Greetings all!

M Linden here.  I’d like to wish you, your families, friends, partners and loved-ones a happy and healthy New Year.

As we come to the end of the year, I thought I’d share some of the wonders of Second Life I’ve encountered over the past seven months and talk about what’s ahead in the year to come.

This has been an incredible period of discovery for me.  Second Life is a wondrous place, filled with amazing avatars, beautiful places and unbelievable things.  I can’t do them all justice in a blog post, but I’d like to share some of the experiences and content that make Second Life unlike any other platform for creativity, connection, discussion, interaction, innovation and commerce.   After the jump, I’ve listed some of the many things I’ve enjoyed, been inspired by and admired in and around Second Life since I joined Linden Lab in May.   I’d love for you to post your top picks in the Forums for all to enjoy, too.

Moving ahead into 2009, we at Linden Lab are continuing to pursue our world-changing mission.  We are working hard to create a virtual world that “…advances the capabilities of the many people that use it, and by doing so affects and transforms them in a positive way.”

To make real progress, we’re continuing to focus on a small set of strategic initiatives:

* Ensuring the platform is stable and able to scale with the growth
ahead

* Improving the first-hour experience (on the web, in the viewer and
inworld) for all Residents and especially for new users so that we
can continue to expand our active user base

* Making the mainland experience more attractive and fulfilling for Residents

* Localizing our content and experience in key international markets

* Developing new products (e.g., land products as well as new social
and commerce tools) that offer Residents more opportunities to
create, connect, socialize and transact

While the majority of our resources are focused on our core market (content creators and consumers), we are also focused on building the business and education markets.  Second Life is a powerful platform for doing business, collaborating, teaching and learning and we want to ensure we remain a vital platform for businesses and educators worldwide.

To support our growth, we will continue to recruit key staff and executives to the Linden Lab team.  This year, more than 100 new Lindens joined the company.  Three of them (FJ Linden, T Linden and Howard Linden) are senior leaders who bring decades of highly relevant management experience to our leadership team.

I feel very fortunate to have joined Linden Lab at this stage of the company’s development. It is immensely gratifying to be part of this amazing thing called Second Life.  You — the Second Life Residents — bring unbounded creativity, passion and commitment to the virtual world.  You — with the content you create and the experiences you craft — make it an amazing world.

Thank you and Happy Holidays!

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M Linden here. Greetings everyone!

For those of our Resident population who celebrate Thanksgiving, I’d like to wish you a happy and joyous holiday!

Sailing to Plymouth

It’s a time to count our blessings and offer thanks for all the good that has come our way.

I can speak for all of Linden Lab when I say we are immensely grateful to our wonderfully passionate Residents who have created many fantastic, rich, engaging, thought-provoking, educational and entertaining experiences on the Second Life platform.

At Plymouth

Look around Second Life and visit some fun locations like Southern Cross!

You can see a great build of the Mayflower and have a bite of turkey…or be a turkey because there are some great turkey avatars in Second Life.

Happy Holidays!

Happy Thanksgiving Day to All

M Linden here. Many thanks to everyone who responded constructively with their concerns and suggestions about our Openspaces announcement. We’ve listened carefully and your feedback has led to some amendments to our original plan.

Before I jump to the policy amendments, I’d like to provide some insight into our decision and then recap what we’ve heard from you. When the Openspaces product was originally launched, Linden Lab offered Island owners the opportunity to add Openspaces to their land for light use only –- such as ocean or park land. But we didn’t build in and enforce specific, quantifiable performance limits on the Openspaces. Why? For two simple reasons:
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I’ve been with Linden Lab for two months and each day has surfaced something interesting — and often quite unexpected. So, what have I seen? Read on.

Second Life has evolved dramatically but perception has not kept up with reality in five important ways:

1. Second Life users are more mainstream than many assume. It’s not just tech-savvy early adopters or gamers. It’s a much broader cross-section of society with a median age in the early 30’s and nearly half the time spent in world is by women.

2. The diversity of use cases in Second Life is mind-boggling. If you were able to read every story around the world about Second Life, you’d see a tremendous variety of use cases presented – for instance, medical research and treatment, education, marketing, customer support…and the list goes on.

3. Second Life has an enviable business model. While some may have written off Second Life during our post-hype phase, Second Life has a business model most media, metaverse and social networking companies would kill for. We monetize unique users at many multiples of advertising based models. Plus, with a healthy and growing inworld economy of more than $330 million annually, our users are able to make real money and pay more than half of our fees with credits from selling Linden dollars they earned inworld — by creating valuable content and providing valuable services.

4. Second Life’s killer apps are just beginning to evolve. I’ve come to see a couple of use cases as future killer apps – namely virtual meetings and education. And, one simple feature – inworld voice – could be a significant product in its own right. Since launching 3D spatial voice inworld, our users have logged more than 7.2 billion voice minutes making us one of the larger providers of VOIP services.

5. Second Life is leading the industry toward interoperability. Finally, some have said Second Life is a walled garden that will go the way of AOL. Second Life is opening up, so the risk of that happening goes down every day. It dropped pretty substantially recently with the big news on interoperability from the IBM/Linden Lab partnership.

…Please read on as I expand on some of these points after the jump…

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