Alas Second Life is too expensive in this day and age for widespread educational usage, that ship sailed with the global financial crisis.

The mesh filter or lack of is odd because when you list items on the marketplace, if you've met the mesh upload criteria you can tick boxes for 100% Mesh or partial mesh. Why there's no corresponding tick boxes for consumers is odd. As for whether this new initiative to help consumers find suitable clothing works, only time will tell, it's certainly a good idea but time will prove whether the executions hits the mark.

Philip has some extremely odd views on telephones, be they land lines or mobile. I'm not seeing this reluctance to use phones he sees.

The pre-auhorisation billing mess has not helped the launch for those of us watching from the outside. The lack of an auction house is an interesting idea but I really can't see it lasting, the problem with MMO's is that a lot of people like to do their own thing and don't want to be tied to guilds, even if it is just for trading and trade chat may become way too noisy. However it's early days there, it will be interesting to see how it evolves.

@Drax the UI issue is brought up too many times to dismiss it as a myth. Something about it clearly isn't intuitive enough. I'd argue the same point about Blender, which is a UI I've come to terms with but many people complain about it. That's not to say people won't pick it up, clearly as you point out, plenty of people of all ages manage to do so comfortably. Maybe there's a lack of instruction when people land as new participants. The new user experience has been oft criticsed too.

There is no myth about the hard to learn interface, it has been brought up many times and many of us may wonder why others find it so hard to learn, but too many people mention it for it not to be an issue. However as ZZBottomHL points out, there are other hard to learn interfaces around, I can handle Blender but I do see a lot of complaints about that interface too. There's only so much that can be done regarding the interface. Maybe the action bars from WoW could be implemented but some people would hate them too. Second Life is not cutting edge in terms of how it looks or performs but it is still ahead of the game in terms of allowing user generated content, commerce, collaboration in certain areas etc.

I'll wait for it to go free to play in 12 to 18 months, I'm a fan of Skyrim and wish I'd got into these games earlier but I decided to go back to World Of Warcraft instead of going to TESO, better the devil you know. From your description it sounds like they are maybe trying to be too clever with instancing, I've seen it in Wow too, you team up but you're in different instances, it's a nice concept but in some ways, it defeats the object of an MMO.

@Pussycat Catnap Yes it is a remote desktop session, people should bear that in mind.

Maybe it needs a monorail. I do think people are getting a bit ahead of themselves and overexcited, although it's good to dream .. maybe not of electric sheep though.

@Pussycat Catnap You create an account on the Onlive site, which requires a username password combination for their service. Once logged in, you then see the SL client as you would if it were opened on your machine, then you login to SL as you usually would. They don't need to link your SL account to your Onlive account.

@Pussycat Catnap Onlive just take your card details and your address etc. they don't ask for or need any of your Second Life details.

This can very definitely be seen as a challenge to Facebook. To a degree Facebook have tried to get into this game with Facebook comments. Oculus Rift will be used in places where High Fidelity's ID system plays a role, so in that regard, they are making a challenge but I don't think the challenge is aimed at the development of Oculus Rift.

@Slhamlet Instagram was already a product, it would be foolhardy to change logins too soon. However I have read that they are testing Facebook places with a view to replacing FourSquare intergration. Oculus Rift has a long way to go yet, Palmer Luckey won't be the person having the final say on this.

Palmer Luckey who said of concerns about data gathering by Facebook : "Nothing changes. Keep in mind that Mark Zuckerberg has publicly spoken against NSA surveillance." Really? There was much mirth when Zuck made those complaints. Palmer Luckey is in absolutely no position to make those guarantees, take anything he says with a huge pinch of salt. Whether Facebook can pull this off is another story, I believe they're right to branch out into new areas, as I believe Linden Lab were, but Facebook are one seriously tainted company.

I'm not quite seeing the angle here, what are people going to do with Occulus Rift and 2D Facebook? I mean a 3D Facebook makes no sense whatsoever. This is an odd move unless Facebook are going to branch out big time.

Well I'm in the camp that felt Linden Lab were doing exactly the right thing in releasing and investing in other products. That's absolutely the right thing to do for Linden Lab's future. When I heard about Dio, I thought it sounded rubbish. When I realised there was far more to it than met the eye, I enjoyed it. However time constraints meant I didn't get to play around with it enough, when I finally went back, it had changed into something else, which was then a lot less appealing to me. Versu remains a product with an absurd amount of potential and it does fit in with Linden Lab's creaivity angle, the idea with Versu was for people to be able to write their own stories with Versu. This is a product that should not be left sitting gathering dust. Linden Lab needed to move on from only having one title under their belt, it was long overdue. They have spent plenty of money on Second Life during this period of diversification.

