3pointD.com

Linden Lab, maker of the virtual world of Second Life, announced on Monday that it would hold an impromptu town hall meeting with chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka to address the concerns of the almost 3,500 SL residents who have thus far signed on to Project Open Letter, a list of five complaints about the Second Life platform that have long gone unanswered. The open letter is an initiative of Second Life snapshot baron Cristiano Midnight, who’s also one of our co-hosts on SecondCast, and has been a member of Second Life for several years now. The project was started “after I read yet another open letter in a third party forum begging Linden Lab to fix myriad problems that have been going on daily for more than a year, in some cases extending years,” Cristiano writes on the project site. He goes on to point out that LL has closed down all the centralized venues of feedback, such as the company-sponsored forums, that had formerly been available to residents. A bug-reporting system is in place, but LL has not been as responsive to that as many residents would like. In the wake of the letter, LL appears to be listening harder, but it may not yet be hard enough. The platform remains vulnerable; read on for more details. (more…)

Thought it worth noting that the top-selling virtual items to date in CyWorld USA, which launched last summer, are tie-ins from the Bravo TV show Top Design, according to a press release. (Bravo is part of NBC Universal.) CyWorld’s Top Design club was apparently very popular during the show’s first season, and members were able to purchase virtual items that were based on the winning designs from the show. “These Top Design-inspired collectibles became the top-selling digital items to-date for Cyworld USA,” the release says. CyWorld is adding Top Design features during the show’s off season, including “an immersive social network and commerce platform from View22,” which does 3D ecommerce services, and a Top Design 3D Throw-Down. No surprise that networks are moving closer and closer to virtual worlds as the age of New New Media^TM takes hold. CyWorld is pitched at a younger audience than Top Design, but that may be perfect for Bravo: get ‘em hooked early via the virtual world, then gather ‘em up in a medium where advertisers will pay more for their eyeballs.