Gavin Hird

Not sure all paid is the way to go, but one could adapt the system many adult sites have; you can only get to the juice as a paying customer. In SL that could translate to you can't reach mature and adult regions without payment. The main challenge is that the burden on the premium accounts are too large to safely carry this forward. Someone, about a year ago, made a fairly detailed estimate that every premium account must, on average, contribute $470 per month for Linden Lab to break even. This was based on the size of the world, premium account holders and LL staff at the time. I am sure the number would be about the same today – could even be higher. So either LL needs to find a significant alternative revenue stream, or they must scale down as was evident in the 30% layoffs.

Frankly, the whole thing makes me embarassed on LL's behalf. I wish they would stop treating SL as some sort of in-house development project - where bugs don't get fixed, and where half thought out, half developed, half planned features and functions are deemed good enough to be released - and in stead start seeing it as the commercial service it is and start planning features from start to finish, concider what their customers want and need, and actually develop SL based on this. I don't think ANY other company who provides a commercial service like SL would go about things the way LL do. - Luc - I agree. As I have said elsewhere in the blog, at times it seems like Linden Lab's beta program is totally out of control – at least when it comes to customer facing applications and services. They have made great strides in increasing performance and stability of the grid. But when it comes to the marketplace, the blogs and forums, the viewer and support it is close to disaster, both in terms of information, features, usability and privacy. My main beef in this particular case is that they – under the cover of a beta, have thrown people's trust in reasonable privacy on the boat, for who knows what. Even without telling anyone. The damage for the current customer base is already done. If they need to generate more revenue, for heavens sake tell us and don't just sell us out for ad space. I am sure that, in a positive dialog with land owners and content creators, together we could make the platform grow with revenue increasing for everyone. We understand this is your little baby, but there are thousands of babies riding along with you who also wants to grow up. You don't have go it alone Linden Lab!

Try remove words such as lovingly, kissable, lustrous, You also break the new listing rules by using names like Angelina Jolie and Lady GaGa in your text. See if that gives you any milage.

Make one of the products active as adult and give us the name of it so we can look at your text.

Ai Velde wrote: I changed everything. I changed the name, I changed the image, I changed the description, I changed the keywords. Nothing fixes it. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It keeps going right back to adult even when it's a bare ass listing. I give up. LL doesn't want me to have a business, fine. Anything in the other language sections that could trip it up?

Gonna twitter my feedback here: Upgraded to 2.5 beta 2 (Mac) and when I want to open a profile I get the SSL handshake failure message as some had seen before (worked fine in beta 1). Then I switched to the web based version in my browser to delete a classified, and that was not possible, but clicking the classified it switched me back to the viewer that opened that portion of the profile in the sidebar. How to delete the thing was guesswork till I discovered a trash can in the lower left corner. Very convoluted I'd say. Pls advice on the SSL message in beta 2?

I am rather surprised that so much mainland is now on Linden hands. Last time I checked the figure was quite a bit lower. Perhaps TG sims are now part of that number? It does seem alarmingly high. Intuitively I would think the Linden homes have had a chilling effect on mainland, and as I have blogged before, I believe the effect would have been much more positive had they been intermingled into mainland on existing abandoned land. Another thing that strikes me is that Linden Lab seems to be in a "go-it-alone" mode, rather than both take input from, and cooperate with land-owners and content creators to generate new accounts and revenue. These two groups of residents do have an interest of generating more income, which again would create additional revenue for LL.

You can find the answer to many of these questions at the Gridsurvey website. But I agree, yes, they should have been answered by Linden Lab.

Yeh, I just posted this to the general forum.

Well, if i ran a company and would allow unrestricted access to adult and illegal content ( e.G. sexually motivated cannibalism) on my pages and would risk to lose about 10 (germany) to 50(europe)% of my clients by publishing this to everyone, i'd most probably would be concerned about that and think over the decision of publishing such stuff publically. I absolutely understand that parents report such content to the authorities. Sometimes, the responsible people in companies should think first about possible consequences of making content from a closed communtiy publically available without any control by the persons who created this content inside the closed community and without age verification instruments. Jeannie Well, I am not sure if publishing profiles with said content is illegal anywhere per se – that is highly dependent on the local legislation. There are tons on US based web-sites that have profiles with similar content. BUT, the difference is that such sites also have privacy settings in effect and don't just blurt out the juice in a beta with no warning on the unsuspecting community. They also usually have mechanism to control how much will be displayed, which this new "feature" seems to be highly lacking or is buggy to prevent proper operation (which should of course have been removed in a controlled beta and not on live data.) As far as I can see, Google has started indexing and caching these profiles. What might get LL in the slammer is the publishing of the child avatar profiles which must be highly controversial if not illegal in most countries. A child (underage) may very well like or friend a child avatar (which there presumably is a grown up individual behind) without understanding what is going on.

I don't think having a public section of the profile is such a bad thing, but it must be managed carefully. You could create a simple Privacy matrix (kindoff like the friends list) for things like: public visible in SL friends private ---------------------+------------------+-------------------+-------------------+-----------------+ group name x x x group name 2 x group name 3 x real life information x picks x x x adult region picks x classifieds x x linked-in x twitter x x Facebook x x x homepage/blog x x x other items..... like gallery, whatever comes up in the future I guess you get the idea? Ads would never be displayed for premium account holders. It would require a restructuring of the profiles, but it would result in higher flexibility that would satisfy all parties. It could live in a privacy tab in preferences. ... sorry for the awful table. I could not be bothered to do it in html :-O

Not sure how much you achieve here but kick yourself in the teeth and get SL blocked in Germany. Even within the union there is quite diverse legislation when it comes to these things, where i.e Germany for historical reasons have fascism legislation in place that no other country has.

All other opinions aside, the web profiles do objectively seem to be an order of magnitude slower to load than the old profiles. It may be a justifiable tradeoff for some other functionality, though then we're back to whether waiting 8 seconds is worth a Facebook "Like" button, which seems to be the only added "benefit". Are there plans to extend the web profiles with further functionality, so the choice of a web platform is essentially a matter of easy updates? This is just pure speculation, but it would stand to reason group functionality including group chat could load in webkit inside the viewer. However, if this is how they plan to implement the UI of it, it is a total clash with the rest of the viewer and actually makes it even harder to master the environment for new users. I looked at how much a profile actually loads in terms of data, and it will be in the order 700k to 1 meg depending on the size of the profile pic. This is very inefficient compared to the old profile that only loads short, efficient text strings in addition to the picture. Javascript was a good portion of the data that was loaded. To make a better experience for web-based profiles, which at the back-end makes sense, would be to make widget floaters that match the rest of the viewer UI all implemented in html5. We have multiple examples of such widgets both in Mac OS X and Windows 7 that could serve as inspiration.

Darren, The web profiles work was not done by Q Linden's area - it was done by another (the SOCIAL team). Q's area is much more open than many other areas of LL and you can find out more and even attend meetings that they hold - see details here. We have been over this all before in the forums multiple times: For far reaching changes having meetings for a few select simply does not cut it. We, the residents, want to be INFORMED and CONSULTED before the fact. BEFORE a single line of code is written! So we - the paying customers can say no, this is not the way we want to have things around here. Throwing our privacy on the boat is one such change that residents should have voted on. To illustrate what is happening with the profiles, type "site:my.secondlife.com groups" into Google search and watch how Google has started caching and indexing those profiles.

A couple more questions: Does this mean that only the G section of the marketplace can be browsed by a non logged-in person over whom you have no control of age or maturity preferences? What about gift items? Will it only be possible to gift items to an account that has the same maturity level as the product in question?

Will these guidelines be detailed enough to also apply to goods sold in-world? I mean there is no point i locking them out of the marketplace if they can purchase the "forbidden fruits" in-world. Edit: It will seriously disadvantage marketplace merchants if the same goods can be traded on G parcels, yeah?

