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Linden Lab recently welcomed a new addition to its executive ranks: Kim Salzer, who became our Vice President of Marketing, at the beginning of August. Kim (known as Kim Linden inworld) joins us from Activision Blizzard, where she was Vice President of Global Brand Management for properties like Guitar Hero and Call of Duty 2, among others. Kim brings a deep background in gaming (including experience at Electronic Arts working on massively multiplayer online games and hit sports franchises), and in online learning, and we’re excited to have her as part of the team. As an introduction to Residents, I asked Kim to tell us a bit about herself in her own words:

Q: What’s the one thing you bring from the gaming world that will be most useful to you in your position at Linden Lab?

A: Working in gaming taught me a lot about just how creative and  passionate that audience can be, and I think the same is true for the  Residents of Second Life. And SL provides so many great tools to enhance  and bring out that creativity, I’m really looking forward to helping foster that as we move into the next phase of the platform’s growth. I  want to see if we can make the range of what’s possible in Second Life  even broader.

Q: What are your goals for your new position as VP Marketing at Linden Lab?

A:  What I really want to do here is help the Lab figure out what the “X  Factor” is going to be for Second Life. When I was working on games, I  always tried to choose a single idea to focus on and bring out, an X  Factor that helped people get into the game and helped them discover all  the rest of the possibilities there. If I can help bring that kind of  focus to Second Life, I’ll be happy about how I’m doing my job.

Q: What excites you most about working on a product like Second Life?

A: I’m excited about the prospect of helping to build a product that  really empowers people to express what they’re about, and that can make a real difference in their lives. I think we’ve only just started to see  what can be done here, and I can’t wait to see where we and our  Residents can take things from here.

After the flood of comments that greeted our announcement of the upcoming Display Names feature, we’re happy to announce that we are now releasing a Project Viewer to help us further test performance and let Residents get a sense for how Display Names would work should they go into production.

Once you download the Project Viewer, you’ll be able to freely change your Display Name via the Profile Pane of the right-hand sidebar. Once in production, Residents will be able change their Display Names no more than once per week, in order to cut down on the risk of impersonation. In the Project Viewer, however, there are no limits to how often your Display Name can change.

The Project Viewer will also let you see how names generally can be configured through your Preferences pane, where you can elect to see usernames as well as Display Names, or have your Second Life friends’ names show as a different color from other Residents. The release is hardwired to connect to a test grid, so that any changes you make there will have no impact on your main grid account.

As mentioned, reducing the risk of impersonation is one of our chief concerns as we roll out Display Names. Our original announcement had over a thousand comments, with myself and the team reading all of your feedback. Many of those comments touched on the danger of impersonation. We’re currently discussing the great ideas and constructive feedback you gave and we want to stress that we certainly recognise and share the concerns over impersonation. We’ll be talking more with you about those issues soon and if there are changes needed we will talk about what we are thinking.

We’d like as many of you as possible to try out the feature as it stands today and let us know how it feels. We’ll continue to gather feedback throughout, both in the comments thread below, and on a specific pjira VWR-21053.

Late last week, we discovered a denial-of-service attack that was being served through the widely distributed Emerald third-party viewer. This is in direct violation of our third-party viewer policy (part 2, section d, paragraph iii).

We have removed Emerald from the list of third-party viewers, and are now in touch with the Emerald team to discuss what can happen next. We did this to do our best to protect the safety and security of Second Life users. We will not tolerate a viewer that includes malicious code, nor will we tolerate development teams with a history of violating users’ trust or disrupting their lives.

We take privacy, safety, and security very seriously, and we will act to the best of our abilities to protect it. We have not yet disabled logins via the Emerald viewer, but will do so if we feel the software and the team behind it is not able to meet the standards we’ve set. While Emerald is currently the focus of our attention because of what happened recently, all third-party viewers are held to the same standard, and must comply with the third-party viewer policy.

The third-party viewer directory is designed to be largely self-policing, but we take our responsibility to act very seriously when problems come to our attention. Our goal is that you should feel comfortable using many different viewers in accessing Second Life. While there are always risks involved in using a third-party viewer, we are doing what we can to minimize those, and we encourage and deeply appreciate third-party development. Our new Snowstorm project is an example -- allowing third-party developers to deliver more directly and rapidly to the Second Life viewer.

If you have been using the Emerald viewer, for now we would encourage you to consider either one of the Linden Lab viewers, or an alternative third-party viewer.

 

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As Philip announced at SLCC, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue Teen Second Life as a standalone product and to lower the minimum age of Second Life Residents on the Main Grid to 16.  Teen Second Life will be closing on December 31, 2010, and we plan to begin accepting 16-year-old Residents to the Main Grid on or before that date.

In the five years since it opened, the Teen Grid has been a space of incredible creativity for teens and also home to a number of innovative educational projects. However, supporting and developing for two separate grids has been a challenge for us, and has slowed progress on improvements that benefit all Residents. To help us focus our resources and development on the Main Grid, we have made the difficult decision to close Teen Second Life.

Second Life has a lot to offer teens, and they clearly have a lot to offer Second Life. We are proud that Teen Second Life has had a genuine and  positive impact on teens’ lives -- as a space for creative self-expression, as a tool helping innovative teachers make a difference, as a place for fun with friends, and more. We are also grateful for the contributions that Teen Second Life Residents and educators have made, and for the support they have provided to the greater Second Life community. Many Teen Grid Residents have gone on to become productive members of the Main Grid on reaching the age of 18.

