Just a short announcement that the Land Store will be taken down on Wednesday 17th September for an upgrade to version 2.01. It will be switched off at 9am PST, and all being well will be back up by 11am PST.

This update is specifically to add one new feature that we’re calling ‘Allow Neighbours’. This new functionality allows you to grant permission to other residents so that they can order islands alongside your own, something previously disallowed unless granted through support tickets. For more explanation we have posted a Knowledge Base article over here.

In this follow-up blog post on Ad Farming, I will be talking about the new rules. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into this thread on the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion over the next few days.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, I’m Frank Ambrose, the Senior VP of Global Technology, and I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the work we’re doing on the Second Life Grid.

By way of introduction, I’m a recent hire here at the Lab, having joined to lead our global technology team. Specifically I’ll be focused on grid infrastructure and our stability initiatives. As noted in the press release, I come to the Lab from many years at AOL (and prior to that MCI), where I experienced the kind of explosive growth, global scale and inherent stability challenges we face here at Linden Lab.

More than anything else, my tenures at those companies taught me the direct relationship between platform stability and user experience. I’m looking forward to applying that lesson, and a host of others, as we work to maintain, build and improve this complex virtual world. I am keenly aware of the pain that any service outage can cause and am both excited and confident that Linden Lab has focused the right resources to achieve this critical objective.

Given the complexities in our architecture, our stability efforts span many individual areas, most of which were detailed by Ian Linden’s May posting. Some areas will be addressed through short-term initiatives, while others will require significant re-architecture, software changes and new physical hardware. Throughout it all, we’re committed to making the transition to a more stable world as seamless and transparent to you as possible. To that end, members of my team will be using the blog regularly to provide updates on plans and progress towards meeting our stability goals.

As part of our wider stability plan, we’re targeting 4 major infrastructure points both with long-and short-term goals: Intra-Grid Network, Asset Storage Cluster, Central Databases, and Host/Transit Data Services. The strategy is to develop and deploy near-term solutions to improve stability, while looking more broadly at our architecture (hardware, software, networks, etc). In the near term we’ve got a number of projects in flight to address some of these problem points. A couple of examples are:

- Asset collection. We’re collecting many assets that are on our storage clusters, but are rarely (if ever) accessed. These assets take up critical space on the clusters and potentially degrade performance and stability as we hit volume thresholds. We’ll be moving these files to different storage mechanisms and, while they will still be easily accessible, it will help us to avoid pushing the limits of our existing storage clusters, while still preserving all existing assets in a reliable storage environment.

- Reducing the need for VPN connections.  Since we don’t encrypt communication between simulators and our databases, there needs to be a safe means to communicate across data centers and so we use VPN connections. The connections don’t scale well and can be unreliable, so establishing a new communications mechanism, that is both safe, scalable and reliable, is another short-term project.

These projects are just a sampling of the work that is currently being done to improve stability, and I’ll be reporting on their progress, as well as other short-term projects, in the coming months.

We have a lot of work to do but be assured that we have the right resources and internal focus to achieve our stability goals. From personal experience, I’ve encountered many equally complex challenges, especially in my time at AOL, and these problems are all solvable with the right level of attention and technical talent. We certainly have both, now we will start delivering.

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the second annual Linden Lab Innovation Awards, known as “the Hippos,” which honor the exceptional, and varied, work done by open source community members.

Rob Linden presented the awards at a mixed reality event that linked an inworld gathering of nominees, attendees of the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, FL, and others tuning in via audio stream. See the wiki for the full text of his presentation and a review of the last year’s highlights.

Winners were selected by a panel of six Linden judges who studied each nominees contributions and rated them for both for impact and positive influence. The judges all came away awed at the breadth of cxontribution and felt they were just scratching the surface. Today’s list of winners includes only a small portion of what is fantastic about this community. While we’re not sure we’ve recognized everyone we could, we’re very confident that we should give special recognition to these individuals.

And now, the winners…

Read the rest of this entry »

In this blog post I will be talking about Ad Farming. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

So flex those typing fingers and join me after the cut..

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we’re happy to formally announce SLim, a lightweight, voice-enabled instant messaging client that will allow you to communicate with your Second Life friends without logging in to the full viewer. While the viewer will still serve as the primary communication engine when you’re inworld, having SLim installed will enable you to connect with friends whether or not they are actually inworld.

SLim further lowers the barriers between virtual world and real world communication and ensures that you’ll always be able to connect with your Second Life friends regardless of location or broadband connection. Capable of running on any computer, SLim will extend the value and experience of Second Life beyond the borders of the virtual world.

Among other benefits, SLim will give you:

• Access to your Second Life Friends list with real-time “presenceâ€� status updates
• The ability to seamlessly migrate a text conversation into a voice call
• The ability for SLim users to leave voice mails for offline friends

We’re putting the finishing touches on the technology now and will be announcing the availability of the client and a new SLim-enabled First Look viewer very shortly. Initially, you’ll be able to use SLim to communicate with Residents who are using the SLim-enabled First Look. Eventually, the main release viewer will also be SLim-enabled.

Voice is a critical component of the Second Life experience and SLim will play a major role in that facility moving forward.

Click here to see the official SLim press release.

Btw, I’m returning from the Virtual World Conference in LA this afternoon and won’t be able to read your comments until I get home. Will comment on the blog then. Thanks.

Some Residents have told me they worry the Linden Lab Blog is quieter than usual, and that this may reflect a decreased commitment by us to communication. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re making changes to enhance dialogue with you through adding better tools and organization along with fewer constraints.

Limitations of the Current Blog and Forums
The current blog has become unwieldy and messy because there is no way to categorize posts. Tag clouds, categories and search are inadequate tools for finding what you’re looking for. And we often hear that it can be frustrating to try and have meaningful exchanges about the original post because of the 150 message cut-off and the difficulty highlighting key comments among all the messages.

Similarly the current forum software is outdated, barely functioning and lacks important features that would enhance conversation between posters.

Coming Improvements
So we have embarked on a significant project to improve the web-based communication tools. In addition to updated software, we will be changing the blog’s organization, integrating the blog and forums for extended conversations, adding content to the log-in page to make it more useful, and integrating tools to highlight communications.

The new blog will have multiple categories to allow topic experts to talk about their areas of expertise and to promote discussion and Resident feedback and ideas. Large topics will integrate with the forums, as we’ve done recently, to allow for richer and more involved conversation with Linden Lab and Residents than is possible in blog comments.

Forum changes include feedback tools to allow Residents to elevate the most useful posts to the top of the thread. You’ll be able to vote on and rate comments so that the ones judged most useful will be highlighted. These helpful answers will be transferred to the Knowledge Base in the Second Life Support Portal.

Forum moderation will also be expanded to ensure focused and reliable exchanges of information, opinions and suggestions. We are contracting with a group to help us keep forum posts on topic and to handle abuse reports. They’ll also skim blog comments for off-topic posts and spam. It’s important to keep in mind that the moderators will not be answering blog or forum questions. This group will not be taking the place of Linden Lab employees, but rather will be freeing us up to communicate with forum and blog participants about substantive issues. These moderators, whose experience includes moderation assistance with EBay, are multi-lingual and will also be moderating our German, French, Korean and Japanese forums.

Timing and Transition
We will be introducing the new blog and forum enhancements in October. Until then, the blog will continue to be utilized for announcements, policy updates and introduction of new features. Other information is also being made available in other parts of the website such as the Grid Status page, blog margins and Showcase. We’ll help you find this information via the log-in message of the day.

In the meantime, we’ve created a forum thread where we can talk about our blog plans. I’ll be out for a short time this evening but will visit the forums in the next few hours to respond to your comments and questions.

I’m delighted to announce that Mono is ready to launch as part of the 1.24 Server deploy starting today.

Mono is an open source technology that improves the stability and speed of scripts – particularly calculation-intensive ones. In some of the internal benchmarking we’ve done, scripts running on Mono ran up to 220 times faster. This extra speed both increases the gamut of scripted applications that can be developed in Second Life and also makes Second Life more responsive when running existing scripted applications that have been converted to run on the Mono scripting engine.

Read the rest of this entry »

BURNING LIFE 2008
September 27 - October 5

In 1999, an innovative man made the long trek from San Francisco to the sun-baked playa of an enormous, flat, dry lakebed in the Nevada high desert.  He went to attend the renowned Burning Man festival where, for one week each year, tens of thousands of people from around the world build art, camps and communities, and celebrate life. This man came back with new ideas for the virtual world he was planning; ideas about the nature of reality, creativity, identity and community.

He worked some of these ideas into the very fabric of “Linden World” which eventually became what you and I know as Second Life. That man was Philip Linden.

