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Second Life (SL) is a privately-owned, partly subscription-based 3-D virtual world, made publicly available in 2003 by San Francisco-based Linden Lab, and founded by former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale. The Second Life "world" resides in a large array of servers that are owned and maintained by Linden Lab, known collectively as "the grid". The Second Life client program provides its users (referred to as Residents) with tools to view and modify the SL world and participate in its virtual economy, which concurrently has begun to operate as a "real" market. As of early October 2006, Second Life has approximately 850,000 total user accounts and 358,000 users active over the previous 60 days, relatively few compared to other virtual worlds, such as World of Warcraft's 7 million subscribers.

Pricing

Second Life has three membership plans.

• First Basic - Free
• Additional Basic - Additional Basic accounts are available for a one time fee of $9.95 per additional account
• Premium - The only differences between these accounts and First Basic accounts (aside from the fee) are the ability to own land (Basic account holders can rent), a L$400/week Stipend and a L$1000 signup bonus. There are three billing options for Premium accounts:
  • Monthly — $9.95
  • Quarterly — $22.50 ($7.50/month)
  • Annually — $72.00 ($6.00/month)

Basic accounts originally received L$250 starting money and a stipend of L$50 a week for every week users were logged in. However, basic accounts created after May 29, 2006 no longer receive the L$50/week stipend, and basic accounts created after June 6, 2006 no longer receive starting money without confirmation of credit card or other valid identity information. However, Basic accounts originally required billing information to be presented (even though no charge was made) because of the need to prevent people creating multiple basic accounts in order to benefit from the stipend multiple times; now that this has been removed, Basic accounts can be created with only an e-mail address, which at last report was not even verified.

Premium memberships receive a stipend every week regardless of logging in or not, with those registered before Friday, July 21, 2006 receiving L$500/week, and those registered on or after receiving L$400/week. Premium members also have the ability to own land (up to 512m without additional fees). Owning larger areas of land attracts an increasing additional fee (what Linden Lab calls "tier") ranging from $5 a month up to $195 a month for an entire 65,536m of land or individual island.

The pricing plan for Second Life has varied over time. Earlier versions did not feature free first-time Basic Accounts. During the beta period, Residents had the option of a lifetime subscription for a one-time payment of US$225.00. After the release of SL 1.2 and the introduction of tiered land payments, this turned into a lifetime tier-free ownership of 4096m of land.

Residents

Residents are the users of Second Life, and their appearance is their avatar. A person may have multiple accounts, and thus be multiple Residents (a person's multiple accounts can be referred to as alts), and a single Resident may have multiple avatars. All scripts and 3D content are created by Residents using nothing but the client, and even though animations, textures and sounds have to be created outside the client, every experience in Second Life is entirely user-created.

Recent improvements

The group tools received many improvements:

• Ability to be members of up to 25 groups; previous limit was 15
• Minimum group membership count reduced to 2; previous requirement was minimum of 3
• Improved communication
• Sending objects to everyone in a group (also possible to implement with LSL)
• Defining roles and capabilities of roles (roles will be similar to the current Officer and Member title system)

These improvements were implemented on August 23, 2006, with the release of Second Life client version 1.12.0

Open standards

Linden Lab is an avid user of open standards technologies. Open-source technologies such as Apache and Squid are already being used.

Open Standards improvements throughout 2006

The plan is to eventually move everything to open standards and standardize the Second Life protocol. Cory Ondrejka, Vice President of Product Development, has stated that a while after everything has been standardized, both the client and the server will be released as open source .

1. Throughout 2006 the built-in instant messaging system will be replaced with Jabber
2. The current proprietary LSL virtual machine will be replaced with Mono .
3. uBrowser, an OpenGL port of the Mozilla® Gecko rendering engine, has been used in the client since version 1.10.1 to display the Help documentation, will also be used to display webpages on any of the surfaces of any 3D object the user creates.

Second Life protocol

In May 2006 it was revealed that the Second Life protocol had been reverse-engineered. A wiki was set up to further the effort . An open-source Second Life library is being worked on .

