Sand Castle Studios

Linden Lab has an extensive history of launching their marketing and advertising campaigns for Second Life to mixed reviews, and their most recent attempts have been no different.

Today Mitch Wagner said he thought that Second Life was inconvenient, has gone as far as it can go, and is the wrong platform. He prefers Facebook and Twitter. As much as I respect Mitch’s opinion, I disagree.

In addition to Linden Lab’s official viewer, users can access the virtual world of Second Life through a number of customized third party viewers. This has created much debate as to whether these third party viewers are safe.

Second Life users have long wanted a way to change their avatar name in a way that did not destroy the history and links associated with it. In attempt to solve this “identity crisis”, Linden Lab announced Display Names.

Recently, the PBS program, “Frontline,” featured a 90-minute documentary entitled “Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier” which examined what it means to live, work, socialize, in a digital world.

Starting on September 14, 2009 virtual items that are in violation of real world copyrights or that infringe on brand owners’ intellectual property will no longer be for sale on Second Life’s ecommerce site, XStreet SL.

Linden Lab Vice President of Customer Relations Cyn Linden has a very lengthy, but clear and concise post on the company’s official blog detailing their new “Content Management Roadmap” for Second Life content and its creators.

Cyn says that Linden Lab is “committed to empowering content creators to better manage and control their content.” She presented a multi-faceted plan help manage content on several levels.

Playboy’s Q1 2008 earnings conference call, Playboy Enterprises chairman and CEO Christie Hefner (the daughter of Hugh Hefner) discussed the company’s future plans and in doing so hinted that Playboy may be developing its own virtual world in the future.

It started when Linden Lab, under the pretext of introducing the new “Second Life® Brand Center,” announced their new trademark policy. In classic Linden fashion, their delivery was mismanaged and outraged the community. The policy was also not very clear. About a week later, Linden Lab offered a further explanation of the policy, but the explanation only reiterated what was already stated and did not further answer any additional concerns or questions. With no real response to their questions, the Second Life bloggers began to protest. SL blogger Gwyneth Llewelyn wrote a petition to Linden Labs and when it went unanswered the strike was organized.