The question of why all teens can’t enjoy the community and creativity that is present on the Main Grid has come up often in the last five years. Many teens want access to the rich experiences -- the variety of content, the broader marketplace, and the chance to interact with parents and older friends -- that the Main Grid affords. Parents and educators, as well, have often lamented the fact that they are unable to experience Second Life with their kids, or to hold classes serving a broader range of ages.

Lowering the minimum age of Second Life Residents to 16 is a first step toward this goal. As we progress with our plans to close Teen Second Life, we will be transferring 16 and 17 year old Teen Grid accounts, land, and content to the Main Grid. We are evaluating if there are ways to allow 13 -15 year olds to have safe access to limited locations on the Main Grid with appropriate controls at some point in the future. However, there is no guarantee that we will be able to do that, or when, as we weigh it against other company priorities at this point.

I will be talking to teens, parents, and educators about the needs of younger users and how we can work toward being able to serve them in  future. I’ll be setting up inworld meetings in the coming weeks to learn more about those needs, and potential short- and long-term solutions to meet them. I look forward to speaking with everyone, and listening to your feedback, thoughts, and suggestions.

For more details, see this wiki page, and stay tuned for further updates.

As Philip mentioned this weekend in his speech at SLCC,  I'm excited to tell you more about a new feature that's on the horizon for Second Life. Known as Display Names, it's a project that will not  only give Residents the tools to better express themselves, it will also help us grow the population of SL further, making it a richer and more  robust social environment for all. Most importantly, it brings a new element of creativity to your avatar, combining the ability to adopt  virtually any name you like in Second Life with the stability of having a  persistent underlying identity that lets everyone be sure at all times  which avatar they're communicating and transacting with.

In a nutshell, Display Names, set to roll out in a project release at the end of August and be deployed gridwide in late September, gives Residents two aspects to their identity in Second Life: a username that  is unique and does not change, and an optional Display Name you can change periodically and can be set to nearly anything you like -- including foreign Unicode characters, more than two words, and many other possibilities. The change means that Residents are no longer  forced to choose from a limited set of last names (which has scared off new users in the past), and makes it possible to use your Second Life name as a more powerful and expressive aspect of your online self. Whether you use your current SL name, your real name, a pseudonym, gamer tag or other ID, Display Names gives you more freedom to express your identity inworld -- not just in avatar form, but in name as well.

Why Display Names?

Moving to a system of usernames and  Display Names has a number of advantages. Above and beyond the greater  self-expression it allows, Display Names also relieves new Residents of  the need to choose a Second Life last name. New users signing up for  Second Life often abandon their accounts when they're asked to choose from a list of last names; Display Names removes this choice from  registration and lets them get into Second Life more quickly.

Display Names also supports European, Asian, and other Unicode characters -- an  important feature for our international Residents (who currently  account for about 60% of the SL community). For years, Residents have requested this capability and we are excited now to be able to share what's coming.

Display Names lets us provide more choice and at the same time provides a  consistent and unique identity for individual avatars. While you may  change your Display Name from time to time, the username associated with each account doesn't change, and will always be easily discoverable by anyone dealing with a  particular Resident. That means there should never be a question over  who you're talking to inworld.

Endless Possibilities

Display  Names gives you more freedom than ever to express your inworld  identity. You can use your real name, a fantasy name, hyphenate with  your inworld partner, promote your organization or inworld business name, or anything that you want other Residents to refer to you as. Torley Linden has created the video below that will give you an idea of  what you can do with this new feature:

More Information

We will continue to update you as we roll Display Names out. In the meantime, here's where you can learn more and share your thoughts.

• Read our Frequently Asked Questions, complete with helpful images
  
• Share your thoughts on Twitter: #slviewer2

 

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Where We’ve Been

Almost two years ago, we set about revamping the Second Life Viewer and in March of this year we released Viewer 2. Over that two year period, we took a heads-down approach to our design and development process to create a Viewer that would be easier for new Residents to use. This heads-down approach meant we had very limited contact with you, and left many Residents feeling alienated. Now, we are making some big changes to better communicate with you and include you in our development process. Specifically, we’re beginning a new open-source program -- known as Project Snowstorm -- that will show you exactly what we’re working on and will also start to bring Resident contributions into our mainline Viewer build. We’re extremely excited to be firing up this program, and we’re confident it will lead to a better Viewer, one that benefits from the tremendous talent and creativity we’ve seen from the most committed members of our development community.

Fast, Easy, Fun!

As part of Linden Lab’s recent reorganization, we’ve taken a hard look at the way we work together, the way we build software, and the way we interact with the open-source community. We’ve got a lot of improvements we want to make to the Viewer 2 user experience. Some of the Viewer’s workflows are cumbersome for some Residents and this has hurt Viewer adoption. We really can improve the Second Life user experience by rethinking the way our Viewer works and making it (and its features and functionality) faster, easier, and more fun for everyone. But we can’t do it without your help.

Where We’re Headed - Project Snowstorm

As we prepare to make Viewer 2.1.1 the mainline release, I’m really excited to introduce you to Project Snowstorm and the Snowstorm team who will be working on the Second Life Viewer in the open and in way that directly engages you.

