Bringing out the good stuff in Second Life®: fashion, hot spots, freebies, etc.

As of today, everyone with a Premium SL account gets to pick their own free Linden Home, on specially designated sims, along with an allotment of 117 prims, not counting the ones from the house. Both a nice gesture and a smart move on the part of Linden Labs, this both adds value to Premium packages and should help bolster the growing home owning business in SL, both for land barons and interior designers, by giving more people a taste at playing house.

There are a few colour themes, and some structure variations on them, to pick from.  The houses are not modifiable and you cannot get more than 117 prims. All parcels are huddled close together. All these limitations are to encourage you to seek your dream land once you have outgrown your Linden Home, I suppose. And it’s really mostly free if you pay for your membership yearly, since you get the amount of your subscription back in the form of a weekly stipend (of 300L/week).

What I’m liking most about the houses being all so close is the sense of community that is going to come from living here, once more people have settled in. I have personally never had a Premium account, so I guess I will only come over to one of these as a visitor, but I can see this growing into something nice in general to have around !

There are so many private residential sims on SL, but I’ve always shunned from ever getting land on them because they can look so random altogether, you never know what your neighbour is going to put up, and you tend to put up “barriers” around yourself, either by living in a skybox or restricting access, generally ignoring everyone else on the sim. Now these Linden Home sims may be really uniform, but I can imagine people who reside there will likely be interacting more, with more neighbourly stuff going on. That could be nice.

More details here on the Linden Labs blog, and TP to one of the sims here.

Update. I just noticed there are 3 more types of houses, depending on which sim you visit: Japanese, Lord of the ring, and mountain cabins. I would describe the quality of the builds as “adequate”. Also, I have to say that after an hour, you may begin to experience a slight feeling of claustrophobia, as I did.