During the first part of the year, Linden Lab spent some time working on a new installer for Second Life. Development seemed to halt in April, but it is still a rather interesting little tool.

Weighing in at a measly 350KB under Windows, the application downloads, installs, then runs the much larger Second Life viewer, and does so quite quickly and painlessly while displaying an assortment of positive marketing messages. The whole process takes a couple of minutes, depending on your network connection.

The marketing bites, akin to Microsoft's Windows setup, are obviously targeted at first-time users. What's interesting about that is the impression they seem to give to new users.