To celebrate the inspiration that enriched Second Life, over the past six years, Residents in Second Life have gotten together to build one of the largest, most unusual and most creative events found in the Metaverse— the annual Art, Fire and Community festival known as Burning Life.

To read more about the project and find out how to participate, visit Burning Life Volunteer Central !

To discuss the event and preparations please visit the SL Forums.

Performers: there will be a separate place for you to indicate your desire to participate, coming up soon.

Just a short announcement that the Land Store will be taken down on Wednesday 17th September for an upgrade to version 2.01. It will be switched off at 9am PST, and all being well will be back up by 11am PST.

This update is specifically to add one new feature that we’re calling ‘Allow Neighbours’. This new functionality allows you to grant permission to other residents so that they can order islands alongside your own, something previously disallowed unless granted through support tickets. For more explanation we have posted a Knowledge Base article over here.

In this follow-up blog post on Ad Farming, I will be talking about the new rules. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into this thread on the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion over the next few days.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, I’m Frank Ambrose, the Senior VP of Global Technology, and I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the work we’re doing on the Second Life Grid.

By way of introduction, I’m a recent hire here at the Lab, having joined to lead our global technology team. Specifically I’ll be focused on grid infrastructure and our stability initiatives. As noted in the press release, I come to the Lab from many years at AOL (and prior to that MCI), where I experienced the kind of explosive growth, global scale and inherent stability challenges we face here at Linden Lab.

More than anything else, my tenures at those companies taught me the direct relationship between platform stability and user experience. I’m looking forward to applying that lesson, and a host of others, as we work to maintain, build and improve this complex virtual world. I am keenly aware of the pain that any service outage can cause and am both excited and confident that Linden Lab has focused the right resources to achieve this critical objective.

Given the complexities in our architecture, our stability efforts span many individual areas, most of which were detailed by Ian Linden’s May posting. Some areas will be addressed through short-term initiatives, while others will require significant re-architecture, software changes and new physical hardware. Throughout it all, we’re committed to making the transition to a more stable world as seamless and transparent to you as possible. To that end, members of my team will be using the blog regularly to provide updates on plans and progress towards meeting our stability goals.

As part of our wider stability plan, we’re targeting 4 major infrastructure points both with long-and short-term goals: Intra-Grid Network, Asset Storage Cluster, Central Databases, and Host/Transit Data Services. The strategy is to develop and deploy near-term solutions to improve stability, while looking more broadly at our architecture (hardware, software, networks, etc). In the near term we’ve got a number of projects in flight to address some of these problem points. A couple of examples are:

- Asset collection. We’re collecting many assets that are on our storage clusters, but are rarely (if ever) accessed. These assets take up critical space on the clusters and potentially degrade performance and stability as we hit volume thresholds. We’ll be moving these files to different storage mechanisms and, while they will still be easily accessible, it will help us to avoid pushing the limits of our existing storage clusters, while still preserving all existing assets in a reliable storage environment.

- Reducing the need for VPN connections.  Since we don’t encrypt communication between simulators and our databases, there needs to be a safe means to communicate across data centers and so we use VPN connections. The connections don’t scale well and can be unreliable, so establishing a new communications mechanism, that is both safe, scalable and reliable, is another short-term project.

These projects are just a sampling of the work that is currently being done to improve stability, and I’ll be reporting on their progress, as well as other short-term projects, in the coming months.

We have a lot of work to do but be assured that we have the right resources and internal focus to achieve our stability goals. From personal experience, I’ve encountered many equally complex challenges, especially in my time at AOL, and these problems are all solvable with the right level of attention and technical talent. We certainly have both, now we will start delivering.

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the second annual Linden Lab Innovation Awards, known as “the Hippos,” which honor the exceptional, and varied, work done by open source community members.

Rob Linden presented the awards at a mixed reality event that linked an inworld gathering of nominees, attendees of the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, FL, and others tuning in via audio stream. See the wiki for the full text of his presentation and a review of the last year’s highlights.

Winners were selected by a panel of six Linden judges who studied each nominees contributions and rated them for both for impact and positive influence. The judges all came away awed at the breadth of cxontribution and felt they were just scratching the surface. Today’s list of winners includes only a small portion of what is fantastic about this community. While we’re not sure we’ve recognized everyone we could, we’re very confident that we should give special recognition to these individuals.

And now, the winners…

Read the rest of this entry »

In this blog post I will be talking about Ad Farming. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

So flex those typing fingers and join me after the cut..

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we’re happy to formally announce SLim, a lightweight, voice-enabled instant messaging client that will allow you to communicate with your Second Life friends without logging in to the full viewer. While the viewer will still serve as the primary communication engine when you’re inworld, having SLim installed will enable you to connect with friends whether or not they are actually inworld.

SLim further lowers the barriers between virtual world and real world communication and ensures that you’ll always be able to connect with your Second Life friends regardless of location or broadband connection. Capable of running on any computer, SLim will extend the value and experience of Second Life beyond the borders of the virtual world.

Among other benefits, SLim will give you:

• Access to your Second Life Friends list with real-time “presenceâ€� status updates
• The ability to seamlessly migrate a text conversation into a voice call
• The ability for SLim users to leave voice mails for offline friends

We’re putting the finishing touches on the technology now and will be announcing the availability of the client and a new SLim-enabled First Look viewer very shortly. Initially, you’ll be able to use SLim to communicate with Residents who are using the SLim-enabled First Look. Eventually, the main release viewer will also be SLim-enabled.

Voice is a critical component of the Second Life experience and SLim will play a major role in that facility moving forward.

Click here to see the official SLim press release.

Btw, I’m returning from the Virtual World Conference in LA this afternoon and won’t be able to read your comments until I get home. Will comment on the blog then. Thanks.

Some Residents have told me they worry the Linden Lab Blog is quieter than usual, and that this may reflect a decreased commitment by us to communication. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re making changes to enhance dialogue with you through adding better tools and organization along with fewer constraints.

Limitations of the Current Blog and Forums
The current blog has become unwieldy and messy because there is no way to categorize posts. Tag clouds, categories and search are inadequate tools for finding what you’re looking for. And we often hear that it can be frustrating to try and have meaningful exchanges about the original post because of the 150 message cut-off and the difficulty highlighting key comments among all the messages.

Similarly the current forum software is outdated, barely functioning and lacks important features that would enhance conversation between posters.

Coming Improvements
So we have embarked on a significant project to improve the web-based communication tools. In addition to updated software, we will be changing the blog’s organization, integrating the blog and forums for extended conversations, adding content to the log-in page to make it more useful, and integrating tools to highlight communications.

The new blog will have multiple categories to allow topic experts to talk about their areas of expertise and to promote discussion and Resident feedback and ideas. Large topics will integrate with the forums, as we’ve done recently, to allow for richer and more involved conversation with Linden Lab and Residents than is possible in blog comments.

Forum changes include feedback tools to allow Residents to elevate the most useful posts to the top of the thread. You’ll be able to vote on and rate comments so that the ones judged most useful will be highlighted. These helpful answers will be transferred to the Knowledge Base in the Second Life Support Portal.

Forum moderation will also be expanded to ensure focused and reliable exchanges of information, opinions and suggestions. We are contracting with a group to help us keep forum posts on topic and to handle abuse reports. They’ll also skim blog comments for off-topic posts and spam. It’s important to keep in mind that the moderators will not be answering blog or forum questions. This group will not be taking the place of Linden Lab employees, but rather will be freeing us up to communicate with forum and blog participants about substantive issues. These moderators, whose experience includes moderation assistance with EBay, are multi-lingual and will also be moderating our German, French, Korean and Japanese forums.

Timing and Transition
We will be introducing the new blog and forum enhancements in October. Until then, the blog will continue to be utilized for announcements, policy updates and introduction of new features. Other information is also being made available in other parts of the website such as the Grid Status page, blog margins and Showcase. We’ll help you find this information via the log-in message of the day.

In the meantime, we’ve created a forum thread where we can talk about our blog plans. I’ll be out for a short time this evening but will visit the forums in the next few hours to respond to your comments and questions.

I’m delighted to announce that Mono is ready to launch as part of the 1.24 Server deploy starting today.

Mono is an open source technology that improves the stability and speed of scripts – particularly calculation-intensive ones. In some of the internal benchmarking we’ve done, scripts running on Mono ran up to 220 times faster. This extra speed both increases the gamut of scripted applications that can be developed in Second Life and also makes Second Life more responsive when running existing scripted applications that have been converted to run on the Mono scripting engine.