The Second Life Protocol Wiki had two tools anonymously donated to them: snowcrash and slice, which quickly furthered the effort. Snowcrash is a tool for decrypting the file comm.dat, which contains a description of the communication protocol. Slice is a tool for dumping the content of Second Life's cache files.

Since Linden Labs has allowed third party programs to access Second Life, a project called libsecondlife has been established. Among functions developed are a map API, recently-removed the ability to create objects larger than normally allowed, and other unforeseen capabilities.

Economy

Second Life has its own economy and a currency referred to as Linden Dollars (L$). Residents receive an amount of L$ when they open an account, and a weekly stipend thereafter — the amount depends on the type of account. Additional L$s are acquired by selling objects or services within the environment. Residents may purchase L$ directly or convert between Linden currency and U.S. currency through either Linden Lab's currency brokerage, the LindeX Currency Exchange, or other third-party currency exchanges. The ratio of USD to L$ fluctuates daily as Residents set the buy and sell price of L$ offered on the exchange, and it has fluctated between 240 L$/USD and 350 L$/USD over the past 12 months (October, 2005 to September 2006). As a point of reference, the current lowest yearly membership fee in Second Life is $72 USD. A premium user, who receives a 400 L$/week stipened that never bought or sold in Second Life (or who bought and sold in equal amounts) would accumulate 20,800 L$/year. Selling this amount on a currency exchange (negating exchange fees) would result in the user receiving back the $72 USD membership fee if they were able to obtain an exchange rate of 290 L$/USD. As of September 14, 2006, the best exchange rate for selling currency was 298 L$/USD.

Linden Lab has stated that the Second Life economy generated US$3,596,674 in economic activity during the month of September 2005. According to a September 2006 Popular Science article, Second Life, through currency trading, shopping and land sales, has a GDP of $64 Million.

Land sales system

Linden Lab usually sells land in small 512m blocks (16 by 32 metres) through it's First Land program, or as entire 16 acre (65536m) regions. Residents also buy and sell land to other Residents, generally intending to make a profit by selling the plots of land at a price higher than the original purchase cost.

First Land

The First Land program is used to reserve small blocks of land for first time land buyers, intendeding to decrease the cost of land for new premium accounts. This program also serves as an incentive for new Residents with free accounts to upgrade to premium accounts. A Resident pays a fixed fee of L$1 per square metre for a 512metre plot. These First Land plots are frequently consolidated into larger plots when the original owners sell them to other residents.

Regions

• Regions put up for auction are usually accesible from the main continent (e.g. by crossing the simulator boundry) of Second Life.
• Regions purchased privately are not allowed to be accessible directly from the main continent of Second Life, multiple regions can be purchased and placed next to each other creating their own island or small continent.

The high land tier fees (US$195 a month) associated with owning a 16 acre region have resulted in many privately purchased simulators being focused solely on content that can return a profit, reducing the variety available. There are exceptions to this behavior, such as Svarga (an artifical eco system driven by LSL, created by Second Life Resident Laukosargas Svarog.

Teen Second Life

Teen Second Life was developed in early 2005 for people aged 13-17 to play Second Life, without entering false-information to participate in the Adult Grid.

On January 1, 2006, the teen grid opening hours were increased to 24 hours a day, whereas it was previously open only during Linden Lab's office hours .

Differences

The 13-17 Teen Grid and the 18+ Main Grid are different in many ways.

Age

• Teen Grid users are transferred to the Main Grid once they turn 18, taking all content and private islands with them.
• Underage users found to be fraudulently accessing the Main Grid (e.g. by being under 18) that are transferred to the Teen Grid lose all their inventory, in an effort to prevent Mature content being transferred to the Teen Grid.
• Overage users found to be fraudulently accessing the Teen Grid (e.g. by being over 18 and lying on the registration form) face banning from all areas of Second Life (website, Teen and Main Grid) designated teen only Teen Second Life Terms of Service section 2.2
• Open Registration was implemented, but quickly removed for the Teen Grid, to increase security against users over age 18 from entering the Teen Grid.

