SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

As your login splash screen may have already told you, a new official viewer is available today, as an optional upgrade… Announcing the Second Life 1.22.11 Viewer! This viewer is a maintenance release featuring improved stability, a greatly improved crash rate, and over 70 bug fixes and usability improvements from previous versions of Second Life. Some of these are small improvements that make existing features work more smoothly (like Beacons, Mini Map, and Snapshots), and others  address problems in the rendering of avatars.  Download it here!

The 1.22 viewer has completed twelve iterations of Release Candidate cycle testing (with hundreds of crash reports & logs provided to our engineers by you, the Residents). With more than 18 key crash fixes in this version, you should experience greater stability than with the previous version 1.21. From all crash metrics collected to this point, we have observed an approximate 20% improvement in total crash rate with this viewer - across all types of hardware.

In addition, this viewer includes completely overhauled translations into both French and Japanese, as well as open source contributions to improve the translations into Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified), Polish, Hungarian, and Danish!  (You can try these out from Preferences > General > Language.)

Finally, the 1.22 viewer delivers some highly anticipated fixes for Resident-reported bugs. Here are just a few, from the long list of those we are proud to include:

• Fixed: VWR-7331: llMapDestination can’t TP to Skybox over 1000 meters
• Fixed: VWR-8920: moving the camera around, or zooming in on an avatar, some attachments ‘disappear’ from view
• Fixed: Removal of Palletized Textures which is the primary cause of the bug VWR-9358: Texture rendering problem Nvidia 178.13 release drivers
• Fixed: VWR-10463: Detected video memory is too high and causes some texture downloads to stall or load forever
• … and over 70 more fixes as listed in the complete Release Notes!

The Release team sends many, many thanks to the Residents and open source contributors who made this 1.22 Viewer possible.  We could not have produced this without your incredible feedback during the Release Candidate cycle.

Note:  You’ll notice the version number is 1.22.11… For residents using the Release Candidate, we have also simultaneously released an equivalent RC11 today with the same code.  The only change from RC10 to RC11 is 1 critical and isolated crash fix for VWR-12274.  (Thanks Emileigh Starbrook for finding that!)

My name is Ram Linden, I’ve been with Linden Lab for almost two years, and I’ve recently been assigned to the role of Product Manager of the Economy.  My core responsibility is to focus on the LindeX, user to user transactions, and anything else that drives economic activity in-world.  As we focus on improving the shopping experience on XStreet SL, these underlying services are getting some attention too. Be sure to follow this post to the end for an important viewer change in version 1.23.

Average L$ Per Shopping Session

To improve the services we need to learn more about how they are used. I recently examined shopping experiences in-world and found some interesting data. When I looked at what an average shopping session in Second Life was like, I found residents spent on average a total of L$1,700 on about 4.4 transactions, paying an average purchase price of about L$380.  Note that this only counts in-world transactions and not XStreet SL purchases.

Most Popular L$ Buy Sizes

We can see this sort of behavior reflected in average L$ buy order sizes on the LindeX as well.  On the web, where the auto-populated L$1,000 amount is not present as it is in the viewer, L$5,000 is the most popular order size and L$2,000 is a close second. As the chart below shows, the auto-populated amount in the viewer has a strong influence on the popularity of L$1,000 as an order size, pushing it to almost three times the popularity of the second place amount.

New Default Viewer Setting

When considering what this means for new users, there’s a disconnect. A block of L$1,000 would only partially service an average shopping session. If new users have at least as many L$ as are spent in an average session, most should be able to avoid running their L$ balance dry prematurely.  Not only that, but more L$ jingling in the pockets of new residents means more sales for our merchants and better engagement with new residents.  In the next version of our viewer, 1.23, currently available as a release candidate, we have changed this default amount to L$2,000 to help accomplish this. It is our hope that this will generate more customers and more sales for our merchants in addition to a better new resident experience.

I’ll be in and out of the forums to respond to any feedback or questions; click the link below to join the discussion!