Here are our goals:

Show Residents continuous visible progress

• Work in the open by sharing not only our code, but our process publicly -- this includes our backlog and our discussion about it.
• Engage with the open source community and aggressively accept contributions from the community into the Second Life Viewer.
• Release new ‘Development’ Viewers frequently -- our initial target is bi-weekly.  All builds from the ‘Development’ branch are visible and available for testing.

Improve the user experience 

• Make continuous improvements to the design and implementation of the Viewer’s user interface.
• Import desirable patches and features from Snowglobe and other Third Party Viewers.
• Add small features and fixes that have high value and low cost, while still remaining consistent with an overall product vision.

Renew and deepen our relationship with the community

• Integrate community work directly into the main Viewer rather than routing it through Snowglobe first.
• Demonstrate rapid responsiveness to feedback and patches from the community.
• Engage continuously with the community to develop new project proposals and provide resources that open source developers need to be effective.

I should note that it’s not just the Snowstorm team who are working on the Viewer. Several teams throughout the Lab are contributing features and bug fixes to the Viewer -- those teams will also be moving to a model where we work more closely with our Residents. The Snowstorm team will be focused on rapid iteration and constant improvement, while working closely with the open source community and sharing everything we do.

How’s that going to work, Esbee?

I’m glad you asked! Linden Lab has adopted the Scrum framework as a way of allowing our teams to work quickly and feel empowered to introduce new features and functionality to Second Life.

At the heart of our process is the Snowstorm Team Backlog. This is a ever-evolving ranked list of user stories that describe things we’d like to do with Viewer 2. Every team at Linden Lab has a backlog like this and ours will be visible to you. If you look at the list and think of something you’d like to suggest we add, change, or just have questions, please let me know!

As a team, we’ll be gathering every two weeks to pick items off our Backlog to work in our next Sprint. A Sprint is a development cycle where teams create tasks to fulfill a series of user stories and work to design, implement, and test those stories during that cycle. Snowstorm Team Sprints will last two weeks. Each day, the team will gather inworld for a Daily Scrum, where each team member will give a short (2 minute) status update. We’ll publish that status update on the Wiki after our Daily Scrum as well.

We’ll also be encouraging open source developers to work with us on Backlog items - or you’re welcome to propose ideas too! Oz Linden will be posting information about how to propose project ideas on the Wiki. Open source developers will be treated as any other team member and invited to our Daily Scrum to share their status as well.

As the Snowstorm team works with you to make changes to the Second Life Viewer with a focus on improving overall user experience, teams in the Lab will also be working on the Viewer. We’ll be sharing our Viewer Roadmap shortly so you can get an idea of all the work being considered for the Viewer this year, not just from the Snowstorm Team.

The Snowstorm team will be blogging at least weekly about their work, sharing their successes, failures, challenges, and ideas with you. We’ll be holding public meetings, sharing our design ideas, and all documentation.

Who’s on the Snowstorm Team?

As I mention above many teams across the Lab are working on the Viewer. The Snowstorm team will be managing the Development branch, coordinating contributions from the open source community, and will also contribute rapid feature development.

The team consists of:

• Q Linden - Tech Lead, Team Lead
• Esbee Linden - Product Lead, Business Lead
• Oz Linden - Open Source Lead
• Merov, Aimee, Tofu, Paul, Andrew, Vadim, Anya - Engineers
• Open Source Community

Where can I learn more?

Snowstorm operates in the open; the home page of the Snowstorm team is on the Snowstorm Wiki page. It has pointers to our various communication channels, processes, and contact information.

The Snowstorm Team presented at the Second Life Community Convention on Aug 15. You can watch the recorded presentation, here.

Let us know what you think!

Do you have questions about what we’re doing, where we’re headed, how we work, our Backlog, processes, etc? The Snowstorm Team would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Please feel free to respond to this post, Twitter using the hashtag #snowstorm or reply to @snowstormsl, email, or come to one of our weekly open source meetings.

Thanks!
Esbee Linden, Q Linden & Oz Linden

On Saturday morning, Philip delivered his keynote speech at the Second Life Community Convention in Boston. In the course of his speech, Philip announced coming changes and made several commitments for 2010.

You'll be hearing more (and more details) on those points soon, but in the meantime you can watch the full video of Philip's talk online to hear exactly what he said at SLCC. The video, made available by the SLCC organizers, is here (fair warning: you'll need to sit through an ad before the video).

I'd also like to give my thanks to the SLCC organizers - in particular Fleep Tuque - for all of their hard work on the event, and their flexibility that helped make it possible for Philip to attend in person.

Today I’m pleased to announce that Viewer 2 (Version 2.1.0) has left beta to become the official release Viewer for Second Life! As mentioned in previous blog posts, our focus over the past few months has been on improving the stability and performance of the Viewer. After the beta release, the crash rate was far worse than our previous 1.23 Viewer and this is something our engineering teams have worked hard to correct. We’ve been closely monitoring crash rates and other key metrics and carefully tuning our code to provide a much more predictable and stable inworld experience. Over the beta period, we’ve watched crash rates decline steadily and we’re confident this release, Version 2.1.0, will be a great improvement over the previous release.