Land

• The Teen Grid is significantly smaller in the size of its userbase, the amount of land and concurrent Resident population at any given time.
• The Teen Grid is a fraction of the size of the Adult Grid, and has significantly fewer Resident owned estates- compare Teen Grid 2006-10-01 with Main Grid 2006-10-01.

Content

• The Teen Grid has a zero-tolerance policy for mature content, including gambling and nudity- see Teen Second Life Community Standards- sections 1,5,7 and 8.
  • Since nudity is not allowed on the Teen Grid, Teen Residents are unable to remove their underwear. However, Teen Residents can use textures with transparent sections for clothing- just as Main Grid Residents can- so that using completely or partially transparent underwear in combination with skins featuring genitalia, their avatar can appear to be nude. Such actions are against the Teen Second Life Community Standards.
• The client differs slightly, in terms of user-interface.

Economy

• The Teen Grid, lacking the economic support of gambling and other mature content, has a much different economy. Land prices and in-world object prices are known to be different, as the average income for the people that play these grids differs.

• LindeX (The Linden Lab endorsed trading service), however, takes from the same pool of Linden Dollars (L$) for both the Main Grid and the Teen Grid.

Issues and criticisms

A number of difficult issues have arisen within the operation of Second Life, both as an online game and a virtual world.

Economy

Legal position of the Linden Dollar

Linden Lab has been criticized for marketing SL as a viable business channel for making real money, while at the same time including provisions in the Terms of Service which give Linden dollars no legal value. Linden Lab is not required to pay any compensation if L$ is lost from the database. The tax position on income earned via Linden dollars is also unclear.

Unusual phenomena in currency market

Services for buying and selling Linden dollars are structured in a similar way to real life currency dealing: amounts are bought and sold through brokers at variable market rates. However, because the actual economy of Second Life does not correspond to a self-contained country (a large proportion of the population have no way to earn money other than buying it with money from outside, and those who earn large amounts of money often only do so in order to sell it for money from outside), the currency market exhibits unusual phenomena: consumers and those with less money within SL have no limit to how low they would wish the exchange rate to fall, and sellers and the rich have no limit to how high they would wish it to rise. This creates conflict and complaints whenever currency market trends persist for long periods of time; consumers complain that a rising L$ gives them bad value for their US$, and sellers complain that a falling L$ gives them bad return on their work .

Effect of in-world economy changes made by Linden Lab

Certain changes made or proposed by the developers have had the effect of creating new markets, but also have on occasion destroyed or removed the value of existing ones, or inadvertently given a market leader at a particular time unique advantages that entrench them as a market leader in the future. The most well known example of this is InfoNet, an in-world newspaper and information delivery service run on a for-profit basis, and formerly (as with many such systems in SL) of limited effectiveness due to a limited range of access points. When the old concept of "telehubs" was removed from the game, Linden Labs replaced them with "InfoHubs" each of which including an InfoNet access point which was hosted for free on system owned land; it also placed InfoNet access points in the Welcome Areas where new users arrive, where no user is normally permitted to leave business-related objects. This had the effect of giving InfoNet an instant and substantial advantage .

Land

This article contains weasel words: vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. Such statements should be clarified or removed.

Lack of zoning

With minor exceptions, Linden Lab has not placed any zoning or content restrictions on what land owners can place on their real estate. This has resulted in a wide variety of architectural variations and buildings of different purposes being fitted into nearby spaces, frequently with mixed success. Additionally, since land is paid for per square metre, residents are pressured to use all their available space to maximise value, leading to buildings being placed right up against each other with no intervening access or spacing. In extreme cases, "land griefing", "vandalism", or "graffiti", has occured, in which residents place deliberately obstructive and/or offensive content near to others with the intent of defacing the local view. Such proneness to vandalism has been leveraged on occasion as a low-level form of extortion, destroying the quality of the local view in an attempt to force neighbors to buy the offending parcel of land at greatly overpriced value.