Lets face it...LL isn't going to take your whining and complaints in to serious consideration. They stopped doing that a few years ago. Let LL do as they will. Its their product, not ours. We own NOTHING in or about SecondLife. Lindens even tell us that in the TOS. SL/LL is not a publicly traded company. Therefore, none of us are true stakeholders or shareholders and none of our opinions really matter. If you think that the content creators and sim "owners" are not stakeholders, think again. There is no way Linden Lab could supply the content currently available in SL with own staff. SecondLife would be closed in the blink of an eye if the content providers pulled the plug. Do you for a single moment think that Apple's App store would be anywhere without the thousands of content developers trading their apps in the store? The big difference is that Apple keep their developers both posted, informed and involved in terms of their roadmap, technologies and APIs to put into the platform. They do it under NDA, and so could LL do when secrecy are required. Actually Linden Lab needs a proper developer program and developer conferences. That would help advance the platform, and keep investors and developers from guesswork and being subject to the whim of the week.

IAll this fussing is silly if not out right stupid. If you still do not feel that SL is safe, then cancel your account and there is nothing to fear, but I am sure you will find something if you have to make it up. To ask people who are concerned about privacy issues to beat it, is rather disingenuous and does not contribute anything to the debate. I don't know what part of the world you are from, but both from a personal and European perspective, Linden Lab needs to recognize that most European countries have privacy legislation that is much more restrictive in terms of disclosure to 3rd parties, and if marketing the product in this part of the world, they also need to observe and follow the legislation in Europe. Also, springing such issues on residents through a beta is either which way you see it, not the right way forward. If you are to introduce a "feature" like this, you do it in a controlled beta /test and not just dump the entire profile database out for grabs on the net like has been done now. The information has been live on the website long enough for many to have had time to crawl it and start using it – most likely to everyones disadvantage. You also thoroughly notify and discuss in advance with your customers when making major changes like this. Then you take feedback and act on it before going live. My feeling is that the beta process at Linden Lab at times are completely out of control. I find it rather discomforting that they have no published roadmap of where this will take us. Everyone who have invested in SecondLife are stakeholders in this, and we are not consulted or informed.

What about the people who are married in RL and "partnered" or married in SL, without the knowledge of their RL spouse? Granted they're being dishonest, but do you really want to risk wrecking hundreds of RL marriages? What about the children? You folks REALLY did not think this one through ... and you didn't ask those of us who must bear the consequences, which as one resident has noted, could extend even to death. Child avatars could also face some really interesting quality time facing neighbors, colleagues, family and others if their profiles get linked to RL individuals and identities.

My concerns are less associated with privacy, but more to do with those of us on low bandwidth connections - waiting 10-15 seconds to see a profile is not very good. A function that was more or less instant, has been demoted to the speed of molasses on a slow line, typically as you say, taking 10-15 seconds. To open my profile, the browser gets sent a total of about 530 kb of backgrounds and javascript excluding my profile image which was 241 kb. This will quickly add up to a meg for every profile lookup if you add ads to the equation.

Um...on the web profile: why would I want this line listed as one of the primary pieces of information about me: "Payment Info:Payment info used"? You don't! That (showing if you are a paying customer or not) in combination with your picks and groups can be used to build a marketing profile of you that later can be used in directed marketing in-world, or even RL if they manage to combine your SL and RL identity.

Anyone else seeing no change when checking off show favorites on login? Not getting them in the drop-down. I can't even check it off. The setting is grayed out.

Ugg. WHY O WHY do we have to click MORE constantly to see our information??? Extremely frustrating. Try edit a classified or pick. Very convoluted. But 2.5 is faster - noticeably. ...when you don't try to do any work. They shall have that!

Not talking about in-world scripts. The new public profile that is accessible without login can be crawled by anyone who want to harvest the information, including that I have made payment transactions on this service. THAT is a big difference!

Couple of interesting things about the information publicly accessible in the profile (accessed when logged out): The internet field in the old profile is now displayed as homepage in the profile. Information that has been put here can easily be used to connect your profile and avatar to real life information. I for instance am the domain owner of the web address that was in my profile, so the connection was super-easy to establish. Why is the information Payment Info Used visible on a public profile? This can be a vector to chase down my financial information. This info has nothing at all to do on such a page. EDIT: Come to think about it, the information Payment Info Used on a public profile can be used to data mine which avatars spend money in SecondLife, and then in combination with information in your groups and picks be used for directed in-world marketing. NOT good!