The quest for the ultimate “SL Killer” continues. I made a few comments on yet another “ultimate virtual world” on SLOG, but the reality is, there are more, and more, and more… and every week there is a new one popping up next door

As part of my curiousity — and to a degree my professional work as well — I tend to keep abreast of what Linden Lab’s “competition” is currently doing. Yes, I’ve put quotation marks around this word, deliberately so. You’ll soon understand why.

It’s hard to believe that Second Life has reached 4 million accounts, a third of which have logged in the past two months, and not believe that the rest of the world is silently ignoring Linden Lab, and simply waiting for something for making an appearance. The strong-willed naysayers of Second Life both try to push their arguments claiming that all those numbers are fake and that “social games” without goals nor purposes have no real long-term success — it’s all hype.

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There was quite a lot of waiting on Gravatar 2.0, but it’s finally out! It features a cool cropping tool that will allow you to upload an image of any size and don’t worry much about the proper format; it’ll resize it to whatever you fancy. Gravatars, like OpenID, are those cool features that all blogs/forums/Web 2.0 should be adopting: a way to have a single place where you can define your online identity in a safe and protected way, and use the same ID for any social website that you can find, instead of going through the painful process of creating a new account on every single site and uploading your own avatar (and struggling with the different size requirements for each site!).

Sorry for the brief interruption. WordPress 2.1 is out and it seems to have a better way to deal with the huge amount of spam I’m receiving at this moment, so I’m trying to do an upgrade. My apologies if the site is unresponsive for a while.

[UPDATE 2007-02-04 18:48 GMT] Apparently, this update went far smoother than what I expected from Dreamhost + WordPress. Someone is doing something right back there I’ll be taking a look at things to see how they’re going, and, fortunately, I’ve got lots of backups

Some plugins are missing, but I can live without them. Now if I only understood why the blog has been soooo slow lately…

[UPDATE  2007-02-05 03:49 GMT] Now only the tag clouds don’t work, the rest seems to be fine; this can go out of the homepage now

Linden Lab, since at least mid-2005, has been caught into a tough dilemma. Second Life is a notoriously hard to configure piece of software — too demanding from the computer it runs on, and almost always requiring detailed configuration and fine-tuning of your own computer to be able to enjoy it properly.

When I tell people that it’s unusual for me to crash more than once per month (logging in every day for an average of 4 or more hours), many are very surprised. My computer is old, almost 4 years now, and uses a graphics card that Linden Lab supports only partially (apparently, the original firmware for the ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 does not support some features properly, and LL prefers not to allow to enable them). Still, I have a rather solid application — Second Life is as stable for me as, say, Firefox 2.0.X (which also crashes once per month or so).

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