Read the rest of this entry »

BURNING LIFE 2008
September 27 - October 5

In 1999, an innovative man made the long trek from San Francisco to the sun-baked playa of an enormous, flat, dry lakebed in the Nevada high desert.  He went to attend the renowned Burning Man festival where, for one week each year, tens of thousands of people from around the world build art, camps and communities, and celebrate life. This man came back with new ideas for the virtual world he was planning; ideas about the nature of reality, creativity, identity and community.

He worked some of these ideas into the very fabric of “Linden World” which eventually became what you and I know as Second Life. That man was Philip Linden.

To celebrate the inspiration that enriched Second Life, over the past six years, Residents in Second Life have gotten together to build one of the largest, most unusual and most creative events found in the Metaverse— the annual Art, Fire and Community festival known as Burning Life.

To read more about the project and find out how to participate, visit Burning Life Volunteer Central !

To discuss the event and preparations please visit the SL Forums.

Performers: there will be a separate place for you to indicate your desire to participate, coming up soon.

In this follow-up blog post on Ad Farming, I will be talking about the new rules. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into this thread on the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion over the next few days.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, I’m Frank Ambrose, the Senior VP of Global Technology, and I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the work we’re doing on the Second Life Grid.

By way of introduction, I’m a recent hire here at the Lab, having joined to lead our global technology team. Specifically I’ll be focused on grid infrastructure and our stability initiatives. As noted in the press release, I come to the Lab from many years at AOL (and prior to that MCI), where I experienced the kind of explosive growth, global scale and inherent stability challenges we face here at Linden Lab.

More than anything else, my tenures at those companies taught me the direct relationship between platform stability and user experience. I’m looking forward to applying that lesson, and a host of others, as we work to maintain, build and improve this complex virtual world. I am keenly aware of the pain that any service outage can cause and am both excited and confident that Linden Lab has focused the right resources to achieve this critical objective.

Given the complexities in our architecture, our stability efforts span many individual areas, most of which were detailed by Ian Linden’s May posting. Some areas will be addressed through short-term initiatives, while others will require significant re-architecture, software changes and new physical hardware. Throughout it all, we’re committed to making the transition to a more stable world as seamless and transparent to you as possible. To that end, members of my team will be using the blog regularly to provide updates on plans and progress towards meeting our stability goals.

As part of our wider stability plan, we’re targeting 4 major infrastructure points both with long-and short-term goals: Intra-Grid Network, Asset Storage Cluster, Central Databases, and Host/Transit Data Services. The strategy is to develop and deploy near-term solutions to improve stability, while looking more broadly at our architecture (hardware, software, networks, etc). In the near term we’ve got a number of projects in flight to address some of these problem points. A couple of examples are:

- Asset collection. We’re collecting many assets that are on our storage clusters, but are rarely (if ever) accessed. These assets take up critical space on the clusters and potentially degrade performance and stability as we hit volume thresholds. We’ll be moving these files to different storage mechanisms and, while they will still be easily accessible, it will help us to avoid pushing the limits of our existing storage clusters, while still preserving all existing assets in a reliable storage environment.

- Reducing the need for VPN connections.  Since we don’t encrypt communication between simulators and our databases, there needs to be a safe means to communicate across data centers and so we use VPN connections. The connections don’t scale well and can be unreliable, so establishing a new communications mechanism, that is both safe, scalable and reliable, is another short-term project.

These projects are just a sampling of the work that is currently being done to improve stability, and I’ll be reporting on their progress, as well as other short-term projects, in the coming months.

We have a lot of work to do but be assured that we have the right resources and internal focus to achieve our stability goals. From personal experience, I’ve encountered many equally complex challenges, especially in my time at AOL, and these problems are all solvable with the right level of attention and technical talent. We certainly have both, now we will start delivering.

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the second annual Linden Lab Innovation Awards, known as “the Hippos,” which honor the exceptional, and varied, work done by open source community members.

Rob Linden presented the awards at a mixed reality event that linked an inworld gathering of nominees, attendees of the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, FL, and others tuning in via audio stream. See the wiki for the full text of his presentation and a review of the last year’s highlights.

Winners were selected by a panel of six Linden judges who studied each nominees contributions and rated them for both for impact and positive influence. The judges all came away awed at the breadth of cxontribution and felt they were just scratching the surface. Today’s list of winners includes only a small portion of what is fantastic about this community. While we’re not sure we’ve recognized everyone we could, we’re very confident that we should give special recognition to these individuals.

And now, the winners…

Read the rest of this entry »

In this blog post I will be talking about Ad Farming. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

So flex those typing fingers and join me after the cut..

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we’re happy to formally announce SLim, a lightweight, voice-enabled instant messaging client that will allow you to communicate with your Second Life friends without logging in to the full viewer. While the viewer will still serve as the primary communication engine when you’re inworld, having SLim installed will enable you to connect with friends whether or not they are actually inworld.

SLim further lowers the barriers between virtual world and real world communication and ensures that you’ll always be able to connect with your Second Life friends regardless of location or broadband connection. Capable of running on any computer, SLim will extend the value and experience of Second Life beyond the borders of the virtual world.

Among other benefits, SLim will give you:

• Access to your Second Life Friends list with real-time “presenceâ€� status updates
• The ability to seamlessly migrate a text conversation into a voice call
• The ability for SLim users to leave voice mails for offline friends

We’re putting the finishing touches on the technology now and will be announcing the availability of the client and a new SLim-enabled First Look viewer very shortly. Initially, you’ll be able to use SLim to communicate with Residents who are using the SLim-enabled First Look. Eventually, the main release viewer will also be SLim-enabled.

Voice is a critical component of the Second Life experience and SLim will play a major role in that facility moving forward.

Click here to see the official SLim press release.

Btw, I’m returning from the Virtual World Conference in LA this afternoon and won’t be able to read your comments until I get home. Will comment on the blog then. Thanks.

Some Residents have told me they worry the Linden Lab Blog is quieter than usual, and that this may reflect a decreased commitment by us to communication. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re making changes to enhance dialogue with you through adding better tools and organization along with fewer constraints.

Limitations of the Current Blog and Forums
The current blog has become unwieldy and messy because there is no way to categorize posts. Tag clouds, categories and search are inadequate tools for finding what you’re looking for. And we often hear that it can be frustrating to try and have meaningful exchanges about the original post because of the 150 message cut-off and the difficulty highlighting key comments among all the messages.

Similarly the current forum software is outdated, barely functioning and lacks important features that would enhance conversation between posters.

Coming Improvements
So we have embarked on a significant project to improve the web-based communication tools. In addition to updated software, we will be changing the blog’s organization, integrating the blog and forums for extended conversations, adding content to the log-in page to make it more useful, and integrating tools to highlight communications.

The new blog will have multiple categories to allow topic experts to talk about their areas of expertise and to promote discussion and Resident feedback and ideas. Large topics will integrate with the forums, as we’ve done recently, to allow for richer and more involved conversation with Linden Lab and Residents than is possible in blog comments.

Forum changes include feedback tools to allow Residents to elevate the most useful posts to the top of the thread. You’ll be able to vote on and rate comments so that the ones judged most useful will be highlighted. These helpful answers will be transferred to the Knowledge Base in the Second Life Support Portal.

Forum moderation will also be expanded to ensure focused and reliable exchanges of information, opinions and suggestions. We are contracting with a group to help us keep forum posts on topic and to handle abuse reports. They’ll also skim blog comments for off-topic posts and spam. It’s important to keep in mind that the moderators will not be answering blog or forum questions. This group will not be taking the place of Linden Lab employees, but rather will be freeing us up to communicate with forum and blog participants about substantive issues. These moderators, whose experience includes moderation assistance with EBay, are multi-lingual and will also be moderating our German, French, Korean and Japanese forums.

Timing and Transition
We will be introducing the new blog and forum enhancements in October. Until then, the blog will continue to be utilized for announcements, policy updates and introduction of new features. Other information is also being made available in other parts of the website such as the Grid Status page, blog margins and Showcase. We’ll help you find this information via the log-in message of the day.

In the meantime, we’ve created a forum thread where we can talk about our blog plans. I’ll be out for a short time this evening but will visit the forums in the next few hours to respond to your comments and questions.

In this follow-up blog post on Ad Farming, I will be talking about the new rules. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into this thread on the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion over the next few days.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, I’m Frank Ambrose, the Senior VP of Global Technology, and I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the work we’re doing on the Second Life Grid.

By way of introduction, I’m a recent hire here at the Lab, having joined to lead our global technology team. Specifically I’ll be focused on grid infrastructure and our stability initiatives. As noted in the press release, I come to the Lab from many years at AOL (and prior to that MCI), where I experienced the kind of explosive growth, global scale and inherent stability challenges we face here at Linden Lab.

