Second Life's fourth anniversary was yesterday. As the next year of Second Life unrolls, it is worth remembering those avatars on whose shoulders we stand - early adopters, pioneers, lab-rats. Out in the Linden land of Plum there stands a memorial to all those fine souls (1,593 if my counting ability has not failed me) who actively participated in the Beta Grid. You can find some of these avatars under Search, as they are still involved today.

From the Second Life History wiki: "Closed beta began on November 2002, with public beta opening on April 2003. Beta brought the first economic system, which was an attempt to control resource usage by charging for object creation."

The soon-to-be-a-viewer update, version 1.13.2(13) is up on the preview/beta grid now for your testing pleasure. Linden Lab kindly arranged the preview, rather than springing it on us at the last moment.

This release separates the settings files for beta and First Look viewers from the regular viewer settings so that one cannot mess up the other, and the promised fixes to the build window. There are several other changes listed in the release notes.

You can download the viewer from the usual place, but the beta grid account database only includes accounts created before the account database was copied to it on the 18th of January. If your account was created after that time, you will not be able to log in to the beta grid.

AOL is getting ready to launch its own presence in Second Life. Its new space, called AOL Pointe, will feature AOL Music, Moviefone, TMZ, among other AOL created content. It is apparently AOL's intent that AOL Pointe will act as a place the company can try out new product features and perform market research.

The beta test of AOL Pointe is expected to begin in about a week. If you are interested in participating in the beta, which will occur within Second Life, you can sign up on AOL's Beta Site. As a reminder AOL is the parent company of Weblogs Inc., the operators of the Second Life Insider.