Mono is late, but it’s arrived – but then what did you expect for a platform named after a disease that causes lethargy (sure, they didn’t invent Mono, but couldn’t they have renamed it SLono or something?)

Now, not being a coder I have no idea whether it will elicit a collective yawn, or whether finally unshackled from LSL we’ll see a flood of new Zyngo machines and automated pole dancers or laser-firing cars.

But Mono WILL make the Grid less laggy (as scripts migrate to it – expect to see “Fully Mono Compatible” sims coming soon). It will make scripts run faster. It will open up new opportunities for animation, games, and anything where you need a response time from a prim running in milliseconds rather than seconds.

So this is good news. And I can now check another box in my list of promises from January of this year. To recap, at that time based on promises and statements from the Lab, the following timeline was outlined for Second Life improvements (note however this was in the pre-M era, one in which vague promises are rarely made, in fact, few are made at all other than “this is important to us”):

February: Lightweight Client
Miller tells IW that the lightweight client will include text chat, instant messaging, and voice communications.
Progress: Not achieved
Update: Joe Miller says it’s coming in weeks (called SLim).

First Quarter 08: Mono Deployed
“In another architecture change, Linden Lab is deploying Mono as a foundation for running the Linden Scripting Language. LSL is the language used to control behavior of objects in-world. Mono is being deployed this quarter, starting on the beta grid. Mono will allow scripts to run up to 700 times faster than they now do, theoretically, although in practice performance has been 100 to 200 times faster than current rates, Miller said. The goal of the Mono deployment, as with the Havok 4.6 rollout, is to make Second Life more predictable and stable.”
Progress: Being rolled out now

April: Open Source Server
Linden Lab said in April it plans to open-source the Second Life server.
Progress:
Backpedal
“There are a number of things about the architecture of our current server infrastructure that inhibit a source code release,” Director of Open Source Development Rob Lanphier told Linux.com. “There are a lot of cases of monolithic design and improper trust relationships between components that would need to be addressed.” (via Virtual World News)

May: HTML on a Prim
Rosedale promised the ability to display HTML Web pages on a prim by May when speaking with Reuters from Davos.
Progress: Well, you can DISPLAY them, but I thought he meant you could CLICK on them too. We’ll call it “in progress”.

Critical Ongoing Issue: Customer Retention
And Linden Lab is working on several measures to improve customer retention. Currently, about 90% of people who try Second Life give up on it quickly. Anecdotally, that’s pretty similar to the retention rate for most Internet activities, but Linden Lab would like to do better. They have regular, weekly focus groups of average consumers brought in off the streets, to test Second Life usability, Miller said.
Progress: I leave it for you to judge. Orientation Island was killed. Popular Places was killed. New avatars were introduced for newbies. No data known.