Version 2.1.0 is not just about stability and performance improvements, we’ve also introduced some great UI and usability enhancements in response to your feedback. Check out the Version 2.1.0 release notes for more detail, but here are some highlights:

• Customize the bottom bar - Right-click on the bottom bar to show/hide the buttons you wish to have displayed.
• Resize the chat bar - Click and drag over the right side of the chat bar to resize the field to your desired width.
• Choose between sliding the world or overlaying it with the Sidebar - Many users didn’t like the squeezing effect that took place on their world view when they opened the Sidebar. In response to that, we’ve added a new preference (under Advanced > Automatic position for: Sidebar” ) that allows you to choose which Sidebar slide behavior you prefer.
• Camera controls clean-up - The pan and orbit controls have been brought back together in one view, so you don’t have to toggle between the two.
• Avatar appearance editing in the Sidebar - You can now edit your outfits and body shape right from the Appearance Tab in the sidebar.

We’ve also introduced a new voice feature - Voice Morphing!

Voice Morphing is a long-requested feature that allows you to change your avatar’s voice to match any number of tones and characteristics. You can change your voice to sound like a robot, furry, monster, or even a different gender! Voice Morphing adds a new dimension to avatar customization, allowing you to be whoever you want to be in Second Life, in both appearance and voice! To learn more, check out the SL Voice Morphing Microsite.

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Hi Everyone,

It's been just over 3 weeks now since my return as  CEO, and I think I've gotten up to speed enough to begin communicating  with you in a useful way.   This post is an update on what we are doing,  and also to announce an in-world meeting where I'll extend on the  thoughts in this post, as well as answer as many question as possible.    Beyond the contents of this message and meeting, I hope to revitalize a  frank and timely exchange between the company and the Second Life  community.  You can expect additional posts from us in the coming weeks  expanding these focus areas to more specific projects.  This is a time  of great change for us:  a downsizing and restructuring of the company, a  change in executive leadership, and big changes to our strategic  planning and directions.

When I spoke at the seventh-birthday celebration, I said how we  needed to 'tear down the walls' that broadly keep more people from  getting into and using Second Life.  We have created together (both  Linden Lab and the many of you who create content and experiences) an  amazing shared experience which at it's best is a breathtaking social,  creative, educational, and entrepreneurial platform.  But we've gotten  ahead of ourselves.  We still have a lot of hard work to do to make this  experience accessible to a majority of people.  At a very high level,  we're slowing down work that we think we've started too early or in the  wrong order, and refocusing our team and projects on improving the basic  features which impact all users and which are essential to the  operation of Second Life.  Additionally we will focus on faster  iteration with more input from the community, as well as greatly growing  the virtual marketplace.

Here are some more details on the current state of that planning  process:

Inside the Lab, we've been using the expression 'back to  basics', to capture refocusing our efforts to re-examine, repair, and  where necessary, re-design the basic experiences and systems that are at  the core of the Second Life experience.   First on the list should be a  big attack on lag and crashes, clearly things that very negatively  impact all users.  We are looking at 'lag' broadly to encompass things  like chat failures and delays, frame rates, and scene and object loading  delays.  Beyond performance and crashes, wherever possible we will make  the basic user experiences (like getting clothes on, communicating, or  your first few sessions as a new user) faster, easier, and more fun.

Next,  we've been looking at how we need to more rapidly improve and innovate  Second Life to re-capture and sustain the technology leadership position  that got us to where we are today, and is vital to scaling the virtual  world experience to maturity.  In creating Second Life, we've solved  some very hard problems across a number of different areas, and few  people have been able to copy us.  We need to get back to being the  first to invent and deliver the solutions that evolve virtual worlds -  we are still at the very beginning of a huge market.  That's a lot of  different work, but in the short term you can expect to see greatly  shortened release cycles across all our systems and a focus on rapid  iteration with lots of community feedback as a first result of those  efforts.   The other key short term goal is to very rapidly make Viewer  2.x the best and most widely-used Second Life viewer.  We are unifying  efforts across the lab to make this viewer both the best-performing and  the most functionally capable for all different users, as well as  hopefully becoming the underlying codebase for lots of  third party  development.

We've also identified the virtual content (both goods and  services) marketplace as a key longer-term area of focus as well as the  key metric for our collective success.  There are 10's of thousands of  entrepreneurs, creators, and merchants working together inside Second  Life that have already created what is easily the world's largest market  for virtual items and experiences, with around $600M expected in total  volume in 2010.   We're going to redirect efforts to improve and grow  that market as quickly as possible.  Making content and experience  creators more successful is what ultimately drives the growth of Second  Life.   Optimizing from end-to-end the process of searching for, trying,  buying, and using virtual goods will be our first focus here.

We will make every effort to deliver visible and continuous  improvements in these three areas over the remainder of the year.  The  shift to shorter cycles with smaller deliverables  should allow better  community involvement and feedback.  We will make our changes, develop  code, and discuss plans in the open.  Before the end of July, we will  also hold an in-world gathering where we can  talk more about these  plans and take questions. More details about how  we can best  get a big group together and talking will be coming in  another post.

As a final note, I would note that we are not planning to change  Second Life to exclude any categories of users.  Our restructuring  messaging around 'consumers' and 'web' versions of Second Life seemed to  mistakenly suggest to some that we plan to more narrowly focus the  experience on a specific demographic or use model.  We aren't.  We are  reducing efforts across the board that in our opinion are being done in  the wrong order, but those resources will re-focus on creating a single  effective system that is better for all categories of user.  We believe  we first need to improve and complete the core experiences that drive  Second Life, before we dive into how to customize it for different  markets.

