In a not-surprising move last tuesday (meme intended), Electronic Arts announced that, effective August 1st, The Sims Online (which at some point seems to have been renamed “EA-Land”) will shut down for good.

“We share the sadness of the entire community in writing this blog to announce that the EA-Land experiment is being brought to an end. Decisions such as these are never easy and the rationale for closing EA-Land is particularly complex. Regardless, it is hard to see the end of the collective investment of emotion, time and friendship.” said Luc Barthelet, who seems to be the EA-Land Project Manager said in a blog post.

The Second Life Times Blog (and for those veteran readers, The Alphaville Times) will be uploading our archive of TSO Photographs in the coming days.

Linden Lab^® dropped the bomb Monday, informing Second Life business owners that they would no longer be allowed to use the brand name Second Life in the name of their businesses. Instead, they’re asking you use the less-descriptive “SL” or “inSL” brands.

In a blog post in the official blog, Catherine Linden said that “Proper use of our trademarks is important to help you and others outside the Second Life community know which products and services Linden Lab stands behind”.

Organizations using “Second Life” in their name or domain names have 90 days to comply with the new guidelines. As you can see, the SL Times is already compliant here on the net. Those of you that have Times web kiosks on your land are asked to contact us to receive a new, compliant kiosk ASAP.

After 9 years, Philip Rosedale is stepping down as Linden Lab CEO. In a message released on the SL Blog on (when else?) Friday.

Philip gave no clear reason as to why he is stepping down, besides that it was a “decision driven by my desire to best grow SL and match my job to both our needs and my passions.”

Rosedale will not leave Linden Lab, he will become the Chairman of the Board, and “focus on product strategy and vision, continuing to design the right kind of company, and being an effective communicator and evangelist about Second Life.” Adding that this job change will likely mean you will see him more in-world once the new CEO is in place.

The hunt for a new CEO could take “anywhere from soonish to many months.”, said current Chairman of the Board Mitch Kapor said in an interview with SL Reuters.

We’ve updated the look and feel of the website in anticipation of re-launching within the next week or two.

We’ve also got a new version of the photo gallery online. Check it out here.

If you’re in the market for a server with

• Single Xeon 5160 3GHz dual-core processor, has available socket for second processor (Socket 771)
• 4gb of DDR2 PC2-5300 (667MHz) fully buffered memory in 4 sticks; 12 memory slots (8 available), to support up to 48GB of RAM
• Four hot-swappable 15,000RPM 36.7gb SAS drives configured in RAID5 (~110gb usable space)
• HP P600 RAID controller with emergency battery backup unit, connected via PCI-X for awesome RAID performance, connector for additional external storage capacity
• Redundant power supply, two total, hot-swappable
• One available slim PCI-X OR PCIe slot (adaptors required; two slots; 1 full / 1 half; RAID card uses full PCI-X)
• Integrated VGA; DVD-ROM; Dual gigabit ethernet

that costs around $3,500, look no further. According to ginkofinancial.com, the eBay listing found here is for the primary server of what was once Ginko Financial.

In case you don’t know, Ginko Financial folded after a bank run in August 2007.

The listing says that the hard drives will be erased before it is shipped to the new owner.

P.S. Look for a relaunch of The Second Life Times in February.

According to Massively.com, Cory Ondrejka (Known as Cory Linden in-world), Linden Lab’s Chief Technical Officer and the man behind Linden Scripting Language, was asked by King Philip Rosedale to leave the company at the end of 2007 after seven years with Linden.

“Cory and I have differences in how we think Linden should be run, differences that in the past few months have become irreconcilable.” Said Rosedale in an email sent to Linden Staff on December 11th.

You can read the internal memo to staff from Philip here, Philip’s Response here, and Cory’s internal memo here.

Photo via Flickr.

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Second Life was on TV twice with in 24 hours yesterday.

Starting with Wednesday’s episode of CSI: NY, where it was shown that in SL, if you are hit by a paintball gun too many times, you fall into a hole and leave shoes behind. Calling cards are actual objects that can lead to terrible things, like a virus that shuts down your computer system.

