History of the Second Life Birthday Celebrations
As you may have heard, Second Life (SL) is turning 9 years old this month, June 23 to be exact! This year marks a change from Second Life running an official birthday celebration, to the users and the community of Second Life being responsible for the celebrating SL’s birthday.
There are many groups, individuals, and organizations that have arranged birthday events and you can find some in the official SL Destinations Category for birthday events.
One large birthday celebration, the SL9B Community Event, is comprised of former avatars who have helped on previous official Linden Lab SL Birthday events. This event, which you can learn more about at their official website http://sl9b.wordpress.com/, will open on June 18, 2012 at 11 am slt and close on June 27, 2012.
This event is sponsored by Dream Seeker Estates, who is also celebrating a milestone of their own—5 years of letting and selling property in Second Life! Throughout the next few days, the Torch will be exploring these celebrations and reporting live on some events! In the meantime, let’s recap the previous SL birthdays and of course relieve how much avatars have changed and improved throughout the years:
Let’s recap a few of the previous SL birthdays:
2004 – First Birthday Event (This event featured a Gala Parade and a live speech by SL founder, Philip Linden. You can read more here on the SL Wikia site.
2005 – Second Birthday Event (The Governor Linden avatar made an appearance and a float parade was organized)
2006 – The name of the birthday event was changed to the following format: SL3B and has been used since this date. (This event saw stricter guidelines on advertising and business promotion and featured machinima).
2007 – SL4B (This birthday focused on the historical significance of SL and megaprims seemed to be the focus and ire of organizers. There does not appear to be much information about this particular birthday, but there exists an old wiki page and a few blog pages on this birthday from organizers. This birthday also had many communities participate that are still in SL, such as The Shelter, Goreans, NCI, and Caledon).
2008 – SL5B (This event has a couple of videos on Youtube that feature Phillip and Mark Linden speaking about various things in Second Life. The former SL Teen Grid also had a Second Life Birthday celebration that year also, that was called Kids5B:
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The former SL Teen Grid also had a Second Life Birthday celebration this year also.
2009 – SL6B (This event focused on the future of virtual worlds and had 20 regions)
2010 – SL7B (This event focused on collaboration between various groups in SL. The official blog for this event is still online: http://sl7b.wordpress.com/ and so is the official SL wiki page about it.
2011 – SL8B (Little did anyone know that this would be the last official SL birthday celebration that would be organized and sponsored by Linden Labs. The theme was the magic of Second Life).
2012 – SL9B (This year SL turns 9 and Linden Labs announced that there would not be a centralized birthday event, instead they would leave the partying up to the community of SL. You can view a listing of SL9B birthday events in the special Destinations Category.