“If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.” ~ Jon Hamm as Don Draper in Mad Men, “Love Among the Ruins” (via Cathryn Humphris, Matthew Weiner, Kater Gordon, Andre Jacquemetton, and/or Maria Jacquemetton)

The dust-up of the last couple days over the shift in TPV policy has led to a great deal of frustration and head scratching. These days I am so disgusted with Linden Lab that I just vent and move on because trying to guess what they’re up to can depresses me even more than their repeated failures on so many fronts. After my little grrr yesterday, however, a friend of mine revived a conversation we had several years ago about advertising in SL.

Frustrated by the lack of promotional venues and methods for small time event planners and shop owners, I had kicked around a few ideas with some code monkey friends. One was a HUD that featured an advertising panel and allowed users to pull demos and/or LMs from magic box type devices owned by the advertisers. I always felt it was a viable idea that could do well if implemented with integrity and a focus on the things users would want to learn about (thus compelling them to use them), but the enormous task of creating an automated process for it, and the potential for abuse made it one of those things you kick around with friends and leave for another day that never comes. Over the years I have been bewildered as to why Linden Lab or a TPV hasn’t implemented something similar into a viewer, however. The Eudora model, for example, was to include low profile advertising in free versions of the software, with paid versions able to opt-out of the advertising.

Linden Lab hasn’t really been able to establish a good reason for people to move to paid accounts. Nor have they shown any interest in what consumers want out of their viewers. Their innovation mostly comes from struggling to keep up rather than connecting with users to bring new features into the fold. So why this new pretend concern over user security and privacy? And why make that out to be a TPV issue, when the problems rest in the Second Life format itself? What motive is there to take a stronger hand with TPVs under the guise of security when they could have fixed the UUID loophole anytime over the last several years?

For those of us who just don’t trust the Lab anymore, reading tea leaves to figure out their true motives is something of a hobby and I keep coming back to advertising.

If Linden Lab did want to introduce paid advertising into their viewer, one of the first things they’d have to do is find a way to force more users to want to use their viewer. Obviously, kneecapping the competition and forcing them to keep to your pace is one way to stack the deck and make yourself appear competitive. But that won’t solve the entire problem. Since Linden Lab continues to take the coward’s way out of anything addressing adult products, they can’t ever really get behind the insanely popular RLV systems. That means a significant percentage of their userbase (or at least their userbase’s alts) will never use the Linden Lab viewer. The only way to downplay that fact is to keep it hidden.

If you’re going to try and woo advertisers, you don’t want them to be able to collect data that proves 80% of your users aren’t using your product.

So, keeping these things in mind regarding priorities for advertising, let’s look at the following again:

2.i : You must not display any information regarding the computer system, software, or network connection of any other Second Life user.

2.k : You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer.

No collecting, sharing, or displaying data. No feature that alters the “shared experience.” Maybe it’s the old corporate girl in me, but this sounds like someone preparing to make themselves sexy to advertisers by forcing their product to appear competitive against superior products and hiding when it’s not.

If this theory turns out to have any validity, I really don’t have a problem with viewer-based advertising being implemented. What would bother me, however, is the tactics being employed to get there. I say “would” because this is just my theory and I’m not suggesting anyone be tarred based on a theory.

Maybe I’m a fruit loop and it will turn out that Linden Lab is sincerely moving in a new direction of cooperation with a focus on meeting consumer demand. But I just don’t believe it yet. I have a memory and Linden Lab has squandered an enormous reservoir of goodwill through ineptitude, arrogance, and duplicity. To pretend that they suddenly deserve the benefit of the doubt doesn’t jive with me. Maybe they’ll earn back the trust of users like me, we’ll see.

In the meantime, I can’t help seeing ulterior motives beneath the surface. Especially when the surface is coated with vague sweeping language and masked in blame toward TPVs for Linden Labs’ own failings.