Last night, when I tuned in to NBC’s “The Office” I was surprised to see one character sit down at his computer and log in to Second Life. This version of Second Life was much more realistic than CBS’ version. Rainn Wilson’s character, Dwight, created a Second Life avatar (Dwight Shelford) that resembles him and has an identical job. at a point when his life “was so great, I literally needed a second one”. He goes on to create “Second Second Life”, a place where people go “to be removed even further from reality.” Another Character, Jim, creates his own avatar later in the show. You can see the entire episode here (Episode 409 - Local Ad)

Editor’s Note: I expect to be going in and adding information to this if I notice something that should be mentioned.

I find it hard to believe that I will have been a citizen of Second Life for 2 years tomorrow. I can still remember arriving on Orientation Island, going through all the tutorials, and then teleporting into the welcome area. The first day I wandered around the welcome area and surrounding sims, doing all the things a noob does. A few days later I had accumulated some money and went and bought a car that I later discovered to be a freebie. I promptly crashed the car off one of the roads and into a tree.

Fast-forward to October 27th, 2005. I started this publication/blog. I had one previously in The Sims Online, but I did something wrong and deleted the entire Alphaville Times blog due to stupidity the month before (I promptly asked a friend, who had been “hired” onto the team to do graphics, to head up all web services from then on).

The first story I wrote was about Linden Labs updating the Community Standards after a W-Hat attack, and a link to the Second Life Herald story about Ginko Financial. The stories to follow talked about Ginko, Anshe calling it a Ponzi scheme, and one or two more stories about her.

On New Years Eve, I held the Newsworthy awards just to continue tradition from the last few years on the Alphaville Times. The event, in my opinion, was a waste of my own time along with the other 4 people that showed up, which were just a few Ginko employees from the sim next to Pumacity, where the event was held.

In January 2006, not much happened besides changing the company that “owned” the Times’ name and a story about Ginko’s future plans at expanding their island “nation”. Sometime during this month, I found out about furries, and got my first (free) furry avatar.

In February I hired Jon Venkman to help with the editing, writing and promotion of the Times. We rented office space in Ginko Island for a week, then bought our first office on a piece of First Land in the Areumdeuli sim.(Picture to come soon, must find it). During this month, Urizenus from The Second Life Herald announced his “retirement” from the Metaverse news business.

March came and nearly went before anything was published. On the 28th, I did a story on our neighbors in Areumdeuli. The Phoenicia Gallery. The Office got a Ginko ATM and we hired one more person for writing.

In April, there was a story on Anshe Chung being banned from SL (Never did post why she was), We moved the blog from Blogspot to WordPress here. Did a “Live Blog” of a grid attack, and a story on Second Life Boxing. I had just randomly chosen to do a story on SLB because I had heard about it. So I headed over to their arena and was allowed in. It was there where I met Areth Gall, and we’ve been friends more than friends ever since.

In May, I had to take a break from the Times because my computer stopped working. At the end of the month I posted about how Marc Bragg was suing Linden Labs for “financial damages in the thousands, in part for a breach of a virtual land auction contract
and for violation of the Pennsylvania Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law.”

In June, I hired Luke Birdbrain who became Editor and Project Manager for the time (I was trying to work on a few other things. Luke purchased the land next to the SL times office and allowed me to expand on to it. In News in June, Linden Labs had removed the credit-card requirement for registration, The 3rd Birthday with an exclusive interview with the event coordinator and the crash that delayed the speech by Philip Linden.

In July, we began making an in-world version of the SL Times, Alerted readers to a scam involving Ginko, and did another “Live Blog” of the asset servers failing.

August came and I closed the company for a week in order to rest and restructure it. I shut down the projects I gave up on, and restarted some projects that went nowhere. Some news stories we covered after returning were the SLStats Watches that tracked you and your friends and published that information on the internet, Linden Labs closing the Official Forums, and some Economy changes.

