New World Notes

Linden Lab Trying to Save Chouchou - If Its Owners Can Be Reached In Time!

Chouchou photo by Loverdag

Potential good news for Chouchou, the beloved, dream-like Second Life sim that is scheduled to be closed down within the next few days. After an impassioned protest by many SL community members, Linden Lab staffer "Patch Linden" posted an appeal in the community:

Your calls have been heard! I need the region owner to contact me directly (via email or through support) to start the process of entering the region into the Second Life Region Preservation Society. I have not seen contact from them so far.

I have also not received word from Chouchou's owners juliet Herbele and arabesque Choche, the Japanese music duo who created and own the sim, since they or their manager told me last week that they planned to take Chouchou down. I've reached out to them again, and I'm also in touch with Patch, so I can connect them directly. However, we may need more help from the community:

Linden Lab's Trouble With Talking to Users to Get Usable User Feedback

Reader Soda Sullivan wasn't happy with this example of Linden Lab responding to Second Life user needs, and feels the company isn't doing enough:

I would like to see the Lindens become less reactive to us residents and more PROactive and maybe try to get out in front of things. Talk to people. Don't poll them, TALK to them and see what they are looking for. 

The proactive point is definitely true, and it does seem the company doesn't do enough of that. At the same time, many Linden Lab staffers do hold regular SL-based meetings for users.

However, there's a downside to direct conversations like this, and it's a problem we talked about a lot during my Linden days:

Linden Lab So Responsive to SL User Feedback That The Company Won't Fix a "Bug" That the Community Has Turned Into a Feature, Says Linden Vet

Dave Kap's memoir of going from Second Life user to Linden Lab developer last week included this passage:

Getting inside the office and seeing how much people were trying to do the right thing by the residents was kind of sobering.

Reader Soda Sullivan was skeptical, writing in Comments:

That would have been such a huge statement, if he had followed it by just listing one single example. Just. One. Single. Example.

So I asked Dave for an example, and here's what he said:

“What residents did to hack in their custom animations is an example of how things in Second Life end up being designed, from my perspective. The sobering thing was simply how much time was spent trying to get things where residents wanted them. Whereas I had previously thought there was more iron-fist design and planning behind everything. Because [Linden Lab developer will] forever be trying to get it to where residents want it without breaking it for all the workarounds people have made."

As for a specific example:

From Second Life User to Second Life Developer - Dave Kap's Linden Memoir

Dave at Linden Lab (note the nerf guns) - photo by Alexi Kostibas

With a well-known Second Life social media star recently joining Linden Lab as an employee, I reached out to Dave Kap, an indie game developer who began his own career that way, first as an SL user from a small town in upstate New York, to share his own experience. This is his memoir of his time with Linden Lab, starting as a user, then working at Linden Lab as an engine developer,  then in operations, support, management, and finally release engineering -- and what he learned about Second Life "from the inside" along the way.

I was a super old resident in Second Life. I signed up for the beta and got invited in January of 2003, shortly after the beta had launched. It was my first year of college and I was joining any game beta I could in the hopes that, down the line, my experience beta testing for a game company could get me connected to the industry when I graduated. However, upon realizing the power Second Life had as a platform, I quickly became addicted to both the software and the community within. I put work in, made cool stuff, became a popular resident, made friends with many of the amazing creators of the time, and also made friends with the alternate accounts Lindens had, only a fraction of which I knew were Lindens until I was officially hired.  

I eventually moved across the country to work for Linden Lab as an engineer. My first visit (I was flown out to help out with Linden's plans for GDC 2005) was the most impactful.

Next: From growing up in a small town to living and working in San Francisco

The Question About Second Life That Linden Lab Has Yet to Answer

Pictured: The Hilarious Hell Of The Second Life Noob Experience

Linden Lab answered nearly every reader question in response to my Ebbe Altberg interview recently, but there's one last follow-up to those follow-ups that they have yet to address:

Any plans for redoing the Viewer?

We are constantly revising, updating, and fixing the Viewer as with the rest of Second Life. There are no plans currently for a complete overhaul of the Viewer.

My question to that reply:

Linden Lab Responds to Second Life User Reader Questions About EEP Failures, Viewer Revamping, the Return of Last Names, and Much More

Linden Lab's communication team kindly sent back follow-up questions from readers after they watched my interview with CEO Ebbe Altberg, including reported problems with EEP, the possibility of instancing SL regions, and the return of avatar last names, if ever:

Will SL be moving to a new engine like Unreal or Unity, and if so, will our scripting etc still work? If not, why not?

There are no current plans to move over Second Life to a different engine. We'd rather focus our engineering efforts on continuing to improve our existing engine to ensure that there is no interruption to ongoing compatibility for our millions of Residents.

EEP has ruined teleports and region crossings for a lot of people. As well as TP crashing, crashing and unseating has increased by many time since EEP was put into the server code in March. When will that be fixed?

