“There is no failure except in no longer trying.” ~ Elbert Hubbard

Note: I wrote this entry a few months ago and abandoned it, but did not delete it. Sometimes, despite recognizing the need for critical evaluation, it’s exhausting feeling trapped in a cycle of negative feedback. However, I remain firm in my belief that in order to support a person, product, platform, or service you have to hold it to the highest possible standard. In this, Second Life and Linden Lab continue to fail in critical ways that harpoon their potential longevity. I want Second Life to evolve and endure, but I don’t see that happening with the sycophantic and sentimental input that seems to predominate the other voices that often speak about it. The tightrope is taut between the walk from objective critic and caustic loon. That is why I always try to take some time before posting something of this nature. I did it with fashion posts — I do it with every post. This post was kept as a draft and unintentionally published the last time I came back to reconsider it. Rather than remove it and the comments, I will leave it as-is and add my thoughts on four and five as time allows. Generally I only like to make minor grammar revisions once a post is live, but as this one was published while incomplete, I’m making an exception.

1. Search
It is nearly impossible to find anything in SL if you don’t know exactly where it is to begin with. Why we have a search field at all is bewildering. You might as well just have a rollover that says “use Google to try and find a blog that wrote about what you’re looking for and good luck to you.”

Search is the one thing on this list that has actually gotten worse since I joined SL and that’s why I’m placing it above Communication. Let’s put aside the fact that the search mechanics are antiquated enough to make you miss Asking Jeeves. On top of poor search-ability that doesn’t seem to have any effectiveness with partial words or common misspellings (or capitalization or punctuation…), SL search results are easily gamed, poorly sorted and offer no value. This state of affairs is frustrating for users, but it’s devastating for mid-level storefront shops that don’t have the time to flog all day and spam all night (or the money to outbid the stores who produce poor quality crap, but know if they pay enough to get their stuff at the top they’ll be able to perpetuate their mediocrity). This is discouraging to new businesses who have few means of getting their products noticed or even shuffled fairly into the mix, and it’s crippling to event hosts and planners who have to spend insane amounts of time, effort and lindens in the hope that their event will generate enough word of mouth to make a dent in the noise.

What is most dismaying is that there’s really no motivation for Linden Lab to fix search as its constant failure assures them that more and more consumers will lean on the Marketplace to find things, which, of course, generates more income for Linden Lab. Unlike many others, I don’t think this situation was arrived at intentionally via conspiracy (when you have incompetence and indifference firmly in place, conspiracy is unnecessary), but it does seem like search is doomed to be kept low on the priority list totem pole.

2. Communication
So you want to develop a social platform? Excellent. Step one, make sure there is no easy way for people to communicate with one another.

Oh? Is that wrong?

YES! Yes, it’s wrong. Dear code monkeys: group chat has been broken for years now with constant lagging chats, failure to connect errors and other oh-so-fun hijinks.

For years. We could have connected every SL user to one another via tin can telegraph by now.

On the communication front, we have open chat that is limited to ranges land owners have no control over, voice chat that only works for Linux users if you offer up your first born to the dark side, (where we can disguise our voices — thanks for making that a priority), instant messaging that doesn’t allow for off-grid communications in any meaningful way, and the previously mentioned group chat that barely works for anyone. As for conference calls, I haven’t been able to make one of those work in voice or text since Halloween two years ago.

And then we have the clusterfuck that happens if you put too many avatars in one area together so they can communicate in the same place at the same time.

It is inexcusable that entertainment venues have to set up obnoxious relay chat devices with public channel listening scripts so that their guests on one side of the room can chat with people on the other side of the room. As a parcel or SIM owner, we should be able to set the range of our communications based on the purpose of our build. It’s shameful that our only means of cross-sim communication (group chat) fails a majority of the time and lags the rest of the time. Most of all, there is the format-sinking fact that nearly all communication seems doomed to being limited to SL-only. By now, there should be some way to incorporate tweets, facebook, skype and/or gchat to or from the grid as a matter of course. How can you have a metaverse hub that doesn’t communicate with the rest of the verse?

If we were just starting out and it was 2003/2004 and social networking was still making the rounds okay, but it’s 2011 and this isn’t working. For anyone.

Finally, as communication goes, we have the uberfail of ways to get messages/notifications when we’re offline. Those of us who are members of any active groups either have to turn them all off when we log or awake to a mailbox full of spam that caps our offline message limits. If you’re a marketplace seller, there is no way to turn on/off sale notifications per item which means that freebie you put up to be a nice person has become it’s own personal spam gift from the interwebs. Why can’t I opt to get only personal IMs when I’m offline?

And why in 2.0 can we not turn off group chat?

3. Privacy

I’m trying to think of a social networking tool on the internet that doesn’t allow you to go invisible, and I’m coming up with nothing. Oh wait, there’s this one, it’s called Second Life. In Second Life, despite eight years of users requesting and requesting and requesting the ability to work or play without being stalked or harassed by others, there is nothing.