In closing, I'd like to thank the SL community,  and in particular  those people who sent me the many heart-warming email messages of  support that I've received since returning.  They have been both a  direct contribution to these plans, and also a way to keep a smile on my  face in these tough but exciting times.  If you have thoughts about  Second Life that you want to share with me, please keep those emails  coming.  I can't say that I can read or respond to everything, but I  have gotten great value from many of the well-written thoughts I've  received.

Yesterday, we released the third beta of Second Life Viewer 2.1. (To learn more about the Viewer 2.1, read our alpha blog post and the last Viewer 2.1 beta post.) We’ve been hard at work to significantly improve both the stability and performance of this Viewer. But we need more Residents to try it out to help us get it ready for prime time. That’s where you come in.

Now that the beta of Viewer 2.1 is more stable than your current viewer -- Viewer 2.0 -- we invite you to download the beta, send us crash reports, report any bugs that you run into, and let us know what what you like and what we need to work on in the Viewer 2 Forum.

And remember, Viewer 2.1 is full of cool features that enable you to:

• Easily share media
• Customize the bottom bar
• Resize the chat bar
• Choose between sliding the world or overlaying it with the Sidebar
• Control your camera more easily
• And morph your inworld voice!

So download the third beta of Viewer 2.1 today and let us know what you think on Twitter using #slviewer2.

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Release Notes

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Be one of the first to check out the new look and feel of our completely  redesigned web-based shopping experience for Second Life, Second Life Marketplace Beta.  To learn more about what has gone into this launch, read the Second Life Marketplace Beta announcement.  While we are testing the new  marketplace in these early days, Xstreet SL will remain up and running  to ensure that shopping can continue if we run into any kinks.

No  Commission Fees for Two Weeks
As a thank you to all of the merchants who provided feedback to help in the design of the new  marketplace, as a show of appreciation for the work put into converting listings over to the new marketplace, and as an incentive for merchants to send some of their customer base over to try the new marketplace in  these early days, we have decided to remove commission fees on sales for the first two weeks that the SL Marketplace Beta is live (June 30th  through July 14th).  After the two weeks are up, we will reintroduce the  commission fee, so take advantage of it now and get your listings into  shape if you haven't already.  Visit the SL Marketplace Help Pages for more information.

How can Merchants Prepare for the Beta?
Learn about what promotional assets you need for your store, setting your migration preferences to manage your times while we maintain two online stores, and other information on getting started in the new Marketplace on the SL Marketplace Help Pages.

Thank  you to our Residents
We could not have done it without our  Residents. XstreetSL was originally created by a Second Life Resident  for the community and we would like to thank all of the merchants who  helped us in early merchant roundtables, by alpha-testing the first  builds, and by providing feedback as users of the marketplace prior to  the public beta.
   
Looking Forward
The new  marketplace is a significant step forward, but it is only the beginning. The Commerce Team is excited to have this new ecommerce platform as a foundation for future improvements and features. We look forward to working together and creating the best experience we can for our  Residents. As always, let us know your thoughts by "Joining the Discussion" and tweet your thoughts using the hashtag #slmarketplace.

Sincerely,
The Commerce Team

Quick Links:
SL Marketplace Help Pages

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Mark Kingdon is going to step down as CEO, and I am going to return as interim CEO, working side-by-side with former CFO Bob Komin, who is being promoted to COO.

This is a big, tough change but one the board of directors and management team deeply believes in.  We owe Mark great thanks for the many things we've accomplished in these last two years -- most notably a great improvement in the stability of Second Life, and also the hiring and nurturing of a strong team of new leaders who are now ready to do some amazing work together.

Our thinking as a team is that my returning to the CEO job now can bring a product and technology focus that will help rapidly improve Second Life.  We need to simplify and focus our product priorities -- concentrating all our capabilities on making Second Life easier to use and better for the core experiences that it is delivering today.  I think that I can be a great help and a strong leader in that process. 

It is an honor to have a chance to help more directly again, and I come to this mission with energy, excitement, and an open mind about what we need and how we need to do it.  I want to see Second Life continue to grow, amaze, and change the world.  It's what gets me up in the morning.  Despite the challenges of such a big change, I am happy to be drafting this blog post while sitting in our San Francisco office, surrounded by the many Lindens who have made it all possible.

More to come, as soon as we all get settled and figure out how best to work together!

Craving birthday cake? Get ready to celebrate Second Life's seventh birthday party, otherwise known as SL7B!

The SL7B celebration begins on Monday, June 21 at 10:00am PDT and runs through Sunday, June 27, spanning 21 regions with over 700 contributors, over 300 exhibits, and over 200 live performers and speakers (including special speeches from Philip and M Linden). SL7B is a showcase for the art, innovations, and ingenuity of all Second Life Residents.

The regions will remain open through July 3 for people to enjoy, but the live entertainment ends on June 27—so be sure to stop by SL7B next week to get your fill of the amazing experiences that this event has to offer.

What can you expect? The unexpected, of course.

This year's theme is "Unexpected Collaborations," a celebration of that which is only possible through our virtual world. While the event is sponsored by Linden Lab, it's really an unexpected collaboration of its own—the fruit of the collective labors of exhibitors, volunteers, and Lindens.

