Hello from Linden Lab’s New CEO

[Dresden Ceriano]

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Marigold Devin wrote:

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LaskyaClaren wrote:

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Dillon Levenque wrote:

I just realized that everyone (including me) got so involved in the fact of the visit we forgot what brought it on. Well done, Dresden. A thoughtful, clear statement with the big quote so that those of us who hadn't seen it (including me) could get a better idea of who the new CEO was.

Nice going. :-)

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What she said, Dres.

 

:-)

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+ also me, Dres. Was out of the loop earlier in the day. Thanks for the heads up.

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The real thanks should go to Ebbe for posting on the blog and LL for using the Second Life account to post a link to it on its profile feed (a powerful tool which could use some further, thoughtful development), which is how I learned about it in the first place.  I was surprised when I realized a thread about it hadn't already been started, so I started one... no biggie.

...Dres *posted it, then went off to do some RL stuff... missing all the action... lol*

[Dresden Ceriano]

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Siddean Munro wrote:

Please *don't* bring back last names. I strongly disliked being forced to select a name I didn't hate from a list of names I didn't like when I signed up.

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It's my opinion that the optimum solution would be to enable us to choose both first and last names, as it works on other, albeit much smaller grids.  Rod seemed to indicate that this wasn't an option... something which I found scarcely believable, since it had been done elsewhere.

...Dres

[Wooja]

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Ebbe Linden wrote:

thank you...and I'll be here trying to soak it up like a

spunge!

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Oh no! Another **bleep** ESLer suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect, not respecting his audience enough to use the inbuilt spell-checker ("I don't have the time"...)

May I suggest you install After The Deadline? And use it. And perhaps make it mandatory for your PR and Marketing people, since it not only has spell and grammar checkers, it offers stylistic advice which knocks Microsoft's offerings into a  cocked hat. It does Swedish too. And it's free.

Wooja...believeidisownedmysonbecausehesagoonerratherthanhedisownedme

 

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

that is an archaic spelling but not really incorrect.

[Sassy Romano]

Welcome Ebbe.

I wonder what Goole Ads appeared for you or do you have ads blocked?  I wish I could block ads on my Android phone instead of being bombarded with undesirable stuff on a corporate forum.

Oh, try reading the forums during the daily Mumbai prostitute spam session... yes, poke someone to figure out how to deal with that would you?  This is what your corporate image looks like on a daily basis:-

[Trinity Yazimoto]

Hello and welcome Ebbe.

 

That's pretty nice to take time to answer and say hello here and its a good point for you. 

I really hope you will create a great communication path between LL and SL residents. Its really frustrating to have zero interlocutor when we need to talk about a problem we have with SL properties. Its like we shout in the wind and noone hear. So its important you work on that, and from what you said about the Jira, at least, we feel a bit heard now.

Also, i think you may already be aware of that, but a lot of creators in SL have a problem with the last TOS (from august 2013) and the section 2.3 in particular where its stated that LL can use our creations for "whatever purpose". While we understand LL need certain rights over our creations for the need of the service, we do think that the "whatever purpose" is a excessive here.

I would like to know what are your thoughts about this and what are your plans about this problem ? 

Can we reasonably hope there will be soon a revision of those TOS about that ?

 

EDIT : vocabulary

[Wooja]

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ObviousAltIsObvious wrote:

that is an archaic spelling but not really incorrect.

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Beaulocques!

Which is also an archaic spelling, and completely incorrect.

Wooja...prefertheeandthinetoyouandyoursofcoursenot

[Tonya Souther]

Welcome to LL, Ebbe!

I'm one of the developers of Firestorm, the most widely used viewer for Second Life. There's a thriving third party viewer developer community, and we do a lot of things for users that the LL-supplied viewer doesn't.

There's a good guy, Oz Linden, in place to do the seemingly impossible job of working as a bridge between LL and the TPV community, but it's tougher than it should be: there's a lot of secrecy around what LL does int eh viewer space, and we're constantly playing catch-up. That makes it harder and takes longer to roll out new features on SL.

The answer is obvious: less secrecy, more collaboration and openness. The implementation of materials was an example of how it should be done.

Let me pile on the JIRA topic, too. I wrote a blog post about it. The post before it is relevant, too.

This is all part of the same thing: LL has acquired a reputation of not listening to its users as it pursues whatever this week's big push is. That needs to change, badly.

You should arrange to come to one of Oz's Third Party Viewer Developer meetings soon. We'd love to see you and give you a piece of our minds...

[Jo Yardley]

Hello Ebbe, we meet again!

Hello everyone else, I was one of the people meeting with Ebbe yesterday, I wrote a blog about it here;

http://joyardley.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/chatting-with-ebbe-altberg-new-ceo-of-linden-lab/

Great to see Ebbe chatting with everyone here, lets hope communication lines between Linden Lab and us users remain this way.