Greetings,

As some of you may have seen, a resourceful Resident got her hands on a very early build of Viewer 2009.

What we ship later this year will be very different from what appeared in that post. We’ll share a sneak peek of the “real” Viewer 2009 later in the year, with plenty of time to receive and incorporate feedback before the final iteration ships.

I blogged about our goals for Viewer 2009 earlier this year. As active Second Life Residents, you know that the redesign of the Viewer is a huge undertaking. We’re very excited about the progress we’ve made so far but there is still much to do.

Thank you for your excitement and your passion for Second Life.

Cheers, Howard

We’re proud to announce the release of Snowglobe 1.0! Snowglobe is a Second Life-compatible viewer, built jointly by the open source community and Linden Lab. As Philip Linden described when he first announced the project back in March, we set out to create “a widely-used, openly developed version of the Second Life client which is a compelling alternative for a broad set of users, and contains enhancements and development that then rapidly make their way back into the mainstream Second Life version.” The viewer we’re releasing today represents our first step toward that goal; getting some early features into your hands.

Watch Torley Linden’s demonstration of Snowglobe in action:

The biggest new feature is the new map. Zooming out is fast and seamless. The icons only show up when you’re zoomed in close enough for them to be useful, and don’t clutter the view when you’re zoomed out. Map tiles load quickly with the right amount of detail for the view. In short, the map really works now.

Another fun feature: the minimap will now let you zoom ridiculously close in.   Handy for those large gatherings where all of the avatar dots just seem to pile on top of each other.  It’s also more fun than you ever knew you could have with your scrollwheel.

There are under the hood improvements as well.  The changing of the map necessitated pulling in some work that we’re doing to improve how textures get loaded in the viewer.  We now have an updated texture loading mechanism, along with some textures (just map tiles for now) being loaded via HTTP rather than over our custom UDP protocol.  Don’t expect too many performance improvements just yet as the result of this, but expect bigger improvements later as we more heavily rely on this feature for future server releases.

C++ developers should find this release much easier to work with.  We’ve rolled out some work we’ve done with Kitware, makers of the popular CMake build configuration tool, which makes it much easier to compile your own build of the Snowglobe viewer.

Some things to look out for, though. This viewer is developed on a more rapid release schedule and less formal manner than the official Second Life viewer and therefore can be less stable. Snowglobe will typically contain new features, changes, or capabilities in SL which are not yet available in the official release. Some of these changes may be experimental and may or may not ultimately be included in official releases. Also note that Snowglobe connects to the live Second Life Grid. All user information, L$, content, land and other transactions conducted in this viewer are real.

If we haven’t scared you off, then please, see for yourself! Download Snowglobe now, and visit the Snowglobe home page to learn more about participating in the development of Snowglobe.

We recently made several changes to the Second Life servers to address a potential security issue. To take advantage of the recent server upgrades and ensure that Second Life functions as you expect, we have released a new version of the Second Life Viewer.

Residents using the Official and Release Candidate versions of the 1.23.4 Viewer are required to update to version 1.23.5. Those of you still using version 1.22.11 will be offered version 1.23.5 as an optional update. If you choose to remain on 1.22.11, you may notice changes in the way notecard editing behaves. If you use a viewer not created by Linden Lab, you may also see changes in the way notecard editing behaves. To avoid any potential confusion caused by these behavioral changes, we strongly recommend that you immediately update to the new 1.23.5 Second Life Viewer.

We apologize for any inconvenience this update may cause.

I’m very happy to announce that, as a core feature of the new Viewer 2 Beta, Second Life Search has been redesigned inside and out to make finding the people, places and content you’re looking for easier than ever before. We’ve revamped the interface, overhauled what’s happening under the hood, and refocused our work on Web-standard tools and methodologies that have not only improved our ability to bring you more relevant search results, but also made us faster on our feet as a development team. And, we’ve been building a first-class Search team–from Yahoo!, eBay, Google, and Amazon–to bring the best of search and advertising services to Second Life. We’ve been hard at work improving Second Life Search, and we’re excited to share some of the work that we’ve recently completed in conjunction with the new viewer.

