Love Thursday: Second Life®
I don’t remember who started this thing of the “Love Thursday”… Possibly it was Berry, but anyway, i think is a lovely idea, to write a blog post about something or someone you love. And specially today, Thanksgiving… So, since this is my first “Love Thursday” post, i’ll start saying THANKS to Second Life®.
Well, thanks to Linden Lab, and to Philip Linden (or Philip Rosedale, as you prefer), for making this amazing world and for keeping it up together with all the residents inside of it. I love Second Life because it gave me the possibility of meeting people from all over the world, with different views, opinions, visions…
I love SL because thanks to it i decided to learn myself Photoshop, GIMP… and some other software related with images, video and 3D creation and edition. And because it helped me to improve (not enough, lol) my English, and made me think about blogging and writing. I love SL because it opened my mind to my creative side with new unexplored options.
I love SL because i met there WONDERFUL friends, amazing creative minds, fun, caring, loving and amazing. Because it gave me the opportunity to share experiences and moment with these friends, to laugh with them, to cry with them, to share much more than a simple conversation.
I love SL because i can build my dreams (and my nightmares) in it and i can share them. Because is a strange world full of crazy and awesome people. Because all you can find inside that world is build by someone like you, another resident.
I love SL because it can cause PASSION in its residents, passion to love it and even to hate it.
I love SL because, after being more than 4 years in it, it can still surprise me.
I love SL because my pixel soul lives in it. 
Farewell to M, a welcome back to Philip and some thoughts
As possibly you know M Linden (Mark Kingdon) is going to step down as Linden Lab CEO and Philip Linden (Philip Rosedale) is back as interim CEO.
I was not a big fan of Mr. Kingdon, i think his view was not as passionate as Philip one, maybe was more about marketing than about community, and even i’m sure he tried his best to make Second Life a better place (or maybe only a better business) he had some… let’s say wrong (or “non popular”) choices or issues: SL Enterprise, the ban of freebies in XStreetSL, Zindra, Avatars United…
Anyway, i think those were not “bad” decisions themselves, but all of them together made a lot of residents be against him and his management. Of course there is also Viewer 2.0, but i’ll talk about it later. It seems sometimes we like to make M look as the Devil, but i’d like now to make some positive comments about M’s management:
In the time Mr. Kingdon was CEO of Linden Lab i think performance and stability has been better and better. Of course that means generally and sometimes is understandable a system so complex as the Second Life Grid has some problems.
Viewer 2.0 is a good product, works pretty good, has less problems with memory use that Emerald or any 1.23 based viewer and has some really cool features. And even you don’t like the UI (i like it personally even it can/should be improved) you can always use alternative viewers based in 1.23 UI.
I’m saying all this from my experience and point of view and is possible someone doesn’t agree, specially about Viewer 2.0, but i think is a question of preferences and nobody HAS TO use it, is an optional viewer.
And i needed to say all this because i’m tired of negativity, of “Second Life is crap”, of all this shit. Is difficult to find positive comments sometimes about Second Life, specially from the residents. Some of the SL residents seem to be incredibly reluctant to any minor change and they will complain about anything in any case (I still remember people complaining about Windlight), and to those who always complain i ask… if Second Life is so crappy and they have nothing positive to say about it why are they still in it? Why are they just complaining and complaining and they just can’t make or say something constructive? What are they doing to make Second Life better?
Criticism is good, it is even needed, but not empty one. Some people who doesn’t like the viewer is creating cool viewers with different features, that’s constructive criticism! Of course most of us can’t create a new viewer, but we can point what we don’t like, suggest how we think it would me and keep loving what we deeply love in this virtual world, say i like this and i dislike that.
As always i don’t pretend to tell people how they should act or react, i just express what i think, so feel free to comment and share also your point of view… and about Philip… welcome back home, Phil!
Image by Daniel Voyager published under a Creative Commons license.
Ramblings about SL6B and the vision on Linden Lab team
Today was the opening of SL6B (Second Life 6th Birthday) celebration with a speech of Philip Linden, the founder and creator of what Second Life is (well, actually himself and his team). The picture above was taken during that speech. Just after the speech i started to think about how residents see Linden Lab and its events, specially when a friend said to me:
Wishing i was that enthusiastic about a Linden event.
In the last couple of years Linden Lab had a “tense” relationship with the residents, specially about one issue: the maturity of content and the grid, there was also quite a bit tension about the land prices but that was occasional. Nipples, child avatars, etc… all those were quite a conflict in some Linden events, at least in Burning Life and SL5B. At the same time, in this period, it seems Lindens are away from the residents and possibly this can be one of the reasons of this conflicts. Of course there are other reasons, like the pressure of some media and politics and the image of Linden Lab as business, possibly they don’t want to look like a sexual service, or a place where perverts have their games. Of course i understand their position is not easy, between the residents and the media + politics, but in the past i think they didn’t do thinks as good as they would.
After some time i presume i feel “in peace” lately with Linden Lab although all those mistakes, or at least after all those actions i think were not right. And i feel this peace because i think they are doing it better, or a few better. I think is a good idea to promote SL as an education tool, i think is a good idea to give the Linden Prize to organizations like Virtual Ability (with a program of help to real handicapped people in SL), i even think is not a bad idea to concentrate all the “sex industry” of Second Life in an special continent. At the same time, with this last action about “Adult” content the limits are clear and are not particularly “narrow” for what i saw and read. One can agree or not, but at least the statements are quite clear, or at least clearer. After this times feeling a bit upset with Linden Lab as resident and as customer it feels weird to talk good about them. 
