Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
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Category: Linden Lab News & Analysis
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This recent video from gaming YouTuber Micky D is hilariously cringey but necessary viewing, shared by reader Lyndka Cochrane as a response to Second Life's new glitzy marketing video. As Lynkda comments, "There's still an 'image' problem around what Second Life is and how to play it or live it", going on to observe:
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Linden Lab – Second Life “Children of Creation” from Levitate Last year Linden Lab started production on the very first big budget online commercial for Second Life, but far as I know, it hasn’t yet officially debuted — though you can see glimpses of it in Second Life’s new-ish homepage (to the confusion of many).…
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This new help wanted ad from Linden Lab looks like the exact same one I mentioned last March, with one significant difference: In this VP Engineering role, you will own the technical and architectural roadmap of Second Life and advocate for robust and lasting strategy as a part of the Second Life Leadership team. You’ll…
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Reader Soda Sullivan posted this comment last week as a tribute to the late Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg: What a guy. I do not think it is an overstatement to say that Altberg was Linden Lab's best CEO and Second Life's best "leader' since its creator. As I read this news about his ongoing…
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With the Second Life community and the wider industry still processing the passing of Ebbe Altberg, I went back to read my first interview with him in 2014, shortly after he became Linden Lab's CEO. It's particularly moving how he discovered the virtual world through his son: Though he is Linden Lab’s new CEO now,…
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Here's an announcement from Linden Lab that I've been dreading to write about for over two years: Ebbe Altberg started with Linden Lab as our CEO on February 5th, 2014. He took the helm of the company and immediately went to work on reinvigorating our spirit and culture. Ebbe brought a profound openness, and transparency…
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Remember Second Life's odd new homepage that debuted last month, inexplicably featuring a real life model depicting an elf? If you go to the homepage now without logging in, you'll see it's been updated with a minute+ video that still includes that RL model, but now, also her SL analog (above). The video also depicts…
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Either this is a belated April Fool's joke, or this is the new official homepage for Second Life. Which is an online virtual world with 3D graphics, but for some reason, now features not an avatar, but a real life model. Yes, really: The flying elf is from an upcoming promo that Linden Lab teased…
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Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg announced last weekend on Twitter that Second Life's world map is, after an outage that started last November, finally working. I'm fairly fascinated that it took so long to update this issue, and how it is (or isn't) related to Project Uplift, moving SL to the Amazon web cloud. ("Now…
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My post on Jim "Babbage" Purbrick's long-ignored C#-in-Second Life integration provoked many "Oh what could have been" responses, both here and across social media. (Especially poignant to read posts by other former Lindens, remembering this project fondly, if bittersweetly.) For example, this comment from reader Pulsar, who not only bemoans the loss of this C#…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 