SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

Greetings everyone!

Over the last several months we’ve been hard at work making Second Life more relevant, more usable and more reliable.  Our work is showing up in Second Life’s usage statistics.  On Sunday of this past weekend, we hit another concurrency high of 76,946 and yesterday log-ins for the previous 60 days crossed the 1.4 Million mark.

What have we been up to?

Reliability is a top strategic focus for the Lab.  In October, FJ Linden described how we are launching LL Net (our private fiber optic ring connecting our data centers) to provide additional redundancy and eliminate our reliance on VPNs.  I am happy to report that this project is ahead of schedule and other improvements are underway.

Another top priority is to make Second Life more relevant. Last month, Ben Glenn discussed the work we are doing with Big Spaceship to improve the first hour experience.  This project is moving along at a nice clip, as well.  You will soon see a new website design that visually highlights the wonderful range of activities people enjoy in Second Life.

With T Linden (Tom Hale) on board and working closely with the user experience team, we are also making great progress on the usability project.  It’s a major effort because the viewer is at least three applications in one.  Maybe four.  Redesigning it so that it is easy to use for new Residents without sacrificing functionality for experienced users is no simple task and it’ll take well into second half of next year before you will be downloading a new and different client.  (In the interim, we’ll have regular viewer updates, as we do now.)  We’ve landed on a new look and feel for the viewer that I am very excited about.  Now we begin the hard work of redesigning the menu structures and tool layouts and modularizing the code base so that it can accommodate the design changes we are making.

As I mentioned in my last update, we’ve been actively hiring to support all the work underway to make Second Life more relevant, more usable and more reliable. I have some great news to share on the talent front.   We’ve added a new leader to our engineering leadership team.

Howard Look (you’ll know him as Howard Linden) is joining us as SVP of Customer Applications — which we call “The Front.” He’ll be responsible for leading the engineering team responsible for the customer-facing part of the Second Life experience.  Throughout 2009, Howard will be working with T Linden and our product, design teams and engineering teams to reshape the Second Life viewer into a simple and intuitive interface.

Before joining Linden Lab, Howard was VP of Software at Pixar.  His team created and maintained Pixar’s proprietary film-making system. Prior to Pixar, Howard was on the founding team of TiVo where he headed up Application Software and User Experience.  TiVo could have had a highly complex interface that put distance between users and the content they were seeking.  Instead, the company did the opposite.  By making the device intuitive and easy to use — and therefore attractive to a broad market — TiVo changed the way people watch TV.  Prior to TiVo, Howard was at SGI where he worked on the Inventor team.   While Director of Applied Engineering, Howard and his team created a virtual world called “O2 Out of the Box Experience.”

Howard also has a passion for education and spent time this past summer as a substitute teacher (4th grade and middle school math).  He told me they were his hardest days of work ever.

When I met Howard, it was clear he was a great fit for Linden Lab – rich content creation tools (Pixar), intuitive interfaces (TiVo), 3D worlds (SGI) and a bonus attribute in his passion for education. I’m very pleased that Howard decided to join the executive team at Linden Lab.

We’re assembling a world-class team to deliver on our promise of a highly relevant and delightful user experience and a stable and reliable platform.

Cheers!
– M Linden

[Resolved at 10:50pm Pacific] Our Support Portal is back online!

[Updated at 10:10pm Pacific] Maintenance is in progress. — Frontier

As reported earlier this week, our support portal will be offline for system maintenance tonight, Saturday, 26th April.

Our software supplier has reduced the length of the downtime from six hours to three, from 9:00pm-Midnight PDT.

During that time, the support portal will be unavailable for chat or ticketing services.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause to you.

As reported earlier this week, our support portal will be offline for system maintenance tonight, Saturday, 26th April.

Our software supplier has reduced the length of the downtime from six hours to three, from 9:00pm-Midnight PDT.

During that time, the support portal will be unavailable for chat or ticketing services.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause to you.

[UPDATE 25 April 08, 3:40 pm Pacific]

Our payment processor has fixed and tested the process.  All card operations (including updates) are now running within normal time frames.

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Due to an issue with our payment processor, we are unable to update your credit card information at this time. Attempting to delete and update your credit card will be indefinitely delayed. You may enter card data but it will not be active in our system for potentially several more hours .

If you have valid credit card or payment information, you can continue to USE it with no problems- this only affects updating card information, or initial card data entry.

Updating Paypal payment information is completely unaffected.

We are working with our payment processor, and credit card updating will work as normal as soon as their issues are resolved.

Due to an issue with our payment processor, we are unable to update your credit card information at this time. Attempting to delete and update your credit card will be indefinitely delayed. You may enter card data but it will not be active in our system for potentially several more hours .

If you have valid credit card or payment information, you can continue to USE it with no problems- this only affects updating card information, or initial card data entry.

Updating Paypal payment information is completely unaffected.

We are working with our payment processor, and credit card updating will work as normal as soon as their issues are resolved.

Our support portal will be offline for six hours of system maintenance this Saturday, 26th April from 6:00pm-Midnight PST. During that time, the support portal will be unavailable for chat or ticketing services.