“There is luxury in self reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.” ~ Oscar Wilde

For those of you unfamiliar with Sondheim’s Into the Woods, there is a sequence where all the fairy tale characters in their make-believe world begin to blame each other for the tragedy of their current situation, which came about through a series of events and misadventures rooted in desire, foolishness, greed, innocence, innocence lost, guilt, vanity, unresolved issues, and lots of other human failings. It has been foremost in my mind while checking in on the Emerald issue.

If you’re not aware of the Emerald situation, a good-enough summary can be found HERE. For me, this summary is a bit too petting toward the Emerald team, but, well, there’s a lot of that going around. My chain of events goes like this:

A. Linden Lab failed to update their product in a way that met the needs of their user base.
B. A talented, but irresponsible segment of the user base created a third-party project for reasons unknown. This project became known as the Emerald Viewer.
C. Lots of people began to use Emerald, as it provided an improved user experience; few of these people knew anything about the team that created and maintained the project.
D. Questions began to arise regarding the reputation and integrity of the Emerald team and their motivations.
E. Despite there being lots of blogs and “news” about Emerald, no one in the blogosphere bothered to ask some point-blank “on the record” questions to the team (I personally sent two emails attempting to get an interview out of sheer frustration. They were never responded to, but then I don’t pretend to be a reporter or a talk show host so I’m sure I was easily ignored).
F. Despite there being no statement of ethics, obvious untruths in their blog posts, and several other low-grade warning signs, people with credibility spoke in support of Emerald and made it clear it was their viewer of choice.
G. The inevitable happened and a member (or members) of the Emerald team abused the trust of their users in a griefer prank. The prank, while not in itself very interesting or damaging, demonstrates a flagrant disregard for ethics, a lack of basic integrity and employed tactics which engaged an unwitting user base in ridiculously childish (and potentially criminal) behavior.
H. An Emerald team member that few people know from Adam posted an “I’ll fall on my sword even though I really don’t think I did anything wrong” non-apology apology; another Emerald member that few people know from Eve said she was stepping up to the plate to get everything under control. Then didn’t. Feel free to read the Emerald blog for more accurate step by step on this part.
I. Rabble, Rabble, Rabble.
J. Linden Lab issued their mock-outrage “we’ve taken care of this” farce statement while dogs and cats began living together (mass hysteria).
K. People began to issue “aww shucks, they’re just confused kids” type excuses for Emerald’s antics, others posted “we think it’s wrong, but everyone’s being so mean” type excuses, and others went the “they’re all a bunch of Nazis” direction. Because, you know, that’s how the interwebs work.
L. Linden Lab continues to fail to update their product in a way that meets the needs of their user base.

There is not enough facepalm in the world. Seriously.

The problem I have with this situation is that some people I like are on the insanely wrong side of this issue, and some people I find disgustingly vile are on the right side. So it’s frustrating. It’s like when you have to admit that the KKK is entitled to free speech. Yeah, it’s right, bt it makes you feel like you need a bath.

Yet, between all the hate-fueled “I told you so” mocking and the Eeyore “you guys are so mean” pouting, there is very little learning going on. It’s enough to make me climb a bell tower and take a hostage. Why? Because there are lessons here that are getting missed in the exchange and they are THE SAME FUCKING THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN GETTING MISSED ALL ALONG.

So, for next time, can we please review:

1. Linden Lab is not releasing a product that services the needs of their users. The buck stops there. If this isn’t where your bottom line on this issue rests, then you’re getting it wrong. Period.
2. If you think it’s shocking that some of the code monkeys working on Emerald had grief-genes, you’re an idiot. I assure you, every product on your computer right now likely had griefers or ex-griefers working on it. They just weren’t in charge, weren’t given a lot of power, or were good enough not to get caught. Save your outrage for the next episode of Real Housewives of New Jersey or something.
3. Third Party Viewers are a valuable tool, but they need to be investigated and held to task. Their project managers need to be interviewed and asked hard questions in a civil, responsible way — preferably by the people who claim to be delivering news to our community. If the names don’t mean anything to the average consumer, their reputation and integrity (or lack thereof) within the community needs to be made clear by anyone advocating the product.
4. When warning signs appear and then begin flashing in neon, YOU PAY ATTENTION and don’t just hem and haw and hope it all gets better. You certainly DO NOT put your name and/or reputation behind the mess unless you’re damn sure you’re right.
5. An active griefer is not going to behave just because you like them. Just because they haven’t griefed *you* doesn’t mean you can trust them not to behave like an idiot. Are griefers evil? No. Sometimes they’re even useful in a social way. But they’re generally irresponsible, juvenile and reckless on the fly. These are not the people you want in unchecked positions of responsibly in any format or project. You just don’t let an alcoholic tend bar, ffs.
6. You cannot cry about being deceived if you never did anything to educate yourself as a consumer. If you didn’t know about the Emerald team and used their product anyway, then just shut up and switch to Imprudence with the rest of us. Your right to bitch is exactly zero. Oh, and while you’re at it, check into the Imprudence team — don’t just switch to them blindly.

