On a lighter note....Prad Prathivi has fun with Linden email

Prad Prathivi actually managed to get into a top Lindens gmail account? Seriously you have to read this, see it full size HERE. Well done Prad this is absolutely genius just at a time when everyone needs a little lightening up!

moreless

M is listening - honestly!

Instead of dealing with the growing frustration caused by lack of communication in the FORUM lets all go down to the blog today we know we'll get a big surprise - Sorry if I seem a little jaded but what the H***
Since the open spaces announcement and charade of a forum *discussion all we see is the good news touting Lindens obviously trying to mask the true state of Secondlife with pep talks that hopefully fool no-one.
Luckily I am of the opinion that ANY outside company looking for a solution in SL will also look at Resident run blogs and real life press about the poor way Linden treat their PAYING customers, I am optimistic that NO corporation would want to deal with a company with so little respect for its customers.
Its great Secondlife is so transparent with its 'Q3 closed on a high note with an unusually strong September' and the mainland cleanup goes on - 'Progress Update regarding the recent Advertising Policy' I just wonder if Linden realises none of this matters? Real companies research before they invest, maybe Linden Lab need to realise public relations are one of the first things corporate businesses look at.
The Solution Providers Update from Glenn Linden just makes Linden Lab look even more desperate for money (sorry Glen, but timing is everything) - bleeding the residents is not enough.
I have always tried to remain objective but it's getting much harder to do. I read with interest Zee Lindens forum and have to admit he did a great job of actually responding and answering many questions, we may disagree on his numbers but at least he bothered to engage with the residents. He is a shining example of a Linden, not perfect but willing to admit Linden Lab messed it up!
"A better way to say it would have been to say that its our fault because we didn't put the proper restrictions on them and then they were naturally used for more than they were intended. Its our mistake. Really. I mean it. Completely our mistake." Zee Linden

The communications officer? You can read for yourself how she dealt with frustrated residents and I will say she needs to take a look at her condescending attitude and remember the residents are not children playing a game but adults many of whom make a real living out of SL and run businesses in the real world also.

The long awaited reply from M Linden finally happened after 2600+ posts, short and not so sweet;
Everybody,
This has been a very robust thread with a lot of dialog and back and forth. I've kept up with all the posts as you've shared them. Since most were specific to the price change, I thought Jack -- the person responsible for Land here at Linden Lab -- would be the best person to answer them. In addition to the posts here, I have gotten a lot of emails and note cards from residents with many thoughts, ideas, concerns, some anger and frustration but also messages of hope and support. Thank you all for sharing your views so profusely!
There is a lot of feedback that will be very useful as we evolve our land product further.
Thank you again for sharing your thinking and your feelings.
Best,
M Linden.

I find it amazing that if he was reading the forum and thought Jack "would be the best person to answer" that he didn't ask Jack to do exactly that, but nobody got the chance to reply as the forum thread was closed just 4 posts later.

In the meantime the SOS movement grows stronger, SOS is no longer simply a group in Second Life, but rather a legally formed non-profit organizaton known as “The Grid Representation Foundation” doing business as SOS.

I will leave this for now as I just find it pathetic and hope that RL companies properly research before thinking of investing in SL the way many residents have done.
Dana Vanmoer

moreless

M(ark) Lindens letter to residents:

In A Letter to Second Life Residents M Linden outlines the new plans for Openspaces and some at least can breath a little easier.
Places like the sailing communities that use the openspaces the way they were originally intended.
But on the whole adding the new homesteads is not much of a change you will still have to pay more for your home but this charge will be stepped - going to $95 in January and then to $125 by July and scripts and avatars will also be limited on these sims - so although you will be paying more for your current openspace you will be getting less for your money.

I zipped around the grid to get immediate reactions:
IntLibber BnT: "I am deeply offended to see M Linden speaking at a breast cancer convention on the same day he released this rapacious policy, when so many residents of SL started their businesses in SL because they or a family member was homebound due to having to cope with cancer striking their lives. Linden Lab policy has steadily been destroying the businesses that these people depend upon for their livings. This is the worst sort of predation upon the most fragile members of our society.I launched my own business in SL to help pay for my fathers cancer treatments, as I was homebound to care for him and my disabled mother. His cancer may be returning to strike his colon. If LL continues these policies, his blood is on their hands.
While the real world has elected new leadership with Hope For Change, the best we can do in SL is hope for spare change after LL robs us of everything we earn and drives our residents away from our businesses."

Other residents on the D'Alliez estate are confused and looking for answers which of course will take some explaining - renters are, of course, harder to sort out especially on an estate as large as Alliez Mysterios'
Alliez Mysterio: I still have to go over it again but it seem like LL is trying. They have given options but overall not much has changed for renters the price will still go up and they will be more limited in what they can do on the openspaces they have and if you rent them out you will be homesteaded.

I also Spoke to Charlene Trudeau of Skybeam Estates and asked for her reaction:
Charlene Trudeau: The slower increase is good for people needing to adjust to the new pricing. It will still force some large scale changes in structure on the new Homestead product, however, especially for those who rented them out to more than one tenant per region. For my own estates, I am glad that my moves to adjust to the initial changes have not be negated, they are still prudent decisions for a long term outlook. Short term, more of my OS regions might have been retained for a time by their occupants, but this gets the painful adjustments over with sooner
dana Vanmoer: so it is still going to be a painful experience, what could LL have done to negate this and is there anything you would have liked to have seen?
Charlene Trudeau: I would have liked the plan that is in place now to have been thought out thoroughly from the beginning. And the only thing I would have liked to see in addition to the current is a willingness to also waive *move* fees in situations where a region is left floating remote from areas that were part of the contiguous estate before. Other than that, the new changes solve most of my major concerns. The pain comes far more from watching residents who have built so much have to tear down because they can't afford the increases.
I was heartsick as I helped everyone tear apart their lives. I've moved on into a 'looking towards tomorrow' mindset now. In fact, I've named my two newest regions based on that theme :)

At first glance the post looks positive and in the short term it is a change for the better BUT overall nothing has changed except the timescale for most openspace owners.

The best place to find out whether you are affected and what you will have to pay is in the SUPPORT PORTAL where a detailed explanation and table are shown BUT again although it say scripts will be limited on homesteads it does not say how much.
Hopefully we can expect more technical details in the near future.
More responses can be seen in the FORUM created for this purpose.
Dana Vanmoer

moreless

Does M making the announcement make it more official?

Openspace Announcement Due Tomorrow

Over the last week we have been listening to your feedback and working hard to revisit the original announcement. This blog post is just a short message to let everyone know that we’re now close to being able to share our thinking more fully with you.
Tomorrow M will post to the blog. The post will be our response to all of the great feedback you have provided and will include details about how we intend to proceed regarding Openspaces.
Immediately after the post tomorrow, we will open another forum thread where we will do our best to answer your questions. We understand that many of you are anxious for news, and so I wanted to be sure to let you know that the waiting is almost over.

source:http://blog.secondlife.com/

moreless

SL5B opens with speeches from Phillip Linden and M

Philip Linden opened the birthday celebrations with a speech that reflected on his amazement at how much secondlife has grown:

"I feel I have lived a lifetime in that 5 years, it feels almost like 50 years"

He also surprisingly addressed the problems surrounding the celebration itself:
"I know there has been tension, protest and stress around this event and I think its great, its emblematic of what secondlife is all about and why it's special. To attempt to make a celebration of what secondlife is about is bound to fail"

I wonder if those excluded think its 'great'?

He goes on to talk about the progress that has been made on the grid itself and notes that Linden Lab are 'working hard on stability' thats it is a 'big focus' for LL to work towards.

M(ark) Linden also touched on a tender subject that of IP rights:

"One of the fundamental elements is on IP rights. Its really really important that people who create great content are able to enjoy it and protect it, its one of the things philip put in place and which has underpinned the economy today."

But although he did mention the topic and admit that creative content is the backbone of the economy there were no answers as to how this was to be achieved or even if Linden Lab were doing anything about content theft.
There was a lot of corporate bolstering and obviously the speeches were tailored to boost that image but on the whole I felt the speeches were aimed at the residents without actually solving any of the present resident concerns, both speeches taken together did acknowledge those issues exist and let everyone know that Lindenn Lab have been listening and they are aware of the problems facing ordinary residents.
I can't say there was any reassurance that these issues would be fixed, just that the Lab is aware. To me that was a reassurance in itself an acknowledgement of the work they still need to do.
The speeches felt to me like a placification for those that have issues and concentrated on the creative content to be seen over the 20 sim exhibition.
There is some incredible content to be seen over there and I urge everyone to take the time to 'wade through the honey', as the lag has been labled, and have a look at what is now possible in Secondlife.
I hope there are some hair displays around too as M pointed out to Philip 'its been 4 years since his avatar was updated and although his hair is the best in SL it is also the oldest' showing perhaps the human side of the Lab. I wonder if some of the hair creators out there could send him some prim hair based on the newbie style he is wont to use.
M Linden himself has obviously been shopping and looks a good deal better than his newbie CEO pictures :)
Happy Birthday Secondlife