If you intend to have any time to yourself in Second Life, you must start your store or blog or whatever under an alt. And once your alt puts something out on the grid with its name on it, you will then need to start another alt. Because there is a segment of the human population that will suck the light from a firefly if they think they can make themselves shiny and they don’t care what it says in your profile or how much you beg them to let you get back to them tomorrow. They spent thirty-two cents on your sofa, damn it, and they messed up the texture when they tried to edit it themselves without taking a copy first and IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO HELP RIGHT NOW!!!!! And because these types of people have spent what I can only imagine are entire lifetimes being avoided, they have figured out all the tricks to make sure they won’t be ignored short of boiling your bunny rabbit (and that’s only because they can’t mod-boil a no-transfer bunny). They know how to find your UUID. They have those attachments that show when someone’s online, even if their preferences try to block visibility. And they take great pleasuring in telling you that you can’t hide from them. And all of these people use the browsers that have these features built into the UI because “if everyone else is going to have it, I should, too.”

Then we have the merchants who collect your UUID from their vendors and add you to their non-group spam list which you cannot unsubscribe from. You get lovely little message all the time telling you that their newest piece of retextured junk is now ON SALE!!!! and when you IM them asking to be removed, you get dead silence. For some reason muting these people, their items, their dog and their grandmother doesn’t seem to help. Ways to combat this in SL? Zero.

I know that these are all communication issues, but privacy is a communication issue on many levels, so let’s just let them be different, mmmkay?.

4. Interface

I have tried for over a year to force myself to get used to the v2 interface. I have moved to exclusively using Firestorm when I log in these days, unless the repeated crashing makes it impossible and then I revert to Imprudence. The fact remains that despite the supposed performance improvements (which cannot be proved by me or most people I know) the SL v2 viewer interface is a clunker. Certainly part of this must be considered personal opinion, but there are also simple objective factors. On average I find that things which used to take me one or two clicks now involve more interaction. Dropping an item on a friend is frustrating. Organizing multiple IMs and dealing with group notices is a menace. Building is just a hassle.

I am the first to admit that my methods of using my camera controls is short bus, so I don’t include that or similar issues which I know are based on my lack of affection for hotkeys.

Although there is good reason to improve interfaces, they should be improvements to the existing structure, not change for change’s sake. The focus of changes should be ease of use and customer immersion, not sleek design over form and function. Most good interface architects know that you also make allowances for previous customers and existing users by providing revert mechanics to allow people to adapt over time.

I applaud the new features Linden Lab has been trying to provide. New LSL functions like TextBox are great. Being able to attach multiple objects on one slot is a great boon.

But the interface remains a clumsy fail, and Linden Lab seems content to allow TPVs to fix those problems rather than hammer out what their customer base really needs to be friendly with the main viewer.

5. Pricing

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.” ~ Ray Bradbury

I resent that there are people making filk I like. I feel dirty.

…in the bad way.

“The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good – in spite of all the people who say he is very good.” ~ Robert Graves

I wrote this a long time ago, or at least the start of it. My initial thought was to crawl inside the concept of an ancient theater that would mourn the actors who played upon its stage, but the more I toyed with it and wrestled with it, the more I considered the concept of not the stage, but the language of the play itself as a living thing. Peeling away the setting left me with the bare meat of communication. There have been a handful of people through time who have woven their presence into the fold of a certain tongue — that transcended the very sounds and silences they employed to convey their cause.

Certainly, French would mourn Baudelaire.

As for English, well, the choice was embarrassingly obvious for me.

That said, I didn’t want to just take a handful of the most well known quotes and mash them about, or try and be clever with obscure references. Instead, I took my favorite passages and snippets and misplaced just enough pieces of the puzzle so that the original image could be remembered, while it tilted and slanted toward my purpose and then tucked that between the framework of my initial intent.

The things that come to us in dreams don’t always have to make sense. Sometimes they just want to be written.

Shakespeare’s Widow

Mezzanine dusted shadows
Lullaby her sweet insanity
Rhinestone rhymes of ancient times
Sphinx-laced riddles and vague profanities
Surviving through the Winters
And discontented vanities

She has not forgotten
No, she has never left
Say her passion’s misbegotten;
Say her alchemy is theft
But there are words that no one owns
Words immortal as the Spring
That is why no one can still her
That is why she sings:

“Come unto these yellow sands and then take hands.
Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered
The prince of darkness is a gentle man
And he hath robbed the rage of Caliban
There are daggers in his smiles
Things beyond all use and I do fear them
I defy the stars their havoc crying
But I am dying, Egypt, dying…”

They infect the spotlit stages
Foreign bodies lining walls
Her velvet sorrows pay their wages
They whore her for their curtain calls
She has suffered fools and sages
And outplayed them, one and all

She has not forgotten
No, she has never left
Say her passion’s misbegotten;
Say her alchemy is theft
But there are words that no one owns
Words immortal as the Spring
That is why no one can still her
That is why she sings:

“Come unto these yellow sands and then take hands.
Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered
The prince of darkness is a gentle man
And he hath robbed the rage of Caliban
There are daggers in his smiles
Things beyond all use and I do fear them
I defy the stars their havoc crying
But I am dying, Egypt, dying…”

She has magic no one owns
Immortal as the Spring
And even though time cannot still her
Sometimes, alone, she sings:

“I am patient as the tides
And I will never give up trying
But I have missed you all these long, long years,
And I am dying, Egypt, dying.
Oh, I am dying, Egypt, dying.”