Much to our delight, the intrepid explorer Magellan Linden has stumbled upon a new and beautiful land that had until now been mysteriously hidden from view. His ‘experiments’ with a new vehicle appear to have lead him to this discovery.

The abandoned city appears to have belonged to a great seafaring civilisation and while the culture and language of the original inhabitants isn’t immediately apparent, Linden Lab has decided to name the island “Nautilus” in honor of its maritime nature. Having claimed Nautilus as Linden Mainland, we would like to offer our residents the opportunity to live in this unique area and so will be selling off some of the land at auction.

If you would like to visit this new wonder, the regions are now visible inworld, all of the regions are prefixed with ‘Nautilus -’. There are many beautiful sights to be seen. The old harbour and nearby dry dock, the great canal and raised inner city, even the seas around Nautilus are rich with things to discover.

There look to be several hundred parcels available, all of them 1024 square meters in size. They cannot be terraformed and have twice the usual prim allocation. Our engineers are investigating how these regions came to exist, and whether they were always part of the Mainland, or were perhaps part of some earlier history. Residents who discover information about the true origin of Nautilus should contact Magellan Linden. We’ll also be adding to a public wiki page soon, where the latest information about Nautilus will be collected.

Auctions for the new area will go live on the 24th October with all auctions starting at L$2000.

I’m excited to announce that Linden Lab is going to be heavily represented at this year’s Virtual Worlds London event, taking place October 20-21. The event promises to be a fascinating and productive look at the future of virtual worlds, particularly in terms of how businesses can benefit form having a virtual presence.

I am honored to be opening the event with a keynote speech, where I’ll be discussing many of the initiatives I’ve spoken about in this space including our focus on improving overall stability, further tailoring the platform for our core audiences and enhancing the first hour experience for new Residents.

As we have so many engaged and enthusiastic Residents in Europe, this is a great forum for myself and other Lindens to discuss how Second Life will be an integral part of ongoing virtual worlds development, including looking at new ways for communities to connect and grow.

Second Life is becoming an increasingly global experience, with a majority of our users coming from outside the US. We’re doing everything we can to support and encourage this growth – as seen by our announcement a few days ago that we are planning to localize the viewer for ten different languages by the end of the year.

Other Lindens will also be presenting and taking part in panel discussions on topics dear to our heart such as the “Future of Virtual Collaboration in the Enterprise” and “Virtual Worlds and Web Integration.” As with any conference we attend, we’re most looking forward to spending time meeting with Residents, hearing your stories and brainstorming new ways that we can keep delivering the optimal Second Life experience to you all.

Thanks everyone; hope to see a lot of you across the pond.

M

I recently celebrated my fourth month at the Lab and it has been a terrific adventure so far. As the leader of this amazing company, what have I been focused on? Leading the company’s efforts to make Second Life more relevant, more usable and more reliable.

How are we doing?

We wrapped up a very busy and productive Summer here in the Northern Hemisphere with great results to report. First off, each week since August 31st has brought a concurrency high. Yesterday, the peak hit 71,232 – that’s an increase of 6% in less than a month. Year-over-year, peak concurrency has grown more than 38%. An even more impressive figure is the number of Residents who logged-in during the prior seven days. For the week ending September 19th, we had 505,839 unique log-ins – another Second Life record. Plus daily user-to-user transactions in Linden Dollars continue their steady climb.

What can we attribute this to? We simplified the registration process to make it easier for Residents to join, registrations are continuing at a healthy clip, existing Residents are spending more time inworld, viewer crash rates have declined, teleport failures have declined and database/network/simulator outages are down substantially (for the past three months, simulator outages were 24% of what they were the prior three months).

All are indications that Second Life is becoming more relevant, more usable and more reliable.

What’s next?

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For years, Philip Linden has talked about the annual Burning Man Festival and the ways its open-ended nature, participant-created content and art contributed to his vision of what Second Life could be.

