The Lindens are talking… somewhat. But, we will have to capture one and waterboard them to get any real details. See their post, Happy 15th Birthday, Second Life! Fifteen Reasons to Celebrate.

We already know about lower land prices and double tier. But, you may not know they are planning to go farther with making land cheaper. Don’t think they are going to lower their income. They are just looking for ways to shift the cost to us.

Just Waiting

Part of that shift is finding ways to make Premium Membership more enticing. So, Premium Members can expect nice stuff coming their way.

We know Animesh and Bakes-On are coming. And there is the migration of SL systems to the cloud.

Windlight is getting an upgrade. We know that change as Enhanced Environment Project or EEP. I’ve been writing about it over the past weeks. Of the known things coming, this is the one I am really excited to see.

Wrath of Ruth is a new version of a Linden game just released. Expect another one in time for the 15^th Birthday Celebrations.

They will be changing how new signups come into SL. They will be using themed learning islands to better serve those people’s interests. So, if someone is into the ever-popular vampires, they will get directed to an island with a vampire theme.

And… OMG! Last NAMES… We will get a way to customize Last Names. Expected this year.

Grid-wide Experiences are coming! I think this is a big deal. We were expecting Experiences to change the way we buy clothes. It didn’t happen. I think a part of that was because Experiences were way too localized… mean each clothing line would have had to make their own Experience. With Grid-wide I expect to see Casper Vending create a generic clothing demo system.

Auctions are changing, new Linden homes are coming, SL Marketplace is getting a facelift and they say they plan to clean out the clutter. Which is good. I was interested in helicopters. My neighbor was flying an awesome one. So, I went looking using in-world search, clicking the classifieds, and in the marketplace. Out of the dozens of places I checked only 3 or 5 were not abandoned empty land or something different. We need a bunch of that cleaned up.

Then there are more performance improvements coming. The Lindens got a programmer back from Sansar that understands render engines. So, that is being improved. Other work is to increase the capacity of things and avatars we can have in a region.

It should be an interesting year.