Budgeting of server resources

The amount of land a resident owns in a region determines how many objects they may place in the region and within what area they may be placed. However, other resources of the region server, such as CPU time and network bandwidth, are not budgeted in this way, creating problematic situations. A typical example is that a person may buy a large area of land in a particular region and build an area, and then have someone else buy a smaller area in the same region and use it to build a nightclub or other popular business. The popular area consumes all the region servers' CPU time and network connections, leading to the large landowner suffering greatly reduced performance on their land or even being unable to access it at all because all available connections to the region are taken up by patrons of the club.

Land cost

SL real estate is seen by some as very expensive and very limited in terms of primitive count and parcel size, considering the in-world (and real-world) cost associated with land ownership. For example, an SL "small island" simulator (sim) is 65,536m, can support 100 users at a time , and costs $1250 to setup (mainly to cover the cost of the hardware the simulator exists on, up to 4 simulators can be run on the same server ) + $195/month to maintain.

Land hosting restrictions

A common criticism of the Second Life land system is that it is a closed network . Currently land/simulators are restricted so that the only way to have land in Second Life is to rent and buy server space/land from Linden Labs. Many users wish for Linden Labs to open up the "grid" and allow privately owned servers to run the simulator programs, and be accessible from the grid. Due to the way the Second Life world is currently designed, with a central secure asset server controlling all of the objects in Second Life, and the way the simulators and the asset server interact, hosting your own simulator is impossible unless a major redesign of the "grid" is implemented.

Content

Pornography

This article contains weasel words: vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. Such statements should be clarified or removed.

Second Life regions are rated either "PG" or "Mature". Numerous areas are designated as sex areas providing special avatar anaimations between avatars, whether they be human in form, furries, or other animals. There have been complaints that sims (areas) marked in SL as "mature" (permitting mature content such as swearing, nudity, etc) are overwhelmed with sex-based "jobs" and entertainment to a greater degree than other "free-form" MMORPGs, and that new users can find themselves encouraged into escorting .

Some Residents promote sexual activity with characters having the appearence of minors, as well as forms of bestiality. Some residents also offer animal genitalia for sale.

Gambling

Gambling is allowed in both PG and Mature regions. The exception of which is the Teen Grid, where all mature content is disallowed, including gambling. Gambling is most commonly conducted using scripted gambling machines created by residents. There is no central authority verifying the workings of these gambling machines, so it is entirely possible for these machines to "cheat", never allowing a user to win, or to include "backdoors", allowing the programmer of the machine to be certain to "win" money from the host.

Non-Commercial Content

Much of the content on Second Life is focused on making money, such as shops, malls, and casinos. Originally, Second Life implemented systems of dwell and developer incentives whereby those areas not actually focused on taking money from customers - such as artworks, vistas, libraries, clubs and other meeting places, and similar - could be rewarded with Linden Dollars newly minted by the system in proportion to the number of people present in the area and the length of time they stayed, and (in the case of the most popular 10% areas), with cash prizes paid by Linden Lab. This money could then be put towards paying the tier fee in order for the area to continue to be hosted on Second Life. However, the reliance on an automated system resulted in exploits being discovered and abused, and the minting of new Linden Dollars created hyperinflation, thus requiring both of these systems to be removed. This has left Second Life in a situation where the builders of such artworks or social areas are left bearing the entire hosting cost themselves while commercial areas are able to recoup them; this has lead to a growth and increase in the number of commercial areas, and a reduction in the size and number of noncommercial areas. Many residents have expressed concern about the consequent focus shift in the world.

Other

Balance between users' ability to edit the world and their ability to damage or disrupt it

Second Life has been attacked several times by groups of Residents abusing the creation tools to create objects that harass other users or damage the system. This includes grey goo objects which infinitely reproduce, eventually overwhelming the servers; orbiters which throw an avatar so far upwards they cannot get back down in a reasonable timeframe without teleporting; cages which surround avatars, preventing them from moving, and similar. Although combat between users is sanctioned in certain areas of the world, these objects have been used to cause disruption in all areas; attacks on the grid itself, such as grey goo, are of course strictly forbidden anywhere on the grid.

