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Well, guess what!? It’s billing time on ‘alter-me’ and the bill is coming to me (no surprise there, and, ‘how rude’ all at the same time)…

What in god’s holy name are you blathering about!?
(another finely crafted Coen Brother’s line… that one from The Big Lebowski)

Virtual Life, Sunny Leafblower, the metaverse, the other place…

Mystified? Well actually it’s pretty straight forward - there’s a derivative of me wandering about in ‘another’ cyber-space, wearing some ok clothes he bought, and paying rates on 1024m² of virtual land he owns, all to the tune of about US$147 per year which ‘he’ bills to me. Pretty generous of me right?

No, not really, that was just a wandering literary attempt on my part to introduce an old blog topic of mine - Second Life (SL).

Sunny Leafblower, my SL avatar, was 1 year old the other day, his ‘rez-day’ - 29July. And to be completely fair on the finances he earns about US$77 (L$20,800) a year in ‘wages’ and cashing in the bulk of the rest of the Lindens in his wallet before billing time meant that I only had to shell out about US$25 for another years subscription.

SL things have moved on, and they haven’t… I keep a cursory eye on SL and don’t that often log in these days. But from June 2007 metrics the growth is quite apparent:

• land area now over 700km² (up from around 200km² in Oct06)
• around 495,00 avatars active in month of June (compared to the headline figure of 8,494,764 residents today, and premium account holders for June of 94,607)
• gender balance seems to be about 75% male, 25% female in June 2006 with usage skewed slightly to 65% male, 35% female

It does seem, as I discussed in a previous post, that a large amount of Linden time has been invested in ‘keeping the thing running’ - sometimes with not much success - during this dramatic growth period.

Having said that there has been continuous work going on in development areas it seems:

• Voice. This will allow voice (instead of just text) communication within SL. ‘First look’ viewers for voice on both beta and live grids have been available for around 2 months. It seems from this post that voice will be rolled into the production client anytime now..
• Windlight. Linden acquired Windward Mark in May 2007 and is incorporating the WindLight technology into SL. This technology gives a sophisticated rendering of the sky and light effects under different ‘climatic conditions’ - I had a look at one of the ‘first look’ Windlight enabled viewers and it was pretty impressive.
• Open Source. Linden Labs made a big deal about open source in late 2006 and they have been quietly pressing on with this. They made an announcement recently that quoted that since the source code release, for the viewer in Jan 2007, 98 patches have been applied which came from the open source community.
• Mono. Mono is a cross-platform framework for deploying .Net type client and server technology. Lots of noise about replacing SL’s scripting language (LSL) with Mono was made in late 2006 but things seem to have gone awfully quiet.

It looks like the numbers which were being batted around in late 2006 were about right and really the situation remains the same - a very low number of accounts are being converted to premium - around 1% (94K from over 8M free sign-ups).

Well, there still isn’t anything like Second Life out there, and it remains early days..