The gates open on Monday at 10:00am PDT, but we'll be kicking things off officially with Philip, who will be joining us at the Main Stage on Monday at 11:00. Second Life will be seven years old on Wednesday, June 23—and M will be joining us for cake and birthday wishes at 9:00am PDT on the Main Stage.

Check out the Second Life Destination Guide and the SL7B Resident Blog for daily updates. For more information about the theme and the history of this annual event, please take a look at the SL7B Wiki pages. And to get yourself amped up to celebrate, take a look at the machinima teaser by Toxic Menges.

Many thanks to the wonderful exhibitors and volunteers who are making this happen!

See you inworld!

This morning saw a decrease in the exchange rate of the Linden dollar versus the US dollar. However, Second Life's key economic indicators remain stronger than the levels we saw in late 2009, though recent weeks have seen some reduction in economic activity compared to the record activity of the first quarter, as well as some uncertainty in the wake of recent corporate anouncements. Linden Lab continues to monitor the exchange rate. Should the average exchange rate change more than 10 percent in any given day, automated circuit breakers will kick in to halt trading for at least one hour.

The first quarter of 2010 saw record economic activity in Second Life. That spike was due in part to the release of the movie Avatar, which drew many new Residents inworld, thus boosting the economy. Recent months have seen economic activity return to levels we saw in the fourth quarter of 2009.

That change, combined with uncertainty related to the corporate restructuring announced last week by Linden Lab, contributed to an imbalance between supply and demand on the LindeX today. Linden Lab remains committed to the Linden dollar as a virtual currency, and to the Second Life economy as one that continues to provide value for Residents, merchants, and landholders large and small.

Today we're pleased to announce the alpha release of Viewer 2.1, the next version of our new Second Life Viewer. (Look for the "test viewer" on the download page.) While most of our work on Viewer 2.1 went into improvements to performance, stability, and usability, as a direct result of Residents feedback, we're also excited to reveal two new features including single sign-on and Voice Morphing, that can change the sound of your inworld voice to match your avatar.

As an alpha release, you should initially expect less stability than our the officially released Viewer 2.0.1. However, we are releasing this early in the cycle so that we can get good experience and data with the performance and stability fixes we've made. We intend to release weekly from here on out. The more residents that run these weekly builds, the better our data will be. If the viewer crashes, then please allow the "Viewer Crash Reporter" to do its thing, and give us as much detail as you can on what you were doing when the viewer crashed.

Responding to Your Feedback
The performance, stability, and usability improvements we've made for Viewer 2.1 Alpha have come as a direct result of the feedback we got after the launch of Viewer 2. We listened closely to your needs, suggestions, and issues and prioritized our development accordingly.

In addition to all of the features included in Viewer 2, including Shared Media, you now have the ability to:

• Customize the Bottom Bar: We've added the ability to customize the button bar, to suit your preferences and activities (in Jira: VWR-17010, VWR-18813, VWR-18889), including adding buttons for Build (in Jira: VWR-17130), Search, Map, and Mini-Map to existing buttons, including Gesture, Move, View, and Snapshot. Simply right click on the bottom bar and choose which buttons you'd like to see on the bottom bar.
  
• Resize the Chat Bar: You can also now resize the chat bar by dragging the right edge of the input to the desired width. 
  
• Option for Right-Hand Sidebar to Slide or Overlay Your Inworld Experience: One major issue that came up consistently was the right-hand sidebar (in Jira: VWR-17006, VWR-18324). We've responded here too, making it possible now to let it slide over your inworld view, rather than causing the inworld view to shift--your choice! (See the Advanced panel in Preferences - Automatic position for Sidebar.) The default preference is set for sidebar resizing of your inworld experience, just uncheck the box if you would like the world to stay as is.
• Better Control Your Camera: Based on your feedback (in Jira: VWR-361), we've also recombined the pan and orbit controls to allow for more fluid camera control.

We've also improved performance and stability by tuning the graphics experience and cleaning up many bugs. Of course, we continue to listen to your feedback and have a substantial backlog of features that we'll continue to work on. But, these were the ones that consistently raised as issues and, subsequently, were prioritized in this release.

Today, Viewer 2.1 Alpha is available in English, German, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Italian, and Polish. Dutch is coming soon.

New Character For Voice
Voice Morphing is a feature that Residents have been asking for almost as long as we've had voice capabilities inworld. Simply put, it's the ability to change your avatar's voice to match any one of a number of tones and characteristics. Want to sound like a robot, a furry, or the opposite sex? With Voice Morphing, that ability is now just a few clicks away. The ability to change what your voice sounds like inworld will not only make it a richer and more interesting experience to be part of a community in Second Life, but will also help introduce voice to Residents who have been reluctant to use it in the past because they were uncomfortable making their real voice heard inworld. With Voice Morphing, you can be whoever you like in Second Life in voice as well as in appearance.

As a first step, we're introducing 25 voices, available for purchase via subscription in five packs of five each, with the following themes: scary, feminine, masculine, tiny, and techie. You'll be able to sample each one for free to find the morphs that work best for you.

To learn more, please read our SL Voice Morphing blog post and visit our SL Voice Morphing Microsite.

With OpenID, You Now Have Single Sign-on
OpenID allows you to authenticate to other Secondlife.com properties, such as the blog, Jira, and the SL Wiki, from Viewer 2.1 -- only one time. You no longer need to login multiple times on each property which saves time and frustration. Although some of these logins won't be available today, they will be soon.

