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Linden Lab axes Vivox SLim Second Life client beta
Back in 2008, quite a big thing was made of Vivox's lightweight voice/IM client for Second Life, called SLim. That buzz continued through 2009, with the announcement of voice fonts, SLim-to-SMS, and client-side recording (all scheduled for the second half of 2009) and conference calls, group text/voice chat (via SLim) and browser-based voice applets on the Second Life Web-site (scheduled for this year). Yesterday, the news came down in a mailout from Linden Lab about the status of the SLim beta. "The program has been a great success," said the Lab and, "we have decided to end the SLim beta program, effective immediately."
Second Life racks up 1 billion voice minutes last month. Linden Lab announces new services
Linden Lab has announced that it is currently averaging one billion voice-minutes per month. That's time actively engaged in a voice session, not just time spent with voice support enabled. That's quite a statistic. That puts Second Life's voice service right up there among the top VoIP providers, and around 12% of Skype. That's very impressive. In the 18 months since voice was introduced, roughly 15 billion voice-minutes have been served, through Vivox's voice services for Second Life. Additionally there are new products/services. Some available from today, and some scheduled for later this year.
Hands-on with the new SLim release
Among all the current Second Life kerfuffle and protests going on about unexpected price-rises and policy changes surrounding certain categories of virtual land, it might have been forgotten that Vivox is preparing to release the SLim lightweight instant messenger system, and Linden Lab is preparing a Second Life viewer that is able to communicate with it. The release of the former, and the first-look version of the latter appears to be very close now. We got our hands on both (as they appear to be available for download now), and took them for a bit of a spin to see how they might have improved over the demonstration versions that were temporarily available earlier this year.
Second Life removes VoIP client
In a lot of ways, we've got a bit of a traditional streak here at Massively. We like the good, solid, family values like "Kill a monster. Steal it's treasure". One tradition that we hold particularly dear is "Announce the software and then make it available". Yes, we know that makes us awfully old-fashioned in the modern, cool, vaporware world of the kids these days. In the wake of our announcement and hands-on piece with the new Second Life SLim VoIP/IM client, Linden Lab has in turn announced it, stamped it "coming soon" and yanked the availability of the web-page and associated setup process. This all seems a bit backwards, to be honest. Granted, the software doesn't actually work very well at all, and appears to be little more than a stripped down copy of Vivox Connector with most of the features removed (we think that it is exactly that, in fact), but still, it is supposed to be a Beta. Perhaps it's the little details like the fact that Lindens can't hide their online status from it that have caused it to be pulled, rather than any other inherent kind of breakage. Since Linden Lab's PR people won't answer any queries about the product, all we can do is speculate. Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.
Hands on: The Second Life SLim client is here
Linden Lab's unannounced SLim lightweight Second Life client is available now. We grabbed it out of the starting gate and took it for a bit of a spin for an hour or so. It looks a great deal like Linden Lab needed some new feature or API in the SLS-1.24 server deployment to support this. As a result, preparation of the SLim software for release prior to an announcement at this year's Virtual Worlds -2008 conference in Los Angeles must have been awfully rushed. We expected this to be the first purpose-designed client for Second Life to come out of Linden Lab since the original in 2002, but actually ... it isn't. The real story is rather more surprising. SLim is a Vivox product and it connects to Vivox servers. Connection with Second Life and its grid and servers is only very peripheral. How much involvement Linden Lab actually had with any of this is debatable. The short version: It does a lot less than you'd hope, and setup of the whole show is far clunkier than you'd like. On with the show... Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.
Improved instant-messaging coming to Second Life
While Linden Lab's virtual environment, Second Life already has built-in instant-messaging services, and a gateway system that allows instant-messages to be passed out by email and to be replied to -- it's certainly not convenient to exchange messages with Second Life users unless you're already logged in -- and running the viewer requires a whole lot more resources than you might have available on a mobile device or a work or school computer. Linden Lab has said on numerous occasions that they've been working on this for the last couple of years -- though there seems to have been little progress so far. Now, however, It looks like that's going to change. It appears Linden Lab is actually getting close to either a new client or service to improve instant-messaging. Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.
