2009's November Surprise?

Linden Lab will announce that they have listened to our complaints

Oh hell. I should have thought of this earlier.

LL will announce the introduction of the new "Linden Preferred™" label for select providers. Doing a search for land will automatically teleport you to the "Linden Preferred™" property. Similar with other key words like 'men’s clothes' or 'shoes' will tp the user to the "Linden Preferred™" store. Once there, the remainder of the locations load in the search window as usual.

I was struck by how although Burning Man has grown a lot over time, it's culture and appearance remains fairly constant. When I was there in '99 there were about 20,000 people, and now there are about 50,000. There are certainly changes, and there are both those who yearn for earlier days and those who are excited to see the evolution of it. This makes me think about Second Life as well. Presently, Second Life still isn't very accessible - most people still don't have the time to get over the steep learning curve and get to the amazing stuff inside. Similarly, the total number of people willing to drive 3 hours from Reno into the middle of a barren desert carrying a week's worth of drinking water and food is limited. I suspect that Burning Man won't grow much more, and frankly as a 'burner' (resident) that's fine with me. I like it just the way it is, and although I know it's selfish, I'd rather just have it stay the same. No more people.

But I think Second Life is different than Burning Man. To reach it's potential, it has to grow, probably more than 100 times larger than it is today. If all the people working on Second Life are right - if virtual reality really is the future of the internet and a big part of our collective human future, it's gotta get a lot bigger. Like I said recently at the SLCC conference, we should try and realize that we are working together on a small village that in a few years will be a gigantic metropolis. Everything will change, and needs to. Try not to cling too tightly to what we have now. The design, the UI, the orientation experience, the tools - all these need to change, a LOT, for Second Life to become accessible to hundreds of millions. Those changes are sometimes going to be disruptive and painful. Coming back from the desert heightened that feeling of empathy - in many ways I don't want Second Life to change either. It is magical, and it is cool to feel like you are one of the brave and visionary few who came early. But a bigger part of my heart wants to see it reach everyone, and so we must evolve. Onward!

When I say "equivalent of the Burning Man" above, I don't mean Burning Life.
I mean the *spirit* of *Burning Man*

Will never happen, where in SL are we gonna find a virgin to sacrifice to make the prims grow next season?

Will never happen, where in SL are we gonna find a virgin to sacrifice to make the prims grow next season?

Facebook buys Linden Lab.

The invasion of the MyFaceSpaceBookers.

Gemstone III was ruined when GEnie made a deal to let the AOLers flood in, increasing the user-base five-fold but making it no longer a fun place to stay and play, as it turned into an AOL chatroom.

Worlds Ultimate 3D was cool, until they partnered with the teen magazines, putting in free CDs and getting a ton of new people- Hanson tweener fans who certainly exploded the userbase but turned it into a place to gush about which Hanson one wanted to marry.

Your prediction of a deal with Facebook to increase the resident base would fit the pattern. Yes bringing in a lot more people, but ruining SL by turning it into a clunky version of Facebook. Fits the pattern exactly. I think you guessed it right.

only the top 10 people\groups\parcels by tier paid will be displayed for any search.

I've seen enough vague but scary hints in office hours and blogs to think it's going to be something that will affect the land market in a major way.

2007, we were actually *spared* the cost of voice in older regions (they were gonna jack all regions to 295/mo initially) ~ a good thing.

Facebook is very unlikely to do this. They haven't really done a lot of acquisitions (actually, I can hardly think of any) since they're still a very young company, and they have their hands full with their current opportunities: a platform for casual games, advertising (RL identity info + groups you belong to = very, very targeted advertising), and a PayPal killer (payments).

The OP would, of course, have more insight into what LL might have planned in that regard.

I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing!*


*srsly

Hmm. LL has been trying to more actively support large estate managers, and indeed those are the only people who can save LL from the immense support burden of directly managing small mainland parcels. If I were Jack Linden, I would want to get to the point where LL only directly sells whole sims, which would vastly decrease the support burden for mainland.

My God, you ARE a Linden alt!

More like John Banner.