For those who aren’t familiar with the event, Burning Man is an annual week-long art, fire and community celebration in the Black Rock Desert – a 400 square mile expanse of barren landscape in Northern Nevada – focused on community values like immediacy and participation. Attendees are invited to be whoever they are, express themselves however they want without fear of judgment or social criticism. It’s a place controlled only by the limits of the imagination – a place where 50,000 individuals come together to form a peaceful, respectful community where all ideas have merit and everyone is invited to create, share, explore, learn and grow.

Sound vaguely familiar? It should. Many of the same principles that guide Burning Man form the core foundations of the Second Life community.

With the histories of Second Life and Burning Man so closely intertwined, it should come as no surprise that a virtual rendition of the event exists – and will be celebrating its 6th anniversary starting today. Burning Life, as it’s called inworld, has now grown into one of the larger, annual Second Life events. This year’s Burning Life – which runs until October 5 – will feature art and live performances, interactive theme camps, a fashion show and of course, the burning of the Man amid a fireworks display.

To help commemorate Burning Life’s anniversary, Burning Man founder Larry Harvey and Philip will be participating in a panel discussion on Tuesday, Sept. 30. They’ll be chatting about their experiences, inspirations, reflection, future goals and the roles that both Burning Man and Second Life play in enhancing the human condition.

For more information on the discussion or on the event in general, including schedules and to find out how you can contribute and participate visit the official Burning Life Web site.

When: Burning Life opens Saturday at 9 a.m. pacific time and runs to October 5th.

Center Camp stage kicks off at 11 a.m. pacific. See the performance schedule here.

Where: Burning Life

What: Art installations, live events, music, discussions and more.

As we’ve discussed several times in this space, improving the “first hour” experience of new Residents is one of our primary goals. As our use cases and base continue to diversify, it’s important to begin tailoring the Second Life experience to the specific needs of our audience and reduce the time it takes to access and begin exploring the virtual world. One of the ways we can address this is to look at how first-time visitors are finding and accessing Second Life.

It’s with that mission in mind that we are launching Direct SLurl, an improved web address vehicle that enables first-time visitors to arrive directly at a location within Second Life, as their first location, by clicking on a Second Life URL from the Web, email, etc. Previously, all new Residents were directed to Help Island upon registration, where they went through orientation before they began exploring Second Life. In this new model, a first time visitor will be directed to www.slurl.com where, on that page, they click “sign up” and quickly register, download and login to the viewer, and arrive at their originally intended destination. A quick tutorial will open upon their initial arrival.

All existing SLurls will be enabled with the Direct SLurl extension effective Thursday, September 18th, 2008.

While Direct SLurl will mostly affect first-time visitors, the tool has significant existing benefits for current Residents as well. For example, if you are hosting an event inworld it will be much easier to recruit and attract non-Residents, as you can post your SLurl to your blog, email to friends, etc., and then attendees will be sent directly to your location.

Furthermore, Residents have the ability to create and brand their own page within slurl.com. When a new visitor clicks on your SLurl, they’ll be directed to a page with your content, further extending your inworld brand(s) to the real world.

While all SLurls will be Direct SLurl-enabled, the same security measures and land ownership protections will still apply. If your island is private and not accessible to the general population, it will continue to be so unless you indicate otherwise. If a first-time user is trying to access private content they will be advised of its status and be directed elsewhere.

It’s our belief that taking the steps to make it easier for new visitors to sign up and begin exploring Second Life will improve the usability of the platform for everyone. Further tailoring of the “first hour” experience can be expected in the near future with Direct SLurl being the initial, and very important, first step.

Further Information:

*  How do I invite someone who isn’t currently inworld to a specific location?

* I don’t want people to use a SLURL to access my land

* I followed a SLURL and it took me to the wrong place!

View Torley’s informative Video on Direct SLurl

Just a short announcement that the Land Store will be taken down on Wednesday 17th September for an upgrade to version 2.01. It will be switched off at 9am PST, and all being well will be back up by 11am PST.

