Massively: "Back in September, when we first noticed the hiring of Tom Hale (T Linden) as Linden Lab's new Chief Product Officer, we had a little difficulty envisioning quite what Hale's role would even be, given that Linden Lab and Second Life was very platform-oriented and had very little product-focus. Apparently, adding that focus as an extra consideration throughout the business seems to be the thing.

Initially, we were more or less expecting Hale to be more focused on, well, the sort of thing that Rivers Run Red's Immersive Workspaces is providing. Perhaps there's some of that in there too. Right now, Hale's looking at Second Life premium accounts and stipends and how they can be improved; a topic which has been much on the Lab's mind of late.

Non-tier-paying premium accounts are apparently in the majority, which obviously suggests that they represent more value for the user than tier-paying premium accounts. Still and all, premium accounts of either stripe are still on the wane, and it would seem to be to everyone's benefit if premium accounts represented better overall value."
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Via Massively: "The Second Life viewer dev team has been working furiously away for some time now, and you may be forgiven for wondering where the fruits of that labor are. It has, after all, been some time since we've seen a new viewer other than emergency security fixes."
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Develop a virtual world application to make user's lives better

Second Life is in the news yet again this week, although this time not because of virtual adultery, but because $10,000 is up for grabs for canny developers.

Linden Labs is calling on freelance developers to build Second Life's greatest ever application or in-game project that will improve the lives of the virtual world's residents when they are offline, with a $10,000 car
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Massively: "Since the announcement of Openspaces 3.0 product pricing for Second Life (and the subsequent update to a reduced specification Openspaces 4.0 product), Linden Lab has seen its virtual world shrink for the first time on record with a net loss of 24.05 million square metres (a little less than 6,000 acres).

That's a net loss, so however many new simulators have been brought online since the beginning of the month, those gains have been canceled out by customers dumping land, and an additional 24 million square metres have been lost. During its Q2 2008 report, Linden Lab identified the (now deprecated) Openspaces 2.0 product as a primary growth driver."
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The published, key metrics for Second Life for the month of September are now available as both an Open Document Spreadsheet and in Excel format.

Your key takeaways this month are an increasing fall in total premium accounts, a fall in total user hours, zero mainland (Linden owned estate) growth (but a 7% increase in privately owned estates), and a reduction in economic activity.
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Tom Hale, formerly Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Knowledge Worker Business Unit at Adobe Systems has been hired to fill what is apparently a new role at Linden Lab: Chief Product Officer. Hale, as CPO will be reporting to new Lab CEO, Mark Kingdon.
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Massively: "Phatland (aka Phat Cat's Jazz club) was originally founded by Dilbert Dilweg and Charity Colville, two people who met in Second Life, worked together, fell in love, and forged a successful and lasting relationship in the physical world - not an uncommon story. Indeed, it seemed like Phatland and its club grew with their romance, up until mid 2007 or so Phatland was one of the single most popular places in Second Life by any reasonable reckoning. [...]We're not really sure what happened subsequently, or how many hands the island has been through since then, but the present owners are preparing to sell the island on eBay, starting the auction on 1 October."
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Tateru Nino writes: "Linden Lab apparently is in the planning stages for an upcoming rollout of new, "Class 6" hardware for Second Life, representing a step up from existing Class 5 server systems. Little is actually known about the roll-out, but they appear to be part of another project to migrate the server systems from 32-bit to 64-bit. How far along in that planning they may be is uncertain."
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A new Second Life viewer is available. Not a release candidate, but an update to the 1.20 series - what's generally referred to as an 'official' or production viewer. The version number for this release is 1.20.16 (97603), and only contains one listed change over 1.20.15.
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Tatero Nino writes:

"At a cost of approximately $23,000 AUD, the WA Police recruiting pavilion in Second Life seems to be quite well thought out. It is attractive, takes avatar and third-person camera mechanics into account. It is also regularly staffed by a police officer (avatar name: Trudi Karu) during WA business hours, and seeks to attract people into the staff-starved Western Australia police force.

Unfortunately, we have had no success in communicating with Trudi, who remained unresponsive throughout our visit, but there is a highly responsive presence at the site. The RMU WA POL. That's the Retired Medically Unfit WA Police Officers. They have a rotating presence at the recruiting site and are very keen and able to discuss another side to this story. Far from being sign-waving protesters or picketers, they're very human, very dedicated and articulate ex-police officers with a story to tell."
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Massively: Not a good month. Mostly things seem static, with slight gains being offset by slight losses (aside from the continuing bleed of subscriber accounts). Basically it seems that Second Life experienced no significant growth for August 2008.