In the meantime, welcome to one of the big reasons the Second Life community continues to be bad-mouthed in technical and professional circles. When “he’s kind of a friend and I don’t think he’ll do anything bad” trumps obvious warning bells, when consumers bitch and moan but don’t educate themselves on their choices or advocate for their needs, when bloggers and journalists self-promote but don’t even try to get answers to hard questions, when “Ha ha ha you got what you deserved and I hope you all die” counts as a valid part of the general discourse — well, how can you take them seriously?

I’d really like it if we didn’t drive this self-hating cycle into the next race on the same tack. Pretty please? With sugar on top?

So stop crying “poor me,” quit making excuses for fuck-ups, back off blaming the branches and learn to identify the roots of a problem, refrain from engaging the hate-mongers, advocate and educate and just LEARN FROM THE FUCKING MISTAKES ALREADY so we don’t end up back in this same place. Ever. Again.

That is all.

“So far, we’ve built awareness. Seven years ago we weren’t a very well known brand. Now we are, and now we have to build preference and emotional attachment.” ~ David Steel

A couple days ago I watched the Second Life brand die a particularly ugly death. One I’m not sure they can revive from and one I’m not sure they deserve to be revived from.

The assassin was a young geek with comedic timing coupled with an appearance and shtick based on Nicholas Brendon circa 1998. Chris Pirillo has some deserved geek cred and comes up with watch-able YouTube stuffage. He’s somewhat knowledgeable and entertaining and I imagine he gets the positive and negative attention that comes with that combination in this forward-frenzy age of all things viral.

And every so often, like all of us, he takes the easy route when asked a legitimate question:

Chris Pirillo on “Whatever happened to Second Life” Take One:

This is what Second Life’s brand has become to the current generation of fine young geekibals.

In all fairness to Chris, there was a time when Second Life, socially, was healthy and happy with little more than porn and gambling. And I don’t mean the elite class of Second Life — I mean the casual user. The “addicted” part is a might unfair. Games of luck have existed at least as long as history has been worth recording, and so have depictions of sexuality. Most people have a guilty pleasure be it gambling, porn, techno-gadget lust, virtual paper dolls, good sippin’ whiskey, or bad 80’s music. But our peccadilloes are not what define us and they shouldn’t be the details that define our societies.

We spend a lot of time declaring “RL” and “SL” in our speech — and I appreciate the movement to stop that practice, even if I don’t abide by it. Because SL is, in many ways RL. It’s sort of like the Dagobah Dark Side Cave:
“What’s in there?”
“Only what you take with you.”

Put another way: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” is ever true in both virtual and real worlds (Oscar knew everything but a good lawyer).

But, let’s look at it from Pirillo’s point of view. There are a lot of people in Second Life doing wondrous things, but they aren’t the average user and those wondrous things aren’t necessarily what will woo a mainstream audience into the format (or even what will woo the current generation of geek). So if you just have a specific elite class working to impress that same elite class and a bunch of other people running around trying to indulge their peccadilloes — what is someone like Chris supposed to come away with?

What Chris got right was his very valid opinion — that Second Life is a crummy product that has failed to capture the imagination of someone like himself. What he got wrong was why — mostly because he simply took the easy out. (Also, he was uninformed about our gambling having been taken away from us — more’s the pity).

To his credit, however, the kid is a trooper and he didn’t just continue to mock and roll his eyes. When attacked by the community in ways I can’t even begin to imagine and don’t want to read, he engaged a few calm voices and re-evaluated his point of view:

The ungodly second take:

This is what Second Life’s brand is, even for those fine young geekibals willing to take a second chance.

I also tried to listen to the Phaylen Fairchild interview, but I couldn’t get beyond the introduction. If you can and must, the link is here.

