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The Second Life viewer dev team has been working furiously away for some time now, and you may be forgiven for wondering where the fruits of that labor are. It has, after all, been some time since we've seen a new viewer other than emergency security fixes.

There are lots of little things in this viewer, mostly bug-fixes. What is particularly peculiar is that whispering seems to be back. Whisper was a short-range chat option that was discarded from the Second Life viewer back in 2005 due to it being confusing both conceptually and in the user-interface. Whispering has a 10 metre range and while it has been a deprecated script function for years is still available to scripted objects.

One of the good things about Google is that they try stuff. They can afford to try out projects, and don't stick with what isn't working. Well, it appears that their Lively virtual environment chat-rooms haven't worked out. Google will be shuttering the Lively service on 31 December 2008, less than six months after launching.

Lively's Web-site -- launched to the public on July 9 this year -- will remain up, and the images of the rooms preserved, but the rooms themselves will no longer be active. This seems to also end Google's plans to leverage Lively as a games-platform. It isn't clear at this point what it means for Google's partner, X-Ray Kid Studios who has been working on Lively for the last two years, and was increasingly positioned as Google's games division.

October metrics for Linden Lab's virtual environment, Second Life are not yet formally available, but Lab CFO John Zdanowski wound up giving out a link to the information in advance, so we have the figures to work with. September was not a good month by these metrics, and we were interested to see how October panned out.

Your key takeaways for October are a continuing plunge in premium accounts, and a reduction in overall economic activity. User hours, however were up. A more detailed summary follows after the jump.

The unprecedented decline of Second Life land area appears to be accelerating according to data from virtual world operator, Linden Lab. The net loss of simulators which totalled nearly 9,000 acres as of midnight on 10 November, has escalated to a net loss of 12,874 acres (52.1 million square metres, or 795 simulators) by midnight of 16 November. At present this represents an accelerating decline, with no sign of it bottoming out.

While a number of users have requested a consolidation of four Openspaces simulators into a single ordinary simulator (which would represent an overall net loss of three simulators per consolidation) there is no data available to suggest that any of the requested consolidations have yet been processed. Linden Lab was not able to confirm for us that any such consolidations have yet taken place, so it is unlikely that they are a factor in this data. The net loss currently represents more than 6% of the total Openspaces simulators as at the time of the new pricing/product announcements.

The torrent of new users coming into Second Life is slowing, with today's signup rates now merely double the typical rates, and expected to close in the vicinity of 22,000 new signups for the day. This is all in the wake of the widespread run of a reprinted and regurgitated piece about the divorce of a UK couple.

The original piece has run in hundreds of print and online outlets since the story broke last week. Even tiny local tabloids in small rural towns with little or no Internet access have pushed the story, and by and large readers responded with enthusiasm.

In Scotland On Sunday, Teresa Hunter writes, "Last week's story about the divorce of a couple who met on Second Life must have been the kiss of death for the online virtual world."

Mythic dev Mark Jacobs writes that the combat and careers patches for Warhammer Online will not be appearing in patch 1.0.5 as previously planned and are instead being rescheduled for patch 1.0.6. "Our plan was that no patch would make it through the [Public Test Servers] until we were sure that it was tested thoroughly and properly." writes Jacobs, "It was evident throughout the testing process that some of the changes needed to be reconsidered and some changed outright."

Patch 1.0.5 is going to deploy to live servers tomorrow (Tuesday, 18 November), with fixes/improvements to the Realm War system, and the "Heavy Metal" Live Event that sets the stage for the Knight of the Blazing Sun and Blackguard.

The Imprudence project now has its first release candidate viewer for Second Life available, and far sooner than we expected. It's impressive work for a first release candidate as well. We've not had such a fast and smooth viewer experience since Nicholaz "The Mad Patcher" Beresford's series of Second Life viewers. Indeed, many of Beresford's patches are also a part of the Imprudence project.

Imprudence necessarily replaces proprietary fonts with Liberation Sans and Bitstream Vera Mono, which look a little peculiar the first couple of times out, but score high on improved readability. There's no audio either, yet, as the proprietary FMOD audio system has yet to be replaced with OpenAL, but that is coming soon, we understand. As for the change from Kakadu/KDU to OpenJPEG -- this is supposed to be fractionally slower, but honestly, the whole experience was so smooth we never noticed.

An old saying goes "There's no such thing as bad press, so long as they spell your name right" which is normally attributed to P.T.Barnum, but there are a few quotes attributed to Barnum that weren't his, so we'll take that with a grain of salt. Right now, it seems more proper to say "There's no such thing as bad press, so long as there's a whiff of salaciousness about it."

