2011 Reviewed

This will be a rather long post as it’s a review of the year, this is the fourth in a series of annual posts, the other three look at different years… I think you’ll have worked that out already! This post isn’t made any easier by Linden Lab messing around with their blog, meaning links that were working at the time, no longer working. However that just means I get to read them again and catch up, so there is a plus side to that.

2011 brought us viewer improvements, Mesh, lot of bug fixes by Oz Linden and his team as well as new scripting functions. On the downside, Linden Lab’s use of the blog to inform us of new features and tools was pretty poor to say the least. I’ll miss plenty out in this review, I’ll also include trivial aspects, so let’s get this rolling.

January

Blue Mars reversed several gears and announced it would become an app for the iPhone and iPad, as is the way with these things, links in the linked article no longer work.

The Grid merger between adult and teen grids was in operation, this doesn’t seem to have caused many complications at all, with the exception of over zealous word filters but we’ll come to that later.

FJ Linden blogged about improvements, including talk of a new group chat system, improved region crossings, web based profiles and announced that the group limit was being raised from twenty five slots to forty two.

I moved my blog back here, after three and a bit years of being a guest blogger on Nobody Fugazi’s Your2ndPlace. Nobody Fugazi had generously allowed a few of us, including Marx Dudek, Arthur Fermi, Sarah Nerd, Jezebel Bailey and Konner McDonnell to blog on his site but as he no longer had a Second Life account and he was pondering what to do with the site, I suggested that he should concentrate on his own projects, none of the others threw anything at me over the suggestion!

New CEO and Aston Villa fan Rod Humble blogged about how he had been getting immersed in Second Life, exploring, building and scripting in his first few weeks and wearing a Toga too! I noted how he had a warm welcome, and also suggested Second Life would benefit from a better system for implementing NPC’s.

SL Marketplace changed its ratings system to match the three inworld maturity ratings of General, Moderate and Adult and promptly annoyed merchants because of how over zealous the word filter for automatically changing the maturity rating of a listing was, this one runs and runs.

Inara Pey reported that Esbee Linden was leaving, courtesy of Daniel Voyager reporting it! Daniel changed his blog during the year so old links don’t work.

February

Arthur Fermi informed me that Fermi Sandbox was merging with Little Blue, Fermi Sandbox had been on the grid for a little over four years and was a popular place. Gillian Carthage would take over.

There was a boost for Battlestar Galactica roleplaying groups in Second Life after Universal had a change of heart and came to an agreement to allow the roleplay to continue in Second Life.

Penny Patton allowed me to share her guide to better camera placement in Second Life. This is well worth looking at.

Amanda Linden blogged about improving communications, encouraging people to get involved in user groups, submitting bugs to the Jira, posting in the forums and rather controversially stated: “Facebook is the best place to find out about cool things going on in Second Life, share ideas, and get the inside scoop on inworld events, contests, machinima releases, PR activities, fun discussions, and more. Come join over 111,000 people who have “Liked” our Second Life Facebook page.”

I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if thousands of people had screamed “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” There was also talk of removing voting from the JIRA, this didn’t actually happen, voting seemed to have the same impact it had always had, which wasn’t a fat lot.

Talking of great disturbances, February brough us the ZF Redzone rumpus, there was an epic thread over at SL Universe, which was actually started in July 2010 but exploded during the rumpus.

March

Skate Foss threw a party for Second Lifers who use Twitter, some rather dubious guests were there:

Skip Oceanlane relaunched SL Capex, a virtual stock exchange, I haven’t kept up with this so don’t know how it’s doing.

The word filter that had plagued the Marketplace was also causing mayhem in the forums, as I reported at the time, typing Dick Van Dyke in a forum post resulted in **bleep** Van **bleep**  …. I’m not making this up! This has since been fixed.

Jeff Petersen, AKA Bagman Linden, was appointed as VP of engineering. Bagman has a gaming background, which excited me more than others.

Kitely, an opensim based virtual world using Amazon cloud services started to get media attention, Maria Korolov of Hypergrid business blogged about it. Unfortunately the publicity came a bit sooner than the extremely polite CEO, Ilan Tochner, had hoped for. This will be worth keeping an eye on throughout 2012 though. Some nice ideas there on charging people for time used rather than flat fees. There are pros and cons.

