SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

As we have mentioned previously, tailoring the Second Life platform to make it easier for new Residents to begin experiencing the virtual world is one of our primary objectives moving forward. With that in mind, we’re pleased to announce that Linden Lab has engaged award-winning interactive design agency Big Spaceship as a partner in transforming the Second Life experience.

The goals of the project are to dramatically simplify the sign-up stage, ease users’ introduction into Second Life, and quickly connect people to relevant content and experiences in Second Life. Big Spaceship is well known for their work creating compelling online experiences that are approachable and engaging.

Linden Lab will leverage this expertise to explore various approaches to streamlining the “first hour” experience, from the Second Life Web site and registration through the Viewer and first in-world experiences.

Q: Who is Big Spaceship?
A: Big Spaceship is an interactive design agency with expertise in user experience strategy, interface design, and Web development. Past and current clients include Adobe, Sony, HBO, Nike, Coca-Cola and Disney.

Q: Why did Linden Lab choose Big Spaceship for this project?
A: Big Spaceship has demonstrated excellence in the area of online interactive experience design. They are widely recognized for their work creating intuitive and elegant branded experiences and has a deep understanding of social systems and online communities.

Q: What is Big Spaceship doing for Second Life?
A: Big Spaceship will be working with internal teams at Linden Lab to research, design, prototype and test web sites and user interfaces that dramatically lower the learning curve for experiencing Second Life. Big Spaceship will employ a user-centered design methodology to develop innovative solutions for streamlining the complexity of Second Life without limiting the freedom and expressiveness that makes Second Life so powerful for so many people.

Q: How will this project affect current Residents?
A: In the near-term, as Big Spaceship designs and prototypes potential experiences, there will be no impact on current Residents. It’s our hope that by dramatically simplifying the initial user experience, many more users will be able to experience the excitement of Second Life, ultimately creating a richer and more diverse community of Residents.

For discussion on this announcement, please visit the forum thread.

Hi, Katt Linden here with a roundup of our main methods of communicating with you. First, I want to acknowledge that I have heard your concerns and complaints about the changes to the blog and the login screen. In answer to your questions about where to find key information, please see:

• Second Life Grid Status Reports. We are collecting all information about the status of the Grid — known issues, new server and viewer software and, very important to those planning events, a calendar showing planned outages, such as rolling restarts. We collect this in one location so that those needing this level of update can find it easily, without having to sort through blog posts on unrelated topics. You can subscribe to this by RSS or Twitter, which means you can have updates sent to your mobile phone.
• Official Second Life Blog. You can subscribe to the Second Life Blog by Email or by RSS or Twitter.
• From the Official Second Life Blog, see the links, in blue text, at the top left side of the page, to the Second Life Grid Status Reports, to the Knowledge Base Articles, and to Torley’s Video Tutorials.
• Video Tutorials by Torley are being updated regularly. Find the latest, or search for the topic you’re interested in learning via the category Browse or Search tabs, in the Tutorials section of the Showcase. You’ll also find these Tutorials on the Second Life Wiki Video Tutorials page. To be updated whenever there is a new one, subscribe to the Video Tutorials using RSS.
• Knowledge Base Articles are updated regularly as well, and you can find them in the Support Portal or follow the link from the Official Main Blog (top left sidebar) to the Knowledge Base Article.
  
• New Releases. When we release new versions of the Viewer, you’ll see the announcement on the SL Grid Status Reports, and Release notes can be found in the Release Notes section of the Wiki. In most cases, we will also provide a link to a forum discussion thread where we read and respond to comments over several days. We use the forum for this because a discussion there can continue for several days, allowing Residents from a variety of time zones to participate.
• As you may have seen during Burning Life, we created a special web site for the yearly event, in part to showcase the year-round events which will take place there. We anticipate continuing to build sites like this for special situations.
• The “Message of the Day” is the notice you see during the login process, (one or two lines of text, under the thermometer showing your login progress.) We have recently used this for a variety of announcements, from Linden hosted events like the Second Life 5th Birthday and Burning Life 2008, to optional testing of of new viewers, invitations to join in a localization project and occasional security announcements, as well as for tips on using Second Life. We’ll start noting new Tutorial Videos and Knowledge Base Articles here as well.
• As many of you have noted, we are not currently showing blog headlines on the Login screen. These will return, as part of the process of updating our blogs, but not for some time.
• Torley Linden and Katt Linden both have Twitter accounts you can follow. We’ll be experimenting with using these for additional, informal updates, and we’ll be happy to hear your feedback.

