For most of the last week, Linden Lab's public data/statistical feeds have been showing signs of being a bit ill. Starting on Wednesday evening, concurrency information started to fall ten or fifteen minutes behind actual data - an unusual occurrence. It's only in the last 24 hours that the system has started to catch up again.
At the same time, the figure for active users ceased updating entirely, with the most recent update to that figure being Wednesday night (24 October), at midnight SLT (US Pacific). Perhaps these subsystems are considered relatively minor, but Linden Lab have said themselves that they consider the accurate and ongoing publication of this data critical to their program of transparency.
Assuming CSI:NY had not aired their program featuring Second Life on Wednesday this week, projected signups for Wednesday and Thursday were expected to total 47,434. Actual signups for Wednesday and Thursday this week exceeded that projection by 74,412 signups, with 122,846 new registrations taking place in that 48 hour period.
The incident was marred, however, by the failure of the webservers for the CSI event, preventing many from registering via the CSI registration portal or downloading the OnRez viewer, both provided by the Electric Sheep Company.
Linden Lab's Robin Linden has stated up-front that Linden Lab has no plans to raise basic tier or island costs this quarter. That doesn't mean it can't happen, of course, but it does strongly signal their intention to leave those prices unaltered before 1 January. Maybe things could jump if Linden Lab suddenly needed a cash influx before then, but it doesn't seem likely right now.
Linden Lab does indicate that the pricing of ... well, just about everything is 'under review' - but at this stage of things, that's pretty much a given. Almost everything seems to be under almost constant review.
Linden Lab weighed in on Yankee Group's highly dubious figures this-morning, even as the Yankee Group was apparently hurriedly distancing themselves from the 12 minutes per month claim that has been spreading so far recently. As we've discussed in the past, the mainstream media loves numbers. Exceptionally large and exceptionally small ones are a favorite. There's not much better way to catch their attention than with a surprising number, and the "12 minutes per month" claim was just such a number.
"One number seems to be a lightening[sic] rod for a lot of attention," Senior Analyst Christopher Collins. (via Virtual World News)
As reported by New World Notes, on VWN, Collins tries to convince us that the rest of the report holds water, while trying to sweep the "12 minutes claim" under the rug.
Zee Linden, Linden Lab's CFO, will be conducting a voice town hall on VAT issues for European residents. The Town Hall is to take place on Monday 8 October at 11AM SLT (US Pacific) at the usual place (the big stage in Pooley).
If you don't have voice available, you will need a voice-enabled friend to handle asking questions and transcribing answers for you.
Zee Linden has attached the VAT FAQ and answers a number of additional questions in his posting. Zee adds, "If you have more questions, I encourage you to download the VAT FAQ, refer to our knowledgebase, send me a message in-world, or come to the discussion Monday (again, please come prepared with voice enabled so you can hear, as I'll be answering chat questions by voice to be most efficient with the time.)"
"According to the recently published Yankee Group Note, Wither Second Life?, the growth rate of Second Life users has slowed since its peak in October 2006, while user engagement (as measured by average time spent per user) has leveled off at just 12 minutes per month." -- Yankee Group's own press release, via Virtual World News.
"I've looked at that sentence several times, and can't make head or tail of it, because it's totally at odds with all meaningful available metrics." - Hamlet Au, New World Notes.
This story's starting to spread all over the mainstream media, so let's actually do the math - because Yankee Group doesn't seem to have done any themselves.
Linden Lab's Rob Linden has encouraged Second Life developers to bring forward issues with the proposed changes to login arrangements. Particularly he has invited a formal, group critique on the proposal "incorporating the salient points ... expanding on some of the earlier points ... and providing a list of questions that you'd most like addressed."
That critique is forming up on the Second Life wiki now. From monitoring the chatter on the development mailing list, I've yet to see anyone who is in favour of the proposed changes - and most tellingly most people seem to see the move as introducing an added level of security risk over and above what is present with the existing scheme.
Sabin Linden informs us that the login process for the viewer is going to change to address anti-fraud and other security issues. Essentially, you're not going to be logging in through the viewer anymore.
Instead, logins will be processed through the Second Life website, and the browser launched from there with a custom, secure token included in a secondlife:/// link. The token is valid for five minutes.
While the solution has been tested internally to function fine with Windows and Mac viewers, the Linux viewer solution still needs work.