Favoritism

The Second Life resident Prokofy Neva achieved significant notoriety on the grid with his theory that a particular group of residents received preferential treatment from Linden Lab. The group in question were supposedly composed of early adopters who had created impressive objects or areas and gained the attention of Linden staff, and gained benefits through contact with these staff - in particular, placement in the publicity used to advertise Second Life to the real world. This position, he argued, then further resulted in residents tending to preferentially associate with these people, because of their celebrity status and the potential favours they could provide. Although it was not essentially unreasonable that users achieving good things should be rewarded in this way, Prokofy argued that granting these great rewards to early adopters would leave no rewards left for future adopters; and that a situation where a society went straight from lacking the technical foundations to support certain social interactions, directly to having the "leaders" of the interacting groups established as those who created those technical foundations, left no openings for users specialising in social or leadership skills and would thus lead to the formation of dysfunctional groups. Prokofy coined the term Feted Inner Core, or FIC, to refer to the "favoured" users.

The FIC theory caused a serious split in the Second Life community at the time, being supported by some but widely derided by others, and became the cause of much emotive discussion on the Second Life Forums. The current Second Life community now uses the term FIC as a satirical term for an imaginary conspiracy that supposedly controls the world, but instances of favouritism (such as the InfoNet example above) have arisen on occasion. It has also been alleged by some residents that the FIC theory itself damaged Second Life by making Linden Labs afraid of supporting residents creating good content for fear of claims of FICdom.

In addition, users who own large amounts of land (and thus pay larger subscriptions) are generally seen to have greater influence on Linden Lab due to the financial loss that would be incurred by removing them. With the growth of the Second Life world, the financial loss is lowered, due to more Residents contributing.

Linden Lab lawsuit

Linden Lab was sued on May 2, 2005 by attorney Marc Bragg , claiming Linden Lab defrauded him of $8,000 worth of virtual property. Bragg accessed the auction pages from which regions of land are sold and, by directly entering region IDs into the auction system URL using the Linden provided indices, he was able to bid on regions thus buying one region for around US$300. After only one region was sold to him in this way, Linden Labs reclaimed all the regions and permanently banned Bragg's account from the entire grid; the Complaint recently filed attaches as exhibits, the list of land previously owned, and the account statement showing it removed. The Complaint with exhibits is avaiable here. Bragg claimed that this constituted illegally depriving him of the products for which he had paid. A new lawsuit has been filed in Pennsylvania (despite the Second Life TOS stating all disputes or claims must be finally settled by binding arbitration in San Francisco SL TOS Section 6.2) after Bragg withdrew the above action.

Mac version is just a port of the PC version

The Mac version is just a conversion of the PC version, and thus delivers inferior results because it is not tailored to the platform it is running on. Some people have created petitions, but none are big enough to make Linden Labs make a Mac version to take full use of the resources. As of software version 1.10.0, all Macintosh clients are Universal Binaries; owners of Intel-based Macintosh systems have reported that the Mac client and the Windows client running under Boot Camp run about equally well; however, performance on PowerPC systems is still disappointing to some residents .

Customer Security

On September 8, 2006, Linden Lab released a news bulletin that revealed their Second Life database had been compromised and customer information, including encrypted passwords and users' real names, had likely been accessed . However it was later revealed that the hacker had in fact been focused on trying to cheat the in-world money system and their access to personal information was believed incidental, although a full alert was still raised for safety's sake.

Businesses and Organizations in Second Life

This section regards real businesses and organizations that have operated in Second Life, either having existed prior to Second Life, founded specifically for Second Life, or originated from the Content Creation market within Second Life

For information on Residents who achieved notoriety through Second Life, see Resident (Second Life)

Originating from Second Life

Aimee Weber

Owner and creator of the wide variety of content in Second Life, including the *PREEN* clothing line, the Midnight City island , a virtual preview of the New Globe Theature , and the American Apparel store in Second Life

Anshe Chung Studios

A virtual real estate business founded by Ailin Graef and her husband in Second Life. It has now evolved into a real company that is said to employ more than 20 people.