I can’t fathom what the poor kid could possibly have to say beyond this point, but the thing that’s clear to me is that he’s done his due diligence. He’s done better by SL than SL has done by him. And that is a harsh, cold reality if you’re trying to evaluate the outreach SL has made toward inviting new users to the table — or even in trying to lure indifferent users back.

Second Life and Linden Lab have murdered a brand that had every chance to be the top of its game for a very long time. It happened through incompetence. It happened through indifference. It happened through arrogance. But, the more I reflect on it, I really think it largely happened because Linden Lab did the same thing Chris did in his initial video — they scorned their user base instead of evaluating the product honestly. For me, this started when they took the coward’s way out instead of defending their user base against the shock-and-awe wave of news stories that revealed *gasp* people were doing naughty things on teh interwebs.

There is a lot of hostility that wafts from Linden Lab toward its users — that sense of eye-rolling that we are all crazy cat ladies and griefer vandals (when we’re not busy being porn addicts that have to be led by the wrist between “Adult” and “Non-Adult” and “Whatever Mature Means” sections of a needlessly over-segregated grid). For the last several years the old Microsoft mantra of “you’ll get what we give you” has been their MO (hint to LL: even Microsoft had to dial that back to keep up, guys). And when pushed up against silly reporting they didn’t take the high road and say “if our users want adult experiences in our platform, that’s their option and we defend their privacy. Second Life is no different from the real world in that adults will spend their time pursuing different social options — be it a night at the opera or a stripper jumping out of a make-believe cake. Now, if I could draw your attention to the money our community has raised for cancer research and the work some of our users are doing to help handicapped individuals explore mobility options…”

Boo-yeah. Dismissed. Moving on.

Instead we got the Robin “deer in headlights” moment which has come to define the “not ready for prime time” reality of the Linden Lab program. LL doesn’t appear to have moved beyond that point. It’s as though they dismissed their user base for embarrassing them instead of bridging the gaps that led them to realize they were out of touch with what was happening on the grid.

Ivory towers kill brands.

What people fail to realize about Facebook games and Twitter social networking is the simplest aspect. Sure, there’s ease of use and the accessibility on the deck, but underneath there is the sense that those tools and entertainments are living languages. Second Life is becoming the Latin of virtual worlds. Sure, you have to study it, but no one really *uses* it anymore except those freaks up in their elite clubhouses.

Can we turn it around? As a user base that has been dismissed from the table? I don’t see how. Not until Linden Lab invites us back. The more frightening question — does Linden Lab want to turn it around? Or is this now the final product that will be stripped down into chatroom / facebook friendliness with point-and-click virtual shopping options to turn profits and no longer push the boundaries of “whatif?”

I’m waiting, hopefully, to see that is not the case. The firing of Qarl and Philip’s inability to talk straight about real goals, however, leave me edgy and disheartened. And yet, still here, unwilling to let go of the possibilities of “whatif.”

To steal an abbreviated moment from James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter:
Eleanor of Aquitaine: “How, from where we started, did we ever reach this…?”
Henry II: “Step by step.”

“In the last days of Vaudeville Theatre, they sued Marconi because radio was killing Vaudeville, where you had to pay to go into a relatively small room to listen to music and voice. But it didn’t kill music, the outcome was a thousand times more music, making a thousand times more money, reaching a thousand times more people. But in the short term, there was panic.” ~ Cory Doctorow

More than any other topic about SL, I am exhausted with content theft. It is always there, somewhere, in my twitter feed, friends’ blog links, or sneaking up on me in the form of an insanely rambling notecard dropped on me by a designer I’ve never heard of (or worse, one I’ve heard of but can’t stand).

When the issue began, I was outraged at Linden Lab’s indifference and short-sightedness. Over time, my feelings have shifted to less disgust with LL (there are so many things they get wrong, how can you be outraged at all anymore) and more disgust with those individuals in the SL creative community (and blogging community) who behave in a ridiculously stupid manner about content theft.

No matter the repulsive antics, however, I come up against the reality that content theft is still a serious issue that threatens the SL economy in may ways. Putting aside the crybaby tactics, the melodrama and the police-state protection measure attempts (that never work, it’s worth mentioning) there does need to be dialog on the topic, and it should include someone from Linden Lab who has a commitment to getting this handled in a way that provides help to the creative community without limiting too much user freedom. Assuming anyone like that still exists at Linden Lab and holds the authority to do more than order refills for the soda machine.

Years ago, I had a three-day debate with Grace about content theft; we kept hitting walls while we volleyed solutions.

