In their latest blog posting, Linden Labs have described an upgrade to their IM to Email system which will decrease load whilst increasing the time you can reply to an IM offline from three days to five days.

An embarrassing admission: I actually didn’t realise you could reply to an IM received via email and have it convert back to an IM for the original sender…

The Linden blog reports a global restart is underway after login issues arose.

This comes on top of the unresolved teleport issues since the new version update. Be warned – reading comments on the blog paints a picture of open frustration on the part of longer term users.

Linden Labs released a new version of the SL viewer today and fairly quickly had to explain some workarounds for issues evident when using the new version.

Some issues include video stutter and the inability to offer teleport to anyone not on your Friends list, which is linked to one of the goals of the upgrade, to remove the ability to determine if someone is online or not (who isn’t on your Friends list). It’ll be interesting to see how quickly Linden offer an upgrade to this version.

Another site has a list of companies they’ve seen launch in Second Life.

The Australian list is much smaller, but we’ll be tracking each Australian company or subsidiary as they launch and creatng a list here…

Click here for the article in the Sydney Morning Herald

Of course, such an article begs the question – does it really matter what an avatar’s real-life past is? In some cases yes – if Anshe Chung had been a dodgy real-estate developer / rip-off merchant in real life, then it matters in a big way. But she wasn’t. I suppose it’s just a standard case of ‘make a million and expect intense media scrutiny’. And of course, it was Anshe that announced she’d made a million so the interest can’t be unexpected.

We’re aware of a couple of individuals who applied for positions with Linden Labs after Philip Linden’s general call for applications in November 2006. On the 13th December Linden asked for patience. A month on, has anyone heard back at all? The two people I’m aware of certainly haven’t. Recruitment is a time-intensive task, but if there are no notifications in the next few weeks, it can’t help future recruitment efforts…

Second Life will be offline for a few hours for the upgrade, and as per usual a new client will need to be downloaded. There’s some useful bug fixes listed .

Linden have made available a new SL client for general users to download and try out. Initial feedback is extremely positive from the few in-world users we’ve spoken to – a lot less grey objects for example.

Corey Linden is holding another Town Hall tomorrow, this time in-world and via the Linden Town Hall Closed Captioning group (last time the Linden repeaters crashed so text was repeated in this group and worked well).

The focus is open source and questions are being taken now if you can’t make it at the time.

Update – Linden Lab’s dedicated open source ‘busybody’ says hi here

In a major move for Linden Lab, they’ve announced that the Second Life client software code is being released as open source under GNU GPL Level 2.

This throws down the gauntlet to any developer who wants to create content – they have access to the source code. This is likely to cut both ways – there’ll be a lot more people doing bug-spotting for free but also others who’ll be looking for ways to exploit what’s there.