Gavin Hird

For the profile suggestions you mean? ... or the snapshots.

Have you changed the aspect ratio of the picks pictures again? All my pictures seems horizontally squeezed. In the new web profiles the ratio is 1:1 - previously it was often 4:3. So 1.4 million profile pictures (active users) needs to be redone. I bet the snapshot tool still defaults to 4:3 aspect ratio images.

- the web profiles are produced by the Social team not the Viewer 2 team - what is happenning is a strategic decision by LL ... Then the Social team needs to start socializing with the residents to get a handle on what they want their second social life to be like.

On the privacy issue, you need to rethink the structuring of the profiles: There could be a small public section that was always visible on the web, with the rest of the profile being internal to SecondLife. There could be a "view full profile" link on the public one, and if clicked by a non-logged in person, it would direct you to the sign up page like so many other sites that has "sensitive" profile information do. In addition there could be an adult section of the profile which was only visible to SL residents who had checked to see adult content in their preferences. I would also like to see all alts of a primary being visible on a profile in-world. This would sober up the use of alts, and to a large extent prevent misuse of such accounts. You need to be sensitive to that profile information such as group membership and picks can, if disclosed as being linked to the real person behind the account, be damaging to career, personal reputation and even life (i.e. a person acting out being gay in SecondLife, for which there exist a death penalty in his country of residence.) You cannot expect people to thin down their profiles to nanny state in-world, and by that I mean hiding all group memberships and removing picks from their profile, in fear of what is disclosed on the internet.

I agree with you there is no massive and immediate need for mesh at the moment, and as your rightfully point out, the learning curve and cost is rather steep. I'd rather see a better avatar mesh first and better animation of the avatar (like fingers/hands). I also think it must be very clear in the mind of everyone that SecondLife is not a game. If you fall into that crack, you will quickly start making fatal errors. So hopefully the new CEO will be deaf on that ear, regardless of his background.

Hi, and welcome onboard. One of the first things you could poke at is to get the Mac version of the viewer listed as a free download in the Mac App store. This should give you some decent exposure (store claiming 1 million downloads on the opening day) at a very low marketing dollar. It would be listed in both the Games, Lifestyle and Social networking sections. ... and while you are at it, make sure development starts working on the mobile version of the viewer now because also SecondLife must urgently get relevant in the mobile / tablet space that is rapidly developing/exploding. – Actually, in my head, that should be your #1 prio.

Please make the background download optional. To brute force a background download is a particularly bad idea for folks on slow, metered or mobile connections.

Faubio.Alter wrote: Only five percent of home computer users use Macs. Mac users aren't a "big thing". Gee, thanks for your support. How many SL user are Mac users? How many of them are premium account holders? Where is your stats on that? The point is not to do so much with Mac users, but with Linden Lab which (again) ships releases with major bugs in them.

Anti-alisasing produce a totally garbled display on my MacBook Pro with NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M, so it must be turned off for the viewer to work. It also set the graphics settings back to some default. Would be nice if it asked to keep the old settings from the previous version.

The entire approach seems to be rather complicated with double names all over. There are a few things we need to keep in mind with this approach: user identities on logon must be unique you have a need to register RL information about an account (for whatever purpose such as billing and age verify) you ideally only want one name to be associated with an avatar at any given time (the current proposal has 2) from a security standpoint, displaying the login ID is never a good idea Fact: Every account is currently uniquely identified with a UUID and a unique login name What if we toss the following into the equation (and this is a different approach): Create a SUUID (super UUID) that can only be registered to one RL person (industry standard verification) and that has a unique logon that is never shown to anyone else than the user and admins Every profile would be an alt of the SUUID, and these profiles have their own UUIDs that can hold an arbitrary name in Unicode. This UUID is thus a child of the SUUID On logon you log on with the main account logon, and then choose which alt you want to take in-world. This means you can have multiple logons to the account, but you can only take one instance of an alt in-world at any time. Residents will only see one name for an alt, but profiles will show the UUID in addition. You may want to enable a copy function that both copy name and UUID in the same operation. A search for a UUID would always go to the same profile regardless of name in use for the alt, and perhaps a name history of say 10 would be in the order for the profile. Clicking on a name, say in chat or IM will take you to the same profile. There are several advantages to this: you increase security as the logon ID is never displayed to anyone (like it is now and in the proposal) having alts being children of a super UUID makes it possible to implement inventories that are completely portable between alts you separate display name from logon identity completely, and these are, in reality just a label you can, optionally, let people flag their display name as being a RL identity in their profiles (switchable by alt so you can have an official that can coexist with more anonymous profiles) this also makes it much harder to create alts for griefing purposes as they must be connected to a RL identity Because of name collision in RL we have invented the SSN to separate people at times when you really need to know their identity. You can design the identity system around the same type of approach, letting the SUUID, in effect be the SL equivalent of the SSN.