First, you come against the fact that anything which can be manufactured indefinitely/at no cost has a difficult time establishing and maintaining a market value. This corrupts the conceptual value of virtual goods with consumers (social morality does not place as much stigma on stealing a stick of gum as it does a diamond ring, and the stick of gum can boast a larger physical value than anything sold in Second Life). Now, to be certain, the time, effort, and skill that goes into creating most objects in Second Life has costs and value, just as every software-based product does. But how many people have not-so-legal copies of one program or another on their computer as they’re now reading this?

Second, you realize that DRM never works and that most companies have been spending billions and raking their middle-men minds out trying to find a method that does work. You also look at history and must concede that every time content creators have tried to stifle invention and technology in the name of protection, they’ve been wrong. TV did not kill the movie industry. The VCR did not kill movies and television. Despite what the music industry claims, MP3s have not stopped most people from dreaming of being the next American Idol. Markets shift; technology opens more doors than it closes; those who try to police progress are always wrong.

Third, you hit the problems with trying to police stolen content without infringing on the innocent and the rights of non-abusers. I am not of the opinion that everyone should be treated as a potential criminal for the “greater good” of something. No-mod items which should be mod (like clothes or hair) piss me off. We shouldn’t have to contact a creator for a “fitting.” The SL consumer is already at a huge disadvantage on most items. We can’t try on most clothes before buying them. We can’t trade-in most objects. There is no longer anything that passes for a second-hand market. We can’t back-up our inventories for data loss. Trying to force the SL consumer to accept that we shouldn’t even be allowed to tailor our purchases to our avatars really fries my yams — especially when making something no-mod is not a protection against anything (excluding scripts, obviously). You don’t stop someone from stealing your textures, sculpts, or shape settings by making something no-mod, you just slow them down, make them use better tools, and piss off a lot of ordinary consumers in the process. There are now content creators who embed scripts in their items to NOTIFY them when you rez an object that’s intended to be worn. Not long ago, a friend of mine rezzed a shoe to leave it out as a prim decoration in her virtual dressing room and the content creator IMed her in a tizzy to accuse her of rezzing it to copybot. Nothing sells a brand like a rabid content creator acting like an idiot and accusing an innocent consumer of criminal activity. Morons.

Fourth, there’s the statistical issue. We don’t know how much stolen content is actually happening, so it’s hard to sell the need strenuously. It’s largely anecdotal guesswork based on a lot of crying from melodramatic hens who, unfortunately, can rarely be trusted to offer sound testimony.

Fifth, you have all the joys of documenting and filing DMCA paperwork and the international issue, coupled with the fact that so few content creators use the system that’s in place to protect them.

Sixth, Linden Lab should not be in the position to judge content disputes. It’s a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad idea. For them, legally, as well as for the community in general.

The list goes on, but for every problem, the main question still stands: how to solve it?

At the time of my debate with Grace, I was firmly in the camp that a third-party organization needed to be established to act as arbitrator. This was the way eBay disputes used to be handled, once upon a time, and it worked fairly well. The idea, loosely would be to have an established Linden-Lab approved protocol which would be included in a revised SL TOS making it so that anyone offering items (free or for sale) agreed to arbitration in cases of potential content theft. This arbitration process would be focused solely on the removal of the content from LL’s databases and would not stop any wronged party from seeking civil recourse. The system would be self-funding, as the accuser would have to pay an arbitration fee, and the defending party would have to also pay one to dispute the accusation. After an established process of review, the party who was found not at fault would be refunded, and offending items would be removed from the grid into a “holding” database (rather than just being deleted) not only to provide for an appeals process, but also to maintain records for any civil legal issues. Obviously, this means the third party organization would need to have a liaison with Linden Lab to execute matters of authority.

I still believe this third company, provided it be headed by responsible individuals with fair and established reputations in the business community, could perform their services with acceptable levels of transparency at a modest fee. They could easily work in tandem with SL. Yes, there would still be sour grapes and crybaby antics, but there would be a system to weed out most of the trouble.

However, I no longer believe this alone is the best solution. This kind of review process would only work for textures that are somehow watermarked by their creators or can be identified as unique to a particular individual, and many concerns extend beyond this point. Specifically, the ability to import non-borked meshes will bring with it a whole new dawn in the need to protect content. As such, the entire way that LL handles offered content needs to be addressed.

So why not simply make it so that free accounts are unable to create transfer items, place items for sale, or mark items as free to the community? Why not make it so that anyone trying to distribute virtual goods must have a confirmed payment to distribute anything? (Please note, I am not talking about the useless age-verification, I mean an actual credit card / paypal account / other payment method transaction on file).

