I’m reminded that I need to rewrite my big rebuttal of your latest analogue hole denunciation.

I hope the Lindens don’t screw up the viewer on the way to “fixing” it.

I don’t think the Lindens can really have a road map of the sort being demanded of them because the field is too new and the global economic crisis making things too uncertain.

The Guardian, the Telegraph, these are all old media, they’re jealous. They have Web 1.0 and even 2.0 gurus who are profoundly threatened by a platform that unseats them first and foremost, as I’ve explained over and over (i.e. in that thread on the Linden blog about the immersive work spaces).

Spimes? If I ever see one of them, I will crack it. In fact, I’m going to start carrying a little hammer around in my bag for that purpose. Goddamn things. Stop them before they get to a city near you. I’m not at all surprised Ugotrade is seduced by spime power, which was David Orban’s big thing a year ago and for which I denounced him, and for which my blog was even blocked in Technorati for a time (because Joi Ito funds spimes and couln’t bear for them to be trashed, but they have to be).

Please tell me where you can meet more than 60 people on a server — or for that matter, in RL, easily, and inexpensively. And..why you would want to meet with more? If you have a yen for broadcasting, do a podcast and put it up on Talkshoe or go on Qik.tv and stop ranting about the capacity of virtual worlds.

What does that say that the general communication from Linden Labs to its use base takes place on the web and not on their platform (which they say fosters communication)

They want SL to be the 3d Web, but yet we can’t interact with web pages, and we can only view videos in Quicktime (can someone wake up over there and finally implement flash?)

And do objects farther away from you load first?

And forget 6 million users, when we can barely get 60 people in one place.

What to do to help existing users/customers? You named the road map, that would help already. On the other hand: looking at history, how trustworthy would that be? The open space debacle was a disaster in the field of customer trust. Actually, it wasn’t one, it still *is* one, with some Lindens sending half-signals about the next step in July not happening and no official words at all. The whole LL approach of “we made a mistake - and our customers will suffer for it” doesn’t go well with me (and many others) - and it will be very hard to gain trust again. A good start would be some honesty about own mistakes, instead of all the bright and shiny PR action and blatant lying.

Prices in general are too high, options to only pay what you really use are (at least on the estate sector) next to non-existent. Example how it can be done (from k-grid): you pay a basis price for a region with only 750 prims - and can buy additional prims in packs of 500. Why pay for 15,000 prims when you only need 10,000?

Service fees are a total rippoff, too. $150 for moving a region, and $50 for a rename? How much work is that, 5 minutes? With those 5 minutes including a coffee break. Totally out of line, especially when the need for these actions was triggered by LLs own messup with open space regions.

You are right about the in-world functions. I can’t believe that there still is a 50 percent chance of group chat not working. I can’t believe that we still have only 25 groups available, when on the other hand groups are needed for many inworld settings.

With some exceptions, customer service is bad on many levels. This starts with tickets not being worked on not only for days, but for weeks. Then closing the performance ticket with “everything looks fine” - while the region still is hiccuping all the time. Taking out useful viewer features (Logitech LCD keyboard support) with a “deal with it” attitude.

As Alberik mentioned: editable megaprims! Simply allow creating bigger prims. Again from k-grid: 256 is the limit there, a very useful and reasonable one. And, another nice point: I didn’t run into a “prims are too far away from each other to be linked” message yet.

Very important: work on the amok running g-team members and the policy of “Shoot first, never ask questions later!” when handling ARs. For example underage ARs: it’s unbelievable that accounts of people who successfully (even manually) verified their age already are suspended just because someone sent a fraudulant underage AR against them?. And it becomes totally nuts when that person is asked to send in exactly the same proof of age he already DID sent in months ago. Same kind of problem: returning kids skin vendors with the pictures of topless 4yo girls. At least some members of the g-team need a reality check - right now their actions are more or less cyber terrorism.

LL has to wake up and realize that it aren’t the few big companies who are responsible for the major part of the income - it is the thousands and thousands of little guys. What do they want SL to be: a meeting room for CEOs - or still a world of their customers creativity and imagination?

I’m still in SL, and will be for the foreseeable future. But now I also have a basis in k-grid, as small and shaky and technically behind it still is. The general feeling there is much better than in SL, I feel like I’m really welcome and appreciated there - instead of feeling like being just a paying nuisance in the eyes of LL. LL better wakes up.

A few minor points: I think Prok is observing Lent, thus the focus is in different areas. I anticipate the return of focus after Easter.

Something interesting about Twitter - I read somewhere recently that they have so much venture money that they are profitable solely from the interest they earn on banking it - they don’t have much to spend it on (other than servers maybe) because they don’t particularly have a business model to support.

And as for Facebook - well, talk about LACK of consistency. They seem to waffle and change their minds every other week. I can’t help thinking that this lack of consistency and the apparent hubris of their management is a far more troubling sign for a technology ‘darling’ than anything else.

Hugs back.

SL is “almost” at that point (which is bad, in the sense that it doesn’t have “billions of users” yet). Media reporting on it really have to work hard to publish something that is interesting — even if it’s just repeating “everybody is running away from SL” or “SL has been long dead”, which is, frankly, the kind of story that I wonder how editors are still willing to pay for: The point is, there aren’t many interesting stories about SL that appeal to a wider audience — exactly like there aren’t any interesting stories about email. Or, well, eBay or Amazon (unless Amazon launches something new on their cloud computing arena).

