I was going to do this in the style of a meme I used to do on Livejournal whereby you’d take the first couple of lines or paragraph, from the first post of each month to give your year in review, but that doesn’t quite work for me here, although it’s a fun meme, I’ll do a little bit of that, quickly go through the months, throw in the odd picture and review the year that way.
January
LL’s new policy on banking certainly caused a storm, and more than just one in a teacup I popped down to JTF to check out the scene and we had a run on the banks in full swing, of course later in the year we had the far more serious issue of people running to RL banks such as Northern Rock to withdraw their funds.
January also saw the rapid disappearance of Dusty’s rock and roll lounge, which left many people out of pocket on their rental fees. Sally Soleil creator of Fierce Designs was just starting out on her empire building at this time and was one of the victims, as was Bells Beck of BB Designed for you who summed up the feelings of many people who have been in similar situations when she said:
“The b*stards f***ing left with everyones money. The man…. Rick Logan has gone, look at his profile. No notice…..no warning…..no refund…… f***er, so out of order and it wasnt cheap to rent there either!”
February
The final hurrah of Unmik Hax, early in the month he left his mark on newly released sims, apparently waving a gun at furious onlookers. Devaluing land everywhere he roamed, riding roughshod over ethics.
A new policy to outlaw extortion practices was introduced and for a while seemed to work, Umnik’s smiley faces certainly disappeared, however the menace still lurked not too far beneath the surface.
February also brought us the Linden Department of public works and a new inworld search engine. Both have had some degree of success.
March
A busy month this, we had the Wonderland perv scandal highlighted by Sky News and Channel 5.
HTML on a prim….sort of!
The ability to put a webpage on a prim arrived in a fashion that was far from perfect but seen as progress.
Linden Lab got involved in the island transfer process to make transferring islands more secure, this was definitely a welcome move.
Uncle Phil stepped down as CEO.
Linden Lab decided to get all efficient over their trademarks and rubbed plenty of people up the wrong way over it.
April
The trademark arguments rumbled on.
Then came the island price drop, to initial cheers and then the wrath of the estate owners as they asked what the heck Linden Lab were playing at with their investments. Jack’s infamous bag of swag offer went down like a lead balloon.
Linden Lab then unleashed the Openspace can of worms that would come back to haunt their residents, unfortunately it would haunt their residents a lot more than Linden Lab but more of that later.
There were developments in terms of the space navigator device and a demo from Mitch Kapor regarding a 3D camera. The latter has gone quiet.
The future of traffic discussions left people with much to ponder, eight months later we’re still discussing it!
May
The showcase caused some controversy with people questioning why fashion stores were in there.
Bay City rolled into town, bowling alley, theatre, outrageous land prices, spinning for sale signs and a very nice looking area which showed that the earlier announcement of the LDPW was indeed very much in action.
Fox news carried a story regarding the safety of children in Second Life.
Mark Kingdon was unveiled as M Linden, the new CEO! We all had high hopes.
June
As the summer approached, things went a little quiet. June was a rather peaceful month.
Personally the most worrying aspect of June was the appearance of a mysterious avatar on my island who refused to leave for four days or more, she moved away from vampire cages though!
People were also starting to notice the use of banlines on 16M plots as a new extortion tactic.
July
If you thought June was quiet, July was even worse.
In July we saw Mitch Kapor’s keynote speech, which many people took offence at.
Open Grid Public Beta testing was unveiled, teleporting between different grids. I wasn’t impressed and I’m still not. What exactly are they upto with this?
August
August was by far the quietest month, was this a sign that all was well? Those warm summer days were delightful. Well in the UK we didn’t have a summer but that’s not the point!
The ad farm issue was brewing over, Maggie Linden in response to a complaint from Robo Marx regarding having banlines removed from a 16M parcel made a contender for response of the year when she said:
“On a 16m parcel? Er. Do you stand in the middle of it and knit, or something like that?”
September
A new ad farm policy was introduced, that was a shiny new one and not the same as the one that was introduced in February. There were unsurprisingly many arguments but this policy has certainly had positive results.
Jack’s office hour was full of interesting participants, there was the infamous Sarah Nerd response to a Twinkie comment.
October
We were settling down to a month of peace but a furore was about to be unleashed.
Prior to that we had the inworld appearance of Terry Pratchett to promote his new book; Nation.
This was a wonderful event that was hard to attend on a full sim, although I noticed a few Lindens sneaked in at the back….Harmony!
There were communication concerns as the blog went very quiet.
Then came the storm after the calm when the great betrayal of the openspace price hike arrived. This would dominate discussions for most of the rest of the year. Linden Lab still show no remorse over this issue.
Sarah Nerd made the infamous comment in Concierge chat and received a short lived ban. There’s a theme here Sarah :p
November
Quietly, in the background, Linden Lab recruited a new European Marketing chief in the shape and form of Clare Rees (AKA Clare Linden).
There was a promise of a further update on openspaces, that produced a so called compromise and listening to the community that was no such thing.
WSE halted trading, hardly anybody noticed.
Zee demonstrated how to hold a discussion in the forum.
Mainland improvements were announced, evidence of the ad farm poilcy working hardly anybody noticed, largely because there was still a furore over the openspace betrayal.
December
Sarah Nerd announced that SNE would be shutting up shop. Frustration over the openspace issue seemed to have finally been the straw that broke the camel’s back. When you consider that Desmond Shang stands to lose USD$10,000 over this, it puts into perspective the sort of damage this policy has caused. Linden Lab still refused to show remorse.
The USS received what some called a bailout when it was announced that their sims would be being moved to the new Blake Sea to be joined to the mainland. The USS were talking of downsizing their Second Life involvement so they undoubtedly received a boost, no matter how much Jack tries to say it wasn’t favouritism.
Damiani Fashion co-owner Pompeja Rossini had trouble teleporting home so I gave her a hand, she arrived buck naked except for some gloves and boots, I have no pictures of this but it happened I swear! She does this to me on purpose!
So there we have it, there will be bits I’ve missed but I have to tidy up and then get myself off to Villa Park for the match of the day! Oh yes Havok 4 and Mono, they were pretty damn important!
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