As Robin said in her recent post, the main, Official Second Life Blog will continue to hold our formal announcements and posts from our Executive team. We’re working to post here more often.

This official, main blog will be joined by a variety of other blogs, authored by Lindens, where we’ll be able to go deeper into specific topics. It is our intention to communicate with you more often and more broadly, but we ask for your patience during the process of updating the blogs.

We very much look forward to our ongoing conversation with you, on the blogs and elsewhere.

We’re happy to announce a new First Look for SLim, a new voice and text instant messaging client.

SLim’s technology is provided by Vivox (www.vivox.com) and developed in partnership with Linden Lab to work with the Second Life viewer.  SLim enables Second Life Residents to conduct voice or text conversations with member of their Second Life friends list….whether they are logged into the virtual world or offline. While the Second Life viewer will still serve as the primary inworld communication engine, SLim is capable of running on most computers, and offers users a voice-enabled instant messaging client that extends the value of the Second Life Grid beyond the virtual world.

SLim significantly lowers the barriers between virtual world and real world communication and ensures that Second Life Residents will always be able to connect to friends, regardless of location or broadband connection. SLim is also a compelling tool for the Second Life Grid enterprise offering, which will enable employees to communicate and collaborate with colleagues meeting inworld without having the Second Life application running.

SLim’s features include:

• Access to your Second Life friends list with real-time “presence” status updates
• Seamless migration from a text conversation into a voice call
• Ability to leave voice mails for offline friends

Learn more about SLim in our Knowledge Base article

Because this is a First Look, there are a few known but not serious issues with this release.  We hope you’ll report any new ones to this PJIRA.

We’re happy to see how voice has taken off in Second Life and to give Second Life Residents alternatives in how they choose to communicate with other. Voice concurrency rates are about 50% of our total inworld concurrency:  for example, when total inworld concurrency on Sunday is 70,000 Residents, the total number of concurrent voice speakers is 35,000. Vivox, our partner in SL Voice, recently  added more voice servers to keep up with demand.

We hope that SLim will be yet another bridge between inworld and out-of-world and other online activities.

FJ Linden here, to report on the latest Ongoing Updates from the Grid.

As I promised in my first post, this will be a regular monthly communication to keep all of you up to date on our efforts to improve grid stability and reliability. I’m finishing up my 3rd month at the Lab and have some significant progress to report.

I’m happy to report that we have an approved plan to move away from VPN reliance. We’ve finalized a design and chosen facility and equipment partners to build and deploy a private fiber optic ring to interconnect our datacenters. “LLnet” will be the designation of our private network and we have established an aggressive timeframe to activate it. I’m pushing hard to bring LLnet online by the end of this year (’08), and begin a phased migration off of the VPN’s immediately after. Given the amount of traffic to move, I would estimate completion of this project by February or March of ‘09 at the latest. So we have a light at the end of the tunnel on one of our biggest stability issues.

In addition to freeing us from our dependency on VPN’s, LLnet will bring additional redundancy, as we will have a means to keep our datacenters from being isolated, if a Level 3 outage were to occur. We’ll also be building a fully routed architecture that will allow us to deploy BGP and finally add redundant Internet providers and improved traffic performance. This is a major infrastructure investment, but one that is long overdue.

I’ve included some timeframes in this posting, but do so only to show that we are pushing as aggressively as possible to get the network operational, if timeframes slip I’ll make sure to communicate that as well. I think it’s important that we start making hard commitments and push aggressively to meet them. I know everyone is tired of talking about the VPN problems, and you can count me in that group! We’ve now got a solid plan in place and are implementing!!

I also wanted to highlight a few additional infrastructure projects that are targeted for completion by the end of 2008.

So, I’ll continue the monthly updates and, while I’m sure there have been individual issues since my last post, we are making real progress towards our primary goal of grid stability and reliability. As always, the proof is in our execution of these projects, not the promises.