[Two Important Updates on 2011 Land Pricing]

Doubling the price of regions for nonprofit and educational use strikes me as a really bad idea. Do we really need a mass exodus of these important members of the Second Life community at this time?

[Check here if you want more options]

Chat focus -- good one! My own preference, though I've never heard anyone else speak up for this, would be for the focus to ONLY go to the chat box or the IM box (or other places like search where you type text), never anywhere else. In other words I WANT the WASD movement controls etc. to be broken, I want those characters to always be for chat - I get so tired of moving around or jumping when I'm trying to talk!! But I know that some people would consider my choice to be dysfunctional so this is the sort of thing that has to be a preference.

[Changes to Display Names Based on Your Feedback]

I like the idea of having some way to protect your name. Either tie it to premium membership, or charge a fee (not huge, but enough to make people think about it -- and preferably one-time rather than recurring) to insure that their name is unique.

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

To be fair, not all the land owned by Governor Linden is abaondoned. 5-10% of every mainland sim is occupied by things like roads and railroads and water that the Governor owns, plus there are things like the Welcome Area, the infohubs, and the Luna marketplace. There will always be a little bit of abandoned land but the current amount is unhealthy; in a healthy SL the percentage of the mainland owned by the Governor would probably run around 15%.

SL usage always drops in the summer, except in the summers of 2006 and 2007 when the rapid growth  masked the seasonal effects. If the trend continues downward in September and beyond we'll have more cause for concern.

Back to the subject at hand... I do have some concern for the fate of existing builders of prim content because their markets are likely to be overrun by already existing mesh content from elsewhere. But I believe that we have to move forward toward higher quality content for SL to survive and remain relevant, even if it will cause pain for some existing businesses.

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

I'm looking foward to seeing the results of mesh import in Second Life. I do worry a bit about a step that moves even more content creation out-world, but on balance I think it will be a net benefit to SL. Please listen to the comments here and make the code available as soon as possible!

As for the viewer issue, I think it's going to be easier to graft the old UI (or something inspired by it) onto the Viewer 2 code base than it will be to backport mesh support (and the other new rendering features like media on a prim) to the Viewer 1 code base. I believe that's the direction that the Phoenix team is planning to take, for example. Some of the UI changes in the new Snowstorm builds and in Kirstens S20 are already a step in the right direction, like the detachable sidebar windows. (Still no way to have more then one profile window open at once though, sniff.)