This update is specifically to add one new feature that we’re calling ‘Allow Neighbours’. This new functionality allows you to grant permission to other residents so that they can order islands alongside your own, something previously disallowed unless granted through support tickets. For more explanation we have posted a Knowledge Base article over here.

In this follow-up blog post on Ad Farming, I will be talking about the new rules. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into this thread on the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion over the next few days.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

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Hello, I’m Frank Ambrose, the Senior VP of Global Technology, and I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the work we’re doing on the Second Life Grid.

By way of introduction, I’m a recent hire here at the Lab, having joined to lead our global technology team. Specifically I’ll be focused on grid infrastructure and our stability initiatives. As noted in the press release, I come to the Lab from many years at AOL (and prior to that MCI), where I experienced the kind of explosive growth, global scale and inherent stability challenges we face here at Linden Lab.

More than anything else, my tenures at those companies taught me the direct relationship between platform stability and user experience. I’m looking forward to applying that lesson, and a host of others, as we work to maintain, build and improve this complex virtual world. I am keenly aware of the pain that any service outage can cause and am both excited and confident that Linden Lab has focused the right resources to achieve this critical objective.

Given the complexities in our architecture, our stability efforts span many individual areas, most of which were detailed by Ian Linden’s May posting. Some areas will be addressed through short-term initiatives, while others will require significant re-architecture, software changes and new physical hardware. Throughout it all, we’re committed to making the transition to a more stable world as seamless and transparent to you as possible. To that end, members of my team will be using the blog regularly to provide updates on plans and progress towards meeting our stability goals.

As part of our wider stability plan, we’re targeting 4 major infrastructure points both with long-and short-term goals: Intra-Grid Network, Asset Storage Cluster, Central Databases, and Host/Transit Data Services. The strategy is to develop and deploy near-term solutions to improve stability, while looking more broadly at our architecture (hardware, software, networks, etc). In the near term we’ve got a number of projects in flight to address some of these problem points. A couple of examples are:

- Asset collection. We’re collecting many assets that are on our storage clusters, but are rarely (if ever) accessed. These assets take up critical space on the clusters and potentially degrade performance and stability as we hit volume thresholds. We’ll be moving these files to different storage mechanisms and, while they will still be easily accessible, it will help us to avoid pushing the limits of our existing storage clusters, while still preserving all existing assets in a reliable storage environment.

- Reducing the need for VPN connections.  Since we don’t encrypt communication between simulators and our databases, there needs to be a safe means to communicate across data centers and so we use VPN connections. The connections don’t scale well and can be unreliable, so establishing a new communications mechanism, that is both safe, scalable and reliable, is another short-term project.

These projects are just a sampling of the work that is currently being done to improve stability, and I’ll be reporting on their progress, as well as other short-term projects, in the coming months.

We have a lot of work to do but be assured that we have the right resources and internal focus to achieve our stability goals. From personal experience, I’ve encountered many equally complex challenges, especially in my time at AOL, and these problems are all solvable with the right level of attention and technical talent. We certainly have both, now we will start delivering.

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the second annual Linden Lab Innovation Awards, known as “the Hippos,” which honor the exceptional, and varied, work done by open source community members.

Rob Linden presented the awards at a mixed reality event that linked an inworld gathering of nominees, attendees of the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, FL, and others tuning in via audio stream. See the wiki for the full text of his presentation and a review of the last year’s highlights.

Winners were selected by a panel of six Linden judges who studied each nominees contributions and rated them for both for impact and positive influence. The judges all came away awed at the breadth of cxontribution and felt they were just scratching the surface. Today’s list of winners includes only a small portion of what is fantastic about this community. While we’re not sure we’ve recognized everyone we could, we’re very confident that we should give special recognition to these individuals.

And now, the winners…

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In this blog post I will be talking about Ad Farming. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

So flex those typing fingers and join me after the cut..

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