According to an email I've just received, and which is being twittered and IMed about like mad, all EU residents will be paying VAT on their bills to LL. What fun.
The email to me is reproduced below.
Hello, Eloise Pasteur.
We have identified that you reside in a European country. Accordingly, your next bill will reflect Value Added Tax (VAT) charged at the rate specified by your country. Please note that VAT applies to all payments to Linden Lab such as land sales, monthly maintenance fees and Premium subscription fees. If you are eligible for a VAT exemption, you may submit proof of your exemption status, such as your VAT number, here: https://secondlife.com/account/vat_enter_id.php
If you have other questions, please read the VAT FAQ: http://secondlife.com/corporate/vat.php
You can also contact us via the support portal: http://secondlife.com/support
Best regards, and thank you for your continuing support.
As promised before the new land auction system has finally gone live. You can see it here and bid if you so choose.
I don't happen to have a spare USR1,200 or so to throw at it and see how it works, but it looks pretty much like the old interface to me, just some background changes, but if you know different please let us know below. You would assume that having it backed by eBay's technology would make it fairly robust, let's hope so!
The TOS for SL is about to change, next time you log in you will be asked (Bragg and his court case might mean we should say forced) to agree to them. The change, as detailed here, is to allow an easier, and cheaper, small claims (up to US$10,000.00) between residents and SL to be settled out of court.
It's never mattered to me to date, and there is quite a bit of fine print as you might imagine - my cursory read suggests that it will let you get overpayments back, but not claim damages for example, so LL won't be "to blame" if things go wrong (IANAL remember, so that might not be quite right), but it is probably more than most of us will ever need to claim.
GNUCITIZEN shows how Microsoft's flagship browser, Internet Explorer can be used to - well, more or less trivially steal your Second Life password - or at least enough of your authentication credentials to log into the grid as you, which is close to the same thing.
Do you have to do anything or confirm anything? No. A simple scrap of HTML on a web-page or blog will do it all for you, triggering the Second Life viewer to hand your authentication credentials over to a third party without any work on your part whatsoever.
Ouch. Might want to tell the viewer not to remember your password, huh?
According to Linden Lab, all credit-card billing is down as of 5:13AM SLT (US Pacific). The third-party provider in Europe who is responsible for validating and processing credit card transactions for Linden Lab is unable to do so at present due to technical difficulties.
You can well imagine that there is likely a dose of desperation at both ends of the processing chain, both with Linden Lab and their card-processing provider which will likely persist until the issue is resolved.
What were you doing this time last year? If you were a Second Life Resident, or media commentator, you were laughing at Linden Lab's prediction of a million signups by the end of 2006. Twelve months ago, the notion was considered a ridiculous one. Neither myself nor anyone else that I'm aware of took it seriously. Six weeks later on 18 October it happened. And another million on 14 December.
Peak concurrency twelve months ago was a whopping 8,997. A bit less than a third of the minimum concurrency now. People were saying three weeks before then that the grid just couldn't handle 10,000 concurrent users. By the end of the month, exceeding 10,000 was a common occurrence.
Exactly 12 months ago, we had one of our first outages in Second Life's database system - a shocking and frustrating event at the time, now repeated in miniature on a frequent basis.
For most of the last week, Linden Lab's public data/statistical feeds have been showing signs of being a bit ill. Starting on Wednesday evening, concurrency information started to fall ten or fifteen minutes behind actual data - an unusual occurrence. It's only in the last 24 hours that the system has started to catch up again.
Assuming 
The latest 
Linden Lab's Robin Linden has 
Linden Lab 
"According to the recently published Yankee Group Note, Wither Second Life?, the growth rate of Second Life users has slowed since its peak in October 2006, while user engagement (as measured by average time spent per user) has leveled off at just 12 minutes per month." -- Yankee Group's own press release, 
The TOS for SL is about to change, next time you log in you will be asked (Bragg and his court case might mean we should say forced) to agree to them. The change, 
GNUCITIZEN 
What were you doing this time last year? If you were a Second Life Resident, or media commentator, you were laughing at Linden Lab's prediction of a million signups by the end of 2006. Twelve months ago, the notion was considered a ridiculous one. Neither myself nor anyone else that I'm aware of took it seriously. Six weeks later on 18 October it happened. And another million on 14 December.