More than anything else, my tenures at those companies taught me the direct relationship between platform stability and user experience. I’m looking forward to applying that lesson, and a host of others, as we work to maintain, build and improve this complex virtual world. I am keenly aware of the pain that any service outage can cause and am both excited and confident that Linden Lab has focused the right resources to achieve this critical objective.

Given the complexities in our architecture, our stability efforts span many individual areas, most of which were detailed by Ian Linden’s May posting. Some areas will be addressed through short-term initiatives, while others will require significant re-architecture, software changes and new physical hardware. Throughout it all, we’re committed to making the transition to a more stable world as seamless and transparent to you as possible. To that end, members of my team will be using the blog regularly to provide updates on plans and progress towards meeting our stability goals.

As part of our wider stability plan, we’re targeting 4 major infrastructure points both with long-and short-term goals: Intra-Grid Network, Asset Storage Cluster, Central Databases, and Host/Transit Data Services. The strategy is to develop and deploy near-term solutions to improve stability, while looking more broadly at our architecture (hardware, software, networks, etc). In the near term we’ve got a number of projects in flight to address some of these problem points. A couple of examples are:

- Asset collection. We’re collecting many assets that are on our storage clusters, but are rarely (if ever) accessed. These assets take up critical space on the clusters and potentially degrade performance and stability as we hit volume thresholds. We’ll be moving these files to different storage mechanisms and, while they will still be easily accessible, it will help us to avoid pushing the limits of our existing storage clusters, while still preserving all existing assets in a reliable storage environment.

- Reducing the need for VPN connections.  Since we don’t encrypt communication between simulators and our databases, there needs to be a safe means to communicate across data centers and so we use VPN connections. The connections don’t scale well and can be unreliable, so establishing a new communications mechanism, that is both safe, scalable and reliable, is another short-term project.

These projects are just a sampling of the work that is currently being done to improve stability, and I’ll be reporting on their progress, as well as other short-term projects, in the coming months.

We have a lot of work to do but be assured that we have the right resources and internal focus to achieve our stability goals. From personal experience, I’ve encountered many equally complex challenges, especially in my time at AOL, and these problems are all solvable with the right level of attention and technical talent. We certainly have both, now we will start delivering.

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the second annual Linden Lab Innovation Awards, known as “the Hippos,” which honor the exceptional, and varied, work done by open source community members.

Rob Linden presented the awards at a mixed reality event that linked an inworld gathering of nominees, attendees of the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, FL, and others tuning in via audio stream. See the wiki for the full text of his presentation and a review of the last year’s highlights.

Winners were selected by a panel of six Linden judges who studied each nominees contributions and rated them for both for impact and positive influence. The judges all came away awed at the breadth of cxontribution and felt they were just scratching the surface. Today’s list of winners includes only a small portion of what is fantastic about this community. While we’re not sure we’ve recognized everyone we could, we’re very confident that we should give special recognition to these individuals.

And now, the winners…

Read the rest of this entry »

In this blog post I will be talking about Ad Farming. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

So flex those typing fingers and join me after the cut..

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we’re happy to formally announce SLim, a lightweight, voice-enabled instant messaging client that will allow you to communicate with your Second Life friends without logging in to the full viewer. While the viewer will still serve as the primary communication engine when you’re inworld, having SLim installed will enable you to connect with friends whether or not they are actually inworld.

SLim further lowers the barriers between virtual world and real world communication and ensures that you’ll always be able to connect with your Second Life friends regardless of location or broadband connection. Capable of running on any computer, SLim will extend the value and experience of Second Life beyond the borders of the virtual world.

Among other benefits, SLim will give you:

• Access to your Second Life Friends list with real-time “presenceâ€� status updates
• The ability to seamlessly migrate a text conversation into a voice call
• The ability for SLim users to leave voice mails for offline friends

We’re putting the finishing touches on the technology now and will be announcing the availability of the client and a new SLim-enabled First Look viewer very shortly. Initially, you’ll be able to use SLim to communicate with Residents who are using the SLim-enabled First Look. Eventually, the main release viewer will also be SLim-enabled.

Voice is a critical component of the Second Life experience and SLim will play a major role in that facility moving forward.

Click here to see the official SLim press release.

Btw, I’m returning from the Virtual World Conference in LA this afternoon and won’t be able to read your comments until I get home. Will comment on the blog then. Thanks.

Some Residents have told me they worry the Linden Lab Blog is quieter than usual, and that this may reflect a decreased commitment by us to communication. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re making changes to enhance dialogue with you through adding better tools and organization along with fewer constraints.

Limitations of the Current Blog and Forums
The current blog has become unwieldy and messy because there is no way to categorize posts. Tag clouds, categories and search are inadequate tools for finding what you’re looking for. And we often hear that it can be frustrating to try and have meaningful exchanges about the original post because of the 150 message cut-off and the difficulty highlighting key comments among all the messages.

Similarly the current forum software is outdated, barely functioning and lacks important features that would enhance conversation between posters.

Coming Improvements
So we have embarked on a significant project to improve the web-based communication tools. In addition to updated software, we will be changing the blog’s organization, integrating the blog and forums for extended conversations, adding content to the log-in page to make it more useful, and integrating tools to highlight communications.

The new blog will have multiple categories to allow topic experts to talk about their areas of expertise and to promote discussion and Resident feedback and ideas. Large topics will integrate with the forums, as we’ve done recently, to allow for richer and more involved conversation with Linden Lab and Residents than is possible in blog comments.

Forum changes include feedback tools to allow Residents to elevate the most useful posts to the top of the thread. You’ll be able to vote on and rate comments so that the ones judged most useful will be highlighted. These helpful answers will be transferred to the Knowledge Base in the Second Life Support Portal.

Forum moderation will also be expanded to ensure focused and reliable exchanges of information, opinions and suggestions. We are contracting with a group to help us keep forum posts on topic and to handle abuse reports. They’ll also skim blog comments for off-topic posts and spam. It’s important to keep in mind that the moderators will not be answering blog or forum questions. This group will not be taking the place of Linden Lab employees, but rather will be freeing us up to communicate with forum and blog participants about substantive issues. These moderators, whose experience includes moderation assistance with EBay, are multi-lingual and will also be moderating our German, French, Korean and Japanese forums.

Timing and Transition
We will be introducing the new blog and forum enhancements in October. Until then, the blog will continue to be utilized for announcements, policy updates and introduction of new features. Other information is also being made available in other parts of the website such as the Grid Status page, blog margins and Showcase. We’ll help you find this information via the log-in message of the day.

In the meantime, we’ve created a forum thread where we can talk about our blog plans. I’ll be out for a short time this evening but will visit the forums in the next few hours to respond to your comments and questions.

In this follow-up blog post on Ad Farming, I will be talking about the new rules. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into this thread on the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion over the next few days.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, I’m Frank Ambrose, the Senior VP of Global Technology, and I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the work we’re doing on the Second Life Grid.

By way of introduction, I’m a recent hire here at the Lab, having joined to lead our global technology team. Specifically I’ll be focused on grid infrastructure and our stability initiatives. As noted in the press release, I come to the Lab from many years at AOL (and prior to that MCI), where I experienced the kind of explosive growth, global scale and inherent stability challenges we face here at Linden Lab.

More than anything else, my tenures at those companies taught me the direct relationship between platform stability and user experience. I’m looking forward to applying that lesson, and a host of others, as we work to maintain, build and improve this complex virtual world. I am keenly aware of the pain that any service outage can cause and am both excited and confident that Linden Lab has focused the right resources to achieve this critical objective.

Given the complexities in our architecture, our stability efforts span many individual areas, most of which were detailed by Ian Linden’s May posting. Some areas will be addressed through short-term initiatives, while others will require significant re-architecture, software changes and new physical hardware. Throughout it all, we’re committed to making the transition to a more stable world as seamless and transparent to you as possible. To that end, members of my team will be using the blog regularly to provide updates on plans and progress towards meeting our stability goals.

As part of our wider stability plan, we’re targeting 4 major infrastructure points both with long-and short-term goals: Intra-Grid Network, Asset Storage Cluster, Central Databases, and Host/Transit Data Services. The strategy is to develop and deploy near-term solutions to improve stability, while looking more broadly at our architecture (hardware, software, networks, etc). In the near term we’ve got a number of projects in flight to address some of these problem points. A couple of examples are:

- Asset collection. We’re collecting many assets that are on our storage clusters, but are rarely (if ever) accessed. These assets take up critical space on the clusters and potentially degrade performance and stability as we hit volume thresholds. We’ll be moving these files to different storage mechanisms and, while they will still be easily accessible, it will help us to avoid pushing the limits of our existing storage clusters, while still preserving all existing assets in a reliable storage environment.