Instead, we just get swamped with stories about Facebook and Twitter. *sigh* It will be a hard blow for the media when they finally burn out their venture capital and have to say “oops, we have no business model, sorry about that”. On the other hand, we have Linden Lab with a business model that is rock solid (even if their technology is not… yet), but that kind of news is… boring. LL are too open about some statistics but…. yes, no roadmaps

However, is there a roadmap for Twitter? For Facebook? For MySpace? I gather not. (Amazon, at least, says what they’re doing outside their core business… and so does Google). The lack of a roadmap doesn’t prevent “social media experts” to drool over companies that we really don’t know anything about. That doesn’t stop them from continue to drool But at the end of the day, when you remove the drool, what will remain…?

You’re right about techies jumping over to “the next best, shiny, new thing”. Wellllll… at least some of them When those techies evolve to become IT consultants, they become conservative. That’s why 40-year-Unix and 40-year-Internet is still around, although sooooo many “shiny new things” have been popping up in the past decades — and quickly forgotten after a few years of “shining”. The old metaphor of burning like a meteor comes to mind. Just 4 years ago people were drooling about Friendster and intrigued if MySpace would ever catch up!… now it’s the war between Facebook and Twitter… and what will come next? Nobody can predict it… but… I can predict I’ll be still paying close attention to Second Life in 2013, even if I might have long dropped my Twitter and Facebook accounts! (The other day I was surprised I still had a Friendster account… somewhere )

It’s interesting that you mention Ugotrade. You’re SO right! I was wondering why I hadn’t read anything from Tish recently — and the answer is simple. She writes now about all sort of things that glitter and shine and catch her attention, but… Ugotrade is not interesting any more. It lacks focus. It lacks vision. When you start looking around for everything shiny and glittery, you lose consistence — a trait you admire so much on M Linden, and which I absolutely agree with you. Even Prokofy has lost his thread, and is now way more happy dissing cloud computing or OpenID than writing about Second Life How long will it take for him to become irrelevant?

A very good friend of mine came to a very interesting observation, which will not be a surprise to you (and to most of your regular readers). Tag something with Second Life, and the SLogosphere will pick it up and amplify it tremendously — waaaay beyond any other environment. And the reason for that? Second Life’s “offworld” interconnection is incredibly powerful because of its consistence. And at this age and day where everything else is too fragmented, that counts a lot. This “magic” of Second Life’s consistency and relationship interconnection is what makes, say, live musicians that have had a MySpace for ages suddenly “pop into existence” after just a few live concerts in SL. They didn’t suddenly become better musicians — or started doing better PR. It’s just the amplifying phenomenon that SL has. Let me try a different example: run a survey to see who still remembers the Sheep and compare it to Rezzable (*bows to RaR*). I’m pretty sure the results will be interesting to follow.

So, of course, everybody knows I’m a SL fan and thus impossibly biased, but for the social media experts, SL is “unexplored territory”. Why does it have this “amplification”, if we just read nonsense and garbage on the media?

The answer is quite subtle. The world is full of people on Twitter and Facebook, but on SL, it’s a different world of quite different people And before my head explodes with the gloat, I’ll leave you in peace…

Hugs,

- Gwyn

Lots of good points. An interesting highlight from the Kingdon presentation in France which I didn’t transcribe was his discussion of the three main “prongs” of development and how those assist both new users and current ones. One of his points Web-side that the Lab has taken half a step of 100. I think this responds to RaR’s comments about Web-side things.

I’m a firm believer that the Lab is indicating that Web-side improvements will help facilitate group, commerce, and connection.

As far as statistics, the first quarter is now over. As I understand it, the Lab is releasing Q1 stats, based on comments made on the Linden blog. I was quite vocal about the need for these statistics to be useful for business planning and to get a better read of where the in-world economy is at. I’ve also been extremely vocal about a road map, and Kingdon has said that it is their intention to release road maps - and that the reality is, they didn’t have any. A road map would go a very long way to help current content creators plan their businesses.

Regarding the <18 comment - I think they’ve been fairly clear that this isn’t something they’re attaching to the adult content issue, but that until the adult content issue is managed they won’t look at it. (Yeah, paradox). I think they’ve also hinted that other things like 3D mesh and HTML on a prim are on the horizon, but like other ‘road map’ items they’re opaque about it.

Finally, I agree about tier pricing. I’m on no authority in this area, I’ve heard nothing, and this is total speculation - but I’m expecting a new tier option or pricing change by June. Again - total out of the wild guess.

Daniel - I’m wondering specifically what things you think the Lab should do for residents that its not doing? I’ll say that my major beefs are the following:

- Lack of a road map
- Lack of a road map
- Tier too expensive against current competition and other options
- Lack of progress on group, friends list and other in-world social and noticing functions
- Search still sucks (big time)
- Lack of a really good channel or senior executive advocating for the interests of land owners and content creators

My wish list includes:
- Early discussions on the policy implications of importable 3D meshes towards developing a community-backed road map
- Clickable HTML on a prim and desktop sharing
- A road map
- A road map

Having said all that, the number one things I would have asked for a year ago would have been stability, stability and stability. And I believe good progress has been made on these three fronts.

I also would have asked for an improved UI for the client (which it’s good to hear is coming) and a better Web site (which is getting there).

Did I miss anything?

Questions that remain unanswered (and most likely will never be answered):

* who is buying new islands? (why isn’t there an owner directory?)
* how many islands are there really now?
* how big a proportion of the grid is the porno grid?
* What is plan for allowing under 18s in?
* what is the technology roadmap? There are tons of issues and what is LL prioritizing?
* when will there be a standard mesh object?
* will there be web services for SL? What about integration to other communities??

I think that LL has wasted a huge amount of goodwill with the content creators that give life to the SL offering. Providing 16,000 prims for $2,000 to $4,000 per year is very expensive. There are some virtual online alternatives on the horizon and LL should be ready to face a more serious exodus once they are more stable.