Linden Labs to Third Party Viewers: "Get Lost"

This just in from Linden Labs: they've changed their Third Party Viewer policy. They claim that some of the changes have to do with privacy (I'm not convinced they're legitimate privacy issues, but OK). But one change has nothing to do with privacy -- it's strictly intended to squash innovation:

2.k: You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer.

LL will break many of TPV features in the next few days. So goodbye region windlights until LL's own viewer gets that feature ... if it ever does. Region windlights were an extraordinary boon to the arts community. [EDIT: see discussion in comments.]

The announcement adds,

We encourage Third Party Developers to continue innovating with unique user interfaces, niche features, and ways of interacting with the virtual world, and we look forward to working in partnership with developers on ideas they have for new or improved shared experiences for all of Second Life. We want to incorporate more innovative new features into Second Life to improve the experience for all users, and we encourage TPV developers to submit proposals through our standard process.

Yeah, right. It's horseshit. Basically all TPVs are allowed to do is tinker with the user interface and a couple of other things.  And as I read it, if the TPV developers come up with ideas, basically they have to work for Linden Labs for free.

See the Phoenix announcement for more.

Honour McMillan on Split Screen, also photos

Honour McMillan has written an excellent post on shellina's and Pinkpink's installations at Split Screen ... which is a good thing for me, given my continuing inability to find time to write my own blog post on them.

But at least now I have a few pictures:

shellina Winkler: Apocalypse 2012: Who's Afraid of the End of the World?

Pinkpink Sorbet: Lots of Nybbles

shellina Winkler and Pinkpink Sorbet at Split Screen During February

During February, Split Screen  is hosting shellina Winkler's "Apocalypse 2012: Who's Afraid of the End of the World?" and Pinkpink Sorbet's "Lots of Nibbles." I have no time to blog right now, but Quan Lavender wrote two excellent posts so read them instead!

Post on shellina
Post on Pinkpink

Here's the SLURL to the entrance.