General News

I am curious how many people will be affected ad how by the announcement of a coming new world by Linden Lab™. Hamlet at New World Notes ran a poll last week to find out. He published the results here: In Survey of SL Users, Plurality Believe Linden’s New World Won’t Change Their Second Life Usage.

Click over to see the results.

It is interesting to see that the group of those that feel it isn’t going to change their use of Second Life™ is about twice to 4 times larger than the other groups in the poll.

Since about a quarter of users are not sure how the announcement will change their use of Second Life, no single group is a majority. But, the larger number of people feel there will be no change.

The SL Forum thread Linden Lab is building a NEW virtual world  has continued to grow. It does seem to be slowing down. Ebbe Altberg (Ebbe Linden) has continued to respond to comments. But isn’t saying much over the weekend. He also seems to have started avoiding answers that are repetitious.

Since his comments are the only source of real information on the new Linden world, I collected them. You’ll find them with links into the forum for the post he responded to in each comment. It was too time consuming to copy the link for each post. Look in the thread list and you’ll find his post a line or two below.

You can search on Ebbe Linden in the SL Forum and get a listing of all his posts. But, the order there seems bizarre. I placed these in the order they appeared, most recent first.

Ebbe often quotes a post in his reply. I decided to leave out most of the quotes to keep the size of this post smaller. I have added some words to Ebbe’s posts so they make sense without the quote. You’ll see the [ ] with my words in the quotes. I’ve also added text, again in [ ]  to give some idea of that Ebbe’s post is responding to. A simple ‘Thanks’ is meaningless for defining context, so added some.

In a couple of cases I have included the posts that lead up to Ebbe’s response. I’ve also corrected spelling. I’ve left grammar as is. I kept the list in a single page so, you can use your browsers FIND to search it. I’ve colored posts other than Ebbe’s silver.

The opening post in the thread is here: Linden Lab is building a NEW virtual world. 

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The Second Life™ blogosphere is abuzz about the coming new world being built by Linden Lab. Everyone wants to know what it will be like and whether we will be able to transfer out inventories. But, today I came across Gwyneth Llewelyn’s article NeXT Life. In the title Gwyn is making a play on the 1990’s Steve Jobs ‘other’ company NeXT, which eventually became the Mac OSX.

In her article she takes an in depth look at who Linden Lab’s™ competition is and how they stack up. She also suggests some interesting ways for the Lab to deal with that competition. In all I like the long article. I shouldn’t complain about length after the article I wrote yesterday. 

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The video is out. There was very little new information released in the meeting. But, Jessica did a pretty good job clearly explaining what we do know about the coming new world. Toward the end there is part of the meeting that is speculation.

For time approximate time marks and a bit of an index see: Jessica’s Future of SL Event at SL11B.

[youtube WemxFkTvLls]

The names we seem to be using for the new world are SL2.0 or the shorter SSL… Second Second Life. The SSL is also an Internet security protocol, so that one could be confusing at times.

Peter Gray is Director of Global Communications – Linden Lab. He has emailed some in SL to make clear what the Lab’s statements and intentions are. Leslea Aldrin shared, with Peter’s permission the following email with the Builder’s Brewry. Ray Zopf tipped me off to the group notice.

The Text:

Here’s what we’ve said:

Linden Lab is working on a next generation virtual world that will be in the spirit of Second Life, an open world where users have incredible power to create anything they can imagine and content creators are king. This is a significant focus for Linden Lab, and we are actively hiring to help with this ambitious effort. We believe that there is a massive opportunity ahead to carry on the spirit of Second Life while leveraging the significant technological advancements that have occurred since its creation, as well as our unparalleled experience as the provider of the most successful user-created virtual world ever.

The next generation virtual world will go far beyond what is possible with Second Life, and we don’t want to constrain our development by setting backward compatibility with Second Life as an absolute requirement from the start. That doesn’t mean you necessarily won’t be able to bring parts of your Second Life over, just that our priority in building the next generation platform is to create an incredible experience and enable stunningly high-quality creativity, rather than ensuring that everything could work seamlessly with everything created over Second Life’s 11 year history.

 

Does this mean we’re giving up on Second Life? Absolutely not. It is thanks to the Second Life community that our virtual world today is without question the best there is, and after 11 years we certainly have no intention of abandoning our users nor the virtual world they continually fill with their astounding creativity. Second Life has many years ahead of it, and in addition to improvements and new developments specifically for Second Life, we think that much of the work we do for the next generation project will also be beneficial for Second Life.

It’s still very early days for this new project, and as we forge ahead in creating the next generation virtual world, we’ll share as much as we can.

If we had one message to share with Second Life users about this new project at this point, it would be: don’t panic, get excited! Again, Second Life isn’t going away, nor are we ceasing our work to improve it. But, we’re also working on something that we think will truly fulfill the promise of virtual worlds that few people understand as well as Second Life users.

Best,
Peter
—
Peter Gray | Director of Global Communications
Linden Lab | Makers of Shared Creative Spaces

Check out what we’re working on!