Bart in SL

There've been some new developments in SL lately which are worth mentioning:

• IBM tested a transport of an avatar from the Second Life grid to their own grid, meaning it is now technically possible to teleport to an Opensim. Sounds quite good, but at the moment it's just moving an ruthed Avatar, since assets are not shared at all between those and are unlikely to be ever shared at all. Otherwise expect a revolt of content builders in Second Life, but we're getting closer to the Intergrid.
• Second Life is growing bigger and bigger. This is of course good for the company and stabilizes their economic model. There's been a shift from premium users to land sales. If you don't really want to own land on the mainland (and who does that really...) has no need to get a premium account at all! Seems also that in world economy is now recovering slowly of the gambling ban. Well, the prices for many stuff are quite high now, higher than they used to be in about one year for example, looking good in Second Life becomes more and more expensive...

And also something funny I've found in another blog: "Entering chat range: Prokofy Neva." Quite a funny chat transcript about how to call things in Second Life and more...

There's been a drastic change to the website of SL: you can see a new graphic and link to a site called "Second Life Grid". It seems that Lindenlabs doesn't want to rely any longer on land sales alone as main source of income and is now starting to market their grid more for certain 3rd parties, which is a good move to me.

It's giving some insights in what the grid can do, about the dimensions and so on and on. The website is clearly targeted on corporate viewers, no doubt about that, and telling about how others use it and how you can participate with it. There are the old target groups like Education and Non Profit and Solution Providers, but there's a new target group, Global Providers. To cite the site about them:

The Second Life Grid Global Provider program is designed to assist international online communities in creating their own presence on the Second Life Grid. This program has significant requirements, obligations, and program fees. It is only available to operators of existing online communities outside the United States.

So to make it short: who's the target group? Big communities like internet providers, for example, or perhaps big web communities outside the USA. Since it is not going to be cheap to be such a provider and you should have at least about two million accounts, this is surely not for everybody of us. But it also means that Lindenlab is finally opening up their grid to 3rd parties, for example there's already a company in Brazil as far as I know that did very much things for SL on their own like giving it away, translating it and so on. Now such a company can open up their own space in Second Life and localize it. I don't expect existing online games to use it, of course, since they got their own special needs.

This here is about communities, really big communities. So for example, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Tiscali area somewhere in SL or T-Online for example as Global Solution Providers. The benefit side makes the target group even more clear, stating for example this as benefit:

Official designation as a Second Life Global Provider, including program branding and press release support.

So this looks for me basically like that: Second Life should spread even more further, but Lindenlabs is unable to do that in all countries on their own. So they open up their grid for paying 3rd parties, who get certain rights but also the risk, and if those providers work good in their country, they expect to get even bigger user counts. If those providers are now big communities somewhere (like myspace.com, which is not eligable) or internet providers doesn't seem to count on that point.

So we all should wait and see who's going to be the first company to open up such a local experience.