This accomplishes a few things.

1. It cracks down on anonymous theft in a big way. It forces someone who wants to circumvent the system and steal content anonymously to commit credit card or payment fraud, making their actions a matter for authorities.
2. It makes it so that anyone filing a DMCA or looking to take legal action will not have to shell out ridiculous amounts of money chasing a phantom just to file a C&D or other notice.
3. It invests those people who want to create and distribute in the community.
4. It gets rid of a bunch of badly made crap from the grid.
5. It provides a real (and fair) line between paid and free accounts. Everyone on the SL grid is supposed to be an adult, and adults (crazy cat people aside) understand that with privilege comes responsibility — it’s rule of society 101.

There will be casualties and unexpected consequences. For every protection, there is a compromise. I’m well aware that creators with multiple accounts will encounter issues (although I do think simple ways to link accounts can be established for concerns like this). When you look at the horrible ways many content creators are trying to address content theft on their own, or you consider how Linden Lab might handle this otherwise, or even when you realize the implications of “in the shadows” projects like Modular Systems’ Onyx, you start to see the benefits of making a transparent compromise with minimal impact.

This system would preserve the ability of free accounts to make things for themselves, to experiment and build, to offer art for exhibition, etc. These would all be good things to encourage new residents who need time to “skill up” before entering the marketplace, etc. It also provides for artists or educators who don’t have any interest in the money game. Performances, lectures, etc will not be affected. Most residents, being straight consumers, likely will not be hindered at all. I personally do not know a reputable content creator who doesn’t have a paid account.

IRL, if you want to go into professional business, you need a business license, articles of incorporation, financial records, etc. There is some record of transparency with the proper authorities so that anyone in the public with a grievance can know who to address. This process, if nothing else, will verify who the parties are in legal matters and protect Linden Lab from having to fight lawsuits with consumers (gestures of good faith also go a long way in most courts).

Making it so that in order to distribute content, you need to have a paid, verified account, is hardly a draconian gesture. I think having this simple protection in tandem with an open protocol for handling disputes (and possibly collaborating with a third party arbitration organization) should be on Linden Labs not-so-distant to-do list. And I hope something like this is on the table for discussion before importing meshes becomes a reality.

“Listen, I’m an old man. I’m much older than you think. I can’t go on for ever. I’ve got no children of my own, no family at all. So who is going to run the factory when I get too old to do it myself? Someone’s got to keep it going - if only for the sake of the Oompa-Loompas. Mind you, there are thousands of clever men who would give anything for the chance to come in and take over from me, but I don’t want that sort of person. I don’t want a grown-up person at all. A grown-up won’t listen to me; he won’t learn. He will try to do things his own way and not mine. So I have to have a child. I want a good sensible loving child, one to whom I can tell all my most precious sweet-making secrets - while I am still alive.” ~ Roald Dahl, Charlie’s Chocolate Factory.

“You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it requires people to make the dream a reality.” ~ Walt Disney.

Because it needs two quotes. That’s why.

I probably shouldn’t blog when I’m running a fever. But I’m bored.

So while most people are humming “Ding Dong, the M Is Dead” and tying yellow ribbons ’round old oak trees for the return of King Philip, I’ve been mulling, as have some of the calmer voices. Zero, Grace, and Zha have all produced reasoned thoughts as well as a host of others. I just keep coming up against one big problem.

Philip couldn’t get it done the first time. Not really. He climbed the mountain, but Wile E. Coyote-d all the way down after that.

I like Philip. I respect him as a visionary. He is actually up there, in his own way, with people like Walt Disney — people who saw something amazing and set out to make it happen. And, unlike most, he made it happen. But what usually sustains the dreamers is not just the dream or luck or the right place at the right time — it’s the ability to engage the right people in the dream with you.

There are three main ways of doing this — (1) making the hard calls and entrusting the people who know how to make things happen (Walt Disney and his brother, Roy), (2) being a charismatic sociopath and turning the world around you into a sort of brainwash zone where your minions believe their existence depends on helping you achieve your goals (Jobs, Gates) or (3) frolicking about making daydream declarations and trusting the Oompa Loompas to deus ex machina you out of the tight spots (hint: one of these only works in fiction).

If the problem with capitalism is capitalists, then the problem with vision is visionaries. They are sometimes their own worst enemies and the worst enemies of their own dreams. Linden Lab suffered early and often because the right people were in the wrong jobs. And, once that festered, the wrong people then became cemented into other positions (ie: the inevitable nepotism). And the whole sunshine and flowers “everyone work on what they want” philosophy turned into a nightmare of nothing getting done.

As the only person I know who was actually unschooled, I can tell you the model only works to a certain point. At some stage knowledge, like work, is unpleasant, but if you’re going to build a mind or a company, the unpleasant stuff has to be done and someone has to be there to make sure it goes right. In business sometimes you get lucky and you have a martyr to do that on their own. If there ever was a Martyr Linden, however, I never met them.

Grace points out that Philip has to get an amazing number one, and that can’t happen fast enough. Zha points out that there needs to be a priority of things that address the current concerns of the existing SL population. I would suggest hiring an average teenager to sit in a room and state the obvious all day, as well, and I’m only half-kidding.

The short fix is easy to say, hard to do. Grace is right. Philip is stuck as the nice guy “Good Daddy.” He needs a “Bad Mommy” to help him parent his adolescent child through these growing pains, and he has to keep himself from sneaking the kid candy after Mom grounds it. This is a rare second chance. M Linden took the hit and cleaned out a lot of dead weight with him. There are no obligations of “How can you fire me, I was standing right next to you when X went live…” or other can’t-fire-guilt lingering.

Zha is also right, and a lot of our suggestions for priorities align.

My priority list would be more like this:

1. Hire someone you respect enough to yell at you when you’re wrong and professional enough to take it on the chin when the hard calls have to be made. Give that person as much power as humanly possible to keep the trains running on time. Pay them. Love them. Pet them.
2. Get your PR house in order. Create actual liaisons to deal with the existing population, the businesses who want to come in, and the educational institutions that want to explore. Stop thinking this is all or nothing and there can be only one. Make their job descriptions include the fact that they have to talk to each other and they have to spend time in the actual fucking product using it the way their base uses it. Tell them not to talk about anything they don’t know (like live music, art, or anything else that happens in SL and has a pulse). Make businesses and education believe they matter. Make residents feel heard. Honestly, no one expects you to do these things 100% (or even 50%) right in business these days, so if you just learn to fake it better that would be an improvement.
3. Communication. For the love of GOD fix it. Any kid that ever went to EPCOT and rode Spaceship Earth understands that communication is the foundation of technology and human society. If your product is failing on communication, your product is doomed. Fix it. Groups. Privacy. ALL OF IT. This should be your main goal for the rest of the life of SL. If you cannot answer how the project you’re working on contributes to people communicating better with one another, your project is a bad one.
4. Interface with small groups of the population. Find out what their issues are. Stop pretending JIRA works. Ignore the crazy people. If you can’t identify the crazy people, call me, I have a list. Again, this is where the average teenager sitting in the room next to you can be of help.
5. Look at what your competition is already doing and do it better. Use the Emerald viewer for a week and realize why over half your users prefer it to your product. You don’t have to work on view 3.0. No, I’m lying. You do. Like yesterday.
6. Give people things that do not suck when you want them to spend money on you. That whole thing about Linden Houses? I’m not sure what you were thinking, but you should never forget how stupid it was. You want to get more people to upgrade to paid accounts? Give them one free “back up” a month so that they can revert to a previous inventory in case of lost data. Then charge them a modest fee to restore after a data loss issue up to X times per year (to prevent exploiting the system). No one else can offer that but you. Give residents the ability to share inventories across registered accounts up to X alts. No one else can do that but you. Give merchants with paid accounts and private regions the ability to list demos in their profiles. This will remove a boatload of crap from XStreet and stop people from having to lag down sims to try on demos. No one can do this but you. Offer those same merchants the ability to set up and manage recurring subscriptions. Build in features that no one else can offer. Make your product necessary. Give people something worth upgrading for.
7. Fix events. Now. Yesterday. Make it possible for people to figure out what the hell to do when they get bored in the platform instead of just quitting.
8. Search. Nuff said.
9. Accept that the adult aspect of SL is a bigger part of the the business in SL than any of you are comfortable with. You may want to call it “clothing sales” but trust me, it’s about making their avatar look hot at the club. You don’t have to endorse anything illegal, become a porn producer, or bring it to the front page, but stop acting like you’re ashamed of one of the major reasons people join SL and stop trying to kick it to the curb.
10. When you fix search, sell adwords like any other company would already be doing. Sell ads during log-in instead of the silly news updates no one reads. Do basic things to increase your income. Make money in the obvious ways, ffs. You don’t have to re-invent the wheel on everything.
11. All your suggestions and “hey, kids, look what you can get” stuff is embarrassingly off the mark of what your user base is actually using your product for. Just put a banner on the website that says “We are out of touch” and stop paying people to make irrelevant lists. Look beyond the ass-kissers and the self-promoting halfwits and figure out who is honest and professional and in touch. The days when you could just throw together a party with volunteers is over. If you’re going to have events and promote activities HIRE PEOPLE WHO KNOW ABOUT THEM or leave them alone.
12. Be as honest as possible with your user base. Yes, the crazy cat people and bitches like me will always have something negative to say. But when you say one thing to reporters and do another with your product, it makes you and Linden Lab appear intellectually bankrupt. It also opens doors of liability that I’m sure make your lawyers wake up in cold sweats. For the most part even we shallow consumer-types respond well to honesty. If we know you’re working on it. If we know it’s on the list. If we know you’re trying we will give you a lot of fucking rope. Look what we’ve already given you, despite yourselves.
13. Give land owners actual control of their land, especially on private regions. We need better management tools for griefing if nothing else. We also need data and information from YOU on how to manage lag. We need to know how script size, script time, texture load, etc all work together to bog down user experiences. We need to know how to prioritize these things when calls have to be made. We need to educate our visitors on how to be respectful toward each other.
14. Stop screwing over the creative community. It’s bad enough that you insult the live music community on a regular basis by pretending to care, but shafting media and content creators in wide sweeping gestures? Cut that shit out. Content creators make the trampy clothes that keep your beloved consumers wiggling their pixels in SL. It’s bad enough they have to deal with the realities of content theft; they don’t need your guff as well. FIX build problems. That crap about SL having 5 decimal places, but we only get 3, so we have all these hairline fractures in our stuff? Stop that. That bug with the 1 pixel fuck-up on textures? Fix that, too. Your users are zoom freaks and your best content creators are anal retentive. That .0001 we can’t get to without scripts or alternate viewers really pisses us of.