The mainstream media's spent the last few days spreading around a story about a UK couple who are getting a divorce because the husband apparently won't stop fooling around online. Maybe she was taking it too seriously. Maybe he wasn't taking it seriously enough. Either way, it is serious enough now.

Now, much of the actual reporting about the couple, their situation, and Second Life (their most recent haunt) is pretty much utter tripe. Badly researched, poorly informed twaddle, really. But that doesn't matter, because it is causing a bit of a veritable torrent of new signups to Linden Lab's virtual world.

Much has been made of a statement recently by Linden Lab's new CEO, Mark Kingdon, that 'Premium subscriptions are immaterial in our overall business.' You see, in a sense that's pretty much spot-on. Unless a premium account owns more than 512 square metres of the Linden Estate (colloquially known as the Second Life Mainland), that account is either only very small revenue for the Lab, or actually represents an ongoing cost to them.

Linden Lab's CFO, John Zdanowski said, 'The revenue we generate from premium subscriptions is largely offset by the stipends we pay out to these account holders, so this decline doesn't have a material impact on our business.'

Either you're on an older premium account with a 500 Linden Dollar per week stipend grandfathered in, or you're on a newer premium account with 300/week. There's also a choice of plans, ranging from monthly to annual. Let's take a look at the relative values.

It's the 14th of November, and you all know what that means, right? It means that for those of you battling in Funcom's Age of Conan: Hyborean Adventures and sick of hearing about Blizzard's Wrath of the Lich King expansion, you've got something of your own to crow about: Ymir's Pass has hit the AoC live servers, and brings you the largest Hyborean content update to-date! Well, largest for adventuring space anyway. Ymir's Pass won't crowd your hard-drive too badly.

Heroes and scoundrels between levels 55 and 63 will find a lot waiting for them in Ymir's Pass, and the update contains a little something for everyone in the way of bug fixes and tweaks.

"This is an important update that opens up a lot of new gameplay content for players who have already passed the level fifty mark," says Game Director Craig Morrison. "In the months ahead we will introduce even more new content, and coming up soon are two exciting new high-level dungeons intended for players who have reached the maximum level. At this stage adding more content and keeping people entertained is very important to us!"

Wrath of the Lich King launched in numerous locations across the USA at midnight (albeit much of the rest of the world needed to wait until business hours). People queued outside Best Buy and Gamestop stores for hours beforehand (though 7-11 broke the street date and were selling copies a couple days early, we hear).

Several locations were particularly magical. A Best Buy in New York City and a Gamestop in San Francisco both sported particularly carnival atmospheres. Eurogamer says it was the UK's biggest launch and from the photos that's easy to believe. The French also had a blast with huge crowds and costumes.

All of the celebrations made one thing abundantly clear: We can all get in and enjoy our favorite MMOG with each-other -- even when we're not actually playing it. What the heck is gaming, if you can't celebrate it?

Linden Lab's CFO, John Zdanowski is better known to Second Life users as Zee Linden, though we think of him more as a Zeno, after Zeno of Elea, who baffled, annoyed and amused pre-Socratic thinkers with a set of seeming paradoxes, many of which revolved around the adjustment of frames of reference and measurement -- and, whatever their original intention -- amply display the follies that arise from doing so.

You can pick up all of that from yesterday's Q3 2008 world metrics from Zdanowski, entitled 'Q3 closed on a high note with an unusually strong September'. You might want to check September's published figures against that report, and see if you agree with 'unusually strong'.

Since the announcement of Openspaces 3.0 product pricing for Second Life (and the subsequent update to a reduced specification Openspaces 4.0 product), Linden Lab has seen its virtual world shrink for the first time on record with a net loss of 24.05 million square metres (a little less than 6,000 acres).

That's a net loss, so however many new simulators have been brought online since the beginning of the month, those gains have been canceled out by customers dumping land, and an additional 24 million square metres have been lost. During its Q2 2008 report, Linden Lab identified the (now deprecated) Openspaces 2.0 product as a primary growth driver.

It isn't presently clear how long this downward trend will last. So far, those net losses amount to just 2.8% of the total Openspaces 2.0 product that are actually out there on the Second Life grid. Many owners, however, have said that they intend to hang on to their void simulators for as long as possible, and dump them just before the jump to Openspaces 4.0 (or Homesteads 1.0) becomes mandatory. It remains to be seen if the Lab can shake off the chill and push those figures up in the latter half of the month.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

You could be forgiven for having forgotten about the Linden Prize already, given that it's been four months since it was announced by Mitch Kapor. Nevertheless, we weren't entirely surprised to see Linden Lab reannounce it, this time with some actual details, terms and conditions.

The fundamentals of the prize seem to remain unchanged. It is US$10,000 worth of Linden Dollars for (as Kapor put it) 'superlative achievement exemplifying the mission "elevating the human condition" through using Second Life.'