In September I reported on a scam that was targeting Areth Gall, Illegal Prims on SL Exchange, Linden Lab’s computers being compromised, A horrible update day, and a post about the future of the Times.

October was an interesting month. We celebrated our 1st birthday, I wrote an editorial on the Novus Ordo Imperialis attacking Areth, a story including 1 Million Residents in SL and Urienzus return to the Herald, and Linden Labs move to price private islands higher.

In November, I took a vacation from the Times, I hired Areth to a General Assignment Reporter position, and moved the SL Times newsroom.

The Month of December I wasn’t very active either, but Areth managed to do two stories. One about the Alliance Navy’s “Operation: Pear-Tree”, that gave dropped gifts from the sky to unsuspecting people below. The other was about the death of the typist behind Jordan Witherspoon. I also gave out the Newsworthy awards for 2006 online, without an official ceremony.

I disappeared again in January 2007, and was able to get out a short article on SL going Open Source. This trend continued into February when I got a different job doing the same thing at the same place in RL, just at a different time. I temporarily closed the Times, and the only post from that month was about Linden Labs discontinuing First Land.

Things didn’t improve in March, I was able to get a press release up that was sent to me.

Everything got better in April. We started with an April Fools story on Newscorp buying us out. Then a story about Linden banning advertising in the classifieds for casinos, followed by the Lindens removing Live Help and Ratings from the game. Areth pretty much took over the rest of the month releasing a couple stories and an Editorial. During this time we received our 10,000 hit.

In May a friend informed me he saw that The Sims Online was experimenting with Custom Content, and a story was written on that. Areth did a story on the SL military groups that honored Memorial Day by surrendering, and another about scams in the Beta Grid.

June featured the SL Times at SL4B, Second Life on “The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet” on TV, and Areth posted a series on griefing groups.

No one did anything in July. In August we covered the collapse of Ginko and a RL story about the severe weather affecting Chicago shortly before the Second Life Community Convention being held there.

Last month I wrote up how ABC News had a story on Second Life on their i-Caught program, and Second Citizen Forums shutting down.

Present Day
Wow. I can’t believe I just covered all the news that has happened over the last two years. As far as the Times 2nd birthday October 27th goes, Events were planned but had to be canceled when we lost our office in Pumacity. I hope to still do something that weekend.

The Future
I’ll admit it, I haven’t spent much time on SL since we lost the office. Losing the office also meant I lost a place to put my SL Exchange servers, which meant I lost money. I rented some space at a in-world datacenter but was too lazy to log in and pay the rent there and lost that too. Maybe I’ll do that later today. I also want to start a new division of Metaverse Communications that builds stuff. I don’t want to give too much away about what I would build, but I’ve shown them to some people.

“Now that I think about it..”
This post was supposed to be about my 2 years in SL. Oh well.

Special Thanks:
To everyone who I’ve met in my SL journey. I also want to thank the people behind the Ginko sims for practically letting me live there for free for a few months (I spent almost all my time on their islands, just visiting), Jon Venkman and Luke Birdbrain for all your help with the Times, Casey Benton for allowing me to rent a office floor in Pumacity Tower (even if you did just evict me and return all my objects one day) and, last but not least, Areth, for all your articles and mostly for putting up with me.

Thank You.

The Second Citizen forums have shut down. “Mother FIC”, the operator of the website had this to say in a statement made about the closing:

Short notice, but it’s better than just seeing the board is closed message suddenly, heh.

SC is going offline, permanently, before the end of the day today. It’s finished.

I can’t be a part of this anymore, and I can’t be the provider for this, either.

You can ask me why, but you probably won’t get the answers you’re looking for, or any for that matter, as it’s not really up for discussion at this point. It just needs to end.

I’m disappointed it has to be like this, but it does. And it’s not even a matter of switching hands at this point, it just needs to close.

It’s over. And I’m really sorry.

We have also learned that a new Second Citizen may be launched. By navigating your Internets to http://www.secondcitizen.org/, you get this message:

“Home of the New Second Citizen Forums”

Just a reminder, our forums are still open and ready for use!