Machinima got its own monthly event, in partnership with the Linden endownment for the arts. The best (in the opinion of the panel) machinima submitted each month gets a screening. Restrictions on content apply.

April

The awesome Fantasy Faire 2011 took place this month, with Second Life users who have an interest in the fantastical aspects that can be created treated to baking gnomes, gorgeous builds and Elves!

The event raised over USD$20,000 for the Relay For Life cancer charity.

Avatar Physics (AKA Jiggling boobies) was introduced, with Linden Lab showing they have a sense of humour with this comment: “Of course, we continue to smash bugs and make strides in viewer stability and performance, but we figured that you would be much more interested in avatars bouncing and jiggling.”

Linden Lab continued to say no to a forum for adult discussions, but did finally bring back an Events forum.

May

Billing problems led to Elf Clan announcing they would be ceasing operations in Second Life on May 18th, then they received an offer from Linden Lab regarding a tier free period, so they decided to stay.

A fire engulfed my tavern on my roleplaying sim … this was a virtual fire of course but we had to board it up!

However a more serious issue was being brought to my attention, people were having difficulty paying Linden Lab, this led to one of the roleplayers on my sim informing me they would need to leave Second Life.

SL Advertising Beta, an advertising partnership with GlamAdapt, was brought to an end at the end of May.

Search was getting another overhaul, with Linden Lab encouraging people to download a beta viewer to test new new search, which would be replacing new search. Old search was being discontinued.

June

Blondin, Courtney and Amanda Linden all left Linden Lab, three very decent Lindens lost there.

Mesh upload requirements were announced, this required needing payment info on file and passing a quiz. I still find it silly that I can’t have an account setting to cover my alts.

Second Life’s eighth birthday celebrations started on June 20th. Rodvik made an appearance during the celebrations but didn’t make a speech, he had upgraded from a toga and his avatar was now a spaceship.

A beta version of web based profiles went live, with beta data.

July

Tateru Nino informed us of the new simplified age verficiation process, by this time Linden Lab’s lack of informing us of events was getting extremely frustrating.

DRTSIM-65, a project that would introduce the ability to restrict sounds and hide avatars on parcels went to the beta grid, the feature would arrive on the main grid shortly after.

Relay for Life in Second Life smashed all previous fundraising records, with  over USD$370,000 raised.

Mesh moved a step closer to arriving on the grid.

August

A side effect of the mesh project was a boost for the good old prim, in mesh enabled sims you could now create prims as large as 64 x 64, rather than the old 10 x 10 limit. This would be available everywhere once all sims were made mesh enabled.

Delicia Whipsnaps Inara Pey covered Rodvik’s speech at SLCC, with a general gist post here and a post questioning what Rodvik meant by Linden Lab diversifying here.  SLCC was a bit low key this year I felt.

The blog started to get active again, with SL flickr picture of the day posts and guest blogger posts, however in terms of news it still wasn’t delivering that much, Hamlet Au of New World Notes gave us news on the content speciality team, which featured Esbee … who had left in January but obviously came back to Linden Lab during the year. This included information about scriptable NPC’s being on the horizon .. well somewhere near the horizon at least!

Mesh finally went gridwide.

Traffic started to make a noise in search again, with active, popular and busy icons appearing, again this was unannounced!

The Justice League Unlimited hoopla broke out, with the men (and women) in tights coming under the spotlight in an epic thread over at SLUniverse, questioning just what data they were storing in their Brainiac wiki and how they were obtaining it.

It was pointed out to me that the name of Game god Will Wright had appeared on the Linden Lab board of directors list.

Grendel’s children announced they were downsizing their land holdings, speculation was rife on the reasons but Toady Nakamura spoke to me explaining it was due to support issues on the other sims taking up too much of their time and nothing to do with their income.

August saw the largest growth in Second Life for nearly four years.

September

Linden Lab embarked on an advertising campaign using Google Adsense, it was short lived.

The official blog started a monthly update feature, this month’s including information on new premium benefits and an improvement to web profiles where you could now post your location.

