In the past eighteen months, Second Life has expanded, growing from a small community of early adopters to a platform supporting millions of users. Linden Lab has created a world that inspires a deep level of passion in its users and provides unprecedented opportunities to share creatively, socially, and financially.

With explosive levels of growth often come unexpected problems. In keeping with your company’s policy and rich history of resident involvement, we the undersigned would like to take this opportunity to address some concerns that we feel have gone unanswered for too long.

There are some consistent, ongoing problems that are getting worse under heavy load, not better, and are not simply irritants but problems that are causing financial loss in some cases, which is unacceptable. Here is a brief list of the main concerns:

* Inventory loss – this is a devastating problem that is worsening. We have no ability to protect our own inventories through backups, and are trusting you to protect that data. This is the highest priority. Sensible inventory limits (on non-verified accounts only), combined with better management tools and ways to protect our inventory ourselves would help to mitigate the problem as well. Regardless, this cannot continue – we will not accept financial loss as a feature of Second Life. It is your responsibility as service provider to ensure our data is not lost, and you are failing us.

* Problems with Find and Friends List – we continue to see search outages on a far too regular basis. It is bad enough trying to get anywhere without being able to use search, but many users are also paying money for classified ads. Our friends lists just do not work reliably any longer, after years without an issue with them. If America Online/MSN/Yahoo can provide presence information for hundreds of millions of users, surely there is a way to make our friends lists work again.

* Grid stability and performance – teleports fail quite regularly, especially under heavy load. Attachments end up in places they did not start out in, and sim performance varies wildly. None of this makes for a very pleasant experience for users. Long promised improvement to physics and scripting would help dramatically to reduce these problems, but there are a lot of other scalability issues as well. It often feels like the grid is coming apart at the seams. The promised use of limiting logins of non-verified accounts during peak load has been severely lacking. This would be an effective interim solution to load issues, but Linden Lab seems unwilling to use it.

* Build tool problems – the importance of build tools that actually work as promised cannot be overstated enough – we rely on them to create content. Prim drift, disappearing prims, imprecise placement, problems with linking and other issues with the tools need to be addressed. Too much time is being spent trying to work around the problems.

* Transaction problems – inventory deliveries are failing with an alarming (and annoying) frequency, leaving merchants with the burden of replacing missing content and having to try to confirm the transaction in the first place. We trust that our L$ balances are accurate, but given recent problems, that is a cause for concern as well, and one we place our full trust in you to ensure its accuracy.

We remain fully supportive of Second Life and are more than willing to continue doing our part to help, but our confidence is steadily being eroded due to a general lack of communication and the apparent failure to successfully address the many issues detailed above. What we are asking for is that these problems are addressed immediately, ahead of new features, and that we are able to see tangible improvements. We accept that this will not happen overnight but it also cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely either.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

I’m in a back to beginner stage with bloody fingers and all but having a great time! The open chords are coming back to me after oh, ten years away or so I’d guess. I can’t wait to get to where I don’t suck and jam with some of the greats in SL’s live musician circles. Wish me luck !

http://www.oscarschmidt.com/product/og2ce.htm

It’s like My Space only not lame. You can develop a friends list and join musical taste inclined groups. The system also learns as you listen and develops listening stations according to your listening history. Very cool. It will also develop recommended event listings according to your tastes and gegraphical location as well. Friends can send track recommendations to you as well which may expose you to a genre you weren’t aware of being so cool.

Web page/blog resources are also available and very cool. Charts for your latest listening list as well as RSS/XML and text feeds. Check it out.

I was thorougly disgusted this year to have gone into a JC Penney store, roughly the week of Halloween. Much to my chagrin what did I find ? You guessed it, 3 million Christmas trees, 2 hundred garlands and a candy cane in a shoe tree. WTF is wrong with America anymore ? No, let me re-phrase. WTF is wrong with corporate America ? Phreakin Christmas decorations etc. before even the beggars’ night ? I seriously cannot fathom what has happened to the spirit of this time of year since I was a kid. (that was a long time ago don’t phreakin ask)

This being said, I offer you my evolution in avatar presented by images. God Jul Alla ! (Happy Holidays you Phreaks !)

His name is Nomasha Syaka and he has crafted some simply beautiful Guitars! The detail is amazing and the price is incredibly reasonable. At this moment they are not animated yet, but he is having custom animations created and offering free upgrades to his customers once they are done. Pics below.

This Saturday is a really big deal. Pixel Records and Phreak Radio are proud to present the Sarah Mac Band, live in concert to commemorate the release of their new EP, “Countdown to Silence.” As a way of saying thank you for all the support, residents of Second Life will be able to purchase the EP over a week before the general public. You don’t want to miss this event.

A lot of well know Second Life artists will perform at this event, which start at 3:00 PM Pacific with the Sarah Mac Band taking the stage at 6:00PM Pacific (9:00PM Eastern). Get there early to make sure you get a spot!
Muse Isle

www.muse-isle.com

http://pixelrecords.com/
www.phreak-radio.com
www.sarahmacband.com
www.secondlife.com