well after much speculation and general concern (mostly by current residents) we now have a new vision for the future of second life. fast, easy and fun.

yeah, it’s probably not what you were expecting if you’ve been worried about buzz, new methods of content creation / protection, the recent layoffs or user base increases. but, if you’ve been worried about those things - chances are you’re already making lots of money in second life, or you work for linden labs.

if however you’ve been concerned about the stability of the platform and the services we already enjoy, or the fluctuation of the linden exchange and marketplace - then the recent meeting philip rosedale held to address the future may have answered alot of your questions.

the goal is to make the user experience more fun by stabilizing both the client and the server software to work better with each other. keeping the 2.x client (while hard for older residents to deal with - and still complicated for new users to learn) is a move to conserve resources while keeping some of the newer ideas about eventually making second life a little more social media friendly… and in the lead when it comes to conversations about the future of virtual worlds.

hopefully this new direction will lead to solutions for the nagging problems that have built up since philip’s absence. search being broken, lag issues from client side to server side, voice issues and all the things that make daily use of second life a little more difficult each time a new service or feature has been introduced without fully debugging or understanding the impact on it’s users.

if so - second life will make a giant leap towards keeping its current users happy, adding and retaining new users at a more reasonable clip and stabilizing a platform that may be the answer to web 3D’s problems sometime in the distant future.