Of course this would never be “the last word”, Linden Lab can do it better… or worse. Anyway, while i was at Philip’s speech, i was wondering where M was. Well, i don’t like M much, you know it, actually i think things were quite worse after he started being CEO. I don’t know if the last actions i talked about are part of his strategy, but someway i see him as an administrator more than as a “president”. M doesn’t has the charisma Philip has, M is more “grey”, more like an office man in a dark suit and white shirt. So i wonder if M was not there because this lack of charisma, because he was on holidays or because things will change again at Linden Lab soon. Well, i presume we will know sooner or later.
The merging of the grids, Teen and Main all in one
What was a rumour seems that will be a reality soon. Philip Linden in his interview in Metanomics yesterday and Blue Linden in this Plurk started by Damien Fate talked about it. Teen Grid and Main Grid may merge soon *insert here screams and sounds of people running and shouting*.
Well, Philip said a lot of interesting things i may comment in other posts, but today i’d like to center my attention about this particular issue, the merging of the grids. And, as always, i just pretend to show my personal opinion, nothing more… but nothing less too.
Personally i think the situation now is not good for the Teen Grid residents, they have access to a really small grid, with not much content and they are, someway, “closed in their golden cage”. I agree that the merging of the grids may be something really good for them, and they will have the possibility of sharing, learning and teaching with other creators and residents, may permit to share the experience of SL with their parents, but i have some doubts about this process.
My doubts are not specially related to “Mature” content and how “teens” can access to it, the internet itself is full of really mature content really easy to access to people even under 5 years, as an example, the daughter of a friend of mine was looking in the Internet for photos of bears and well, you can imagine what she found. Moreover the Main Grid has a lot of underage people, they are not a huge number, but from time to time Linden Lab has to close accounts of teens using Main Grid, so if they find some i’m sure that means there are more than “only a couple”. Also, i think is not the responsibility of Linden Lab to “control” the access to “Mature” content of teens (well, their responsibility may be to “mark” or “indicate” where the “Mature” content is), the responsibility of controlling that access is in the parents. Also well, some teen residents are much more mature than some of the main grid residents, seriously.
What makes me feel worried is how Linden Lab will face that change and what they do about it, specially thinking about how tabloids can use, abuse and distort the reality. I think they may need to work hard on PR and, well, lately seems not to be their best area of work. I know there are some technological tools LL may use to inform clearly about the contents, but the definition of Mature is diffuse in some areas and may change depending the culture or the country, and due this we saw some sad incidents in the last SL5B and in Burning Life in 2007. Linden Lab should clearly define what is Mature content and what is not, and should respect the right of creating and accessing mature content for mature users. So the issue here is not technological, is totally about PR and moral under my point of view.
So what makes me worry is not how bad it can be for teens, because i think it will be really good for them, what worries me is how that may affect our user experience, the right we have in this moment to express, create and live in the way we want.
Image by Daniel Voyager published under a Creative Commons license.
Customers or citizens of a benevolent dictatorship?
Sometimes, in the past, i protested for some comments of Philip Linden, the founder of Second Life. Most of the times i though he was having a wrong idea about the community of residents. Anyway, although all that M Linden is making me miss Philip badly. And we are having M for the last six month, so maybe is time to analize his work.
M said in an interview by Dusan Writer some days ago:
80% of our business is focused on the consumer market — which of course includes content creators. We are putting more than 80% of our investment in the consumer market because a good part of our investment in Enterprise crosses over (shared media). We talk about Enterprise because we are doing new things there. We need to talk more about our plans for consumer because we have many big projects under way there.
Ok, is only me? I don’t see where this 80% is going, and i don’t think it is for LDPW and the roads. Either seem to be for software development, because performance is getting worse in the last months although the “lower” impact of Openspaces now that almost 2000 sims disappeared in the last month.
We still don’t know how many islands will be lost until July next month, when the process of changes on Islands products will change. I just know we are having less “land” to explore and enjoy… and more residents (users hours and residents inworld are peeking), and that produces more problems with servers, so the “excuse” of poor performance to change the Openspace product is just going against Second Life itself.
As you may know Reuters left Second Life recently, Eric Krangel (Eric Reuters inworld) wrote a really interesting article talking about his vision of Second Life and why they left. I think you should read it because his opinion is pointy.
Personally i think all that is due the bad work of Linden Lab, Public Relations must be on holidays, Software development to be too it seems, so we just have M saying in an interview basically “All is good, all is ok.”.
Linden Lab acts like if the residents were citizens of a benevolent dictatorship, where M is the “Emperor” and the Lindens, the government. A dictatorship where they do “the best for the nation and its people” under their point of view ignoring the citizens. But they seem to be forgetting we are not citizens, we are customers! They seem to forget Linden Lab derives its revenue from user fees, not compulsory taxes. They seem to forget Second Life is NOTHING without the residents and their creativity but empty virtual land, where teaching virtual classes or making business presentations, of course.
I’d like to quote here, to end this post, something Vint Falken wrote in a blogpost, something that explains also my feelings with Linden Lab in the last times:
Excuse me my bitterness. But I still feel betrayed: a 2 year relationship, that you _know_ is dying. You still wish to fix everything, mainly because of the effort you put into it, because of you’re used to it and because of the mutual friends you now have, not because the butterflies are still there. You keep trying, attempt to be bedazzled again, but the other party just f*cks it up, each time. Eerrr… overreacting, me?
If the resident had the power to vote for Linden Lab CEO, be sure i would never vote for M.
UPDATE (Dec. 02 2008): Just after posting this M published a post in the Official Linden Blog in the same line “We are better than ever and nothing is happening”.
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