I am more surprised that 36% of landmass is homesteads. Would be interesting to know if there is a conversion of full estates sims to homesteads, cause if that happens, tier income should drop.

Q Linden wrote: "Viewer 2 sucks, ...The sooner you guys get into the "We think it sux too – what were we thinking?!" mode the better, and you would score big with your customers for admitting it. Your course of action could be: Freeze the current 2.1.x development in a stable condition and stop there, including no more adding of new "features" like display names. Then take a very good look at the 2.x branch code and re-architect it so you can layer over it a UI that is adoptable to and complies with operating system user interface standards. This will enable you to create user interfaces that at the core complies with the UI guidelines of various Linux distros, Apple's UI guidelines and Windows 7. But more importantly, that will also enable new mobile user interfaces that use touch, gestures, gyros and accelerometers to operate. Provide the Snowglobe 1.5 branch as your official viewer for now, but also direct users at reliable alternatives if they want more options. A couple hints for the re-architecting: Making the viewer a true Mac OS X UI compliant application is probably the biggest depart from the current code in terms of separation. If you accomplish this you have possibly gone as far as you need in separating the UI from your core code (the version 2 branch). So this is a good case study. It obviously means that you in the future will have to maintain more operating environment specific code, but you will gain in user satisfaction and adoption, and most likely less load on your service desk. Integrating WebKit into the code is in my opinion important. Why? Because a number of the functions that is currently hardcoded into the viewer can be separated out to services that are rendered with html(5) inside the viewer. Profiles, group functions, chat, editors, search and others spiring to mind. This makes it possible for you to scale faster and also iterate faster on the functionality of such features without having to push viewer updates constantly. Drop flash support over proper html5 support.

Gavin, you can't compare Apple with Linden Lab, that's like comparing McDonald to your local diner. They don't have the same ressources, money, amount of employees, etc... No, but they can have the same attitude to market development and their developers. The scrambling to fix fundamental flaws in their viewer 2 design is far more costly. As is alienating their current users. ;-)

Prokofy Neva wrote: I'd love for you coding Lindens for once in your lives to meet with a group of 20 people who *aren't* the geeks. Who *aren't* the hacker freaks. Who *aren't* the JIRA lifers. Who aren't there to goof around with you, impress you, talk shop with you, suck up to you, or bond with you in tribal opensource ecstasy, but who are just there to tell you very, very simple stuff about how the viewer as it is now *hobbles commerce*. That's all. How it *destroys business*. By people who actually use these tools all day in their full glory, unlike you all, who use only pieces of them, and only usually to obsess on one piece of them or break them (Sorry, but Esbee telling us she shops and jetskis and all the rest doesn't cut it, because she doesn't *run a business all day* with group tools, land tools, communications tools, etc. Let her even do something fairly small like I do, running groups with 500 or 700 people in their and half a million meters of land on dozens of different sims with all the group permissions and issues, and then tell me the UI isn't broken.) I am not sure how this has become the order of the day at the Lab, but it seems like they are under the impression they can evolve the product without their content providers and premium account holders, of which they in fact are 100% reliant on. There are many small witnesses to this fact, but the main evidence is in viewer 2 and the new marketplace. Both, in different ways, have removed or suppressed core functionality that is vital to anyone trying to run an efficient business or community group in-world. The sensible way for the Lab to handle this is to start having developer conferences which focus on the core needs of these groups of users in combination with presentation of development and business plans, so both the Lab and developers work towards a common goal. We see how this has been very successful in the case of the iPhone and the App store. Apple is holding a firm hand on the development of the platform (hardware, operating system, development tools and overall marketing), but at the same time (despite some hauling) encourage developers to create just about any content you can imagine (the exception being porn and malware.) In doing so, do they stomp on the developers? Do they limit options? Yes, they limit some options that will serve to compromise the platform. But on the other hand, in iOS 4 alone, they added over 1500 new APIs, largely as a result of developer feedback. In addition hundreds of new user and UI enhancements. Did you see any Apple rep complaining in office meetings or blog posts that this was hard to program, or added to their testing burden? Of course not! Yes, it is hard to program, yes it is hard to test, but you add to your capabilities and refine your product to move forward and create a bigger market. A mentality shift is in order for the Lab, in particular when it comes to covering the needs of the developers they rely 100% on for their continued success. When it comes to the specifics on what to do with the viewer, you can read my posts further up if you are interested. PS. The open source process can be very useful to drive product development forward provided you have a development target, and firm product management and feature prioritization. I am not a big believer in scrum for this kind of development. Nokia has used in extensively, and they have consistently poured out crappy user interfaces and functions on their phones.