Second Life Search, as part of Viewer 2, now includes:

• A New and Improved User Experience: The first thing that you’ll notice about search in Viewer 2 is that it’s got a whole new look and feel. We’ve reorganized the interface to be more intuitive and to use filtering and sorting techniques common to search on the Web. We’ve also cleared away some of the legacy UI found in Viewer 1.23 to create a clean hierarchy of information and actions. One of our biggest goals in this redesign was to make the search interface more inviting for new Residents while still preserving many of the search options that current Residents had become accustomed to. For example, in the Viewer 2 Beta,  there is now only one location for conducting a “Places” search (rather than a tab and a filter as found in Viewer 1.23), and that “Places” search can be filtered and sorted to achieve similar results as in Viewer 1.23.
• A Robust Search Infrastructure: We’ve also redesigned the search infrastructure to be more robust and nimble. These changes, although maybe not as immediately visible, are a major step forward as we work towards innovating more rapidly and being responsive to Resident feedback. Previously, Search was hard coded in the XUI language of Viewer 1.23; now, search uses HTML on top of Django Web services and can be developed independently of Viewer 2. This gives us greater speed and flexibility as we develop additional search features, advertising products, and bug fixes.
• Google Search Technology: As we all know, Google’s relevance algorithms are the defacto industry standard on the Internet. In Viewer 1.23, the Google Search Appliances (GSA) served results to the “All” and “Group” search tabs for years. For Search in Viewer 2, we have expanded our use of the GSAs, and they now provide the first set of results for most search types. (Advanced search users can still access Linden Lab’s proprietary search tools through category filters and sorts.) Google alone cannot provide the best results for Second Life Residents, however. So, the Search Team is continually adjusting how the GSAs work in order to provide the highest quality, most relevant results within Second Life.
  
• Enhancement to Classified Advertising: Second Life business owners can benefit from a significant change to classified advertising within Second Life Search. Now, we can place classifieds alongside more searches, and advertisers will have a better opportunity to be found by relevant buyers. In Viewer 2, potential ad exposure (i.e., the number of search requests that serve ads) will increase to 100% of initial searches, whereas in Viewer 1.23 classified ads were only shown alongside search results in the All and Group tabs.  Additionally, we have increased the number of featured classifieds from nine to 12 on the Search homepage (which appears when you click the magnifying glass or type CTRL-F).
  

The bottom line is that the new Second Life Search benefits everyone within the Second Life economic ecosystem–most importantly business and Residents–as it plays a crucial role connecting inworld buyers and sellers. The more that Second Life Search can help Residents, particularly new Residents, find compelling content, communities and experiences, then the higher the probability they will be come active, long-term Residents. Plus, more Residents mean more potential customers for inworld businesses.  So, go download the Viewer 2 Beta, try the new and improved Second Life Search and let us know what you think.

Searching Tips

To browse the features in the Find window (including Search, Destination Guide and Classifieds), click the magnifying glass icon in the Search field at the top right of the Viewer 2 navigation bar. To initiate a search, type a keyword in the Search field on the Viewer navigation bar.

Once you’ve initiated a search from the Viewer navigation bar, the Find window will open with an initial set of relevance-ranked results. You can then narrow your results with Category filters and organize the list with Sorting options. Your search terms are now carried from one category to the next, with no need to re-type!

Further Reading:

• Tom Hale’s Viewer 2.0 Beta Launch Blog Post
• Edelman  Linden’s Shared Media Blog Post
• Viewer 2.0 Beta Forum

Resources to Help  You Learn Viewer 2

• Viewer 2 Help Portal (links to everything below)
• Quickstart Guide (SL Wiki)
• Frequently Asked Questions (PDF)
• Release Notes (SL Wiki)
• Video  Demos (YouTube)
• SL Answers (SL Answers)

And, if something breaks or  you’re really stuck, then contact Support and we’re happy to help.