Once you have a handle on these things (and I’m not saying once they’re all solved, I’m saying once you have a handle on them) then you can murmur something about the next shiny thing without us burning you at the stake. Fix it, make practical improvements on the existing, and then you can dream the next dream, reach the unreachable stars — whatever soundtrack plays in your head when your light bulbs go off. But until then, you’re cut off. Whatever is on the plate now is all you get until you finish your veggies.

I’m now going to sleep and dream that Philip is capable of managing his dreams. Because I like the way he dreams and there’s got to be someone out there to help him get it right. Including an average teenager.

“Bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.” ~ The late, great DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Via Bennett, Krikes, Meerson, Meyer, and/or Nimoy)

So, right, the layoffs… erm, restructuring.

I don’t have a lot to add about the reasons behind the recent changes taking place at Linden Lab, or emotional response. For insight far keener than anything I have to offer on that subject, I suggest reading, Grace, Gwen or Tara. However, amid all the history, speculation, and other reasoned interpretation (not to mention the mass hysteria) there has been a significant point I’ve not seen covered and it’s still buzzing in my skull.

The unreliability card and the unforeseen side-effects of playing it one too many times.

Whatever this new direction means for Linden Lab and Second Life, and whatever spin is being put on the situation, this drastic, public about-face signals yet another example of how arbitrary and unreliable the management/decission making structure within the Linden Lab hierarchy remain. In fact, unless there is some heavy-duty duct tape being applied to what remains of the SL Enterprise division, this latest stunt may make certain no serious business looks at SL for quite some time.

Gwen brings up an interesting point in her post, speculating that probably only a couple dozen SL Enterprise boxes ever got shipped, indicating (to her) that this makes the project a failure, or, at least a failure in the eyes of income strategy for Linden Lab. But, the fact is, we don’t (and can’t) know that for sure. Forgetting that we don’t have any real numbers to mull, the SL Enterprise system has only been in place for a year. A year. A year is not nearly enough time to evaluate a project that is marketed to the types of organizations that can consider investing in anything with a $100k price tag.

Why? Because bureaucracy takes time — and this appears to be something that neither Linden Lab, nor most bloggers who talk about the SL Enterprise project seem to understand and address.