The terms and conditions now make eligibility somewhat more precise.

Outcomes for all

"Lower barriers to entry should result in a larger, more active and diverse user base"

The Lab is confident that this project will provide beneficial outcomes for both current users and potential users of Second Life, particularly with many of the flow-on benefits that improved user-retention might bring, 'Lower barriers to entry should result in a larger, more active and diverse user base, which has social and economic benefits for the entire Resident community. We anticipate this project will benefit many different Resident communities, making it easier to bring friends and event participants in-world, expanding the Second Life economy, and generally making in-world exploration and creative efforts easier for all.'

That brings us squarely onto the issue of new users, Second Life's rather low retention rate, and the difficulties of finding relevant and interesting content. 'We want to streamline new users' introduction to Second Life and make their initial in-world experiences intuitive, compelling, and delightful,' Ben told us.

'We'll do this by providing better up-front education and context-setting about what users can expect in Second Life, simplifying the Viewer interface, and enabling users to quickly find and connect with content and communities most meaningful to their unique interests and desires.'

Collaboration with Big Spaceship

Big Spaceship does quality work, there's no doubt about it. Certainly their showcase Web-sites are a bit heavy on the Flash and Javascript, but that doesn't represent the whole body of their work. Working through their back-catalogue Big Spaceship is obviously adept at cleaving to a theme, and staying focused.

"We reached out to Big Spaceship based on recommendations from one of their larger clients"

We did wonder, though, if the move of Matthew Rosenberg from Organic (Mark Kingdon's old stomping grounds) to Big Spaceship had an impact on the decision to join forces with the media agency. Ben told us no, 'As it happens, this was coincidental. Big Spaceship competed against several other design agencies in a rigorous selection process and they were chosen on the merits of their proposal.'

So, how exactly did Big Spaceship wind up on the Lab's radar?

'We reached out to Big Spaceship based on recommendations from one of their larger clients,' Ben informed us, 'Big Spaceship presented a unique blend of capabilities (user experience strategy, interface and visual design, web development) and experience, having designed numerous online experiences that are engaging and approachable. We were highly impressed with Big Spaceship's user-centered approach to analyzing and designing solutions for the Second Life user experience.'

Obviously a cursory inspection of Big Spaceship's work doesn't seem to commend them as an ideal fit, but then, much of their visible portfolio is Web-centric. There's more under that shiny surface than meets the eye, however, and they do have some first-hand knowledge and expertise. 'Many members of the Big Spaceship design team are long-time Second Life Residents, some having been in-world since 2003. The team also has deep expertise in online communities and social computing.'

'This project is being handled through Big Spaceship's strategic practice, which is platform- and technology-agnostic – their focus is on determining the best possible experience, then figuring out how to implement it.'

Working together

Linden Lab has run usability-testing and focus-groups. Some represents feedback from the participants of the old SL-Views program, while more recently the Lab has undertaken a schedule of focused usability evaluations at their San Francisco headquarters. We asked how that material fit together with the work that Big Spaceship was undertaking. 'Linden Lab and Big Spaceship have been collaborating closely throughout the project. We've provided the Big Spaceship team with a wealth of existing research, including the output of recent usability tests and focus groups. So they're not starting from scratch, nor are they working in a vacuum. We're also putting a plan in place to gather and respond to feedback from the Resident community throughout the course of the project.'

"The teams are effectively functioning as extensions of each other"

While in-world communications between the Lab and Big Spaceship are not left out, it is obvious to most that the platform itself does not yet lend itself to the sort of ad-hoc creativity of being able to sketch diagrams and scrawl all over white-boards, so there's a certain amount of physical travel between the offices of the two groups as well. How close is close collaboration, exactly?

'The teams are effectively functioning as extensions of each other. Big Spaceship is a great "cultural fit" with Linden Lab, both in our philosophical desire to create extraordinary experiences, and in our fun, energetic working style.'

In the past, our project implementation stopwatch (with which we time the Lab's progress from conception to release of individual projects) generally seems to run to around 14 months. Ben seems confident that this project will be well resourced and move along quite smartly, even though it is a bit early to say yet, 'The project is in a very preliminary phase, and implementation plans aren't yet finalized, though implementation will likely be handled through a combination of internal and external development resources working in close partnership.'

All in all, we're very interested to see what comes out of all of this energy and collaboration. We've been disappointed before, of course, but perhaps a fresh perspective will indeed do the trick. Big Spaceship has a record of success in their ventures, and great success for the majority.

All things considered, we're cautiously optimistic about the possible outcomes. While completion might be a year or so away, we're looking forward to Linden Lab keeping the users involved and informed about the ongoing progress of the UX project.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.