Viewer 2.1 Alpha is a New Option to Choose From, Among Other Available Viewers
As you know, Viewer 2 will be the primary commercial viewer for all SL Residents: Viewer 2.1 Alpha and Viewer 2.0 are both available today. Keep in mind that Viewer 2.1 is an alpha release; expect more bugs and crashes than you'd experience in a "gold" version. Viewer 2.0 is still the latest "official" Second Life Viewer, and Viewer 1.23 is still available. In addition, the Third-Party Viewer Directory now contains 10 third-party viewers, many of which are based on our Snowglobe open-source program, for Residents with specialized needs. In fact, the Viewer 2.1 Alpha code will be available to the open source community shortly.

Moving to Rapid Iteration Cycles
As I mentioned earlier, we are aiming to iterate on viewer development more rapidly, releasing a new alpha version on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. This will help us stamp out bugs and make performance improvements more quickly than we've been able to do before. So, try out this first alpha version and let us know what you think. We're looking forward to working more closely with you as we push ahead.

Lastly, we want to thank you for trying Viewer 2, sharing your thoughts, and helping us guide the development process. Your input has been invaluable -- so keep it coming! Check into the  Viewer 2 Forum, and post updates to Twitter as well (using the #slviewer2 hashtag).

Resources
Download Page
Release Notes
Jira
SL Answers
Knowledge Base for Voice Morphing

Dear Residents of Second Life,

Earlier today, we announced the undertaking of a significant restructuring of Linden Lab. (Read the press release for details.) Though the company remains in a solid financial position, it has become clear that we need to make some hard decisions in order to bring current and future Residents the kind of product and experience we feel they deserve. After three years of intensive hiring, we've come to a place where it's important that we reorganize our teams and find a renewed level of discipline and momentum as we move forward.

Our restructuring plan has three main goals:

• to improve our focus as a company on the projects that matter most to Residents
• to simplify our organizational structure and operate more efficiently
• to achieve cost savings so that we can invest in platform improvements, new products, and new lines of business.

Reorganization in a company the size of Linden Lab is never easy, and this restructuring will result in the loss of a number of jobs, at all levels of the organization. None of these cuts are easy for us to make. I am extremely proud of the team we've assembled in recent years, and am not happy to have to say goodbye to any of them. But as an organization, we need to become more focused and more efficient, and this is the path we've chosen to meet those goals.

Linden Lab remains a great business. We have a strong balance sheet, and our revenue will reach record levels this year. The inworld economy continues its solid growth as Resident creators of great content and experiences do what they do best, and new Residents continue to join the phenomenon we know as Second Life. Here at the Lab, I'm concentrating on our reorganization. In coming weeks, I'll blog more about our focus for the remainder of the year. For today, I'm sorry to have to bid farewell to some great employees, but I'm also looking forward to what the newly streamlined company will be able to bring to our Residents in the months ahead.

Thank you,

M Linden

Congratulations to Agent Heliosense and the The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop, the winner of the 2nd annual Linden Prize.

The Tech Virtual launched in 2007 with the mission of bringing faster and more collaborative exhibit development to museums worldwide using an online platform. Last year, the core concept of Tech Virtual was extended beyond prototype exhibits to virtually prototyping an entire museum gallery and share that with stakeholders such as administrators, curators, exhibit designers, and sponsors. In 2010, The Tech Virtual began to prototype and test a new and participatory exhibition, called Expolab, to institutions such as Citilab Cornella, the Science Centre Singapore, the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History who built a Places of Invention. The Tech Virtual has gone beyond the "virtual museum" concept  into one in which the virtual exhibits become a precursor of the real construction. These are results that those in both the virtual and real worlds can experience and appreciate--a core requirement for the Linden Prize.

Summaries of Tech Virtual, and each of the finalists, were provided throughout the last 11 days, and can be found on May 21st blog post announcing the top ten finalists. And, each finalist was highlighted throughout the past few days with videos, filmed by TreetTV. You can find all the videos on the Second Life YouTube channel.

To see a video of The Tech Virtual Musem, click here. To visit The Tech Virtual Museum, click this SLurl or browse our special Destination Guide that includes brief descriptions and all SLurls for all ten of the Linden Prize finalists.

Congratulations to The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop and all of the 2010 Linden Prize Finalists.

Today, we wanted to update you on the status of Search and what we're doing to make it a more accurate and powerful Second Life tool. As many of you are aware, we have had some challenges with Search, particularly in Viewer 2. We know that many of you consider Search the most important item for us to fix and, consequently, it's a top priority for us.

Upgraded Google Search Appliances

We use the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to power most of your searches. Google's technology can crawl, index, and rank a huge amount of inworld content. With few exceptions, when you search inworld, the results you see are coming from our GSA machines. We recently upgraded from GSA 5 to the latest GSA 6 version. This change not only produces a better search experience, but it also causes some changes in search behaviour that we want to share with you.

The Impact of GSA 6

GSA 5 results were good, but not good enough. GSA 6 delivers more sophisticated relevance, scales more easily, and returns results much more rapidly, especially in serial searching and search pagination where we've seen a significant performance improvement. Second Life Search processes millions of searches every month, so query performance is something that we continually monitor and improve. It also supports multi-language relevancy tools -- a big win for our international Residents! Additionally, the new algorithms more efficiently factor in many types of "search gaming".

