I did not see Philip Rosedale’s keynote presentation in person, but I have been able to pick up a few key things he announced at the Second Life Community Convention 2010 in Boston.

Of course my primary interest was to find out if he said anything about mesh import. Daniel Voyager was kind enough to present a brief synopsis of Philip’s speech. Apparently mesh import is still in the works and the plan is to have it in open beta by the end of the year. I am excited to hear this, but we do know that deadlines can be missed and postponed. Perhaps if we all write a nice letter to Santa Philip and mail it off to Linden Lab we might hope to have a little surprise under our Christmas trees in Second Life. Please Philip, tell me, “Yes Vivienne, there is a Santa Claus.”

Also of interest was the announcement that the Teen Grid will be closed. 16 and 17 year olds will be permitted to access the main grid, but at present time there is no access planned for those aged under 16. There was mention of some discussion with educators about potential solutions and applications for younger people.

There was more talk of fighting lag, increasing the number of avatars that can be in one place at any given time without crashing the region. They have reduced crashes on Viewer 2.0 by 50%, and working on improving sim crossings and fixing group chat problems are high priority at present.

A video of Philip’s speech has just been made available here.