Philip Rosedale leaves Linden Lab and moves on

Philip Rosedale (Philip Linden) announced yesterday on the Official Second Life Blog his Next Chapter, that he will be starting a new company and that he will no longer be working full-time at Linden Lab anymore. Philip Rosedale will still be a chariman of Linden Lab and he will still do media conferences about Second Life.  M Linden (Mark Kindon) became the new CEO of Linden Lab about one year and a half ago when Philip Linden stepped down as CEO.

I’m starting a new company, and wanted to let you know.

I will still be chairman, as I have been since leaving the job as CEO.  The change is that I’m not going to be working full-time at Linden Lab anymore (some of you might have thought I wasn’t still there, but actually I have been!).  I’ll still be doing the same outbound and media type things as before – talking about Second Life, etc.

We’re now at a place where I feel really comfortable that Second Life and Linden Lab are OK without me being here day to day anymore.

M (and others) have also managed to hire a bunch of diverse, smart, passionate people who I feel can very capably lead the company.

And as for all of you – the people all over the world who have built Second Life – you all feel very near and dear to me, and I want you to be a part of this next adventure.  I can’t say enough, or say thank you enough, about the experience that has been watching Second Life come to life.   On a personal level, it has deeply changed me.  I am a different and better person, in part through the experience of being in Second Life with all of you.   So anyway… I’ll keep you posted, as I get things more sorted out

I wish Philip good luck on his new adventures. So I guess now the full attention is now pointing towards M Linden to carry us through into the distant future of Second Life.  This was a big shock to many and I really do admire what Philip has done over recent years and of course bring us Second Life.  But with all things everything has to end sometime and move on at some point.

Orange Island in SL closing down

SL Breaking News

• Orange Island entered Second Life in October 2007
• Orange Island was a very successful “experimental” SL project.
• Orange Island is sheduled to close down on Tuesday 29th September at 11am SLT/PDT.

Official Statement from the Orange Team, CLICK HERE

Linden Lab releases figures of the scale of Second Life

Tateru Nino who is a SL writter for SL Massively has published interesting statistics relating to the scale of Second Life.

Approximately 1,250 text-based messages are sent every second in Second Life. That’s 108 million messages per day and more than 600 million words are typed on an average day.

Wow that’s alot of messages and words.

Roughly 60% of active Second Life Residents are based outside of the US, representing more than 200 countries, and the Second Life Viewer is available in 10 languages.

That’s interesting that only 60% are based outside of the US. 10 languages is great and room for more in the future.

In total, users around the world have spent more than 1 billion hours in Second Life. That’s roughly 115,000 years spent doing everything from meeting and socializing with friends; to attending live concerts; to creating, selling, and shopping for virtual goods

SL rocks

The total land area of Second Life is now equivalent to approximately 2 billion square meters – roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island.

Giggles, hasn’t it grown alot over the years. Interesting image!

More than 18 billion minutes of voice chat have been used in Second Life since voice was introduced in 2007. More than 6 billion minutes of voice have been delivered in 2009 alone.

Wowwww

Users create more than 250,000 new virtual items every day. There are now more than 270 terabytes of content in Second Life, and this is growing by approximately 100% every year.

Yay, for SL content and storage. LOL

The average session length (time between login and logout) is given as 100 minutes per visit.

I spend alot more than 100 minutes in-world these days. When I joined SL it was like 15 minutes or so, but that was when I was a newbie. HAHA

• Read the full post here
  
• New season of Metanomics starts tomorrow, read my previous post for more info!
  

Class action lawsuit against Linden Lab

Breaking on the SL news wires and on social networking sites like Plurk, Twitter and Facebook.  Strokerz Toyz/Eros LLC takes Linden Lab to court in class action lawsuit apparently.

Kevin Alderman, who sells virtual erotic goods in Second Life, said in court papers that Linden Lab allows other virtual marketers to offer knock-offs of his “SexGen” beds and other products.