Yes, there are some organizations where a few people in the tech division can write a $100k check for new development and projects without a lengthy time-table, but they are not the bulk of this type of targeted market. SL Enterprise is/was focused at a certain type of clientele — the type that includes government, big corporate structure, or higher education and all the red tape those types of environments entail. Red tape means drafting funding proposals and grant applications. It means submitting budget requests. It means shuffling paper between departments, making deals, revisiting numbers to shuffle some more. Lather. Rinse. Repeat until blind and/or numb.

Anyone looking to use the SL Enterprise system would have to evaluate it, research it, investigate it and put together a preliminary report that would convince a board and/or someone who makes the big calls that they could further develop proposals. Assuming that hurdle is lept, then they have to go through the budget planning phase and pass that on for approval. Probably more than once. Then, assuming they still have a green light, they may well have to wait for fiscal markers or goals to be reached (especially during one of the shakiest financial years in recent history). This process would reasonably take months in a best-case scenario. Throw in a conservative penny pincher at any leg in this process trying to stretch a profit margin for an extra quarter (or two) and approval gets stalled or rebooted back a few steps.

In fact, I have a contact who recently related a conversation they had with a frustrated government official who’s been considering an SL Enterprise implementation into their existing projects. The official explained that trying to get the necessary funding could be expected to take up to nine months due to the basic process of review cycles — each of which last more than a month — to seek approval.

One year is not enough time to know if SL Enterprise was a success or not, and you have to wonder how many people were engaged in some sort of planning process that just, for all intents and purposes, appears to have been cast over Linden Lab’s collective shoulder (assuming rumors are true that the SL Enterprise top planners and liaisons are among the layoffs).

Anyway you look at it, this radical shift in focus sends the message that Linden Lab is a company with short-attention-span syndrome. Something didn’t work as quick as they wanted it to, so they moved on to the next shiny idea. And who knows — the next shiny thing may, in fact, be better. But there’s something to be said for not burning bridges you don’t have to burn. And, don’t kid yourself, without a liaison and advocate in a high office, SL Enterprise is a burned bridge. Because no organization is going to be able to function as they’d like with basic Linden Lab “support.”

Now, don’t get me wrong — I do not default to the position that the layoffs are a bad thing. I am not in the Chicken Little “sky is falling” camp on this one. The internal structure of LLab hasn’t been working for a long time - a personnel shake-up was damn necessary. Some good people will always get swept away in a house cleaning like this. There are always unfortunate casualties in a restructure. But usually, in any corporate sweep, the bulk of what goes is dead or outdated weight. Who is going out doesn’t interest me intellectually. Who comes in, and what those that remain focus upon is the food of my concern, and my hope.

Moving toward a consumer-based market (or, moving back to that market, to be accurate) is actually a direction I support. I also support making some of SL functionally available for mobile devices and making it more social networking friendly (assuming they do the legwork and get their privacy options up to par before implementing this kind of thing). These sorts of evolutionary steps are simply a necessity to remain competitive in today’s market of social formats. Yes, I’m concerned that this may lead to a “Farmvilling” of SL, but I’m not greatly concerned. Technology moves forward. It just does.

Now, if we’re lucky and the Lab finally gets a fire under its ass and starts moving in a coherent direction, this will lead to community and consumer growth. That’s a win no matter your business in SL. New communicators, new customers, new creators — this is what it’s about. In a best-case outcome, a significant influx of new residents and new energy into the format means that some of the SL Enterprise targets may even forget and forgive this recent quake of unreliability.

But, it’s worth noting the message this abrupt series of events sends out regarding the stability and reliability of Linden Lab’s internal structure. Shifting focus off SL Enterprise after only a year means they didn’t understand the market they were going after, or they lost patience before a reasonable time frame of execution. Neither of those instills confidence in the company or its product.

Was this because they recognized it as an unrealistic focus and turned it into a more back-burner long-term project? If so, where it the PR to assure SL Enterprise customers (and those who might be seeking funding) that the SL Enterprise project is still healthy and supported? And I don’t mean the lame “the kids are alright” M Linden statement. I mean real PR. There’s a lot of work to do to make this a case where current obligations appear to be tucked safely under one arm while turning a new corner. Right now, it still looks like a kid with ADD chasing the next pretty butterfly.

When it comes to SL, my current belief is that “anything different is good.” So I remain a little hopeful; I’m a sucker that way. But then again, I didn’t shell out $100k for an SL Enterprise box, so my hope is free.

Sure, everything new is a gamble, but smart players understand the importance of remembering the cards they’ve already revealed so they don’t overplay the hand. No one likes placing all their bets on the wild card round. Especially not in a high stakes round.