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Teen Grid

Teen Grid gets a Remake

First, a little background...Teen Second Life opened on Valentine's Day 2005 with an initial population of 6 teens. Today the population of active residents (teens that have logged in during the past month and spent 1+ hour in-world) has topped 6500 with maximum concurrency peaking at just under 500. During the summer months, we can expect to see these numbers jump.

TSL is currently 6,250,000 square meters, or the size of a small town with 937 teens owning 807,152 square meters of the mainland. 5 residents currently own a private island and 1 owns two (Leviathan, the newest teen-own island, was profiled in the January issue.

Until February 2006, Teen Second Life was populated entirely by teens. In response to requests from educators and non-profit organizations, Linden Lab agreed to allow for the first educator and non-profit owned private islands. In addition, Linden Lab went on to launch the Campus program which gives qualified educators the use of a free parcel of land for a semester. Since then, educator and non-profit run islands, owned and inhabited by non-Linden, background checked, "Approved Adults" have become a major part of the TSL landscape. Over 1 million square meters are owned by 18 different educational projects.

Global Kids led the way as the first public island administered by an outside organization. Always concerned with the opinions of the teen residents, Global Kids staff facilitated a dialogue with teens on their blog and with inworld debate. They encouraged teens to voice their visions and fears for the future of the Teen Grid. Several teen residents expressed concern about the influx of adults and the intermixing of adult-owned, Linden-owned and teen-owned estates. As a result of this dialog (and similar conversations on the TSL Forums) the decision was made at Linden Lab to change the layout of Teen Second Life.

In the interest of making it more obvious which teen grid sub-estates are owned by who, numerous islands were moved and grouped specifically by ownership. The new layout for the teen grid places all Linden owned islands to the Northwest of the TSL Mainland, teen-owned islands to the North, and adult-owned islands to the South. This will better allow residents to choose to engage or ignore the experiences offered by educators or non-profits and to further empower those residents who would like maintain a teen-only experience in Second Life.