Nalates Urriah brought us news from the mesh user group meeting that prim equivalence was going to become known as Land Impact. This is another example of something Linden Lab should have been blogging about.

Despite Mesh having gone gridwide in August, Modavia Fashion week was held on a sim where Mesh was disabled.

Annmarie OToole found herself suspended, allegedly due to faulty brakes on vehicles causing mayhem, the fault was allegedly due to a bug.

The news that long time content creator Stroker Serpentine was leaving Second Life was broke by Cindy Claveau over at SLUniverse.

Web profiles got a new privacy option regarding who can send you messages.

October

Rodvik blogged an update telling us of the August growth, as well as talking about expanded support and some brief information about forthcoming features such as pathfinding and NPC’s.

Prim Perfect informed us that Parametric Deformation, a project to improve how Mesh clothing functions, was going to be crowdsourced, with former Linden (Qarl) Karl Stiefvater offering to do the work if funding was met. Funding was met.

Rodvik gave me a pony!

Linden endownment for the arts secured a twenty sim deal with Linden Lab for artists to display their wares. This made me a little uncomfortable personally, but it was a good deal for the artists involved.

Land Impact finally hit the main grid, users on viewer 2/3 no longer saw parcels displaying prim usage, they used the new land impact measure, although in most cases this would still be the same as prim usage. Again there was very little official information about this change.

Linden Lab softened their stance on adult content, an adult section had already been added to the destination guide, now there was a section on the forums to discuss adult issues, albeit in a PG fashion.

Linden Lab also embarked on a land sale in October, with a weekend special that meant you could buy a new sim for just USD$295 as opposed to USD$1,000. Tyche “Statto” Shepherd reported there had been a net growth of 508 regions during the weekend sale, suggesting it was a roaring success.

Ina Centaur announced that the Metaverse Shakespeare Company, Primtings and sLiterary would be closing their doors at the end of October.

November

Despite the deal earlier in the year to keep Elf Clan in Second Life, by November they had had enough and sailed off to Inworldz.

Project LR, the Linden Realms game arrived, rather quietly with word of mouth creating a buzz. I got stuck in a hut trying to pick crystals off a shelf, until it dawned on me that these weren’t the droids I was looking for. I was also chased by angry looking furballs!

The November update, penned by The Wizard of Oz like Linden Lab account, a cousin of CommerceTeam Linden I imagine, informed us of improvements to the user interface in the latest viewer and linked to video tutorials, which to everyone’s shock and most people’s horror, were not voiced by Torley!

Traffic was definitely back on the agenda, now traffic figures were back in search.

The freedom continent had won the right to run the adult infohub, but a row brewed over their exclusive rights to the Zindra name, the new sims weren’t actually on the Zindra continent for a start. However after meetings between concerned parties, the freedom continent agreed to give up their exclusive rights to the Zindra name.

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes informed us that Kim Salzer (Kim Linden), VP of Marketing, had left Linden Lab.

However over at an adult content user group meeting, Xiola Linden made an appearance as the new communities Linden, AKA the new Blondin, which is a tough act to follow.

December

The Marketplace introduced a new option for listings of “User Licensed” for those whom want to elaborate on the permissions an item has, this will largely be to benefit those who sell items full perms.

I noticed that Carmilla Linden had been talking of a long term project to improve region crossings.

The tag line “Your World, Your Imagination” reappeared! Hurrah!

Customers who had been on local payments beta were informed by email that the beta had finished and they would need to update their billing information.

Rodvik blogged again, informing us that tier wouldn’t be going up, that pathfinding would be here shortly and that powerful new tools would be handed to content creators, well those who qualify for the creators program anyway, which caused some angst as people aren’t sure what the requirments will be or whether they will be divisive.

Arguments about Mesh continued, with some places welcoming Mesh and others rejecting it. This will rumble on for a while longer yet.

So there we have it, a fairly decent year all round with the new CEO still getting a lot of general support, but I really do hope that 2012 brings us better information from Linden Lab, they should be posting more information on the blog.

Further Reading

2008 Reviewed

2009 Reviewed

2010 Reviewed