better graphics or full on technodildonics, this part of the MMO market is sure to be a profitable one.
» Read More 

Having virtual sex in Second Life isn't what it used to be.

The 6-year-old virtual world, run by Linden Lab of San Francisco, is apparently so littered with bootlegged sex toys that it's hard to know whether you're getting the right bang for your buck.

Raising the stakes on a two-year-old intellectual property controversy in Second Life, a popular seller of online adult novelties filed a federal copyright- and trademark-infringement lawsuit against Linden Lab this week. The suit claims that Linden looks the other way, while virtual residents rip off the SexGen product line, which includes specially programmed beds, rugs, sofas and even a coffin that enable consenting avatars to engage in virtual sex acts.
» Read More 

Tonight there's going to be a Second Life panel being run here at Dragon*Con, and Massively woul love it if you attended! The panel will be run simultaneously in Second Life and in real life.
» Read More 

Linden Lab have launched the promised revamp of the secondlife.com Web-site rather sooner than expected, with the new site having gone live today. Massively's takeaway from the presentation at the recent Second Life Community Convention was that the new site wasn't due for a little while yet, during which time it would receive additional features.

Nevertheless, the new site and dashboard have launched, and look pretty much like what was previewed by Tom Hale just recently. Hale described the site revamp as a beginning, rather than as an end, so there's still a ways to go yet.
» Read More 

The new traffic scores will replace the old scores on 1 September, with heavily trafficked parcels expected to see the least difference in resulting scores. The new system simply totals cumulative minutes spent on the parcel, what Linden Lab has previously referred to as the '1:1:1 system': One point is one user for one minute; rather than a system which partially relies on where a user spends the rest of their time during the day.
» Read More 

The Second Life Avaline service beta has come to a close, and the product is now launching properly. Avaline allows callers on a land-line or mobile to call a logged-in user within Second Life.
» Read More 

It seems these days that you can't have a Linden Lab employee give a speech to Second Life users without some included warning label of rough times ahead for them. It's almost relentlessly axiomatic nowadays.

At this year's Second Life Community Convention, Rosedale gently urged users and Lindens to support some necessary changes to come: "Try to work with us. Let go a bit." Ironically, he has encapsulated the same core message that Second Life users have been trying to get Linden Lab to hear for the last several years.
» Read More 

As a part of his keynote presentation today at this year's Second Life Community Convention, Linden Lab's Tom Hale has unveiled a new plug-in framework for the Second Life viewer. The Second Life viewer has hitherto been restricted to rendering media content that was supported either by its browser component or by the use of Apple's Quicktime. Quicktime is certainly quite workable, but only provides a subset of the extensive range of potentially viewable media that's out there.

The introduction of the LLMedia API looks to change all that, by allowing a straightforward plug-in system to extend the viewer's ability to render various arbitrary kinds of parcel media.
» Read More 

In 2008, the IRS project team established a presence in the Second Life virtual world with the goal of exploring the potential use of this environment for recruitment and training purposes. The team has created the IRS Careers Island and constructed a sky platform with an IRS Careers Center and an IRS Education Center. A number of building design configurations have been tested. A number of education and entertainment features have also been built to attract residents to the simulation (sim). All basic construction has been completed and the sim has been opened to the general population in Second Life since February 2009.

Nearly identical to brand marketing in the physical world marketplace, brand marketing in the SL virtual world involves placing brand messaging in high traffic venues. Unlike the physical world, the IRS has actually built its own venue that provides excellent marketing opportunities.

In the physical world, the IRS could spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, on sponsoring a race car that displays their brand in a field of thirty or more other cars. In the SL virtual world, the IRS has spent a few thousand dollars to build complete entertainment and communications venue that includes a race course.
» Read More 

This week, Linden Lab announced a move to quash casual infringement of marks, rights and copyrights on their Web-based Second Life goods service, Xstreet SL, among a general tightening of the listing rules.
» Read More 

Linden Lab's Tom Hale has published the Quarterly report for Second Life for Q2 2009: "Economy grows 94% year to year, hits new all time high in Q2; World expands and voice usage hits all time high; Bot policy affects user hours and logins"
» Read More 

Linden Lab has launched a contest on 99designs to obtain a new logo for their Snowglobe Second Life viewer. The prize has been prepaid to 99designs and the chosen winner will be paid the sum of US$295 by them.
» Read More 

Massively would like to caution their Second Life readers about a dodgy Second Life viewer that's currently doing the rounds under rather dubious circumstances. The viewer is calling itself Neil Life, and purports to include some content-ripping features over and above those normally available to users.
» Read More 

You may have heard that the official Stargate Worlds MMORPG is dead before it even launched. But that will not stop you from playing this free Stargate game...
» Read More