Demographically, Second Life is still firmly in the hands of Baby Boomers and Generation X, with younger users statistically remaining unengaged with the platform.
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Remember back in August where we predicted that a corporate/enterprise version of the Second Life grid was more or less inevitable? Well, that appears to have functionally come to pass, though the details are still hazy.

Rivers Run Red has partnered up with Linden Lab to provide a product called Immersive Workspaces to (what appears to be primarily) the global enterprise corporate market. Immersive Workspaces is a fusion of Second Life grid technology along with a blend of Second Life objects, web-sites and web-services, all apparently very tightly integrated.
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Massively: On a bit of a tangent to the battle between SLART's Richard Minsky and Linden Lab over the SLART trademark (which we will be getting back to, as there have been interesting developments there), we're going to take a few minutes to look at a rather interesting development surrounding the 'SL' trademark.

As we wrote previously, the 'SL' trademark is not a registered trademark in the USA, and the registration process was started almost three months after Minsky commenced the process for his SLART trademark. Linden Lab's 'SL' trademark has now reached an interesting stage.

It has been published for opposition.
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Continuing the attempts to further stabilize the new Second Life server code, SLS-1.24.5 will be replaced with SLS-1.24.6 in the latter half of this week, Wednesday through Friday. There are also some signs that precursors to yet another revision, SLS-1.24.7 are already undergoing preliminary testing.
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Massively: "Ladies and gentlemen, we'd like you to give a big hand to the US Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which is back with us once again as a special, and rather unexpected guest. You see, while the UIGEA initially kicked around in 2006, the actual regulations that will implement it are just about to kick off.

Today, the House Financial Services Committee will be holding an emergency mark-up of some of this legislation. Why is it an emergency? Well, because while the whole thing is technically about 'gambling', the wording of the UIGEA isn't at all clear about what it actually is making unlawful, and when it comes to legislation and regulations, the words are everything. Words that are getting decided today."
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Linden Lab's Frank Ambrose (Senior VP of Global Technology) has weighed in with his first public statement.

Ambrose delivers the basic message that players hear in virtually every infrastructure-related announcement for the last several years: Scalability and stability. Unfortunately, after three years, users indicate that they're finding the promises wearing a little thin.
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Linden Lab's Jack Linden, head of the land team has announced that Linden Lab will not go ahead with previously-announced plans to license network advertisers on the mainland of the virtual environment Second Life.
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Massively: Linden Lab have been working very hard to attempt to bug-fix and stabilize the SLS-1.24 Mono-enabled Second Life simulator server software (try saying that three times, fast). Since Monday, the 8th of September, we've counted no less than 19 distinct versions of 1.24.5 that got far enough along to test.
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A 9/11 remembrance was held in Second Life yesterday on the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

As reported by The Click Heard Round the World:

"There were 70-80 other avatars present... Most folks sat on the grass in respectful silence, restricting communication to instant messages. A couple of avatars in soldier's uniforms stood at attention. Believe it or not, it means a lot for a bunch of avatars to sit in silence. It just never happens...

On the audio stream, starting at 8:45AM EST (when the first tower was hit) and for several hours afterwards, the names of all the victims of 9/11 were read out by various members of the Second Life community... You could hear people's voices breaking in the midst of reading the seemingly endless list of those lost..."
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Massively: "Earlier this year, we made a number of attempts to determine how Linden Lab handled DMCA notices on content in their virtual environment, Second Life. Linden Lab declined to answer at the time, however, the owners of a clothing and accessories store ~*Fresh Baked Goods*~ (whom we will call FBG for brevity) were recently the recipient of one such DMCA action, and have documented the whole process from their end of things.

It all started on Tuesday, 19 August 2008, when an email arrived from the Removals Department at Linden Research Inc (the proper name for Linden Lab). Citing three sets of necklaces as the offending articles, the owners of FBG were asked to disable or remove access to the content and had two days to fax a formal DMCA counter-notice to Linden Lab, including their physical identities and contact information, which Linden Lab would then pass on to the person or organization who filed the original DMCA notice."
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