- Reducing the need for VPN connections.  Since we don’t encrypt communication between simulators and our databases, there needs to be a safe means to communicate across data centers and so we use VPN connections. The connections don’t scale well and can be unreliable, so establishing a new communications mechanism, that is both safe, scalable and reliable, is another short-term project.

These projects are just a sampling of the work that is currently being done to improve stability, and I’ll be reporting on their progress, as well as other short-term projects, in the coming months.

We have a lot of work to do but be assured that we have the right resources and internal focus to achieve our stability goals. From personal experience, I’ve encountered many equally complex challenges, especially in my time at AOL, and these problems are all solvable with the right level of attention and technical talent. We certainly have both, now we will start delivering.

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the second annual Linden Lab Innovation Awards, known as “the Hippos,” which honor the exceptional, and varied, work done by open source community members.

Rob Linden presented the awards at a mixed reality event that linked an inworld gathering of nominees, attendees of the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, FL, and others tuning in via audio stream. See the wiki for the full text of his presentation and a review of the last year’s highlights.

Winners were selected by a panel of six Linden judges who studied each nominees contributions and rated them for both for impact and positive influence. The judges all came away awed at the breadth of cxontribution and felt they were just scratching the surface. Today’s list of winners includes only a small portion of what is fantastic about this community. While we’re not sure we’ve recognized everyone we could, we’re very confident that we should give special recognition to these individuals.

And now, the winners…

Read the rest of this entry »

In this blog post I will be talking about Ad Farming. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

So flex those typing fingers and join me after the cut..

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we’re happy to formally announce SLim, a lightweight, voice-enabled instant messaging client that will allow you to communicate with your Second Life friends without logging in to the full viewer. While the viewer will still serve as the primary communication engine when you’re inworld, having SLim installed will enable you to connect with friends whether or not they are actually inworld.

SLim further lowers the barriers between virtual world and real world communication and ensures that you’ll always be able to connect with your Second Life friends regardless of location or broadband connection. Capable of running on any computer, SLim will extend the value and experience of Second Life beyond the borders of the virtual world.

Among other benefits, SLim will give you:

• Access to your Second Life Friends list with real-time “presenceâ€� status updates
• The ability to seamlessly migrate a text conversation into a voice call
• The ability for SLim users to leave voice mails for offline friends

We’re putting the finishing touches on the technology now and will be announcing the availability of the client and a new SLim-enabled First Look viewer very shortly. Initially, you’ll be able to use SLim to communicate with Residents who are using the SLim-enabled First Look. Eventually, the main release viewer will also be SLim-enabled.

Voice is a critical component of the Second Life experience and SLim will play a major role in that facility moving forward.

Click here to see the official SLim press release.

Btw, I’m returning from the Virtual World Conference in LA this afternoon and won’t be able to read your comments until I get home. Will comment on the blog then. Thanks.

Some Residents have told me they worry the Linden Lab Blog is quieter than usual, and that this may reflect a decreased commitment by us to communication. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re making changes to enhance dialogue with you through adding better tools and organization along with fewer constraints.

Limitations of the Current Blog and Forums
The current blog has become unwieldy and messy because there is no way to categorize posts. Tag clouds, categories and search are inadequate tools for finding what you’re looking for. And we often hear that it can be frustrating to try and have meaningful exchanges about the original post because of the 150 message cut-off and the difficulty highlighting key comments among all the messages.

Similarly the current forum software is outdated, barely functioning and lacks important features that would enhance conversation between posters.

Coming Improvements
So we have embarked on a significant project to improve the web-based communication tools. In addition to updated software, we will be changing the blog’s organization, integrating the blog and forums for extended conversations, adding content to the log-in page to make it more useful, and integrating tools to highlight communications.

The new blog will have multiple categories to allow topic experts to talk about their areas of expertise and to promote discussion and Resident feedback and ideas. Large topics will integrate with the forums, as we’ve done recently, to allow for richer and more involved conversation with Linden Lab and Residents than is possible in blog comments.

Forum changes include feedback tools to allow Residents to elevate the most useful posts to the top of the thread. You’ll be able to vote on and rate comments so that the ones judged most useful will be highlighted. These helpful answers will be transferred to the Knowledge Base in the Second Life Support Portal.

Forum moderation will also be expanded to ensure focused and reliable exchanges of information, opinions and suggestions. We are contracting with a group to help us keep forum posts on topic and to handle abuse reports. They’ll also skim blog comments for off-topic posts and spam. It’s important to keep in mind that the moderators will not be answering blog or forum questions. This group will not be taking the place of Linden Lab employees, but rather will be freeing us up to communicate with forum and blog participants about substantive issues. These moderators, whose experience includes moderation assistance with EBay, are multi-lingual and will also be moderating our German, French, Korean and Japanese forums.

Timing and Transition
We will be introducing the new blog and forum enhancements in October. Until then, the blog will continue to be utilized for announcements, policy updates and introduction of new features. Other information is also being made available in other parts of the website such as the Grid Status page, blog margins and Showcase. We’ll help you find this information via the log-in message of the day.

In the meantime, we’ve created a forum thread where we can talk about our blog plans. I’ll be out for a short time this evening but will visit the forums in the next few hours to respond to your comments and questions.

In this follow-up blog post on Ad Farming, I will be talking about the new rules. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into this thread on the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion over the next few days.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, I’m Frank Ambrose, the Senior VP of Global Technology, and I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the work we’re doing on the Second Life Grid.

By way of introduction, I’m a recent hire here at the Lab, having joined to lead our global technology team. Specifically I’ll be focused on grid infrastructure and our stability initiatives. As noted in the press release, I come to the Lab from many years at AOL (and prior to that MCI), where I experienced the kind of explosive growth, global scale and inherent stability challenges we face here at Linden Lab.

More than anything else, my tenures at those companies taught me the direct relationship between platform stability and user experience. I’m looking forward to applying that lesson, and a host of others, as we work to maintain, build and improve this complex virtual world. I am keenly aware of the pain that any service outage can cause and am both excited and confident that Linden Lab has focused the right resources to achieve this critical objective.

Given the complexities in our architecture, our stability efforts span many individual areas, most of which were detailed by Ian Linden’s May posting. Some areas will be addressed through short-term initiatives, while others will require significant re-architecture, software changes and new physical hardware. Throughout it all, we’re committed to making the transition to a more stable world as seamless and transparent to you as possible. To that end, members of my team will be using the blog regularly to provide updates on plans and progress towards meeting our stability goals.

As part of our wider stability plan, we’re targeting 4 major infrastructure points both with long-and short-term goals: Intra-Grid Network, Asset Storage Cluster, Central Databases, and Host/Transit Data Services. The strategy is to develop and deploy near-term solutions to improve stability, while looking more broadly at our architecture (hardware, software, networks, etc). In the near term we’ve got a number of projects in flight to address some of these problem points. A couple of examples are:

- Asset collection. We’re collecting many assets that are on our storage clusters, but are rarely (if ever) accessed. These assets take up critical space on the clusters and potentially degrade performance and stability as we hit volume thresholds. We’ll be moving these files to different storage mechanisms and, while they will still be easily accessible, it will help us to avoid pushing the limits of our existing storage clusters, while still preserving all existing assets in a reliable storage environment.

- Reducing the need for VPN connections.  Since we don’t encrypt communication between simulators and our databases, there needs to be a safe means to communicate across data centers and so we use VPN connections. The connections don’t scale well and can be unreliable, so establishing a new communications mechanism, that is both safe, scalable and reliable, is another short-term project.

These projects are just a sampling of the work that is currently being done to improve stability, and I’ll be reporting on their progress, as well as other short-term projects, in the coming months.

We have a lot of work to do but be assured that we have the right resources and internal focus to achieve our stability goals. From personal experience, I’ve encountered many equally complex challenges, especially in my time at AOL, and these problems are all solvable with the right level of attention and technical talent. We certainly have both, now we will start delivering.

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the second annual Linden Lab Innovation Awards, known as “the Hippos,” which honor the exceptional, and varied, work done by open source community members.

Rob Linden presented the awards at a mixed reality event that linked an inworld gathering of nominees, attendees of the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, FL, and others tuning in via audio stream. See the wiki for the full text of his presentation and a review of the last year’s highlights.

Winners were selected by a panel of six Linden judges who studied each nominees contributions and rated them for both for impact and positive influence. The judges all came away awed at the breadth of cxontribution and felt they were just scratching the surface. Today’s list of winners includes only a small portion of what is fantastic about this community. While we’re not sure we’ve recognized everyone we could, we’re very confident that we should give special recognition to these individuals.

