Gwyneth Llewelyn

Well, I was deleted yesterday; it's definitely not a rumour. All it takes someone to flag your profile for review, and Facebook will act swiftly, and not even send you an email. You also have no way to dispute your claim. For me personally, the only abuse of my rights as consumer is that I've joined Facebook under different terms of service, which most definitely allowed artistic names, pseudonyms, and the like. Facebook changed their terms of service over the years and the only option I had was to leave it; I did register my name as a valid literary pseudonym and as a trademark, back when Facebook became more aggressive in their policies, but all that is worthless nowadays. Sure, I still keep a Facebook "page"; but "pages" are terribly limited in functionality.

Hm! At least it seems to be faster. There was something on the "old" blog software which made an extremely long comment section painfully slow to browse (I aways suspected heavy JS, but with my ancient hardware, it's always hard to tell...). Well, I like to try new social thingies

Bravo, Harry! Well said For every person commenting on this post and complaining about the economy, 5,000 are happily in-world having fun and shopping

More sims, more users = more profit for LL = more sales for designers and land barons = more instability = bad Less sims, less users = less profit for LL = less sales = less instability = still bad. Hmm. So what strategy should LL follow then?

Well, thanks for the facts, Nelson! As for speculating what the numbers mean, I'm sure that everybody else will interpret them differently. I would personally like to see a bit more growth, but after a year of reasonably bad PR (every week some bad news about measures hurting all residents), I'm actually positively surprised that the decline was anything but dramatic. I hope that for Q4 the constant release of bad news stops a bite and allows us to keep our faith that LL really doesn't want to kick us all out

All right, this is getting there Just three minor annoyances... Inventory sort order (sort by date) doesn't work. With SL 2.2.0.211499, the New Inventory window did work well (but the Sidebar Inventory didn't). With the now released 2.2.0.212097, that window lost the ability to sort inventory... again Yes, there is a JIRA for it. Clicking on attachments on the pop-ups for group notices doesn't have any effect. Sigh. This was fixed, broken, fixed, and is now broken again. And yes, there is a JIRA for it, too. When copying & pasting the transcript, everything that has /me in it gets the avatar name duplicated. So if you type "/me grins", this shows on the viewer chat as "Gwyneth Llewelyn grins" but the copied transcript will actually have "Gwyneth LlewelynGwyneth Llewelyn grins". Very annoying. And... yes... you guessed right, there is also a JIRA for this. The rest seems fine on first impressions. Some minor issues here and there, but I can live with them! (I'm not a very demanding person, lol)

Hooray! Overall, great news indeed Now if just everybody remembered to check their checkbox on HTTP textures (yes, all TPVs support it too, and so does the old Snowglobe 1.X codebase; it's not just Viewer 2)... While I was quite happy with Viewer 2 since the very start, I have been quite intrigued with the rapid pace of change on the development branches, that came up with some clever ideas. The detachable Sidebar (and fully resizable/moveable windows for pretty much everything) that has been present on the most recent 2.2 pre-releases are a huge step ahead in the right direction. And — finally — Inventory sort order works again... on the detached window (not on the sidebar... yet!), so I'm happy The push to a content delivery network is a huge step. Good luck on that. I hope Amazon buys you guys You're certainly going to push their technology to the limits and give them a pretext to release a wonderful Case Study about how to do massive 3D content delivery over the Amazon cloud — something that, to my knowledge, nobody has done before. I have nothing further to add on Display Names except for my previous comments on identity theft. After testing it on Aditi, I found out that it's even more easy than I thought and while I understand the rationale behind it, I'm still a bit concerned that all this will lead up to increased legal fees as we try desperately to protect our brand names via the slow DMCA process. So far, avatar names as brands have been protected pro-actively by Linden Lab, since they were unique; from January onwards, we have to sue misappropriation of our brand names after-the-fact, and this is not only costly, but hard to do (who can monitor the whole grid to look for culprits?). What I cannot understand is why you don't turn avatar name protection ("reservation") into a profitable service for LL. You used to have a cost for "vanity names"; why not have a cost for protected/reserved names? Brands are valuable, and it might cost far more to deal with the legal costs of suing culprits who might live anywhere in the world than just buy "reservation" for a few hundreds of dollars. Many virtual worlds (like IMVU) or social networking sites offer name reservation for a few dollars... Mesh works fine. I'm actually impressed how so many Google Warehouse meshes can directly be imported without tweaking. Your team did a most excellent job in implementing this, congratulations! And ahh XMPP for chat... at long, long, long last!! HOORAY! Please go and federate with Google at the earliest opportunity A nice side-effect is that I've noticed that a huge proportion of bandwidth is consumed to track down all those friends that are in-world. On SL 2 this is more elegantly handled, as the offline friends are only loaded if you scroll down — which was a great tweak to increase performance! Nevertheless, presence data seems to consume an outrageous amount of bandwidth — and, I'm sure, needless simulator CPU overhead — so I'm really, really happy to see that being pushed out of the sims. I'm curious about public chat in a sim, though — will it work via XMPP too? It would be the most obvious choice (e.g. each sim becomes its own XMPP "chatroom", filtered by distance), but how would that integrate with the LSL scripts listening to the channel? Mmh. I foresee some clever trickery working under the hood and look forward to see what you guys have come up with. Dirk Talamasca, as usual, hits the nail. If you're implementing XMPP for chat, just add group chat functionality on top of that. Easy-peasy, and you don't need to increase group limits at all: just have "chat groups" (implemented in XMPP) with the usual tools for managing group chat, notices, etc. as well as titles and such, and "land groups" to deal with the more complex issue of object sharing and land property. I can even imagine that you might do a clean sweep on your group database and push all groups that don't own land or rezzed objects into XMPP "chat groups", which would go a long, long way to ease the load on it... Still, it's great to see so many improvements coming at the turn of the year. Congratulations and thank you for all your work!

Hmm I guess it's only for Windows for now. Mac users just get the version for Display Names...

Because it's 6 AM in San Francisco and LL's offices only open at 8 And, as Josef put it so well, they might only release it at 6 PM SLT (or even later) and still keep their promise — they have about 16 hours to do so

I'm patient too... lol

Well, this is consistent with LL's policy of focusing on the residential market only, leaving business and education out of Second Life — unless they are willing to pay the same that everybody else pays. Note that the "discount" for education and non-profits is not something taken for granted since the beginning of Second Life; it just appeared much later. "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.", Job 1.21. And of course I guess that this is also a measure to limit some pseudo non-profits which just abuse their status to be able to undercut the real estate land market, offering lower-priced land thanks to their 50% discount... even though this is against LL's "policies", those are inconsistently applied. But yes, I agree, for some reason Linden Lab is pushing all educators into OpenSim. There might be a logic there, but it eludes me.

Welcome aboard, Kim! It's a tough task you have ahead, and I surely wish you all the best in steering Second Life into the era of Fast, Easy, and Fun! It won't be easy... I seriously suspect that the "X Factor" is something quite hard to find on the mainstream population: it's the ability to self-entertain oneself. If I'm right, that's bad news: it means that SL will never become a mainstream product, but just something appealing to a tiny fraction of the online population — the ones that have this ability. They may, in fact, already be all in SL, but there is a chance that somewhere out there a few people with this ability still haven't found out about SL, or thought that after the Golden Age of 2006/7, SL was simply wiped out of the map — when in fact it has grown almost ten times (in population, economy, landmass, and pretty much every metric). So... the best hope is really in reaching out to those people with this amazing ability, and make sure they don't leave before they figure out how great SL is for self-entertainment.