Wired's Second Life Travel Guide

Wired's travel guide is online now. It is the most in depth review of Second Life to date. One interesting thing to note, when the article was written the in world population was right at 500,000. As of this morning the total population is now...wait for it...server down. Oh well I will update the real number when the site is back online but I think they broke one million yesterday.

UPDATE: Real number from the site: 983,621

From Wired:

"The vision of former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale, Second Life emerged from beta just three years ago. Rosedale was convinced that the increasing adoption of broadband and powerful processors made it possible to create a 3‑D virtual world similar to the metaverse Neal Stephenson described in his sci-fi novel Snow Crash.

Today, Second Life is second home to half a million people, and everyone from Duran Duran and Wells Fargo Bank to the Department of Homeland Security has funded real estate here. The national currency of Linden dollars is freely convertible to US dollars (and the exchange rate is quite favorable at the moment!), and an increasing number of residents are ditching their jobs back on Earth to make their living entirely within Second Life's economy."

Facts for the Visitor:

"LOCATION
3,000-plus servers at a data center in San Francisco

POPULATION
518,524, growing by 36 percent a month

PERMANENT RESIDENTS
236,562 (Residents who logged in at least once in the last 60

AVERAGE AGE
3.6 months (Skews young due to high birthrate; oldest living resident: 4.5 years)

AVERAGE TIME SPENT IN-WORLD
40 hours per month"

Entertainment:

"SAMURAI ISLAND (Click here to teleport)
Engage in magic-enhanced combat, complete with weapons, acrobatic animations, and gorgeous outfits. Hundreds of players brawl individually or in clans. This game was created by former exotic dancer KatanaBlade Anubis, who makes more money in SL than she did on stage. Buy a sword (around L$800) and start practicing your red flame attack."

Destinations:

"The three main landmasses of Second Life – Heterocera Atoll, the Main Continent, and the Southern Continent – presently cover some 26,000 acres, almost twice the size of Manhattan. They are expanding as fast as new servers come online, and each server adds up to four 16-acre regions. Also growing is the number of private islands – 1,350 as of mid-August – that can be purchased by individuals for development."

Shopping:

"A few tweaks should be enough to keep your getup from shouting “tourist” as you walk down the street. Of course, to really fit in, you’ll need some custom threads – and maybe a new body part or two. Luckily, Second Life has plenty of expert tailors to help you."

Wired in Second Life:

"You will notice that our virtual offices bear a striking resemblance to the innards of a computer. You'll probably wonder whether our brick-and-mortar offices also resemble circuit boards and have gigantic serial ports sticking out the back. In fact, no, our real world habitat is much more quotidian – a cubicle is a cubicle is a cubicle.

But when we commissioned the highly inventive virtual architects at Millions of Us to create the Second Life Wired Offices, we figured, why let Newtonian physics get in our way? As Rodica Buzescu, chief architect on the project, puts it, "The beauty of Second Life is that it allows you to embody an idea in the form of architecture in a way you never could in real life."