And now, the winners…

Read the rest of this entry »

In this blog post I will be talking about Ad Farming. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

So flex those typing fingers and join me after the cut..

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we’re happy to formally announce SLim, a lightweight, voice-enabled instant messaging client that will allow you to communicate with your Second Life friends without logging in to the full viewer. While the viewer will still serve as the primary communication engine when you’re inworld, having SLim installed will enable you to connect with friends whether or not they are actually inworld.

SLim further lowers the barriers between virtual world and real world communication and ensures that you’ll always be able to connect with your Second Life friends regardless of location or broadband connection. Capable of running on any computer, SLim will extend the value and experience of Second Life beyond the borders of the virtual world.

Among other benefits, SLim will give you:

• Access to your Second Life Friends list with real-time “presenceâ€� status updates
• The ability to seamlessly migrate a text conversation into a voice call
• The ability for SLim users to leave voice mails for offline friends

We’re putting the finishing touches on the technology now and will be announcing the availability of the client and a new SLim-enabled First Look viewer very shortly. Initially, you’ll be able to use SLim to communicate with Residents who are using the SLim-enabled First Look. Eventually, the main release viewer will also be SLim-enabled.

Voice is a critical component of the Second Life experience and SLim will play a major role in that facility moving forward.

Click here to see the official SLim press release.

Btw, I’m returning from the Virtual World Conference in LA this afternoon and won’t be able to read your comments until I get home. Will comment on the blog then. Thanks.

Some Residents have told me they worry the Linden Lab Blog is quieter than usual, and that this may reflect a decreased commitment by us to communication. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re making changes to enhance dialogue with you through adding better tools and organization along with fewer constraints.

Limitations of the Current Blog and Forums
The current blog has become unwieldy and messy because there is no way to categorize posts. Tag clouds, categories and search are inadequate tools for finding what you’re looking for. And we often hear that it can be frustrating to try and have meaningful exchanges about the original post because of the 150 message cut-off and the difficulty highlighting key comments among all the messages.

Similarly the current forum software is outdated, barely functioning and lacks important features that would enhance conversation between posters.

Coming Improvements
So we have embarked on a significant project to improve the web-based communication tools. In addition to updated software, we will be changing the blog’s organization, integrating the blog and forums for extended conversations, adding content to the log-in page to make it more useful, and integrating tools to highlight communications.

The new blog will have multiple categories to allow topic experts to talk about their areas of expertise and to promote discussion and Resident feedback and ideas. Large topics will integrate with the forums, as we’ve done recently, to allow for richer and more involved conversation with Linden Lab and Residents than is possible in blog comments.

Forum changes include feedback tools to allow Residents to elevate the most useful posts to the top of the thread. You’ll be able to vote on and rate comments so that the ones judged most useful will be highlighted. These helpful answers will be transferred to the Knowledge Base in the Second Life Support Portal.

Forum moderation will also be expanded to ensure focused and reliable exchanges of information, opinions and suggestions. We are contracting with a group to help us keep forum posts on topic and to handle abuse reports. They’ll also skim blog comments for off-topic posts and spam. It’s important to keep in mind that the moderators will not be answering blog or forum questions. This group will not be taking the place of Linden Lab employees, but rather will be freeing us up to communicate with forum and blog participants about substantive issues. These moderators, whose experience includes moderation assistance with EBay, are multi-lingual and will also be moderating our German, French, Korean and Japanese forums.

Timing and Transition
We will be introducing the new blog and forum enhancements in October. Until then, the blog will continue to be utilized for announcements, policy updates and introduction of new features. Other information is also being made available in other parts of the website such as the Grid Status page, blog margins and Showcase. We’ll help you find this information via the log-in message of the day.

In the meantime, we’ve created a forum thread where we can talk about our blog plans. I’ll be out for a short time this evening but will visit the forums in the next few hours to respond to your comments and questions.

In this follow-up blog post on Ad Farming, I will be talking about the new rules. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into this thread on the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion over the next few days.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, I’m Frank Ambrose, the Senior VP of Global Technology, and I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the work we’re doing on the Second Life Grid.

By way of introduction, I’m a recent hire here at the Lab, having joined to lead our global technology team. Specifically I’ll be focused on grid infrastructure and our stability initiatives. As noted in the press release, I come to the Lab from many years at AOL (and prior to that MCI), where I experienced the kind of explosive growth, global scale and inherent stability challenges we face here at Linden Lab.

More than anything else, my tenures at those companies taught me the direct relationship between platform stability and user experience. I’m looking forward to applying that lesson, and a host of others, as we work to maintain, build and improve this complex virtual world. I am keenly aware of the pain that any service outage can cause and am both excited and confident that Linden Lab has focused the right resources to achieve this critical objective.

Given the complexities in our architecture, our stability efforts span many individual areas, most of which were detailed by Ian Linden’s May posting. Some areas will be addressed through short-term initiatives, while others will require significant re-architecture, software changes and new physical hardware. Throughout it all, we’re committed to making the transition to a more stable world as seamless and transparent to you as possible. To that end, members of my team will be using the blog regularly to provide updates on plans and progress towards meeting our stability goals.

As part of our wider stability plan, we’re targeting 4 major infrastructure points both with long-and short-term goals: Intra-Grid Network, Asset Storage Cluster, Central Databases, and Host/Transit Data Services. The strategy is to develop and deploy near-term solutions to improve stability, while looking more broadly at our architecture (hardware, software, networks, etc). In the near term we’ve got a number of projects in flight to address some of these problem points. A couple of examples are:

- Asset collection. We’re collecting many assets that are on our storage clusters, but are rarely (if ever) accessed. These assets take up critical space on the clusters and potentially degrade performance and stability as we hit volume thresholds. We’ll be moving these files to different storage mechanisms and, while they will still be easily accessible, it will help us to avoid pushing the limits of our existing storage clusters, while still preserving all existing assets in a reliable storage environment.

- Reducing the need for VPN connections.  Since we don’t encrypt communication between simulators and our databases, there needs to be a safe means to communicate across data centers and so we use VPN connections. The connections don’t scale well and can be unreliable, so establishing a new communications mechanism, that is both safe, scalable and reliable, is another short-term project.

These projects are just a sampling of the work that is currently being done to improve stability, and I’ll be reporting on their progress, as well as other short-term projects, in the coming months.

We have a lot of work to do but be assured that we have the right resources and internal focus to achieve our stability goals. From personal experience, I’ve encountered many equally complex challenges, especially in my time at AOL, and these problems are all solvable with the right level of attention and technical talent. We certainly have both, now we will start delivering.

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the second annual Linden Lab Innovation Awards, known as “the Hippos,” which honor the exceptional, and varied, work done by open source community members.

Rob Linden presented the awards at a mixed reality event that linked an inworld gathering of nominees, attendees of the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, FL, and others tuning in via audio stream. See the wiki for the full text of his presentation and a review of the last year’s highlights.

Winners were selected by a panel of six Linden judges who studied each nominees contributions and rated them for both for impact and positive influence. The judges all came away awed at the breadth of cxontribution and felt they were just scratching the surface. Today’s list of winners includes only a small portion of what is fantastic about this community. While we’re not sure we’ve recognized everyone we could, we’re very confident that we should give special recognition to these individuals.

And now, the winners…

Read the rest of this entry »

In this blog post I will be talking about Ad Farming. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

So flex those typing fingers and join me after the cut..

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we’re happy to formally announce SLim, a lightweight, voice-enabled instant messaging client that will allow you to communicate with your Second Life friends without logging in to the full viewer. While the viewer will still serve as the primary communication engine when you’re inworld, having SLim installed will enable you to connect with friends whether or not they are actually inworld.

SLim further lowers the barriers between virtual world and real world communication and ensures that you’ll always be able to connect with your Second Life friends regardless of location or broadband connection. Capable of running on any computer, SLim will extend the value and experience of Second Life beyond the borders of the virtual world.

Among other benefits, SLim will give you:

• Access to your Second Life Friends list with real-time “presenceâ€� status updates
• The ability to seamlessly migrate a text conversation into a voice call
• The ability for SLim users to leave voice mails for offline friends

We’re putting the finishing touches on the technology now and will be announcing the availability of the client and a new SLim-enabled First Look viewer very shortly. Initially, you’ll be able to use SLim to communicate with Residents who are using the SLim-enabled First Look. Eventually, the main release viewer will also be SLim-enabled.

Voice is a critical component of the Second Life experience and SLim will play a major role in that facility moving forward.

