Gavin Hird

Since you are removing voting in JIRA (we kinda suspected you did not use it anyway, hehe), would it be possible for to publish a flowchart on how product improvements/requests are handled, and what stages they move through so we better can understand the process? The Snowstorm team, which does Viewer work and integrates work both by other Linden teams and open source contributions has a detailed flowchart on the wiki of how issues move through the change process. That's the workflow for the STORM project, so there's an implied step not show in which the VWR issues are triaged and moved to that flowchart... Thanks, that is useful. Perhaps you could generalize the chart so it is valid for all your products and more detailed in the triage steps, although, perhaps, the bulk of issues end up in the viewer. It would also be useful if you published RACI* charts for your products so we know who you think are the stakeholders and who are the decision makers. *Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed

--We do not depend on Facebook/Twitter to communicate with you, but since so many of our Residents are using these social platforms, it makes sense for us to be where you are--from a communication perspective--in addition to being inworld and using inworld communication tools. Today, most smart businesses use social media to reach out to customers, get feedback, etc. and we are not only using them, but also providing clarity on which ones are best for different types of communication and audiences. That said, it’s completely opt-in. And, more importantly, using these social networks is an effective way to reach new potential customers and grow Second Life. That sounds pretty good to everyone, Many small businesses have a presence on Facebook because they don't have their own social media platform where they have their customers full attention. SecondLife customers logs on to that platform to do their business, and you have every means possible to communicate directly with them there. That is a heck of a difference! (...on a side note, I hope your new platform will be visible inside the viewer or at least tightly integrated.) When you review you communications strategy, you need to instill in everyone involved that you already have the ideal (perhaps not in tooling) platform for communication with your customers; it is completely captive and you don't need to go elsewhere. That you use Facebook, twitter and others as a secondary communications channel it fine, and it may also be an efficient channel for prospecting new customers. The biggest problem is that you have little control over what direction your Facebook communication takes; you try to convey a message, but that can be highly skewed by comments and likes for that profile, This is not something small businesses will see as they have a defined product set that usually is not controversial like parts of SecondLife can be with other Facebook users. I also see a large portion of the fan photos placed on the SecondLife profile is product marketing for resident businesses. Not sure that was the intention? I hope the new communications platform also will be mobile friendly so we can hang on to our secondlifes also when not in front of the big screen. ;-)

It will be interesting seeing the marketing effect of SecondLife Facebook filling up with likes from resident profiles of escorts, slut-wear merchants, Gor masters dragging their women and slaves, vampires, sex bed creators, shackled slaves, yiff loving critters and furies, femdom goddesses, child avatars and role players all mixed up with teens.

Since you are removing voting in JIRA (we kinda suspected you did not use it anyway, hehe), would it be possible for to publish a flowchart on how product improvements/requests are handled, and what stages they move through so we better can understand the process?

By insisting SecondLife is a game, you limit your audience. That is the entire point. What you call it is irrelevant. What Linden Lab market it as is imperative for the success of this place.

I totally agree with you on that, and I think it is important to squish the use of the word game or in game when talking about SecondLife because it creates false expectations for new and potential residents on what they will experience here. So they turn away bored. Yes, you may play games in SecondLife, the but the environment is not a game in itself.

You completely ignored the part where I said that it should have hit the development community for a longer period of time before going into the stable tree. The overall arrangement of the UI, language used in some of the menus not withstanding, is a big step closer to being inline with MacOS and GNOME's UIs. Changing the language of the some menus while they are strewn all over the place sure no UI compliance makes. It would be interesting to make a mockup of the viewer as it should be according to Apple Human Interface Guides. It would look quite different from v2, and actually some of the Ui elements from v1 is much closer. I might actually do that in Interface builder and publish it. One of the biggest mistakes you do in UI building is to keep it in the developer community only, here is what AHUI guide says about that in the Design Fundamentals section: Involving Users in the design process The best way to make sure your product meets the needs of your target audience is to expose your designs to the scrutiny of your users. Doing this during every phase of the design process can help reveal which features of your product work well and which need improvement. When you give people an opportunity to use your product (or a prototype of it) you may uncover usability problems that you did not anticipate during your initial design phase. Finding and eliminating these problems early can save you time and money later on. Clearly identifying the needs of your users helps you create products that deliver effective solutions and are typically easier for them to learn and use. These improvements can translate into competitive advantages, increased sales, and enhanced customer satisfaction. The part LL seems to neglect over and over again is the ...doing this during every phase of the design process..., where they only blurt it out as a beta that goes live to everyone the same day or max a week later. So the feedback they would get during the early design phases completely escapes them, and when it comes to beta it is really to late as they have also implemented the server backend to support it at that time. (mesh is an exception from the above) It further says: It is useful to create scenarios that describe a typical day of a person who uses the type of software product you are designing. Think about the different environments, tools, and constraints that this person deals with. If possible, visit actual workplaces and study how people perform those tasks you intend your product to help them perform. Throughout the design process, find people who fit your target audience to test your prototypes. Listen to their feedback and try to address their concerns. Develop your product with people and their capabilities—not computers and their capabilities—in mind. Unfortunately the design target for v2 are new signups, and forgot the rest of the audience, and this is almost impossible to undo without going back to the drawing board. The only logical outcome of that is to stop doing more development on the v2 interface, freeze it in a stable state, and put your resources into getting v3 right.

;-)) Let's put it this way; I think there were many lessons learned on both side in this case. However, at the outset I believe it was pretty clear how those sims were supposed to be used. With the direction it took, it had to come to an end.

This honestly surprised me. Not for what Linden Research did, they were only enforcing the usage scenarios they advertised for those regions; but what people buying into OpenSpace did. Heck, even the name is indicative of what it was intended for: Sparse regions with little, light weight development. Not malls. Not apartment allotments. Just space where acreage mattered more than object count or scripts. Agreed, no fail on LL here.

All in all the new v2 GUI brings a lot to the table, and brings it more inline with the GUI design standards for two of the three supported operating systems (with Windows, as usual, being gratuitously different from the rest of the world). The new GUI brings a lot to the table all right - a lot for grief and utter frustration. As to bringing it more in line with supported operating systems, I can tell you, it is as far from the Apple UIG as it can be. All the way from the placement of menus, use of system widgets, colors, to consistence and usage of screen real estate. It is not consistent with anything. Absolutely nothing. Further, the entire code is structured in such a way you can't even separate the GUI from the core engine. Total fail in system design. Yes, they have made good strides in performance both for the viewer and the grid, but with all the extra clicks and errors you make because of inconsistency every time you want to do something, it sure feels slower overall.

Not only that, but these days, you pretty much need Facebook to be visible in the marketplace. There is a difference between being visible on Facebook and telling your customers to go to Facebook on your login screen and communication in blogs and email messages. That is just disingenuous and completely failed marketing.

Heh, I don't know what their ambition is, but let us call this an early concept that shows: They can upload an arbitrary mesh based avatar They can apply mesh based clothing and accessories The animation of the mesh is pretty snappy (tested on iPad) They can search their directory They can give feedback The help file says you will be able to modify and dress the avatar in a later version. I suppose it will prompt existing users to log on and upgrade their avatar - good for the content providers and general mobilization of the user base. I am sure it will appeal to the big crowd that spends a lot of time dressing their barbie-doll avatar including new users. If you look at the amount of accessories and clothes for the SL barbies, in addition to the time spent on this, I am not sure it is such a bad starting point for their app.

...but the basic server code is OpenSim, which is open standard and shared by many grids (worlds). I don't expect LL to journey far from the standard. Actually that is not true, as Opensim is a reverse engineering of LL's server code, and they are at about 70% of the functionality in the LL server – which is a moving target too. Opensim has been the baseline for most of the other grids, but we see deviation from the "standard" here also since Inworldz have forked that code to rewrite the asset system in addition to other private functions. The folks behind Imprudence are also now behind a fork they call Aurora-sim, so this is not so clear cut any more. They have said they will add functionality in their viewer to match their server software as a priority. On an interesting sidenote, Bluemars have released the client for iPod, iPhone and iPad today in the App store.

@Rene, Which part of "in a family oriented grid, there will be real children" was it you did not understand? Try to apply my argument to that eventuality ;-) I mean, do you seriously think anyone but a child can appear as a child in such an environment?

I agree with you in principle that the more self governed an online community is, the less likely it will be subject to legislative or political intervention. This is an opinion I voiced to LL back in 2008 when we hosted a couple meetings on the subject. The error you make in your analysis is that you assume legislation is the same in the rest of the world as in the US. Remember more than half of the revenue for Linden Lab comes from areas of the world where the view on this may be very different. Not following such legislation may exclude you from a big chunk of the market such as the EU countries. This is the primary reason why I believe many connected sub-grids hosted in, and adapted to more localized legislation would work better as you in sum could provide more diversity and a wider span of offerings.

I've been a child avatar for the entire 5 years i've been in SL. Those who know me wether they are Adult avatars, furries, mermaids, giant hamsters, Griffins or dragons appreciate me and the work ive done in SL. I'm sorry that my choice of self expression of childish imagination and creativity for the past five years causes some people to WILDLY generalise my type of avatar and associate my avatar with their own perverted ideas. This has nothing to do with perverted ideas, but protecting the underage. First of all we know there currently are underage in SL all the way down to the age of 10. Secondly, if SL evolve to be a family venue, there will be real children in here. We then cannot have a situation where adult persons impersonate children; real children may not understand there is an adult behind the avatar. This is clearly a situation that can be taken advantage of. There is simply too much at stake – also for the person impostering a child who could risk ending up in a register or worse. I also believe parents would be pretty freaked out over adults impersonating children in front of their own children regardless of the motivation of the adult behind a child avatar (unless perhaps for a theatrical performance, but then again in RL you would not make any mistake about the person being adult or not). Finally, this is an area where we both culturally and in our legislation seek to protect the child, and the room for expression of the adult is limited for good reasons.

That is how we got the pedos in SL - anything goes doesn't work! Well, LL has not exactly been helpful here; allowing the child avatars to exist has both contributed to the anything goes impression, and played up to the agenda of pedos. There sure will be no room for adults running around masqueraded as kids if there are real kids in-world.

I am sorry, but the provider of the service is liable in the eyes of the law. A complicating factor is that the service is offered globally, so all kinds of legislation can potentially get into the mix. Which is why splitting the grid into more themed sub-gids that have TOS adapted to the theme. These could be hosted in different legislations to make diversification simpler from a legal standpoint. In this scenario LL could have the role as SAAS provider and not be the legal owner of the grids – these could be farmed out to separate entities licensing the solution. In such a solution portable inventories and ability to move between grids would be important for the overall success.

Brett Linden said: Looks like we have a huge pro-Facebook crowd here To all the Facebook haters: There is something called "knowing your audience". Facebook is first life, SecondLife is second life and they don't mix up very good most of the time. What (it looks like) you are trying to do is to create an image on Facebook of how vibrant SecondLife is, but you do so at the expense of your own customers. Besides, it is very risky business as Facebook is a venue that will compete both for your customers time and energy. You risk loosing more current customers than you gain new. Also Facebook users are typically in the non-spending-on-internet crowd as they rather spend in RL on things they can show off on Facebook. There are other venues you as a company can get more active, and this in a space where people are used to subscription based access, and are high consumers of digital content; the mobile area. This is where the real battle for attention will unfold – also for SecondLife. I wish everyone a nice spring break when it comes. Looks like the northern hemisphere will be in for some rough winter weather still in weeks to come.

