Author: Ciaran Laval

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Second Life Could Do With More Widgets

I’ve mentioned this before but here we go again. Second Life could do with more ways for people to share information about events, places and sims by allowing people to easily embed that information into blog posts.

Flickr allows you to embed or copy the code of a picture easily so that you can included it in a blog post :

Cracked Mirror

YouTube makes it easy for you to share or embed videos :

These quick and easy ways of sharing content from social media sites help to not only promote your own content, they help to promote the brand of the platform you publish on. Second Life is a little lacking in this area when it comes to sharing content from Second Life on blogs. Let’s look at some more social media examples.

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Visiting Virtual Dublin In The Rare Old Times

Centre Of Dublin

Virtual Dublin in Second Life has been around for a long time but it’s still a joy to visit. The first sim was opened on 29th April, 2006. There are now three sims joined together, Dublin, Dublin 2 and Dublin 3. The regions have gained attention outside of the virtual world environment,  a St Patrick’s Day parade organised by Tourism Ireland back in 2008 was held there and it’s not difficult to see why this would have been considered such a good location for that event.

Box Junction

The theme of the Sim is of course based on Dublin In Ireland and they have attempted to recreate the look and feel of part of the city, mainly O’Connell Street, Trinity College, St. Stephens Green, Guinness Brewery and Temple Bar area of Dublin including Grafton Street, Halfpenny Bridge, and Millenium Spire.

Looking Across Dublin 2

The Mayor of Dublin in Second Life is also the owner, Ham Rambler. The impressive recreation of Dublin has led to many Dubliners who have visited the sim saying “it’s just like being there!”

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Indigo Goes With Web Groups Whilst Hamlet Looks To Achieve

Linden Lab’s invite for people to send suggestions to them via a new feedback process is gaining some interesting commentary outside the suggestion box. Indigo Mertel has gone for greater web functionality for Groups and communications whereas Hamlet Au over at New World Notes goes for achievements. Neither of these are new territory but they are good discussion territory.

I’m very much onboard with Indigo’s suggestions as they are largely suggestions I’ve made myself in the past. The benefits of web based groups are many but some key areas would mean that you wouldn’t have to receive a notecard, landmark and texture advertising events. The idea would be you’d get a notification pointing to the group web page. This allows communication channels to do what they do best and web pages to do what they do best.

Indigo has added some depth to the broad based group web page idea suggesting that they could have a forum, a wiki, an option for people to subscribe to notifications and the ability to make the group page viewable on the world wide web or not.

In short Indigo is thinking along the lines of the functionality that Facebook and Google + offer. Now you may think that if Facebook and Google + already offer this added functionality then why not go with them for Groups? Many people do, I get event invites sent to me on Google +. However not everyone has or wants an account on Facebook or Google + whereas people who are members of Second Life groups are already happy to be members of Second Life …. one would hope!

Now obviously this isn’t easy to achieve but going forward, I think there might be a pointer or two on how to try and manage groups in the future. Groups are a social experience and they require greater resources than the inworld Second Life experience can provide. Groups are essentially a social media tool and they really need a social media solution but one that can link into the inworld experience.

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Ebbe Altberg To Open VWBPE 2015 & Education In Second Life Still Has A Healthy Pulse

Linden Lab have slowly been trying to make peace with the education community in virtual worlds after the price change controversy a few years back. This has of course been reversed as Linden Lab seem to value the potential of educators using virtual worlds and this is further exemplified by the news that Ebbe Altberg will be the opening keynote speaker at VWBPE 2015 :

Great things are happening again this year at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference, so don’t miss out! We are very pleased to announce that Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, will be back on March 18, 2015, this time as our opening keynote speaker.

Ebbe will be joined by many other noteworthy presenters such as educators, researchers, professionals and instructors representing a broad range of areas including non-profits, sciences, IT , artists and of course, education.

Virtual Worlds Best Practices In Education will be running from March 18th – 21st 2015.

I decided to dig a little deeper into the educational institutions currently active in Second Life. Unfortunately the Official Wiki is hopelessly out of date in this area. However the ever improving Destination Guide is very much relevant to the current market and better still, it includes lots of places that aren’t traditional places of learning. I decided to start my exploration at the DePaul College of Computing and Digital Media

DePaul University

The  thing to note is that this is a bloody impressive build. If you hadn’t intentionally teleported into an education sim, you would probably think it was some sort of roleplaying environment or a place where some serious content creators were at play. This is a very photogenic location.


DePaul University, College of CDM

See what the students at DePaul’s College of Computing and Digital Media have created on the school’s official campus. A monastery, pirate ship, manor house, and bell tower are just a few of the attractions to explore.

Visit in Second Life

Next up I headed over to The Cystic Fibrosis University. This is another impressive build and has a winter holiday theme going on at the moment.

Cystic Fibrosis University

The Cystic Fibrosis university is ran by the Boomer Esiason Foundation and they explain a little bit about the purpose of their build in Second Life on their community portal section of their website:

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world – set up and monitored by the Boomer Esiason Foundation – with virtual characters (avatars) in a cyber community. The online world allows people to socialize and communicate (via typing) “face to face.” CF University, located on Second Life, is an educational and resourceful tool that also allows people with CF to have social interaction.


Cystic Fibrosis University

Presented by the Boomer Esiason Foundation, this region aims to educate the general public about cystic fibrosis, provides valuable resources to sufferers, and is a fun place to relax and socialize with the CF community.

Visit in Second Life

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Linden Lab Announce A New Way To Share Your Suggestions For Second Life

Linden Lab have announced that they are now offering A New Way To Share Your Suggestions For Second Life. “The Tier Is Too Damn High!” will probably not receive much of a response. The blog post opens with :

What’s the one thing Linden Lab could do that would have the biggest impact on further improving your Second Life experience?

Whether your suggestion is small or large, Linden Lab will welcome the feedback. I’m pretty sure we used to do this with a new feature suggestion on the Jira and in a galaxy far far away, on the Second Life forums. However attempts by Linden Lab to receive feedback from their community are most definitely welcome.

The new way of submitting feedback is to go to the feedback and suggestions section of the Second Life website. There, after logging in, you will be presented with a fairly simple form that informs you not to use this form for support requests.

Please note: this form is intended for suggestions, not support requests, bug reports, and other inquiries.

If you are trying to get in touch for a different purpose, below are links to the most appropriate resources.

Support and Downloads: Second Life Support Portal Bug Reports: JIRA

There’s a helpful dropdown on the form to help you categorise your suggestions and feedback. “The Tier Is Too Damn High!” isn’t there, but land is. In all seriousness, unless you’ve got a bloody good plan on how Linden Lab can lower tier and keep revenue stable, “The Tier is Too Damn High!” isn’t going to get very far. The Maths simply doesn’t add up for the idea that a reduction in tier cost would see an equivalent increase in demand and I say that as someone who very much believes that “The Tier Is Too Damn High!“. There’s no easy answer to that one, it involves Linden Lab being able to create more revenue streams.

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