If you want to watch the entire speech see the blog HERE

moreless

Letter to 'M' Linden

Foreword:
On Tuesday M(ark) Linden posted about his first week in SL and I was tempted to answer it, but reading through the comments, I came across one which so expressed what I felt about it that I contacted the writer and asked him if he would like to put it here. This is his letter unedited:
Dear M,
On May 27, I wrote a response to your "My First Week" piece in the blog. Since then, I've heard about the piece from several residents, but not from any Lindens. I'll take this opportunity to offer you the opportunity to respond directly to the concerns a lot of us seem to share.
As I review what I wrote, it seems dripping with vitriol, which I guess is some measure of both the passion of your core users and the immense frustration we feel at the issues that have plagued Second Life for so long, and what many of us feel is the inattention to what really matters to us.
In the blog you mentioned you've been in-world for a year. Good for you.
What have you built? Ever found yourself hunched over your laptop in an airport trying to finish up that last little piece of whatever your build was only to have the sim crash and eat the whole thing? Your citizens have.
Have you scripted? Ever stared at a screen trying different combinations of commands only to have that contrary witch you call a script editor stare you down with "ERROR : Syntax error"? And how did you learn scripting? Did you join some scripters groups? Find some freebie scripts and tear them apart to try to figure out how they worked? Go to some classes?
Ask yourself this: Why do we need those classes, anyway? Why does the LL documentation and implementation of your own scripting product continue to be so user-hostile that there is a continuing hubbub of events, offline editors (LSLEditor and more) and at least one separate website (lslwiki.net) to teach what should be easily available from the company that put the system together? Despite your best efforts, as the error screen says, the citizens of Second Life continue to create amazing scripted objects and teach other the craft.
Have you ever tried to learn something from that strange combination of Rube Goldberg contraption and Fibber McGee's closet that is the Knowledge Base? The citizens have, and we managed to learn despite it.
Have you ever spent hours learning Photoshop/PaintShopPro just so you could create that one texture that you needed, or learning GoldWave/Audition/ProTools to tweak the bird sounds for your inworld garden? The citizens have.
How's your group life? Have you honestly had the experience of having your group chat requests for (or offers of) help show up 45 minutes after you send them into the dark hole that is group chat lag? This persistent problem rips the spontaneity and creativity out of community after community --- yet, the groups soldier on, mostly good humoredly. Those are the citizens of Second Life.
Have you tried to build something in a public sandbox and experienced this boob Nightmare Dench’s griefing as an average citizen without any hope of getting a timely response from the LL support desk? The citizens have.
Have you ever despaired for your (usually empty) in-world boutique because of the weekly random reminders from your company to stop all transactions while your techs fix some other part of your network and viewer? The citizens have.
Have you sunk some money -- some sum that is significant to you -- into some land and actually paid the tier out of what you make from your business as you watch the land value plummet? What are we up now? 20,000 sims? And about 55,000 concurrency? That's less than three real citizens, camper alts, griefers and bots per sim. Take out the camper alts, the griefers and the bots, because let's face it, they're not the greatest customers, and is it any surprise that land value and retail businesses are depressed? "Robust economy"? Are you kidding? Have you concatenated the SL economy with the LL economy?
The user-friendliness of this infrastructure is not a side issue, not even the most important issue for the future of this world. It is the only issue. I include the following:
- Reliability of the asset servers for all functions 100% of the time.
- Reliability of the viewer.
- Ease of use of each component of the system, including the website, the knowledge base, support, the building editor, etc.
- Ease of moving from "How do I download this Second Life thing?" to being a contributing, participating citizen.
I ask myself, how on earth can it be that I have been here since 2006 and the same issues continue to plague this system, despite endless assurances that it has all been [RESOLVED]. (Want to get a hearty round of LOL's in any group chat? Just answer any complex question with, [RESOLVED].) Clearly there is something astonishingly inept about the Linden Lab system of handling these things. I state this categorically not only because company after company handles far more complex data handling tasks, but because it seems so apparent that LL loses focus more easily than a squirrel with ADD.
I said in my blog entry and I'll say it again here: The best imaginable news for the core residents (the ones who have actually created this world despite your company’s platform) at this point would be if your real job is mergers and acquisitions and your bonus rides on how big a sales price you get. It seems the Linden “management system” is all about vision, not execution. Maybe if the next guys pay enough, they’ll pay attention to what really matters here; and it isn’t Windlight or Dazzle. And it sure as hell isn’t the “feature” of displaying Avatar Rendering Costs, LL’s astonishing, cheap, and blithering ill-timed attempt to blame the most creative residents for the miserable performance of your network.
Make no mistake. I am a huge fan of Second Life, and I have probably spent more time, emotion and money here than I really should have. I’ve spent weeks learning so I could pass along some useful knowledge to new people, and maybe create something of value. Most of all, I’ve met amazing people from all over the world. I think I’m a pretty good citizen, and most people I meet are, too. They persist in their commitment to this world despite LL’s best efforts to discourage them. Those are the citizens of Second Life. While I have my cynical moments, I don't spend hours and hours composing my complaints about things here. Mostly I shrug it off and move on. But the grinding mediocrity of LL's performance, the consistent failure to solve the fundamental issues .... well, it does get frustrating.
Your company has treated the citizens poorly. I think you have treated them like fools, but they are not fools and the evidence is everywhere every time you log on. You would do well to engage in an adult to adult relationship with the citizens, and I've seen little evidence of that.
So here we are. A new moment in Second Life. Your grand entrance. Competition looms on the horizon. It is only a matter of time before we will have the option to port our inventory and skills to some other world. How about some answers? Enough of the "we have a lot to do" -- hell, we knew that long before you did. What are you going to do? What is going to be different? What concrete steps will Linden Labs take to repair this creaking wreck of a platform and by when? Is there a future in Second Life, and if so, why? I know it is none of my damn business, but given what I've invested in this world, I'm impertinent enough to think that it IS my business, and I'd like some answers before I fritter away too much more time or money investing in a virtual future that seems more and more to be the "proof of concept", not the real deal.

And by the way, welcome. :-)
llListen(0, "M", NULL_KEY, "");
Best regards,
Mishka Butuzova

Have your say: Add comments below or click the banner at the top to find out more

moreless

Phillip Linden announces the new CEO:

Direct from the SecondLife blog:
Announcing our New CEO!

I said a month ago that I was looking for a new CEO to lead Linden Lab, and we’ve found one! His name is Mark Kingdon, and his Second Life name is “M Linden”.

As you might imagine in a new leader of Linden Lab, there are lots of great things I could say about him, but let me just pick a few and then encourage you to meet him in-world. He is a person with the rare and unusual combination of business leadership, creativity, and passion for Second Life that we were looking for. In terms of history, he has a background in art, economics, and business. He has been in successful and highly regarded leadership roles at two companies that are bigger than Linden Lab: PricewaterhouseCoopers and Organic. He is a well-loved people leader who is fearless and can weather challenges and change.

He is going to start on May 15th. Like I said when we started looking, I am not going anywhere, and will be working with Mark to help lead Linden and Second Life onward. I am really looking forward to working with him, as he has so many skills and capabilities that will help us and that I can also learn from - here are a few: He will have an intense focus on improving the in-world experience and stability and reliability of Second Life. He has extensive hands-on experience with user experience design, which will be critical in making Second Life an easier and better experience for more people. Finally, he has a ton of experience leading companies and products with global reach, which is now essential given that the great majority of Second Life usage is international and Linden Lab will continue to grow as an international company with offices in many locations.

I have to say I am also really happy at how we found Mark. We decided to talk in public about searching for a new CEO because we thought it was the right thing to do, but of course we were concerned that it was unusual for a company to talk about such a change before finding the right person. Generally, recruiting executive people involves lots of work in creating lists of potential candidates and calling out to them.

But I always also hoped that with our public message out there, maybe the right person would actually just come to us. The intersection of people who would hear that news, have the right skills, and also be passionate enough about Second Life to pick up the phone and call me and ask for the job - well that is a very small list. But I thought maybe it would happen and turn out to be the perfect person. It was!

We will schedule a series of inworld meetings in the coming weeks where folks can get a chance to meet and talk to him and me together.

================================

Kingdon comes equipped with an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, as well as more than a half decade's worth of experience running digital-ad agency Organic.
Hiring a 'business guy' to head Linden Lab, rather than someone with a background in social networking or gaming, gives credence to the rumours that the company wants to achieve some corporate momentum and eventually go public.

Said Kingdon in a press release, "To me, the CEO role at Linden Lab combines perfectly my passions for art and design, business and technology" the executive added, "Until Second Life, we experienced the digital world passively in two dimensions. By enabling users to create a rich and immersive virtual world, Second Life is transforming the way we connect, collaborate, learn and transact online."

moreless