Due to the more sophisticated relevancy in GSA 6, search results will be more dynamic. That's a big change that will be most noticeable to those who may be accustomed to the more static search rankings from the previous version of GSA. You may already have seen that your search listing can move up and down in search results more than it did before. As the new GSA 6 boxes learn more about Second Life content, the results will settle down and become more relevant. However, you should expect that, in general, search results will still be less static.

Improvements and Fixes

As we mentioned, improving Search is a top priority.  Here are some changes that went out last week.

Improvements  include:

• Doubling the number of results per page in Viewer and web
• Improved update speeds for Destination Guide in Viewer 2
• Added Destination Guide profiles to web search
• Change to "Profile" labels in line with Viewer
• Sorting by region name

Bug fixes include:

• Maturity boxes auto-unchecking
• Missing event details in Viewer
• Unicode search failures for classifieds
• Classifieds not triggering Viewer launch

More Improvements and Fixes Slated for June

Here are three significant issues that we're planning to address in June.

1. We currently have a bug that can randomly cause parcels to drop from Search. Basically, when we crawl the hundreds of thousands of parcels inworld, occasionally one will have malformed data and it doesn't appear in the search index. It doesn't happen often, and when reported to us we can fix it, but clearly this is an important one to solve. We have a solution planned and will be working to push that through as soon as we can.

1. Relevancy is currently skewing in unexpected ways due to some of the secondary data that gets associated with a particular location. We understand the problem and, whilst subtle, it's definitely not helping so we are taking steps to address this too.
2. After launching Viewer 2, we found that events posted with deliberately inappropriate keywords were causing problems. This kind of "gaming" caused some events to dominate search results. This is why events were removed from the All tab. We'll be looking at how to best address event listings without causing search results to be unfairly skewed. For now, events can be found in the Events tab.

Also, over the next few months we'll continue to push out improvements and fixes on a regular basis. Usually, this will happen with our web releases every two weeks.

Questions? Check out the Search Guidelines

If you are having search related issues, please read the Search Guidelines before you contact support. This is important because most of the  reported search issues have actually been caused by the parcel being less relevant than a Resident expected; sometimes it's due to keyword  spamming, bot abuse, or otherwise using content to game the search rankings. Not only is gaming Search a violation of our terms of service, but increasingly it will be ineffective and may well result in a lower ranking.

We are committed to improving Search and implementing GSA 6 was a big step forward, but we also know that we have plenty of work yet to do and some significant problems to  address. We are monitoring results closely. You should begin to see some real improvement very soon. Meanwhile, we'll continue to keep you posted on our progress here in the blogs.

The wait is finally over! After receiving over 130 applications in January, the field has been narrowed to ten projects that we feel exemplify the criteria of the Linden Prize. Last year, we launched this annual award program to recognize a Second Life Resident, or team, with a $10,000 USD prize for an innovative inworld project that improves the way people work, learn, and communicate in their daily lives outside of the virtual world. We recognized two projects in 2009--honored as co-winners--Studio Wikitecture and Virtual Ability. To learn more about the Linden Prize, including criteria and eligibility, check out this link and the Linden Prize FAQs.

"Many programs in Second Life have greatly enhanced and changed thousands of lives around the world and we, at Linden Lab, are not only inspired by their accomplishments, but also want to formally recognize the best-of-the-best with a Linden Prize," said Mark Kingdon (SL: M Linden), CEO of Linden Lab. "There were so many wonderful projects to choose from this year and I want to thank all of the Linden Prize applicants and congratulate the 10 finalists. Regardless of who wins, the world is a better place because of you."

Drumroll, Please
I am very pleased to present the 10 finalists for the 2010 Linden Prize, listed in alphabetical order of organization name.

1)The Power of Story: Karuna and the Uncle D Story Quest
     Submitted by: Jenaia Morane & Marty Snowpaw from the Karuna Project &Lorelei Junot from the Alliance Library System

2) The Library and Archives at NASA CoLab in Second Life
     Submitted by: Archivist Llewellyn from NASA's CoLab

3) The Nonprofit Commons in Second Life
     Submitted by: Glitteractica Cookie from Nonprofit Commons

4) Open University: A Third Place in Second Life
     Submitted by: Elsa Dickins from The Open University in Virtual Worlds

5) Play2Train™
     Submitted by: Moriz Gupte from Play2Train

6) sionChicken and sionCorn
     Submitted by: Sion Zaius from Sion Labs

7) Skoolaborate: Engaging all Students for Learning
    Submitted by: Westley Streeter from Skoolaborate

8) The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop
    Submitted by: Agent Heliosense from Tech Virtual

9) Teaching, Research, Art, Architecture: The University of Western Australia (UWA)
    Submitted by: Jayjay Zifanwe from the University of Western Australia

10) Virtual Helping Hands
    Submitted by: Saxet Uralia from Virtual Helping Hands

So What's Next?

Visit this blog later today, and for the next ten days, as we launch individual posts that highlight each of the 10 finalists. Paired with short videos produced by TreetTV, the blogs will give a brief description of each project and what makes them unique. Links and SLurls will be provided so that everyone can learn more and find ways to get involved.

We will announce the winner of the 10,000 USD cash prize on June 1st and launch a special Destination Guide category that features all of the finalists.

Good luck to all the finalists and come back to read even more about the finalists!

Blondin Linden