We will be discussing all of this during the next Drax Files Radio Hour, with some sound clips from the actual chat we had and opinions from other SL users.

http://draxfiles.com

[Pamela Galli]

Nice reporting, Jo! 

 

. 

[Treasure Ballinger]

Sweet!  Great blog, Jo, thank you.  I feel excited and positive also.  As Ebbe said he'd love to meet some communities, I can only hope he'll keep Virtual Ability in mind as he moves forward!  There's so many great groups, orgs and cities for him to explore!  I'm hopeful, now, that I was wrong about LL not caring about SL; Ebbe certainly sounds like he cares.....I hope he'll grow to love it as some of us do.

[Jasmyn Vaher]

Hello Ebbe!

It’s absolutely delightful to see you getting in touch with SL users. Again, welcome...and enjoy!

[Heart Brimmer]

*feels faint* An actual Linden posting in the forums, be still my heart! *laughs* Welcome to SL, Ebbe and to the Second Life Forums. I am excited at the prospect of what new and exciting things you have in store for us. Congratulations on your appointment and, I as well as all the others here, look forward to your input.

[BLADEZRAVEN]

                         

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                   

 

 

 

 

 

                                             GREETING'S and goodluck , may the force be with you !

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jack Abraham]

Funny, both engineering and product heads here also didn't like that jira was closed and want to open it up again. Proposal for how is in the works! I hope we can figure out how to do that in a way that works/scales soon. 

Welcome news, Ebbe. Even opening it up read-only would be a huge improvement.

[MarcusD Braveheart]

AdBlock Plus for Android.

[Teagan Tobias]

Hi Ebbe (again),

I have seen suggestions from others about things that need to be addressed, so...

 

File this under “SUGGESTION” New USER Retention.

 

One of the things no one can be in denial about, is that in Second Life, a very large amount of the items for sale cost an obscene amount of money. {yes, to my purse it is true, like it or not}

Have a Demo switch on the Marketplace, off = no demo in search results, on = you see demos.

Why?

I have heard from one friend (one I know is a small amount but I would bet it happens a lot) that playing on SL is just to expensive. But there are good items for not that much on the Marketplace if you have the staying power to find them, and I am talking hours of searching. I set my upper limit to 150L$ and I get Demos for items costing thousands of lindens. What good does that do, really, what good, if you don't have the money, its not going to pop out of your “what ever” so you can buy that really expensive thing, its not going to happen. Get the Demos out of the search results on the Marketplace. Let the new people see you can survive on SL without spending an arm and a leg.

[Pamela Galli]

You can type:  Red Shoes NOT Demo  

[LaskyaClaren]

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Pamela Galli wrote:

You can type:  Red Shoes NOT Demo  

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Pamela, you're right, of course -- although even that will only get rid of items that have "Demo" in the description rather than embedded on the image.

The key point here is that using a Boolean operator is not, for most users, a very intuitive approach. It is not, in other words, very "user friendly."

If Second Life is going to expand its user base, it's going to need to cater to a lot more people who wouldn't know a Boolean expression if it knocked on their door asking for a cup of sugar AND a cup of cream OR milk.

[Sassy Romano]

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MarcusD Braveheart wrote:

AdBlock Plus for Android.

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Only works on Wifi data, NOT cellular.  I'd expand on a security issue around this but i've been asked not to yet.

[Sassy Romano]

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Teagan Tobias wrote:

Hi Ebbe (again),

I have seen suggestions from others about things that need to be addressed, so...

 

File this under “SUGGESTION” New USER Retention.

Have a Demo switch on the Marketplace, off = no demo in search results, on = you see demos.

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Don't need this.  Simpler solution is to NEVER EVER show demos in search at all.   A demo is already identifiable because it is linked FROM a full product listing.  Thus never show items that are subordinate to another listing. 

Simple!

Demos only ever need to be found within a listing of the full product.  THAT was the original intention, along with multiple colours within one product listing...

...Then we got Marketplace instead.

What we DO need is for the ability to search on the "Mesh" attribute which is stored with each listing but never exposed as a searchable item.  People should have the ability to search for mesh, not mesh or don't care by checking a box, just as you can select the permissions that are required.

[Silvertrod]

Welcome to Second Life Ebbe and congratulations on the new job.  I wish you nothing but the best of luck in the getting SL back on track.  I am relatively new to SL and do not know all the back story and history of what has been tried before and what has failed miserably over the years in SL.  That said I do have a request  that seems simple and logical to me with how I hear there is all this unused and abandoned mainland lying about. 

Allow Linden home owners to transfer their existing land tier they have to one of these empty Linden owned plots of land elsewhere.  The Linden homes are a nice starting home for when I had absalutely no idea what I was doing at all.  But that said  it would be nice to be able to build or place my own version of a home on a empty plot. 