We are aware that some Residents have had an increase in disconnects during a teleport. These occur when an avatar attempts to teleport to a new Region (or cross a Region boundary, which is handled similarly internally) and the teleport or Region crossing takes longer than usual. We’re working quickly to fix the issue. Incidentally, while the wide deployment of the bug that we believe is behind the TP disconnects did coincide with EEP server deployment, it's actually unrelated to the EEP features. Readers can check out our Tools & Technology blog for updates as we continue to roll out any fixes.

Several more below the break:

Linden Lab's Social Media Team Should Promote User-Made Marketplace Content (Comment of the Week)

Popular Flickr post from Strawbery Singh's pre-Linden Lab days

News that Second Life social media queen Strawberry Singh just joined Linden Lab as a social media employee has provoked some interesting reactions in the SL social media ecosystem, chief among this comment from reader "irihapeti", which at first seems seriously controversial:

A thing that Linden Lab should reconsider is to allow the LL marketing team to provide marketplace and/or in-world shop links to the stuff that appear in the pics and vids blog posts.

A big reason why [SL] content-influence blogs are popular is because of the links to where the readers can get the stuff shown. Not just in SL but in the real world as well. Some well-known person wears something and the next day the shops are full of people wanting that garment.

I'm fascinated to find out how often real world fashion in pop culture immediately influences virtual world fashion shopping. But irihapeti's core argument is this: Linden Lab should actively promote user-owned SL brands and commercial content on its massive social media channels.

This despite the fact that when Strawberry announced her move to Linden Lab, she also announced "I will no longer be sharing style credits or reviews on items in-world" to avoid favoritism. irihapeti argues this is the exact wrong direction to take:

Listen: Philip Rosedale Interviewed by Linden Vet About Building Virtual Worlds

Here's a great podcast interview of Philip Rosedale on the podcast show Stayin' Alive in Technology hosted by Melinda Byerley, former Head of Marketplaces at Linden Lab, and known in SL as Pink Linden. And because she is a Linden vet, this is a much more substantial, in-depth interview, and brings up some points I've not heard Philip discuss before. (Streamable above.) It's also an important companion piece to the recent bombshell video where Philip announced scaling back High Fidelity content and making it more desktop client-focused.

Byerley is now founder of Timeshare CMO, a data marketing firm where Catherine Smith, another Linden Lab veteran, also works. "It's a recap of Philip's history, his thoughts on the 3D web and the future of VR," Catherine told me, when sending over the podcast. "What he's learned over the years. It was very Philip and made me laugh and smile and miss working for him!" So this is an interview with the founder of Linden Lab, speaking with a Linden, which was promoted by a Linden, and is now being blogged by a Linden. 

Here's the key highlights -- my favorite being what he says about "the 3D web" as a term -- with my biggest point of contention being what he says about the original goal with Second Life:

EEP, Second Life Environmental Enhancement Project, Makes Acclaimed Developer Say EEK!

Example of reported EEP display problems featured in Niran's post

I haven't been closely following Environmental Enhancement Project (known as EEP), Linden Lab's bid to greatly improve legacy WindLight environments while introducing new inventory objects for defining the environmental settings. However, SLer NiranV Dean, creator of Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following due to its amazing graphics, has been following EEP quite closely. And according to him in an epic, before-and-after illustrated rant he recently posted on the official community board, EEP as it currently exists is an L of titanic proportion:

I am absolutely speechless what a pile of broken mess you want to sell us. This has been by far the worst experience i have had in Second Life so far, it was a displeasure from login to logout and i could cry tears, that is how much this hurt me... [Rendering is] absolutely, totally and completely broken from back to front. Shadows, let's start with shadows. Shadows have become noticeably worse, they are ugly, pixelated, bad, inaccurate and constantly bug out, clip away and shadow blur is at a point it basically starts destroying itself when i turn around the camera and that's with the minimum draw distance...

And so on like this, except with more salty language. He's not the only one: Among the follow-up reader questions I just sent to Linden Lab after my talk with Ebbe Altberg is this one: "EEP has ruined teleports and region crossings for a lot of people."

Fundamental to Niran's objections is a monetization option for EEP, at the expense of users being able to edit WindLights:

Second Life Hires Second Life's Top Influencer to Help Promote Second Life

Remember that Linden Lab job posting for a Second Life content marketer? To no one's surprise, that job went to Strawberry Singh, who over the years, has created a network of social media influence around her Second Life content that is almost as large as key official company channels:

• Strawberry has 11,000 followers on Flickr; the official SL Flickr account has just under 13,000.
• Strawberry has 14,000+ followers on YouTube; the official SL YouTube account has about 27,000.

"Hopefully I'll continue to do what I did before, in terms of tutorials and images and exploration videos," she tells me. "The only thing that will stop is the promotion of brands." (When she announced her hiring, she also published some policies distancing herself from SL brands she's formerly worked for and/or blogged.) Lucky for her, she's not relocating to be near Linden Lab's HQ in San Francisco (where rent would eat up most her salary) but working from her home office in Florida: