Linden Lab’s Advertising of Second Life — really?

It is mentioned again and again; Linden Lab’s advertising / advertising graphics are terrible. In the comments to Serendipidy Haven’s post (reblogged below) it is mentioned more or less in passing several times.

I decided to take a look for myself. First I sent an email to the LL PR department, no reply after over a week – not really unexpected. Next I went trolling around the internet using Philip’s description of SL residents as a guide. I must have scanned a couple thousand blogs, not a single advertisement for Second Life! In fact the only place I find SL banner and side bar ads is at SL related blogs and LL’s own site!

I know that in today’s world of targeted advertising it can be difficult to know what advertising you will see. I did see a few ads for on line games (Thirst of Night and The Godfather), so someone is targeting me.

I have to conclude that if Linden Lab is advertising Second Life at all it is very minimally, and to some target other than who they believe will become SL residents.

They say there are a lot of people signing up every day, and not staying. Other than bots and alts I assume most of these people found Second Life by chance.

That leaves word of mouth, residents telling their RL friends about SL. There are several groups of residents working on various welcoming projects and LL seems to have come around and is being somewhat more helpful to them.

What Linden Lab could do to help us get the word out in RL is give us some tools to work with, nothing fancy, just the same licensed use of the Eye-In-Hand logo most companies do with their logos. Caps, Sweatshirts, Mugs, Stickers, even the jacket Philip wears in the picture below! With a little help, we, the residents could be an advertising powerhouse and the newbies would know what to expect and have a helping hand getting started.

Quote; Unquote

Reblogged from Serendipidy Haven's Blog:

• 

“The problem with creating an immersive 3-D experience is that it is just too involved, and so it’s hard to get people to engage. Smart people in rural areas, the handicapped, people looking for companionship, they love it. But you have to be highly motivated to get on and learn to use it.”  Now, read that again and tell me what you think is being said here. That particular quote comes from none other than one Philip Rosedale, aka Philip Linden, aka the person who created Second Life – i’m not …

“Houston, we’ve had a problem” – - – -

“They’ve all gone home for the weekend” responds the janitor.

It can feel like that in Second Life. There is no telling when the problem of people not being able to log in due to “stuck presence” actually started (best guess is inventory maintenance on Thursday). It was posted to Grid Status at 10:15 am on Saturday. I am writing this over 24 hours later.

The number of people in second life has understandably always been highest on the weekends. At Linden Lab that appears to be when support of all types is weakest, especially the kind of technical support needed to fix things that are broken in the code that makes SL work.

In the beginning (Linden World beta) that was an advantage. Stellar Sunshine built the beanstalk when LL went home for the weekend and left the servers on. We have all come a long way since those days. Second Life is 60 to 70 thousand or more residents on the weekends these days. Service should be at it’s best on the weekends and if there is an issue, all staff should be on 24 hour recall if they are needed. The Scouts in customer support (some of my favorite people) need to be especially well manned when the Lindens are away.

The thing Linden Lab finds hardest to change is transitioning from their comfortable geekiness of software development to the reality of customer service. It is NOT OKAY to let a problem that is preventing residents from logging in languish until Monday when everyone comes back to work!

Note: for now, if you see someone, or know of someone stuck in “presence limbo” pay them L$1, that usually will kick them to logoff.

Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.
Donald Porter, V.P. British Airways

UPDATE 1/31/2012: Timeline:

1. Oskar Linden acknowledges the issue; 26/Jan/2012 3:27 PM
2. Problem initially posted to SL jira; 27/Jan/2012 6:40 AM
3. Posted by Status Desk; 28/Jan/2012 10:15 AM
4. Rolling restarts begun on main channel; 31/Jan/2012 5:04 AM (completed 31/Jan/2012 10:24 AM)
5. Hopefully the issue is resolved.

To me, taking 5+ days to resolve an issue that is preventing your customers from accessing your product is unacceptable! Not to mention the consequences of pissing off many more people who’s friends are unable to get into SL on the weekend. A better short term fix would have been a rollback as soon as the issue was understood.

A Field Guide To Lindens

Reblogged from Serendipidy Haven's Blog:

• 

We talk about them all the time; they get the blame for pretty much everything that’s wrong with sl and they have almost mythical status… but who are these mysterious people we call the Lindens? – Is it true they have laser beams for eyes?; Are they in league with the Undead in a ploy for world domination?; Do they covertly monitor your internet and steal your bandwidth for their own secret purposes? The answer to these, and many other equally scary questions is, of course, in all probability, ‘yes’… …

Tongue-in-cheek? Are you sure?

Thanks to Hamlet for finding this

Protest SOPA & PIPA (updated)

The SOPA (house) and PIPA (senate) bills have been put on hold.The battle is not over. A lot of lobbying money is promoting these bills. They will return in modified form under a different name. Electronics Frontier Foundation is the lead organization on our side! They lobby and testify on behalf of internet freedom and security. Follow the news at their site, join if you see fit, send $ if you can. Updated 1/20/2012

———————————————————————————————-

I am a newbie at blogging, there is a lot of stuff I do not know how to do yet. If I knew how, this blog would redirect for the day to a protest and information page.

Go HERE to learn more and easily send a letter to your congresspersons.

This is all very important, in an attempt to stop on-line piracy, big money is being spent to effectively stifle all transfer of copyrighted material by making the site owner responsible. This could be the end of SL and many other sites, including Wikipedia.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller

of Geeks & Freaks

The current flap over Qarl’s Prim Alignment tool highlights one of the oldest conflicts in Second Life. Without getting into the specifics of this particular issue, the conflict breaks down to perceptions.

1. Linden Lab’s seeming view of the residents as expressed by Philip Linden is “Smart people in rural areas, the handicapped, people looking for companionship, ….”. In short, not nearly as smart and sophisticated as they are.
2. Residents often view the Lindens as a bunch of Ivory Tower Geeks with little or no experience of what Second Life is really about.

While there is a grain of truth in both perceptions, there are many exceptions and in fact the attitudes are often reversed!

As residents we need to remember that whining, venting and insults are counter-productive. I would not want to have the job of wading through a jira full of vitriol to find the few gems of productive input. If you really need to vent, start a BLOG, it works wonders when you have to think about what you are saying and post it under your own byline

The Lindens need to take a moment and THINK before they comment or set status at the jira. Your input needs to be not only factual, but sensitive to the frustrations of residents.

I certainly do not recommend a return to a heavy handed PR department or the silent treatment that we have endured in the past. Perhaps the Lab would be well served by a Miss Manners quietly looking over people’s shoulders and holding their hands when they trip into a social quagmire.

 

Remember, I’m pulling for ya. We’re all in this together! Red Green

Sometimes it is just no fun being right

As I posted in an article on December 20, Linden Lab is no longer offering Viewer 1.23, the download is gone from the official download page. Thanks to Tateru Nino for spotting this notification from Oz Linden (I am unable to find where Oz posted it). LL is deploying changes to the inventory backend that will need a patch in all viewers and they have made the decision not to include this patch in 1.23.

If you are using Viewer 1.2.3 you will have serious inventory problems beginning some time in the next few weeks when this change is deployed into the asset servers.

If you use a Third Party Viewer (including V1 based ones) you can expect an update very soon with the necessary patch.

My suggestion to those using V1 viewers is to bite the bullet and switch to a V2/3 viewer, this is only the first in a series of updates that will eventually break V1 for good.

I wish there were better alternatives for those of you who struggle in SL with V2/3 viewers

Update: Nalates has a very good explanation of this at her blog.

There is need for a “Lite” Second Life Viewer

Lately I have had several discussions with residents seeking a very efficient SL viewer. In all cases these people either 1) have computers that are on the low end of the Minimum System Requirements scale; or 2) use their computer for other things while they are in SL (have several applications running at once in separate open windows). What they all are looking for is a viewer with full graphics but minimal “bells and whistles”, one that is very efficient and uses as little computer memory as possible. They would be happy most days with a viewer sufficient simply to live in Second Life; on those days when they want to build or have need of the more advanced features like windlight settings, they can log in on a full featured viewer.

One approach might be cloud streaming SL as Hamlet discussed at NWN, although this is not really what they want and based on Hamlet’s assumptions would be a pay service.

Text viewers are another way to go. These have very rudimentary graphics if they have any at all. For the people I have spoken to this is going too far, the graphics are a big part of what makes SL enjoyable to them.

So, what could such a viewer do without, and what must be kept.

1. Build- strip everything away except rez, stretch (re-size with the white handles), rotate and move.
2. Windlight- remove the dialog, use region default at all times.
3. Inventory- full functionality, one window only.
4. Avatar appearance and clothing- full functionality.
5. Graphics- preset Low → High based on computer properties detected during install. No advanced settings. No Ultra setting. No shaders. Maybe a LOD (level of detail) slider. Draw distance slide max at 256M.
6. Transactions- full ability to buy, transfer, etc. both L$ and items both in person and via a vendor. Also to accept deliveries via Marketplace.
7. Movement- basic arrow keys + page up/down. No double click teleport or other enhancements and options.
8. Eliminate- built in AO, spell check, translator, flight assist, color selection for chat or tags, or any of the other nice but unessential features found in advanced viewers.

Whether it is built on a V1, V2 or V3 code-base, or some mix is not nearly as important as that it runs efficiently and treads lightly on computer memory.

If people think this is important enough to leave comments I will do my best to drum up some attention from Linden Lab and third party viewer developers.

Divining the Tea Leaves from Linden Lab

2011 has not been an especially good year with respect to communication from the Lab. A rumor here, a casual comment there, occasionally a missive from above combine to give us a glimpse into what we can expect at least in the beginning of the new year.

• No more magic boxes. This project is already well along, nearing general release. As I understand it there will be a special inventory folder that will, in effect, be the magic box. I do not know how I feel about selling directly from my inventory, I will be somewhat surprised if there are not security glitches and exploits in the first months. We will have to wait and see.
• Mesh will see increasing adoption throughout Second Life as content creators explore it’s possibilities. This will get a huge boost once Qarl is finished with the Parametric Deformer* and LL officially adopts it. I can hardly wait for my first mesh jacket that actually fits!
• Gaming tools and code will be made available sometime early in 2012. I am not big on SL games, but it will be interesting to see what Mad Peas comes up with
• Pathfinding –– I am not sure what this will accomplish other than better zombies and greeter bots, but it will be interesting to see.
• Last Names will be back for newbies. This is in the talking stages at Linden Lab, but given the clamor over “Resident” I expect some possibility to change to a name from a list. It would be interesting and a lot of fun if LL created a way for residents to suggest last names for them to choose from. We could even participate in the vetting process, weeding out names that might cause problems or misunderstandings.

My Wish List in addition to those things above:

1. Continue progress toward making everything work a little better. Lag, Region crossings, Sim performance all have improved, but there is more work to do!
2. Something must be done about Mainland occupancy rates. In my opinion the surest way to do this is by increasing the land allowance for premium residents. Yes, Linden Homes and the Land Barons would take a hit, but it would be correcting an unintended benefit they enjoy at the expense of the mainland.

My Predictions.

1. Linden Lab will make a complete cock-up of one of the items above.
2. One development from above will be an overwhelming success and Linden Lab will not get the praise they deserve for it.
3. There will be those who will predict the end of Second Life as we know it in response to every project and feature LL puts out!

*Last minute update: Qarl has posted a preliminary test version of the parametric deformer!!

A Message from On High

The messenger has made his way down from the towers of the gods.

The herald has read the proclamation and it is posted outside the city hall for all to see.

All is well in the world and the future is bright!

Specifically:

• The Linden’s first experiment with creating a new feature set, then actually making an application of it (Linden Realms) has worked out well. In the process of actually creating something using the new gaming code LL learned a lot and hopefully gained some respect for the residents struggles when they have to debug half baked ideas implemented before they are ready.
• As a result of their hands on experience with the new gaming tools they recognized that there is potential for abuse in some of the features so they will not just be made available willy-nilly to everyone. They will be introduced via a “creators” program which will verify those with access to them.
• Linden Labs introduced a new viewer with an improved user interface. I can’t help thinking that they are still following the lead of the Third Party Viewers like Firestorm, but they are doing it their way, incorporating their own take on the “ideal viewer”. The way they handle buttons is in some respects an improvement over the Firestorm viewer I am most familiar with.
• After a very long and painful development period Mesh is with us to stay. There is still more to do, a parametric deformer so clothing works properly being the most obvious thing still lacking. Over the next year or two we will see what resident creators can do with the new technology. Right now it seems limited, but so did sculpties when they first came out.
• Additional benefits of premium memberships began to appear in the past year. Not enough I think to make a real difference but more are promised in 2012, hopefully enough to inspire more people to buy land of their own. The mainland really needs it. (Dare I again suggest increasing the tier allowance for a premium account?)
• We are assured that tier will not increase in the coming year. Ironic in that there has been an unrealistic outcry that tier should be decreased.
• The first promised new feature of next year will probably be “pathfinding”. This will greatly improve the performance of Zombies and other objects which are tasked to move around a region.
• Lastly, and far from least; Linden Labs will be launching some completely new products that have nothing at all to do with Second Life. – - – - – calm down! - – - – -. This is actually a good thing. Diversity will increase stability for Linden Lab, both as a business and with their workforce. Give them a chance, this does not necessary mean they are taking their eye off Second Life.
• Finally we are thanked for being customers. That is something LL has not always remembered. Customer is a big step up from guinea pig or victim.

Have a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanzaa and a Bright Sosltice.