Slow times
It is slow in Second Life, not many visitors and certainly not much sales these days. It is not a good time to be a landowner 
Many islands are set for sale because people can’t pay for it anymore. I mentioned earlier in my blog i pay for my islands every month. I love SL, love to build, create and plan, but lately all this does make me less inspired to do anything in SL anymore. I don’t know how much longer i am willing to pay for it.
Land mass grew over 44%. The total number of regions owned by residents increased 44.2% over Q1 to just over 1.5 billion square meters. RL economics and too much new land created empty rental islands. Land owners who cannot pay for the tier every month. Renters who leave SL. RL drama to people who have put in so much of their time to create an island, real tears when they have to sell their creations. It has happend.. and i am afraid it will happen more.
Think of it..to purchase an island costs you less than it did me, but to pay tier USD 295 a month is huge. That’s 3540 USD a year per island…. To get this kind of money you have to have a good business but even if you do, there have to be people who are willing and able spent money in SL. For months now we all see a drop in sales in all business sectors. On top of this, if you are a European citizen you have to pay VAT, in the Netherlands we pay 19% so an island costs us 4212,60 USD a year and 1190 USD to purchase. So we are talking real money here. If SL doesn’t do something to lower the costs like adjusting tier to 195 USD per month, more people will sell their islands. So M Linden and all the other Lindens: it’s time to lower the costs otherwise you will loose a lot of good islands. And we will finally be paying as much as landowners who purchased their land before September 2006 (or somewhere in 2006). They pay 195 a month until further notice i guess
On the other hand Linden Lab is working hard to improve Second Life. IBM and Linden Lab have announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another. Another thing is that Linden Lab is going to focus on innovative use of this virutal world. So great things lie ahead and i am sure SL is going to be here for a long time!