As the new year approaches and we all get ready to look forward, it’s time to look back on a contentious, frustrating and disappointing year for Second Life. However there were highs as well as lows. This really was a topsy turvy year. This will be a fairly long post, I will warn you of that now, it will also miss some important subjects as my time is restricted, feel free to add your own highs and lows in the comments.
January
We were greeted with a very chirpy blog post from CEO Mark Kingdon. The post looked backwards and forwards and talked of the need to get users to that moment where they really embrace Second Life faster, by the end of the year we were still waiting for that moment, proving just how difficult a step it us but Linden Lab have made some progress there.
M also gave us a list of things we could look forward to in 2010 including: Viewer 2.0, SL Enterprise, new discovery and social tools to help people meet people more quickly, a new orientation experience, a revamped community gateway program, a content management and protection program which would include a viewer and seller directory, using C# to write scripts, a revamped e-commerce website and technical improvements to reduce lag and improve inventory management.
This was an ambitious list, too ambitious as it turned out but some of those boxes were ticked.
Tyche Shephed was providing us with impressive data about fourth quarter 2009 economic statistics, statistics that were ahead of Linden Lab’s and more impressively presented.
Liana was telling us about upcoming search releases, which would become a major and quite frankly damaging bone of contention later in the year, whilst former Alphaville Herald writer Wallace Linden was being introduced to us all in his role of conversation manager, many of us still have no idea what this role entails.
January also saw Linden Lab get into the social networking scene outside of Second Life when they purchased Avatars United, as announced on the blog. This had potential, none of the Facebook restrictions about real names, extra features to take advantage of, how could it possibly go wrong?
February
February started with the expected, but disappointing news that the VBulletin forums were to be nerfed. However as an added slap in the face, the commerce forums where people advertised new products etc. were not going to be replicated at all.
Jack announced that from May 1st grandfathered status on transfer would end when islands were sold, personally I felt this change was long overdue.
People realised that teens were now allowed to post on the main forum along with adults, which led to me speculating that the grids would soon be merging…no they would never do something that silly would they.
A post on PPRS, the people behind a paid picks system revealed that Linden Lab had deemed paid picks to be gaming search and another income avenue for residents was lost, to some cheers and some boos, depending upon which side of the fence you sat.
However February was about to explode into life, first of all Linden Homes were launched. This allowed premium residents to have a home in exchange for 512M worth of tier, with the added advantage that you still had 117 prims to play with, small prefab creators and small parcel landlords frowned, but the scheme was generally seen as positive.
Then came the Linden Endownment for the arts, a plan to support art within Second Life, unfortunately this didn’t appear to get that far off the ground.
Viewer 2.0 was heralded and moved into Open beta, media on a prim, or shared media as it became known was here, so was horrible camera controls, an unpopular sidebar and other contentious features, but it was beta, right?
Then a third party viewer policy and directory was announced. This caused a kerfuffle with some claims that third party developers would not be able to work with these terms and conditions and others wondering whether it would work, in general, the policy did work.
March
After the breathtaking month of February, March became a bit more realistic. Liana’s infamous “Search: More than just a pretty face” blog post rubbed many people up the wrong way, largely because the search improvements simply weren’t there, events were rubbish, land sales were rubbish and results were rubbish, spin fail here of a very high magnitude.
However signs that all wasn’t well appeared when an email to the SLED mailing list revealed Pathfinder would be leaving Linden Lab.
March also brought a beta advertising option whereby advertising could be purchased on message of the day. There were problems with this venture, one being a price of upto USD$4,500 for an advert and people complaining this was not how message of the day should be used. Personally I felt it was a decent idea, just way overpriced.
Metaverse Services limited launched a successful takeover of Azure Islands. Metaverse Services limited turned out to be an arm of Anshe Chung’s empire, some people were not happy about how this takeover happened and there were a few tales of woe.
The first step towards script limits was announced. The most glaring issue at this stage being that all mono scripts would be counted as 64K, even if they weren’t using 64K, making them less economic on the face of it than LSL scripts. However we did get new tools to look at script usage:
SLIM, the Second Life instant messenger system was brought to an end.
April
Compared to the first three months of the year, April was a lot more quiet. The big issues were viewer 2.0 and search, Marx Dudek posted about Viewer 2.0 and TPV’s and pointed to polls suggesting that 87% of respondents did not like viewer 2.0.
Linden Lab surprised us all by reintroducing the land sales and rentals forums to the new blogrums, a large thanks for this should be paid to Melody Regent who had been bringing the issue up at Jack’s office hours.
However search issues were coming to a head, and Jira Web-2001 highlighted a massive issue whereby parcels were not appearing in search as expected when multiple maturity ratings were selected. This was a biggie, this was a biggie that Linden Lab got very wrong.