The losses had slowed down quite significantly prior to the recent rise. The grid didn't grow at all this week in terms of private estates, the net change was 0 but the week prior to that saw net private estate growth of 42 regions. That was the largest week on week growth since 17th June 2012. It is much too early to read too much into this, in the heady days of June 2012 the grid grew for three weeks in a row and then saw a large loss that removed all that growth and then some. However the grid only grew once during the whole of 2013 and has now shown growth for 2 of the last 4 weeks, so something does seem to be changing. Between November and February World Of Warcraft attracted an additional 200,000 subscribers after months of losses too. No idea why that would happen either.

Just to clarify, I don't think the Versu and TOS issues are identical, to quote my first paragraph: "First of all there are some key differences between The Second Life TOS change and what has happened to Versu. The most glaringly obvious apparently being that Linden Lab are not asking Second Life content creators to give up their intellectual property rights and they are not asking for an exclusive license." Where the issues are similar is in the terms being binding. I do believe that Linden Lab have no intention of doing anything they please with people's content, but that should be reflected in the TOS because if LL have a change of heart those terms can be applied. On a wider issue, I'm glad to see this being discussed further, Versu has a lot of potential and interactive fiction is a growing market, if LL don't want to take the project further that's their choice but it seems a great shame to let the product sit on a dusty shelf. A royalties type deal may be in everyone's best interest, Linden Lab have invested money and Emily was a paid employee.

Yes this is an incredibly sad tale. Linden Lab didn't really promote Dio or Versu. Dio seemed to lose its way completely and went from being an interactive fiction and photo sharing site, to being just a photo sharing site with some bolts. Whereas LL have Flickr pic of the day for Second Life, they didn't have anything for Dio. Versu was full of promise, one of the comments on Emily's blog was from a former Linden who said of Versu: "The Versu underpinnings are genuinely revolutionary; my jaw dropped in the meeting where you explained how the engine works. " So much potential but it seems to have struggled to find a footing. Linden Lab do have course have the right to do what they want with the product, they paid for it and Emily has certainly been supportive of Linden Lab in public, pointing out they spent money on the project. However why they want to keep it on a dusty shelf when others were prepared to develop it further is a bit of a mystery, some have suggested that even though its dormant, it still has value as an asset in the valuation of the company. Whatever the reasons, it's a sorry state of affairs and also emphasises why the TOS issues should be rectified sooner rather than later. Linden Lab have the right to do what they want with creators content and whereas they would be foolhardy in the extreme to go down the roads some of the more vociferous have suggested, they absolutely could if they wanted to. This is why their intent needs to be reflected in binding words.

@Pathfinder "The entire game industry has come to the conclusion that the future belongs to freemium, free-to-play, and pay-once-play-forever." Well the entire gaming industry except Zenimax Online it seems who are launching Elder Scrolls Online with an upfront fee and subscription only model, they will need good luck with that after the initial rush. As for the 1990's, they address that in their blog post: "This variable-rate billing model seems very 1990’s, but is inescapable since so many MMO users spend large fractions of their lives connected, sometimes only in the background." I feel they are somewhat missing the point there but it's early days and they need more data to try and find the right model.

As a proof of concept it's absolutely brilliant. As a consumer model for a service as a whole, the pricing is way too high. If Onlive want to be able to deliver MMO's via this service, which I strongly suspect is where this is trying to head, then they have to lower their prices substantially otherwise it will remain a brilliant example of something that could have been a game changer.

The right move but it still has some issues, are they now going to inform the reporter a bug is fixed or will they still be left to the mercy of the release notes? The odd part about once its triaged it gets locked to the select few is also a tad disappointing. However the positives of the change far outweigh the negatives.

Ok let's try this again because my original comment is missing words and has words that I didn't intend to type in it! Not sure how I managed that. I'd say the difference between the old viewer install and the new one is less time and certainly less clicks than signing in to comment here via Twitter ;) My view on this is that if this is part of a larger project that will improve viewer performance then it's well worth it, but on its own I don't see the big fuss. As you point out, there are another 3-5 steps after install and the next big one is logging in and waiting for the world to rez, someone who doesn't have the patience for such a small client install as the SL viewer is hardly likely to be impressed about how long the world takes to appear.

I'd say the difference between the old viewer install and the new one is less time and certainly less clicks than signing in to comment here via Twitter ;) My view on this is that if this part of a larger project that will install viewer performance then it's well worth it, but on its own I don't see the big fuss. As you point out, there are another 3-5 steps after install and the next big one is logging in and waiting for the world to rez, someone who doesn't have the patience for such a small client install as the SL viewer is hardly likely to be impressed about how long the world takes to appear.

Well it's a bit clunky. There's no indication on the sign in page that other sign ins are available, the wordpress sign in claims I don't own my own user name, which surprised me as I can comment with my wordpress login at plenty of sites. Whenever this site has been eating my comments in the past, Impermium, whom I believe run Typepad's spam filter, have been able to assist me. I'm sure people will get used to it though.