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Give us more worlds, Linden Lab
As Linden Lab continues to evolve Second Life towards a one-size-fits-all 'world'-product it encounters a wide variety of problems and issues. For example, existing users for whom the change means that the product is no longer the one they signed up for, while still not necessarily guaranteeing that it will attract potential customers. What Linden Lab has right now is a single 'world' product riding on top of a technology that is intended to be a platform that supports multiple worlds. (Technically there's three worlds, actually, the main grid, the preview grid and the teen grid, but there's barely any differentiation to be had, and no crossover at all) One-size-fits-all doesn't just doesn't work in the mass-market. Otherwise there'd only be one kind of iPod. What the Lab really needs is a number of differentiated 'world'-products, each offering something a little different. If inter-grid teleportation is all that it promises to be, this could be the perfect solution to many of their policy woes.
Linden Lab announces winners of 2008 Hippo Awards
Linden Lab has announced the winners of this year's Hippo Awards (otherwise known as the Linden Lab Innovation Awards), which focus on the open-source community that surrounds their virtual environment, Second Life. This is the second set of Hippo Awards (the inaugural edition taking place last year in 2007), and while you might not recognize all of the names, each of the winners has contributed positively to Second Life, albeit sometimes in subtle or indirect ways. 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.
Second Life JIRA statistics site launches
A while back, Rob Linden was asking for volunteers to collect and compile periodic JIRA statistics. Jason Giglio took that idea "and kinda ran with it", producing the sljirastats website. JIRA, the issue tracker used by Linden Lab, is more or less frequently slammed for having a daunting interface. Realistically speaking, while it could probably stand some improvement if it is intended to be used by non-technical people (whether it is or not is in some doubt), it's no worse than most and better than quite a few.
The Linden dollar - every bit as fake as the US dollar
Caleb Booker (better known as Onder Skall) reports on this week's Metanomics session in Second Life. For those of you who came in late, Metanomics (sponsored by our friends over at Metaversed.com) seeks to study how economies work (or sometimes don't work) in virtual worlds and MMOs, how they develop and how people interact with them. A virtual world economy is a capsule microcosm full of lessons about real economies.