“Eros’s virtual erotic SexGen products sold for use in Second Life have been counterfeited, cloned, and ripped off countless times by a multitude of Second Life residents,” the lawsuit alleges.

Shannon Grei, who sells virtual clothing under the business name “Nomine,” also joined in the lawsuit. She alleged that Linden Lab infringes her copyright by allowing other marketers to sell fake versions of her designs.

Linden Lab declined to comment. The company has faced similar allegations in at least two prior lawsuits, but neither resulted in substantive court rulings.

News Articles about this story!

New World Newsfeed: Second Life Content Creators Sue Second Life Creator Linden Lab

Second Life Sued For Allowing Sale Of Impostor Virtual Goods

Eros LLC, Shannon Grei form class action against Linden lab for infringement

Class action lawsuit leveled against Second Life’s Linden Lab

What do you think about this action ?

New Citizens Inc Blog comes back online

After many weeks of being offline, the New Citizens Inc from Second Life is back and bigger than ever before. I’ve been returning over the last few weeks to the site and I’m seeing alot of good progress being made. The NCI Web Services team has introduced new forums and its worth checking that out, CLICK HERE.The New Citizens Inc group in-world has over 9, 547 group members and its growing all the time. NCI is one of the biggest, well known groups in the Second Life community. If your interested in helping with the NCI blog, check out the latest post called Open Casting for NCI Bloggers! or contact Lethe Naumova in-world.

New Citizen’s Inc. Your Portal to Second Life

The three columns to the right are for our Classes and Events, Second Life, and our community, in that order. You’ll find class schedules and news, Second Life news and grid news, and lots of links to both NCI stuff and SL stuff.

NCI calls itself “Your Portal to Second Life”, and I like to think of this blog as “Your Portal to NCI” (which makes it “Your Portal to  Your Portal to Second Life”

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about that kind of thing, be sure to wander over to the forums and post them there!

Learn more about New Citizens Inc, CLICK HERE

New SecondLife.com, check it out!

The new Second Life website just went LIVE today by Linden Lab. You can visit the new redesigned SL site here: http://secondlife.com/.

• The New SecondLife.com – Details of the new changes and send your feedback here! :D
• 3 SL Machinimas for the new Secondlife.com website, CLICK HERE
• SL website dashboard beta – June 2009!

Improvements

• I love the new site design
• It’s clean
• It’s easy to navigate
• ———————————————-
• Improved for new users
• Improved tabs at the top to browse through SL
• Easier to choose what languages you want to have
• Improved Search and Log In
• Improved registration page for new users
• New button to launch Second Life straight away
• Redesigned land store and new web-based map

Downsides

• Showcase or video tutorials is not shown
• Could be slower for users (flash and videos)
• Xstreet and Transaction History are the two main issues at this time

Future (long term projects)

• New social media functionality
• More search improvements coming (long term project)
• The SL Dashboard will become fully customizable

What do you think of the redesign?

Coming Soon: Burning Life 2009

Been informed that Burning Life 2009 in Second Life will be scheduled, between the 3rd-11th October 2009. This year Burning Life will mark its 7th year in Second Life. I’ve never ever been to Burning Life before in Second Life, because there was nothing scheduled like this on the Teen Grid. I transferred to the Main Grid in mid December 2008. I’m looking forward to something new and hopefully it will be a great adventure when it opens in early October. If i’m around I will be blogging about my experiences at Burning Life.

Burning Life is a festival of art and community held in the virtual world of Second Life. It was first held in 2003 when the Second Life grid was still in its infancy, and 2008 marks its 6th year.

Via Group Notice: 24th August 2009

Volunteers: We need 24 hour stage managing. So please if you are interested drop by the Performance Office and drop me a notecard in the red mailbox to the right

Please name it “BL Stage mgr-YOUR NAME”
In the note:
Your time zone-
Which days/times are good for you-
I will be taking names right up till the event  BUT if you want your preferred time you should get me your list ASAP.
http://burninglife.secondlife.com/

LANDMARK – Add notecard to red mailbox

I would love to know what your previous experiences were if you have ever gone to Burning Life in Second Life. Thanks!

