Second Life Pros

Wagner tells us that 1000 runners from 89 teams were able to raise 200,000 USD (which equals to roughly 54 million Linden Dollars) for Relay For Life 2008, which is a collaboration between the Second Life Community and the American Cancer Society.
Well, 200 THOUSAND dollars is a lot of money, don’t you think?
Maybe this is an interesting aspect of how to use Second Life.
I’m sure that there is space for an even bigger raise for such important matters. Who will be next?

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A great interview with Mark Kingdon, on GigaOM, by Wagner James Au.
A few interesting excerpts:
- Google Lively is not even a competitor; you have much more use cases in Second Life.
- They are focusing on three things:
a) “solidifying our proposition for what we’re defining as our core markets”;
b) Improving Second Life’s interface;
c) Stability and scalability of the platform.
- 3D is much better than 2D or 2.5D (as in the Habbo Hotel virtual world)
- Second Life is profitable (but less than 40 million USD a year).
- The partnership with IBM on interoperability is GREAT.
Well, good points. And good luck, Mark!

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Well, it’s not a surprise: NOT THAT MUCH.
However, Artificial Intelligence in Second Life is improving.
Abi Carver, the “Robotar” (Avatar and Bot) of Daden Navigator:
“…is programmed for movement and avatar proximity, can turn to face a Resident who’s chatting with her, and even accept friendship when it’s offered“.
Well, not bad at all.
We will probably see some mayor improvement in Second Life’s AI in at least two years. Until then, we’ll stick with Abi

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It’s official: Linden Lab will stop supporting Mac OS 10.3 on their Second Life Viewer.
My guess is that this will push the few SL aficionados using Mac OS 10.3 (0.25% of total residents!) to an upgrade of their OS.
Surprisingly, they seem to agree! Read the article for more infos!

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Daden Limited has just created a Second Life browser.
According to them (bold is mine):
“The technology is built on Linden Lab’s HTML on a Prim technology launched in March, so it includes those limitations (no Flash, Java, or forms), but will launch difficult pages in users’ external Web browsers.
The big benefit, says Daden, is the ease of integration and collective viewing.
I’m traveling right now, so I haven’t had a chance to try out Daden’s browser, but one major limitation of Linden’s default implementation is that users don’t necessarily see the same content when looking at the in-world browser.
The Daden Navigator allows …read more

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Linden Lab plans to deliver value added services for Opensim.
This is an interesting excerpt from VP Joe Miller’s interview by reuters:
” …new plan for OpenSim, according to a Reuters interview with VP Joe Miller is to look for “value-added services,” like a reputation or economy system thta makes the Second Life Grid, or its properties, attractive alongside the open grid. Miller told Reuters that “I could see Linden offering economic services, trading services, search services…”
Well, the interoperability between Open Sim and Second Life is a huge step, and I really hope they will go along this path. This could be …read more

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As always, Torley gives us another cool tutorial: this time, it’s all about creating a customized and awesome shirt for our avatar. This is ArtRage website, by the way, and this is the high quality version of the video.
From Torley’s words:
“In today’s tutorial, you’ll learn just how easy it is to use ArtRage — a 3rd-party program — to expressively paint a shirt that’s all yours. ArtRage is superb for making organic textures that look like natural media, such as paints, pens, and pencils. It’s also one of the key tools behind my popular series of FREE! Torley Textures, and …read more

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Do you know Google’s Lively?
In short, you create an avatar and chat with your friends in room that you design. A simple 3D web, if you want.
Some people think that Lively will be the end of Second Life. I don’t.
Sibley Verbeck, Electric Sheep Company’s CEO, commented that Google’s lively will not be a threat to Second Life.
Reuters is neutral about it. No comments.
Wagner James Au thinks that Lively will ultimate help Second Life gain more users.
Virtual World News has an interesting article about Lively and Second Life. And, to be noted, Rivers Run Red and Millions of Us are already …read more

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This is great news: IBM announced interoperability between Virtual Worlds, and Second Life in particular.
Lots of sources commented on this:
Cisco calls it a mayor interoperability milestone.
Virtual world news is warm about it: “Linden Lab will start an Open Grid Public Beta in July, making the Second Life Preview Grid available with Open Grid Protocol support for login and teleport”
And, of course, the official Linden Blog stresses out the importance of the Open Grid protocol.
I agree that this step will help Second Life a lot, and will probably save them from competition. I am happy to see that they are finally …read more

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[image source]
We all love Mitch Kapor!
Well, not exactly, of course, but anyway: I greatly respect Mitch Kapor, and lots of other people agree with me.
That’s why there is so much about his recent Keynote at the fifth SL birthday event (SL5B):
- A new Torley Linden documentary on Mitch Kapor
(“… mighty Mitch Kapor went out of his way to insult current metaverse residents by implying they are socially inept outsiders soon to be swept away in a flood of “pragmatic” business, education, and non-profit players …”)

- MP3, video, and text transcript of Mitch’s Keynote.
Well, we’ll see what happens.
I compare Second Life …read more

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