Click here to see the official SLim press release.

Btw, I’m returning from the Virtual World Conference in LA this afternoon and won’t be able to read your comments until I get home. Will comment on the blog then. Thanks.

Some Residents have told me they worry the Linden Lab Blog is quieter than usual, and that this may reflect a decreased commitment by us to communication. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re making changes to enhance dialogue with you through adding better tools and organization along with fewer constraints.

Limitations of the Current Blog and Forums
The current blog has become unwieldy and messy because there is no way to categorize posts. Tag clouds, categories and search are inadequate tools for finding what you’re looking for. And we often hear that it can be frustrating to try and have meaningful exchanges about the original post because of the 150 message cut-off and the difficulty highlighting key comments among all the messages.

Similarly the current forum software is outdated, barely functioning and lacks important features that would enhance conversation between posters.

Coming Improvements
So we have embarked on a significant project to improve the web-based communication tools. In addition to updated software, we will be changing the blog’s organization, integrating the blog and forums for extended conversations, adding content to the log-in page to make it more useful, and integrating tools to highlight communications.

The new blog will have multiple categories to allow topic experts to talk about their areas of expertise and to promote discussion and Resident feedback and ideas. Large topics will integrate with the forums, as we’ve done recently, to allow for richer and more involved conversation with Linden Lab and Residents than is possible in blog comments.

Forum changes include feedback tools to allow Residents to elevate the most useful posts to the top of the thread. You’ll be able to vote on and rate comments so that the ones judged most useful will be highlighted. These helpful answers will be transferred to the Knowledge Base in the Second Life Support Portal.

Forum moderation will also be expanded to ensure focused and reliable exchanges of information, opinions and suggestions. We are contracting with a group to help us keep forum posts on topic and to handle abuse reports. They’ll also skim blog comments for off-topic posts and spam. It’s important to keep in mind that the moderators will not be answering blog or forum questions. This group will not be taking the place of Linden Lab employees, but rather will be freeing us up to communicate with forum and blog participants about substantive issues. These moderators, whose experience includes moderation assistance with EBay, are multi-lingual and will also be moderating our German, French, Korean and Japanese forums.

Timing and Transition
We will be introducing the new blog and forum enhancements in October. Until then, the blog will continue to be utilized for announcements, policy updates and introduction of new features. Other information is also being made available in other parts of the website such as the Grid Status page, blog margins and Showcase. We’ll help you find this information via the log-in message of the day.

In the meantime, we’ve created a forum thread where we can talk about our blog plans. I’ll be out for a short time this evening but will visit the forums in the next few hours to respond to your comments and questions.

In this follow-up blog post on Ad Farming, I will be talking about the new rules. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into this thread on the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion over the next few days.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, I’m Frank Ambrose, the Senior VP of Global Technology, and I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the work we’re doing on the Second Life Grid.

By way of introduction, I’m a recent hire here at the Lab, having joined to lead our global technology team. Specifically I’ll be focused on grid infrastructure and our stability initiatives. As noted in the press release, I come to the Lab from many years at AOL (and prior to that MCI), where I experienced the kind of explosive growth, global scale and inherent stability challenges we face here at Linden Lab.

More than anything else, my tenures at those companies taught me the direct relationship between platform stability and user experience. I’m looking forward to applying that lesson, and a host of others, as we work to maintain, build and improve this complex virtual world. I am keenly aware of the pain that any service outage can cause and am both excited and confident that Linden Lab has focused the right resources to achieve this critical objective.

Given the complexities in our architecture, our stability efforts span many individual areas, most of which were detailed by Ian Linden’s May posting. Some areas will be addressed through short-term initiatives, while others will require significant re-architecture, software changes and new physical hardware. Throughout it all, we’re committed to making the transition to a more stable world as seamless and transparent to you as possible. To that end, members of my team will be using the blog regularly to provide updates on plans and progress towards meeting our stability goals.

As part of our wider stability plan, we’re targeting 4 major infrastructure points both with long-and short-term goals: Intra-Grid Network, Asset Storage Cluster, Central Databases, and Host/Transit Data Services. The strategy is to develop and deploy near-term solutions to improve stability, while looking more broadly at our architecture (hardware, software, networks, etc). In the near term we’ve got a number of projects in flight to address some of these problem points. A couple of examples are:

- Asset collection. We’re collecting many assets that are on our storage clusters, but are rarely (if ever) accessed. These assets take up critical space on the clusters and potentially degrade performance and stability as we hit volume thresholds. We’ll be moving these files to different storage mechanisms and, while they will still be easily accessible, it will help us to avoid pushing the limits of our existing storage clusters, while still preserving all existing assets in a reliable storage environment.

- Reducing the need for VPN connections.  Since we don’t encrypt communication between simulators and our databases, there needs to be a safe means to communicate across data centers and so we use VPN connections. The connections don’t scale well and can be unreliable, so establishing a new communications mechanism, that is both safe, scalable and reliable, is another short-term project.

These projects are just a sampling of the work that is currently being done to improve stability, and I’ll be reporting on their progress, as well as other short-term projects, in the coming months.

We have a lot of work to do but be assured that we have the right resources and internal focus to achieve our stability goals. From personal experience, I’ve encountered many equally complex challenges, especially in my time at AOL, and these problems are all solvable with the right level of attention and technical talent. We certainly have both, now we will start delivering.

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the second annual Linden Lab Innovation Awards, known as “the Hippos,” which honor the exceptional, and varied, work done by open source community members.

Rob Linden presented the awards at a mixed reality event that linked an inworld gathering of nominees, attendees of the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, FL, and others tuning in via audio stream. See the wiki for the full text of his presentation and a review of the last year’s highlights.

Winners were selected by a panel of six Linden judges who studied each nominees contributions and rated them for both for impact and positive influence. The judges all came away awed at the breadth of cxontribution and felt they were just scratching the surface. Today’s list of winners includes only a small portion of what is fantastic about this community. While we’re not sure we’ve recognized everyone we could, we’re very confident that we should give special recognition to these individuals.

And now, the winners…

Read the rest of this entry »

In this blog post I will be talking about Ad Farming. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

So flex those typing fingers and join me after the cut..

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we’re happy to formally announce SLim, a lightweight, voice-enabled instant messaging client that will allow you to communicate with your Second Life friends without logging in to the full viewer. While the viewer will still serve as the primary communication engine when you’re inworld, having SLim installed will enable you to connect with friends whether or not they are actually inworld.

SLim further lowers the barriers between virtual world and real world communication and ensures that you’ll always be able to connect with your Second Life friends regardless of location or broadband connection. Capable of running on any computer, SLim will extend the value and experience of Second Life beyond the borders of the virtual world.

Among other benefits, SLim will give you:

• Access to your Second Life Friends list with real-time “presenceâ€� status updates
• The ability to seamlessly migrate a text conversation into a voice call
• The ability for SLim users to leave voice mails for offline friends

We’re putting the finishing touches on the technology now and will be announcing the availability of the client and a new SLim-enabled First Look viewer very shortly. Initially, you’ll be able to use SLim to communicate with Residents who are using the SLim-enabled First Look. Eventually, the main release viewer will also be SLim-enabled.

Voice is a critical component of the Second Life experience and SLim will play a major role in that facility moving forward.

Click here to see the official SLim press release.

Btw, I’m returning from the Virtual World Conference in LA this afternoon and won’t be able to read your comments until I get home. Will comment on the blog then. Thanks.

Some Residents have told me they worry the Linden Lab Blog is quieter than usual, and that this may reflect a decreased commitment by us to communication. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re making changes to enhance dialogue with you through adding better tools and organization along with fewer constraints.

Limitations of the Current Blog and Forums
The current blog has become unwieldy and messy because there is no way to categorize posts. Tag clouds, categories and search are inadequate tools for finding what you’re looking for. And we often hear that it can be frustrating to try and have meaningful exchanges about the original post because of the 150 message cut-off and the difficulty highlighting key comments among all the messages.

Similarly the current forum software is outdated, barely functioning and lacks important features that would enhance conversation between posters.

Coming Improvements
So we have embarked on a significant project to improve the web-based communication tools. In addition to updated software, we will be changing the blog’s organization, integrating the blog and forums for extended conversations, adding content to the log-in page to make it more useful, and integrating tools to highlight communications.

The new blog will have multiple categories to allow topic experts to talk about their areas of expertise and to promote discussion and Resident feedback and ideas. Large topics will integrate with the forums, as we’ve done recently, to allow for richer and more involved conversation with Linden Lab and Residents than is possible in blog comments.