Tweets from M Linden and Philip Linden Keynotes Speech

Here are the tweets from the CEO Keynotes speech today at SLCC09. In-world there was 45 – 50 avatars that listened through a live audio stream at the SLCC region in Second Life. There was no video or slideshows in-world to follow which was disappointing.

Philip Linden Keynotes

We need new people to be able to experience Live music within 5m., maybe we need a web client that lets you experience it.

Philip and M: “Evolution, or Revolution

Technology improves, the impact of these changes can be revolutionary

The idea of Second Life was to digitize reality, to create an option to reconstruct the entire world in the digital form

There will be lots of change. The prairie where we are now can become New York City

Things are changing extremely rapidly and the impact will be revolutionary not evolutionary

The old world will be changed. within the limits of physics we will gain complete control over the atoms

Two paths, One made of atoms, one of bits. And we will be able to control atoms

The digital world has compelling properties. More possibilities, and safer

“we;re not going to stop at reality”. This is very important point. Once VW are as real as reality,we’ll go on pioneers of virtual worlds will be disliked. People will have the feeling to be outmoded.

Try and understand we’re at the very beginning, we’re going to have to weather tremendous change

To scale large, we need: More decentraliztion of services. But we have “right napkin drawings”

We are at the very beginning. We’ll not like all the changes. It is inevitable. Try to work with us, let go a bit

M Linden Keynotes

Philip did not create a virtual world. He created a platform so we could all create a virtual world

Do not feel Godlike as CEO. First time I felt Godlike was terraforming pulling a mountain out of the sea

we’re coming out of the trough of disillusionment. In the middle of a top to bottom renovation

IN the middle of top-to-bottom renovation. Relevance, presentation to outside. Viewer. Usability. Orientation.

(server crash rate down 60%, viewer 40%)

We’re at SL 1.0 heading to 2.0. We probaly need to get to 10.0 for billion users

SL user spend 8X as much time as Facebook user

Bringing more of the web into SL, more SL to the web

sl will bring more of the web into second life and more of second life into the web

• Check out Dusan Writer’s review of the CEO Keynotes, CLICK HERE
• Follow the LATEST SLCC09 tweets, CLICK HERE
• CEO keynotes speech
• SLCC09 Flickr group
• SLCC09 Shedule

SL Economy: Q2 Metrics 2009

Linden Lab have published: The Second Life Economy – Second Quarter 2009 in Detail. You can compare it with the last published metrics for Q1 back in April 2009: The Second Life Economy – First Quarter 2009. Feel free to check out my SL Metrics page for more metrics and links.

Q2 Key Highlights

• Economy grows 94% year to year, hits new all time high in Q2
• Voice minutes totaled 3.2 billion minutes, up 48% from the same quarter last year
• LindeX and Xstreet hit new all time highs
• Resident-owned land in Second Life increased 11% from last year
• Homestead sales drives addition of 109 million square meters
• Peak Concurrent Users hit 88,065 early in Q2, but concurrency trended lower over the course of the quarter
• USD 144 million dollars in total user-to-user transactions, an increase of 94% from the same quarter last year

What do you think? Send feedback here!

Talk about the Second Life Q2 economy

SL Content Management Roadmap Compilation

• Official Second Life Blog post > Our Content Management Roadmap
• FAQ about Our Content Management Roadmap
• SL Forums > New blog post on LL’s Content Management Roadmap
• New World Notes > Lindens Announce Upcoming “Content Seller Program” — The End of (Most) In-World Content Theft to Follow
• Dusan Writer’s Metaverse > Linden lab Listening: Second Life Content Protection Road Map Released
• SL Massively > A Second Life roadmap: Content-management/Intellectual-property
  
• XStreet SL > LL Content Roadmap-Will some content creators have to stop
• SLuniverse Forums > SL Blog: Our Content Management Roadmap

What do you think about the SL Content Management Roadmap ?

• I hope this compilation is useful!