Use of a management prim to store the existing home into maybe would also be a solution that would not require moving at all if you liked the neighborhood you are currently living in.  

[Storm Clarence]

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Silvertrod wrote:

 

Allow Linden home owners to transfer their existing land tier they have to one of these empty Linden owned plots of land elsewhere.

  The Linden homes are a nice starting home for when I had absalutely no idea what I was doing at all.  But that said  it would be nice to be able to build or place my own version of a home on a empty plot. 

 

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But you can do this already. 

Enjoy.

 

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

A late welcome to Ebbe to Linden Lab, Second Life, the forums, and utter chaos being finely balanced on the tip of a needle

No, wait, now I remember: the first welcome message to Ebbe from me was on Twitter...

Anyway, it's nice to see, for a change, someone with a lot of background in social media and online communications at the helm of Linden Lab. It sure should give us some hopes that at least, this time around, we'll see better communication. And that's certainly quite welcome!

There are some pearls of wisdom at the LL board. We started with visionaries, like Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka to get the ball rolling, even without knowing what direction it would take. Mark Kingdon saw an opportunity in expanding Second Life into the "serious" market and tried to turn it into a virtual 3D communications tool for enterprise and academic users. This didn't work so well at the corporate level, but did wonders in the research community: thousands of scientists are engaged daily in researching lots of aspects of virtual worlds (even though, because of the high cost of leasing land in SL, they do it now mostly on OpenSimulator — but all their work applies to SL as well). There are a handful of peer-reviewed scientific journals which practically only publish research on and about SL. I might even be so bold as to claim that "virtual world" and "Second Life" are now synonymous; few alternatives exist, after all, and probably the last serious one (Cloud Party) has gone with all the others. Second Life, by contrast, remains long-lived in spite of everything.

Rod Humble had a background in artistic game design, and he worked incredibly hard to fix bugs, add astonishing features — some of them in the pipelines for almost a decade! — and coming close to reach the impossible: on a high-end computer of the latest generation, Second Life is almost impossible to recognize. Long are gone the days of the "2007" look, images of which are still appearing on the mainstream news media. Gah! We have gone a long way since that.

Rod also managed to diversify LL's portfolio, and turn SL's success and profits into a source of financing for LL to launch new products. This was rather clever. In this era where two people with a computer and a programmer's handbook are able to grab a business angel, suck them dry, and waste millions after two or three years, it's refreshing to see LL and its financial resource allocation into R&D of new platforms as a functioning alternative to the "usual" ways of funding new development. Sure, not all "new products" are a success (or at least, not yet). But Rod proved the model worked without throwing LL into debt. He also recognized the potential of SL itself as a way to develop prototypes for games, by looking at the clever things that the RPG enthusiasts are doing in SL.

In SL, content is king, so getting designers the ability to create even more fantastic content (like meshes!) created a veritable Renaissance in SL. I remember this old image from Khannea Suntzu, made in 2009: http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2009/05/21/khannea-suntzus-preview-of-second-life-in-2009/ This was rendered on a top 3D modelling tool at the time, and she predicted that the SL renderer would be able to achieve those results by 2020. We laughed at her. And ironically, we actually get that kind of quality today — if not better.

Now it's your turn, Ebbe. For ages we have waited for a substantial improvement in SL as a communication tool — not only between LL and SL residents, but obviously among SL residents themselves. The way in-world text chat works is still stuck in the late 1990s — despite all improvements over the years, it still feels that the whole chat environment is not better than IRC running on a battered 486 with 512 KBytes of RAM and a sub-GHz CPU. We have my.secondlife.com, and some tentative integration with Facebook here and there. We have these clumsy forums where I'm typing now, which are invaded by spam every day (and yes, that's where most of the daily 10-12k registrations come from — not to join SL, but by spambots hitting the forums). Tickets (either in JIRA or elsewhere), abuse reports, requests for support and intervention by Linden employees — all those need a rehaul, mostly policy-wise, and not necessarily tech-wise.

So there is really quite a lot to improve, just on the communication side of SL. And it's desperately needed. Content is indeed king, but communications is its queen: we don't need merely to be able to buy awesome content, we need to be able to talk about it

Therefore, Ebbe, even if you don't stay at LL for a long, long while, you'll definitely have your hands full with things to do. It's definitely very kind of you to waste some of your precious time just to chat a bit on these forums, merely a week after you first sat on your chair That's an accomplishment, but the truly daunting challenge will be to keep it up over time. I sincerely wish you the greatest success in your new role at the helm of LL — after all, our (virtual) lives depend on it.

Cheers and good luck!

[Silvertrod]

Oh well now I feel silly for asking for something that already exists but can't learn if you don't ask the question I suppose.  Thanks for the letting me know that its possible to do the land tier transfer  Storm Clarence.