While lagging heavily in Second Life yesterday, an acquaintance informed me that the virtual world There is now free. It appears they were forced to respond to Linden Lab’s recent move to make basic Second Life accounts free. Anyway, while posting my previous entry I was reminded of this – which is curious, actually. Why haven’t I read about this already?

Turns out the good folks at There appear to be having problems getting their story straight… which is probably keeping it out of the press (or at least the bits I read). So they’ve posted this “Clarification“:

Despite our best intentions, it’s apparent that our announcements and posts about “Free There” have been confusing, and in some cases, contradictory. To clear things up, we’ve removed all of the old posts on this topic by There and it’s employees, and are replacing it with what we hope is one simple explanation. I apologize if you find the language that follows a bit terse, but we are aiming for clarity here.

During this test, ALL prior memberships plans are replaced with two lifetime plans, with the exception of Beta Lifetime Memberships. The two plans are:

* A FREE Basic membership, which includes the Music pack. This plan is FREE, and it is a lifetime plan
* A Premium membership, which includes Voice, the Explorer pack, and Music pack. This plan costs $9.95 and is a lifetime plan.