Forum changes include feedback tools to allow Residents to elevate the most useful posts to the top of the thread. You’ll be able to vote on and rate comments so that the ones judged most useful will be highlighted. These helpful answers will be transferred to the Knowledge Base in the Second Life Support Portal.

Forum moderation will also be expanded to ensure focused and reliable exchanges of information, opinions and suggestions. We are contracting with a group to help us keep forum posts on topic and to handle abuse reports. They’ll also skim blog comments for off-topic posts and spam. It’s important to keep in mind that the moderators will not be answering blog or forum questions. This group will not be taking the place of Linden Lab employees, but rather will be freeing us up to communicate with forum and blog participants about substantive issues. These moderators, whose experience includes moderation assistance with EBay, are multi-lingual and will also be moderating our German, French, Korean and Japanese forums.

Timing and Transition
We will be introducing the new blog and forum enhancements in October. Until then, the blog will continue to be utilized for announcements, policy updates and introduction of new features. Other information is also being made available in other parts of the website such as the Grid Status page, blog margins and Showcase. We’ll help you find this information via the log-in message of the day.

In the meantime, we’ve created a forum thread where we can talk about our blog plans. I’ll be out for a short time this evening but will visit the forums in the next few hours to respond to your comments and questions.

In this follow-up blog post on Ad Farming, I will be talking about the new rules. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into this thread on the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion over the next few days.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, I’m Frank Ambrose, the Senior VP of Global Technology, and I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the work we’re doing on the Second Life Grid.

By way of introduction, I’m a recent hire here at the Lab, having joined to lead our global technology team. Specifically I’ll be focused on grid infrastructure and our stability initiatives. As noted in the press release, I come to the Lab from many years at AOL (and prior to that MCI), where I experienced the kind of explosive growth, global scale and inherent stability challenges we face here at Linden Lab.

More than anything else, my tenures at those companies taught me the direct relationship between platform stability and user experience. I’m looking forward to applying that lesson, and a host of others, as we work to maintain, build and improve this complex virtual world. I am keenly aware of the pain that any service outage can cause and am both excited and confident that Linden Lab has focused the right resources to achieve this critical objective.

Given the complexities in our architecture, our stability efforts span many individual areas, most of which were detailed by Ian Linden’s May posting. Some areas will be addressed through short-term initiatives, while others will require significant re-architecture, software changes and new physical hardware. Throughout it all, we’re committed to making the transition to a more stable world as seamless and transparent to you as possible. To that end, members of my team will be using the blog regularly to provide updates on plans and progress towards meeting our stability goals.

As part of our wider stability plan, we’re targeting 4 major infrastructure points both with long-and short-term goals: Intra-Grid Network, Asset Storage Cluster, Central Databases, and Host/Transit Data Services. The strategy is to develop and deploy near-term solutions to improve stability, while looking more broadly at our architecture (hardware, software, networks, etc). In the near term we’ve got a number of projects in flight to address some of these problem points. A couple of examples are:

- Asset collection. We’re collecting many assets that are on our storage clusters, but are rarely (if ever) accessed. These assets take up critical space on the clusters and potentially degrade performance and stability as we hit volume thresholds. We’ll be moving these files to different storage mechanisms and, while they will still be easily accessible, it will help us to avoid pushing the limits of our existing storage clusters, while still preserving all existing assets in a reliable storage environment.

- Reducing the need for VPN connections.  Since we don’t encrypt communication between simulators and our databases, there needs to be a safe means to communicate across data centers and so we use VPN connections. The connections don’t scale well and can be unreliable, so establishing a new communications mechanism, that is both safe, scalable and reliable, is another short-term project.

These projects are just a sampling of the work that is currently being done to improve stability, and I’ll be reporting on their progress, as well as other short-term projects, in the coming months.

We have a lot of work to do but be assured that we have the right resources and internal focus to achieve our stability goals. From personal experience, I’ve encountered many equally complex challenges, especially in my time at AOL, and these problems are all solvable with the right level of attention and technical talent. We certainly have both, now we will start delivering.

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the second annual Linden Lab Innovation Awards, known as “the Hippos,” which honor the exceptional, and varied, work done by open source community members.

Rob Linden presented the awards at a mixed reality event that linked an inworld gathering of nominees, attendees of the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, FL, and others tuning in via audio stream. See the wiki for the full text of his presentation and a review of the last year’s highlights.

Winners were selected by a panel of six Linden judges who studied each nominees contributions and rated them for both for impact and positive influence. The judges all came away awed at the breadth of cxontribution and felt they were just scratching the surface. Today’s list of winners includes only a small portion of what is fantastic about this community. While we’re not sure we’ve recognized everyone we could, we’re very confident that we should give special recognition to these individuals.

And now, the winners…

Read the rest of this entry »

In this blog post I will be talking about Ad Farming. As with my previous post, I’d like to then move the discussion into the forums so that as many of you as possible can give us your opinion.

Please keep in mind that this post is about the Linden Mainland, and does not apply to private islands where the estate owners choose how they wish to run their own estates.

So flex those typing fingers and join me after the cut..

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we’re happy to formally announce SLim, a lightweight, voice-enabled instant messaging client that will allow you to communicate with your Second Life friends without logging in to the full viewer. While the viewer will still serve as the primary communication engine when you’re inworld, having SLim installed will enable you to connect with friends whether or not they are actually inworld.

SLim further lowers the barriers between virtual world and real world communication and ensures that you’ll always be able to connect with your Second Life friends regardless of location or broadband connection. Capable of running on any computer, SLim will extend the value and experience of Second Life beyond the borders of the virtual world.

Among other benefits, SLim will give you:

• Access to your Second Life Friends list with real-time “presenceâ€� status updates
• The ability to seamlessly migrate a text conversation into a voice call
• The ability for SLim users to leave voice mails for offline friends

We’re putting the finishing touches on the technology now and will be announcing the availability of the client and a new SLim-enabled First Look viewer very shortly. Initially, you’ll be able to use SLim to communicate with Residents who are using the SLim-enabled First Look. Eventually, the main release viewer will also be SLim-enabled.

Voice is a critical component of the Second Life experience and SLim will play a major role in that facility moving forward.

Click here to see the official SLim press release.

Btw, I’m returning from the Virtual World Conference in LA this afternoon and won’t be able to read your comments until I get home. Will comment on the blog then. Thanks.

Some Residents have told me they worry the Linden Lab Blog is quieter than usual, and that this may reflect a decreased commitment by us to communication. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re making changes to enhance dialogue with you through adding better tools and organization along with fewer constraints.

Limitations of the Current Blog and Forums
The current blog has become unwieldy and messy because there is no way to categorize posts. Tag clouds, categories and search are inadequate tools for finding what you’re looking for. And we often hear that it can be frustrating to try and have meaningful exchanges about the original post because of the 150 message cut-off and the difficulty highlighting key comments among all the messages.

Similarly the current forum software is outdated, barely functioning and lacks important features that would enhance conversation between posters.

Coming Improvements
So we have embarked on a significant project to improve the web-based communication tools. In addition to updated software, we will be changing the blog’s organization, integrating the blog and forums for extended conversations, adding content to the log-in page to make it more useful, and integrating tools to highlight communications.

The new blog will have multiple categories to allow topic experts to talk about their areas of expertise and to promote discussion and Resident feedback and ideas. Large topics will integrate with the forums, as we’ve done recently, to allow for richer and more involved conversation with Linden Lab and Residents than is possible in blog comments.

Forum changes include feedback tools to allow Residents to elevate the most useful posts to the top of the thread. You’ll be able to vote on and rate comments so that the ones judged most useful will be highlighted. These helpful answers will be transferred to the Knowledge Base in the Second Life Support Portal.

Forum moderation will also be expanded to ensure focused and reliable exchanges of information, opinions and suggestions. We are contracting with a group to help us keep forum posts on topic and to handle abuse reports. They’ll also skim blog comments for off-topic posts and spam. It’s important to keep in mind that the moderators will not be answering blog or forum questions. This group will not be taking the place of Linden Lab employees, but rather will be freeing us up to communicate with forum and blog participants about substantive issues. These moderators, whose experience includes moderation assistance with EBay, are multi-lingual and will also be moderating our German, French, Korean and Japanese forums.

Timing and Transition
We will be introducing the new blog and forum enhancements in October. Until then, the blog will continue to be utilized for announcements, policy updates and introduction of new features. Other information is also being made available in other parts of the website such as the Grid Status page, blog margins and Showcase. We’ll help you find this information via the log-in message of the day.

In the meantime, we’ve created a forum thread where we can talk about our blog plans. I’ll be out for a short time this evening but will visit the forums in the next few hours to respond to your comments and questions.