Last year Second Life celebrated its tenth birthday, you don’t need to be a genius in maths to realise that this year will be its eleventh birthday, although technically it’s a tad older as Steller Sunshine celebrated turning twelve in March!
However let’s not let that spoil matters, the celebration this year is the eleventh birthday and there will be music and magic, fireworks, puzzles and much more in yet another celebration of the virtual world that leads all virtual worlds, the Mom and Dad of them all, yes I’m still talking about Second Life!
Originally, during the Alpha period, the grid was known as Lindenworld. As we were getting ready to launch the Beta, we decided we needed a name that would convey the expansiveness, involvement and complexity we hoped would characterize this world as it grew. We started by debating the merits of a ‘place’ name versus a ‘descriptive’ name. We believed a place name would give people a sense of destination, and possibly some added layer of meaning. And we thought a descriptive name would help people understand this new concept of a shared, 3D collaborative space.
We had a lot of ideas for place names — one of my favorites was Sansara, which was not only euphonic, but had an interesting meaning in the original Sanskrit, meaning roughly ‘ever changing world’. Ultimately, though, we chose to go with a descriptive name, and looked at many derivatives of Terra, Viva, and life. We kept coming back to Life2, and then landed on Second Life as more interesting, more evocative and more what we hoped the world could become as it evolved and grew to be as big as life.
And that’s how it came about!
Originally there were just 16 regions, eleven years on there are over 26,000. However enough of this, what of these celebrations, well I’ll post the press release after the cut.
Continue reading “Second Life’s 11th Birthday Plans Annoucned”
