Who and What has helped build SL to what it is?

Second Life's fourth birthday has just come and I'm left with a question. What events and what people have built SL into what it is today? What inspired it..and what changed impacted the culture the most?

Hehe a lot of us are still SL pups and can't really say with any assurance what has been a big change. For my part, I'd say the stuff that has influenced me has been the early builds, like Lauk's Nest, the Caves of Rua, the Gardens of Apollo, etc. It seems like commercialism, even in my short time, has reared its ugly head and pushed out some of the older builders... just one girl's opinion.

I remember reading about Second Life years ago, I can't be certain but this may have been in the Beta or Alpha days. I remember a booth at E3 in Los Angeles, though which E3 escapes me at the moment. There was a little house on a hill you could walk around in, and the guy they had there was pushing how you could make things for your house and sell them for other people's houses.

It looked nice enough, but it didn't really impress me. A 3D dollhouse? That's nice and all, but once you're done decorating it what are you going to do?

The SL grid has not changed too much since, it didn't terribly impress me then, and the technology is not too different now from a functional standpoint. It is what the users have done with Second Life that has impressed me, those early adopters that made it more than just a 3D doll house.

I think the future of Second Life has to be about connecting to the outside world. HTML on a prim, Text on a prim, better communication all around will allow people and businesses big and small to utilize Second Life to it's fullest capacity.

I think the principle of being as open as possible, as amenable to individual visions and creations as possible, is what has brought SL as far as this. I think that principle will take it as far as LL wants to go, and anything less will hobble it.

I think one of the most significant events was the decision by LL to allow content creators to retain IPR. This decision had far reaching effects.

I'm pretty sure I am a faithful lag contributer what with prims and scripts and just breathing and logging in I can't fail.

That decision, together with the switch to the tier fees model (which didn't exist in the original version of SL), triggered the entire commercialisation phenomenon we are seeing today.

I helped Darwin Appleby spread the hippo love

The residents made SL what it is the Lindens just seem to get in the way alot
The more they control SL the worse sl will become I think

What people have built SL... hm. Freethinkers, sex addicts, goreans, furries, escorts, strippers, artists and business people. What inspired it... human imagination, desires and fantasies, many of them about sex. Every novel that was ever written, every movie ever made, every sexual fetish ever developed by the human species. Greed and competition too.
I don't know what change had the most influence on SL, I haven't been around from the beginning. The first prim genital, which was likely built on day 2? The first poseball set with couple animations? The first furry avatar? Collars and particle chains? Dunno

Pretty sure the first prim genital was built as soon as a guy logged on.

Every update is the change that impacts the culture the most. Whatever gets fixed or broken determines who stays and who goes. We have lost a lot of talented content creators who got sick of their scripts getting mucked about with each update. We miss you Starax!

I helped build SL as have thousands of other residents. If not for me (or the others) SL would never have celebrated it's 4th birthday.

What event has impacted SL the most?

IMO, free, unverified accounts had the biggest noticable impact on the world. Linden Labs got caught with their pants down and did not anticipate the volume of growth and the results spread accross the grid like a plague because the technical and social implications of this 'invasion' of free accounts was not foreseen by LL and the fallout was very porely managed and LL is only just now recovering.