There have been other events that required the use of Facebook or flickr. There was a Valentine's Day event last year that required posting a snapshot, for example. Yes, there have, and the wisdom of sending your customers to a site that competes for their time and attention to register and participate in an activity for SecondLife is nevertheless questionable. Maybe next quarter we can be presented with the efficiency of this strategy.

With reference to the latest Spring Break in Secondlife blog posting, I think marketing tactics like this will backfire on Linden Lab to the extent we will see it in the next quarter figures. "Show off your freshest “Spring Break” look (deadline: Feb. 6) by submitting your head-to-toe avatar shots to our Facebook page, where you’ll also find complete entry and image guidelines." So here, you actually have to go to FaceBook, and most likely register as a user there, to participate in SecondLife activities. I find it rather shocking to be frank.

I think this baffles many of us. Perhaps the push to have RL info in the public profile has got to do with this. The Like button, however, has nothing to do with the FB profile as it will only establish a link between am arbitrary Facebook account and an arbitrary SL profile if clicked. So unless you like yourself from your FB account, there is no immediate link that can reveal your identity. Add to that, I suppose the "Your profile is % finished" progress bar that is displayed on the profile will prompt a lot of new users to register their RL information on the profile, perhaps not even realizing it will be for all the world to see.

I think you'll be surprised how high the use of the iPad is at home displacing a laptop or desktop, simply because it is small, light and easy to lay on the coach with or take to the bathroom or whatever.... If BM are going to render on servers and stream to the client, they will for all practical purposes limit themselves to a wi-fi connected device, but that may not be such big constraint as you first think. This might have to do with that the graphics render they have used have been windows-only. However, for an SL client, you don't have to render on a server since the iOS devices can render OpenGL directly. The SL desktop client works reasonably good even on an EDGE connection once your environment has settled down. The biggest issue is latency when moving about. For a 3G connection the SL viewer works well to snappy depending on the connection speed you get. I routinely log onto SL over 3G. A mobile client could be placed in a canned environment or a max draw distance of say 16 meters significantly limiting the amount of data sent to the device. Turn of tree movements, clouds, bird chirps and voice, and the viewer does not have to update the environment all the time from the server. This is not unpossible. ;-))

How do they expect to operate a cloud concept in a limited bandwidth environment? One user-in-the-know stated it could take up to a gig an hour to operate Blue Mars. How do they expect that to succeed when Apple charges what, $25 a month for 2 gigs? First of all all iOS devices has wi-fi, so in a home environment they can run at the same network speed as your desk or laptop. One would expect access to Blue Mars to be prevalent in the home. Second: Apple does not charge for bandwidth. They don't sell that. An owner of man iOS device will purchase that from an IPS or a Telco. Third: By letting the avatar operate in a "canned" environment, much, if not all of it will be cached on the device, and since there is little interaction with the surroundings, bandwidth requirements are pretty low. Just try it yourself. After you have settled down in a skybox, you will see your bandwidth with SL viewer 2.4 or higher slows down to 3-5 kb/sec. Which is perfectly acceptable for a mobile connection. Chat and IM adds very little overhead on top of that, and since the device also is an iPod, you possibly have the music you want to listen to local anyway.

If these few functions is all it takes to make a VW, then two pickles and a bun are all you need for a supersized combo at Burger King. They are not, but then again most of us are not bolted to a gaming rig throughout the day. The client hierarchy would possibly evolve to be this: iPhone - stay connected primarily though messaging, in addition to shopping and avatar dressing iPad - light to middle level interaction in addition to the above PC client type system - immersion and content creation The entire point of also going mobile is to get relevant in a space that explodes both in terms of technical capabilities, customer focus, content creation and real dollars. It is about to create new revenue streams and opportunities both for Linden Lab and content providers in SecondLife. I believe it is also a big opportunity to proliferate virtual worlds – much more so than chasing the Facebook crowd.