The Electric Sheep Company

A design, building and scripting firm that creates content for three-dimensional online worlds. Originally began in Second Life, they have also done work on the Virtual Laguna Beach project for There.com

Operated inside Second Life

0-9

• 20th Century Fox held a premiere for X-Men: The Last Stand in Second Life.

A-F

• Adidas Reebok will be creating a permanent presence in Second Life with assistance from Rivers Run Red
• American Apparel opened a branch inside the game selling digital renderings of clothings modeled after real-life merchandise. .
• American Cancer Society has held a version of its Relay For Life national fundraising event inside the game.
• BBC Radio recreated the 2006 One Big Weekend event on a 64 acre virtual island in Second Life
• Creative Commons is building a community in Second Life around Creative Commons licenses and standards through events and projects in the virtual world ]
• Disney employed Second Life Resident Fizik Baskerville (and others in his team) to create content based on production designer's specs for the films The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 & 3 and The Chronicles of Narnia
• Forward Together, the PAC headed by former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, is integrating Second Life into its campaign strategy

G-L

• IBM recently met in Second Life to discuss the effects of MMOGs on business.
• Lichtenstein Creative Media, 16-year old Peabody Award-winning documentary and public radio/TV production company, which became the first broadcast entity to have a permanent presence in Second Life, and the first to produce a live, virtual 3-D broadcast emanating from Second Life. LCM open a sim (a single 16-acre region in Second Life), in July 2006, that includes a broadcast center, offices, recording studios, listening and screening rooms and auditorium. They have produced live broadcasts from Second Life featuring host, John Hockenberry, with singer/songwriter Suzanne Vega, author Kurt Vonnegut, MIT Media Lab's John Maeda, and futurist Howard Rheingold, for three episodes on "Virtual Communities" airing as part of LCM's national, weekly public radio series, The Infinite Mind. The coverage of the programs was extensive. LCM says regular broadcasts for The Infinite Mind are planned.
• Leo Burnett Worldwide has established a creative hub in Second Life for globally dispersed staff to interact within .

M-R

• MLB.com broadcast the Home Run Derby and a Red Sox-Yankees game into SL, with the help of the Electric Sheep Company.
• MTV held a fashion show which was later broadcasted on G-Hole, a show on MTV's IPTV channel, Overdrive
• The New Media Consortium, led by CEO Dr. Laurence F. Johnson, built a virtual campus in the spring of 2006 that includes a library, museum, planetarium, auditorium, classrooms, and a welcome center. In the fall of 2006, the communtiy affilitated with the campus had grown to nearly 1000 educators, and the NMC Campus expanded from 1 sim to 7. Plans included a machinma school and a life sciences center. The NMC has hosted a great many events on the virtual campus including IBM's Global Innovation jam on September 12, 2006; Howard Rheingold, October 22, 2006; an in-world artists event on August 13, 2006 ; along with a long list of educational events and activities. A short film about the effort was produced entirely in Second Life.

S-Z

• Starwood Hotels in conjunction with The Electric Sheep Company and marketing firm Electric Artists is premiering their new hotel brand, aloft, in Second Life via a virtual construction of the hotel before the actual hotels are built. The building process was documented on a corresponding website, virtualaloft.com.
• Toyota (via Millions of Us) have offered a virtual replica of the Scion xB
• TELUS Mobility (TELUS) is the first Canadian company to have opened a Second Life retail outlet offering replica mobile phones with in-world specific features. In the near future the store may be offering its real lineup of mobile phones with a twist, to Canadian avatars.
• The World Transhumanist Association is presently the premier international organisation for the advancement of transhumanist ideas, causes, and goals. After using Second Life to recruit and organise a transhumanist following within the virtual world, WTA established a large island and conference centre called "Uvvy Island" to disseminate transhumanist ideas and provide unrestricted access to useful materials (including, among other things, videos and webcasts from WTA) to interested but geographically unrelated parties. Uvvy Island is organised like a regional Chapter, and even holds Chapter status within the WTA, holding weekly meetings, talks, and debates on various subjects.

