Ciaran Laval

By 2007 Linden Lab had moved their communications away from the forum and to a shiny new blog. At this point a few things should be noted, firstly, Linden Lab made great use of the blog and engaged in some excellent communications. However Second Life was growing, fast. This meant that blog posts attracted a lot of comments and many of those comments were of a negative nature.

Linden Lab employees must have found this frustrating and some people speculate that Linden Lab moved away from communicating due to the level of negativity. However users were engaged and negative though many comments were, they were of a cruel to be kind nature because people would not take the time out to be heard if they were not engaged with the platform. This sort of thorny situation plagues many a company when it comes to communications.

June 2007

Daniel Linden blogged Keeping Second Life Safe, Together. Ok, this was blogged on the 31st May 2007 but the ripples ran into June … ok feeble excuse but this was a controversial post. Daniel was asking for users to keep reporting questionable content. However some users felt that this post was a dig at adult content in Second Life full stop and took umbrage with the post. The controversy seemed to revolve around the term “Broadly Offensive” which was used in the post.

Torley Linden blogged First Look: WindLight update – beauty & bugs! This post, not surprisingly, concerned Windlight which was new at the time. The feature looked very exciting with talk of multiple suns, moons, region owners being able to control visitor settings and making it easier to edit presets. I think it’s fair to say that although Windlight was a great addition, it has never really fulfilled its potential.

Jeska Linden blogged Voice First Look Viewer Available for the Live Grid. Strange as it may seem these days, voice did not hit the grid until 2007 and was considered a controversial move. This blog explained that there was a voice viewer available and that Linden Lab would be seeking feedback. Ah they really did engage with the community back then.

Sabin Linden blogged Día de la Liberación and Het-Grid. Unfortunately the Second Life blog archive appears to have eaten that post, but it can still be found on the wayback machine. This was a bold move in which viewer updates would be optional and server updates were set to be released only to certain parts of the grid if circumstances dictated. This was of course the forerunner for what we see today with server channels for updates.

Sardonyx Linden blogged An open source community update. This was a post that thanked the excellent work they had engaged with to help fix bugs and add patches. The problem Linden Lab had was that they did not have enough developers to implement these updates, but this post suggested that developers had been hired which was allowing Linden Lab to implement these fixes. Many residents were credited for their help, far too many for me to list but they included the likes of Nicholaz Beresford, Alissa Sabre, Tharax Ferraris, Fremont Cunningham, Dale Glass, Able Whitman, Thraxis Epsilon, Peekay Semyorka, Argent Stonecutter, Jacek Antonelli, SignpostMarv Martin and Strife Onizuka.

Continue reading “June Highlights For The Years 2007 – 2009”

Second Life officially hits eleven years old this month, although if you count closed beta it’s older than that. I’ve decided to delve into the annals of history and look back at some June highlights from the early years of Second Life.

I’ll take a brief look at some topics from June 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. This covered a period of major growth in Second Life, especially 2006 when users were no longer required to provide billing information, there also seemed to be a lot more competitions back in these years.

I provide this information courtesy of the old old old forum archive at : http://forums-archive.secondlife.com/120/1.html

There’s a lot more information there but I can’t fit that all in one post!

June 2003

Robin Linden confirmed that the NDA had been lifted and people were free to build Second Life websites, they even provided some resources to help with those websites.

Tanya Linden announced that someone had won the free use of an Island for three months as well as as well as an NVIDIA nForce™2-based computer, including an NVIDIA GeForce™ FX 5900 graphics card, courtesy of NVIDIA. The computer comes equipped with the Cordless Elite Duo, state-of-the-art wireless mouse and keyboard, courtesy of Logitech.

Hunter Linden announced that groups would now need to consist of at least three people after three days of existence or they would be disbanded.

Haney Linden announced that the payouts from voting stations would be increased from 10,000 Linden Dollars to 12,000 Linden Dollars. Now if you’ve ever wondered what the purpose of those voting stations around the grid was, this gives us a bit of a clue.

James Linden announced that there would be some downtime to roll out patch 0.9.1. Highlights included Trying to link a tree to a primitive does not crash the simulator (it will quietly fail) and a rather worrying look at how things used to be in the shape and form of Sandbox simulators being tax free.

June 2004

Robin Linden announced that Philip Rosedale would be appearing on CNN News.

Catherine Linden announced that someone had won a lifetime membership which came with a free 4096M parcel.

Robin Linden announced a big technological breakthrough that would allow content developers to tie in-world objects together with programs written in languages like Perl, Python, PHP, or Java. XML-RPC was fully functional and live.

Haney Linden announced that there would be a gala to celebrate Second Life’s 1st birthday. Highlights included a parade, which attracted so many attendees that it pushed Second Life past its technical limits, as Haney explained :

This afternoon’s parade attracted so many viewers that it pushed past the limits of Second Life’s current technology. The brave float drivers experienced major problems especially at sim boundaries.

Problems at sim boundaries hey …….

Magellan Linden announced that a resident needed to be sacrificed to satisfy a newly discovered volcano of Mt. G’al. I do like Magellan Linden!

Continue reading “June Highlights For The Years 2003 – 2006”