* Removing industry standard menus such as FILE, EDIT, VIEW and TOOLS... menus that are used by every Windows and Mac and Linux user in the nation and have been for years, was an extremely poor decision. Agreed! Why? Two words: EXPECTED BEHAVIOR Every time a user must unlearn behavior that is consistent across applications in his operating environment, he gets frustrated. This is particularly true for new users, where this significantly can raise the barrier of entry.

Well, in the case of the marketplace it would be interesting to see who you think your customers are, and how the requirements were put together? Code can be as complex as it wants if the outcome (in this case for the marketplace) is reduced cost of doing a transaction (for the merchants) and better exposure and brand management to drive more transactions. I don't see you have achieved any of these outcomes.

Q Linden wrote: Regarding the various accusations of condescension and not listening to our customers, how about a little reciprocity? I'm trying to have a somewhat nuanced, open discussion, explaining some of Linden Lab's desires and constraints, and what I get in return seems to be an attack because I haven't simply agreed to some hypothetical ideal. I'm listening and trying to engage, are you? Q, there are a few things, you as a company, needs to quickly get a handle on in your communication before this snowstorm develops into a blizzard: It is more than likely that the number of people making their entire income in SecondLife is substantially higher than the number of Linden Lab salaried staff. If you add to that the people who make a significant portion of their monthly income in SecondLife, you are looking at 2500+ number (according to your last resident profit distribution stats.) You, as a company, are totally dependent on the content providers in SecondLife. Without them, your company would become irrelevant to the customers you try to attract. For a good section of your customers – the section who provides the bulk of your income, you are not much more than a platform / service provider from which they expect stability, performance, support and reasonable protection of investment. The reason why you get the reactions you get from the above section of your customers, is that a number of the initiatives you have – let me say, sprung on these customers, such as viewer 2, changes in search and the SL Marketplace, significantly impacts, mostly negatively, these customers ability to make business in SecondLife. What you in essence is doing is taking away the tools of the trade these people use more or less every minute in SecondLife in the process of doing their business. The business you, as a company, is 100% dependent on for your existence. --- You know what? After seeing your colleague's response earlier in the thread, the prospect of creating a new avatar to participate in the anniversary of an alternative viewer, on another grid, seems so much brighter than continue to flog this dead horse that viewer 2 is.

To get some idea on how to minimize UI clutter, study how the inspector in Apple's Keynote application works. It has many parallels to the current Build floater only with a somewhat different implementation. It is flexible, gives the user the power needed for the context and tries to stay out of the way as much as possible. If you don't have a Mac or Keynote, find a friend or colleague who has and get the idea.

Here is a posting I made earlier today, in a slightly different context, but the zest of it is that you urgently need to separate core code from the UI for a number of reasons. One of them being the issue you bring up in this discussion; providing user interfaces matching the skills of the users and complexity level for the task at hand. The below will also facilitate your above stated goal. Here is the post: "What Linden Lab needs to do is to freeze the current 2.1.x development in a stable condition and stop there, including no more adding of new "features" like display names. Then they need to take a very good look at the 2.x branch core code and layer over it a UI that is adoptable to and complies with operating system user interface standards. This will enable them to create user interfaces that at the core complies with the UI guidelines of various Linux distros, Apple's UI guidelines and Windows 7. But more importantly, that will also enable new mobile user interfaces that use touch, gestures, gyros and accelerometers to operate. Emerald does not fit the above bill, but is one alternative LL may point the user base at, as a stopgap, till we see a lets call it version 3 viewer emerge. Possibly the best bet would be to offer Snowglobe 1.5.x as the LL viewer for now, and also point users to reliable alternatives like Imprudence and, if something like that exist, a clean, malware free Emerald and others. Even though Kirsten's viewer is somewhat better than Linden's v2.x, it is still a bastard when it comes to the UI."

Lias... Teens and Zindra are like oil and water. You know where the focus gonna be, eh? ;-)

Welcome Kim, I hope you will have many happy marketing moments at the Lab! Let's see if you brought your own little RDF in your tool chest. We could need some clever use of it here and there both in land and lab. ;-) Ping! Ah, one little detail I left out. Remember the future is mobile.