Second Life as the Metaverse

Second Life is one of several virtual worlds that have been inspired by the science fiction novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and the Cyberpunk literary movement . The stated goal of Linden Lab is to create a world like the metaverse described in the novel Snow Crash, a user-defined world of general use in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate. Despite its prominence, it has notable competitors, among them Active Worlds, considered by many to be the founding company of the 3D internet concept in 1997, There and newcomers such as Entropia Universe and the Dotsoul Cyberpark, which is rapidly gaining recognition around the cybersphere as a metaverse aspirant with an emphasis on noncommercial culture.

External websites such as SL Census allow Residents to locate each other from outside of the virtual world, and SLURL allows external links through the Second Life World Map to locations in-world.

Trivia

• When objects are created (or instantiated) in-world and then transferred to the user's computer, they are said to "rez"--a reference to the Disney movie Tron. This also appears in the environment's internal scripting language, where the command to create an object is llRezObject().
• Linden Lab itself is named after Linden Street, the street where the company's first office was opened. Many of the simulators of SL are named after streets or alleys around the San Francisco area; the very first sim of the world to be set up was (and still is) named Da Boom, a combined reference to DeBoom Alley in San Francisco and to the Big Bang.

More trivia can be found at Second Life History Wiki

Competitors

• Active Worlds
• Croquet project
• Dotsoul
• Entropia Universe
• OLIVE Platform
• RedLightCenter
• There
• Virtual Object System
• Habbo Hotel

Screenshots

More photos taken within Second Life can be found on Flickr and Snapzilla. Photos from the Teen grid can also be found on Snapzilla.

• Avatar customization in Second Life; over 200 settings to tweak Avatar customization in Second Life; over 200 settings to tweak
• Building/modifying an object in Second Life with the in-world 3D modeling tools Building/modifying an object in Second Life with the in-world 3D modeling tools
• An odd Second Life man with a duck on his head An odd Second Life man with a duck on his head

• Romance in Second Life. Romance in Second Life.
• Suzanne Vega's virtual performance in Second Life for public radio's The Infinite Mind. Suzanne Vega's virtual performance in Second Life for public radio's The Infinite Mind.
• Kurt Vonnegut's SL avatar created for his interview by host John Hockenberry for public radio's The Infinite Mind. Kurt Vonnegut's SL avatar created for his interview by host John Hockenberry for public radio's The Infinite Mind.

External links

• Second Life: official website
• Teen Second Life
• Current system requirements
• Linden Lab: developer's official website
• Official Linden Blog

Media

• Second Life Media page
• Template:Google video
• Dr. James Purbrick and Cory Ondrejka on User Creation and Scripting in Second Life at Lang.NET Symposium 2006

News coverage

• The Infinite Mind
• Living a Second Life: The Economist Special report on Second Life (September 28th 2006)
• Does your life suck?: Boston Phoenix SL culture cover story on Second Life (July 14, 2006)
• In Second Life, the world is virtual. But the emotions are real: Houston Chronicle story on Second Life
• Money matters in cybercash game: BBC News article on Wells Fargo's activities in Second Life (dated Thursday, 15 September 2005)
• BBC starts to rock online world: BBC News article on BBC Radio 1's presence in Second Life for Radio One's Big Weekend 2006
• My Virtual Life: Business Week cover story on Second Life (May, 2006)
• Second Life released for Linux NewsForge article on Second Life Client Application for Linux
• Second Life Rocks (Literally) Wired News article on live music in Second Life
• "You can have a Second Life on the Net" by Carly Weeks, Canwest News Service (Canada). Interview with Alex Strong, a 23-year-old Ottawa resident who sells property and supplements his income using Second Life.

1. http://www.nmc.org/sl/2006/09/28/jam/
2. http://www.nmc.org/sl/
3. http://www.nmc.org/sl/2006/08/13/on-the-green/
4. http://www.nmc.org/sl/

• 2003 computer and video games
• Massively multiplayer online games
• Virtual reality communities
• Windows games
• Mac OS X games
• Linux games
• Second Life