These answers are tepid indeed, very stock boilerplate easily findable on the official blog or in the one-liner staples routinely put out at Office Hours.

And here’s a rather misleading statement, “We’ve recently improved our community department who is able to deal with complaints of this nature”.

He says “of this nature,” which is a little sleight of hand that covers up the fact that complaints *exactly of this type* in fact are NOT dealt with. Bank fraud is NOT dealt with by LL, they resolutely keep hands off, they refuse to get in the middle of any resident-to-resident transaction of this nature, and they will not regulate banks. They will not accept for action any complaints of the type “I invested thousands of Lindens in this stock market or deposited in this bank and now the people have flown the coop.”

The will handle more straight-forward theft involving scripted objects that dupe people into agreeing to give their money to them or hacked accounts, in these more rare cases they apparently do return Lindens, but these big bank heist and Ponzi scheme allegations are things they stay away from. And maybe that’s a good thing. This is debatable.

The company mantra in the last half year has been that Linden Lab would open-source the server code “within a year”. Now that this date is looming to be some six months away, I guess the mantra has changed to saying “as soon as possible” and “because it’s complex”

When I think of a gaming environment of our planet, I look at the great views and landscape that is presented in a game such as Spiderman 3.
If this type of landscape could be used as a building block for a full mirror earth online gaming environment, then Second Life would unfortunately have to face the fact that it is now GAME OVER.

No, they are not. They are WORKING on just that for several years already.
Sony > Home
Microsoft > Earth

Imagine if either Microsoft or Sony created a gaming immersed online platform that visualized the full earth environment with the help and creativity of global gaming developers.
Imagine if everyone who entered this gaming platform was allowed to create their own Avatar to socialize and communicate with anyone they liked inside this platform.

Why would you want to Facebook or Twitter your friends ever again, when you could just all meet up as Avatars and go shopping or walking to places of relevance and interest – and possibly meet new and interesting people.
Plus Global Companies would never have to worry about online Sponsored Ads ever again, as they can build their own online shop fronts inside this earth platform exactly in the same places that their real earth ones stand.

What both Google and Microsoft fail to understand that whilst it is cool to visualize the earth, through their various Earth Platforms, their current representations for both of these platforms is not truly engaging for the important ‘gaming generation’ that were born in the early 80’s.
An online Earth Platform that was totally immersed inside a mirror earth game would not only capture the imagination of every global gamer, but it could also truly mark the dawn of Web 3.0, via this integration of both the gaming and web world’s.

There is a tremendous opportunity for Microsoft to truly do something exciting and innovative across their Xbox 360 online platform. Perhaps their true goal of reaching a target of 30% Ad Revenues over the next few years could be achieved within an online gaming Earth Platform.
Why search on Google when you could discover everything on Microsoft’s possible online gaming earth platform.

Sony is also in a tremendous position to possibly develop an online gaming earth platform. If they could look at ways of using the global gaming community to create an open source online gaming earth platform, they could then use their up and coming Home service for every Users internal online address to really immerse communities inside this space. Home could then become a sort of online ‘Pimp My Crib’.

I think that Second Life has been a truly innovative site that deserves all of the praise and popularity that the web community has given it.
But I truly believe that the most exciting future developments within the Second Life environment, could only be achieved by either Microsoft or Sony entering this arena – and rewriting the rule books.

Is anyone at Microsoft or Sony listening to me.

@ Wrestlevania: Gotta wonder if SL has another engine in the works in the BG, one that would help them scale. They’ve got to be re-writing so much code anyway that it would make a lot of sense.

The first would be great of course, the latter I am not so sure. I will just add another barrier to entry and SL has enough of them already (as StartupEarth might have experienced). Of course these are issues which need to be addressed (I just wonder if they are that different from issues arising on the WWW).

And there actually is a project for opening up the Second Life Grid which is open for everybody to participate. The goal is to create an open standard for connecting 3rd party hosted sims to Second Life and also creating your own grid.
This effort is now taking place in the scope of Second Life but of course this protocol might as well be suited to build other stuff on top (and have that compatibility integrated).

Part of that project is also to encourage developers to join it and to create their own (maybe open sourced) components for it. This ensures that the protocol is as interoperable as possible. It also means a lot of opportunity to implement your own ideas on performance, stability or features more easily.

I summarized the latest development recently on my blog:

http://taotakas...rlds-an-update/

Anyone interested in further thoughts from Chris could check here too:

http://www.sloz...terview-part-1/

From: Second Life Blog WindLight First Look Viewer update! Quote from the site – As a last minute treat before Thanksgiving (also known as Thursday and Friday to the rest of the world ), we’ve managed to get in an update to the newly released WindL…

The actual engine powering the whole experience is laughably bad and is in dire need of a drastic rewrite if Second Life hopes to remain prevalent. Otherwise, give it another 18 months an it’ll be a laughing stock.

Has anyone actually tried going outside? There’s ‘real life’ out there and the graphics are better.