May
May started out with Linden Lab on the attack, the new marketplace beta was announced. This promised a better look, a better customer experience, more tools. Of course as with anything new there were concerns, picture aspect ratios being a prime concern, 2,000 character limits another concern, the lack of BBCode another concern, but hey it was only just announced and it was beta.
Meanwhile T Linden was telling us about upcoming features such as viewer 2.1, improved search, mesh public beta, the relaunch of Avatars United, Havok 7, Server code 1.40 and the new marketplace. There was also talk of better communcation between the lab and residents. When you look at all this, positive traction and moving towards a better experience, the heavy hammer that was just around the corner is all the more surprising.
However there were signs that all wasn’t well, after six years at Linden Lab Jeska Linden announced she was leaving. However people leave companies, nothing too untoward seemed to be happening and there was more positive news when Colossus announced that the extremely controversial freebie roadmap was being put into hibernation.
Linden Lab admitted that there was a hard to reproduce bug with search. However the bug would contiune to be a pain for some time to come.
However the job losses started to pick up pace in May, Colton and Plexus were no longer found in search, Teagan was reported to be leaving and VP of strategy and emerging business Judy Wade was leaving, something seemed to be amiss here.
At the end of the month the top ten finalists for the Linden Prize were announced, of the ten one stood out like a sore thumb, Sion Chicken, personally I didn’t see the problem of them being in the top ten but many disagreed with me.
June
June would prove to be a month when serious concerns were raised about Second Life but it started in positive fashion. Those concerned about Sion Chicken winning the Linden Prize had their fears allayed when it was announced that the winners were The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop.
Long time Vendor creator JEVN changed hands, with Esmay Rand admitting the time consuming project was no longer feasible due to RL commitments, Mystical Demina and his partner Jenzza Misfit of Extreme Reality Inc. took on the day to day operations and development of JEVN.
Then came the bombshell, Linden Lab were restructuring. There is no way of spinning thirty percent staff reductions as a positive move, so I have no idea why they even tried, something was seriously amiss, when you look at the promises and planned developments of the first five months of the year and then read about thirty percent cuts when everything seemed to be on an upward curve, something very dramatic must have happened.
Lists did do the rounds but there wasn’t a definitive list, however amongst the reported casualties were Blue, Pink, Zero, Socrates and Harmony. I know that Pink and Blue were definitely on the hit list, Pink was extremely surprising considering the work going into the new marketplace.
Inworld Jezebel Bailey informed us that the Lilypad Lounge had closed, whereas I reported that Greenies would be closing its doors in Second Life.
However there were more casualties on the job front, the biggest one of them all being CEO Mark Kingdon himself leaving to be replaced temporarily at least, by Philip Rosedale, who of course used to be the CEO. Exactly what happened here nobody outside the circle involved will know, but the move was swift to say the least.
July
July way was a releatively quiet month, indeed we’d probably had a year’s worth of news in the first six months. Relay for Life was coming to its conclusion after once more seeing a lot of hard work from residents, whilst on the inworld business front the LISA retail system was going going gone.
Personally I was concerned with the nonsense Blizzard were upto with Real_ID and wanting real names on their forums. Blizzard of course backed down after all the complaints.
However search remained a problem and one issue was sneaked through, the mature content checkbox, which was used to signify that your mature parcel really did have mature content, was made redundant, without much of an announcement. The reason for this change would become abundantly clear later in the year.
August
Summer months are generally quiet on the blog and development front, not many announcements are made during the summer. However this year was a tad different, there was controversy, surprise announcements and more.
The job losses continued, Qarl announced he would be leaving the lab, even though he didn’t want to. This was all the more puzzling as he had rave reviews from his manager about his performance.
SLCC was to be the focus of the grid merger bombshell, with Philip’s keynote speech claiming that measures were in place to make the merger suitable, they are not in place and the merger isn’t suitable but Linden lab haven’t been listening since August on this issue so I don’t expect them to get their heads out the sand now. They should have built a PG continent, they were told and told and told again to do this.
EmeraldGate broke into a right bloody storm with Philip encouraging people to use a different viewer to Emerald. I know Emerald was popular, I know it hurt people not to use it or move to another viewer, but there were serious allegations of misuse and Linden Lab could not stand idly by.
Another hot summer topic was Display Names. Many people expressed concerns about foul deeds being performed, I agree there’s potential for such but they are also a useful feature, although not as useful as one would wish. Once a week changes aren’t much use to me.
Concierge live chat was cut from a 24/7 to a limited hours service, with bizarre claims on the blog that these were improvements. Sometimes you just need to stop digging.
September
September brought with it an issue on the marketplace that we still have today, albeit in different guises. Ann OToole reported that an item had been delisted for not being as advertised. There were two big problems here, one, the item was as advertised, two, Ann had not been notified the item had been delisted. I am still seeing complaints today about items being delisted and the merchant not being notified, merchants should be informed when this happens.
In a reversal on the job front, Kim Salzer was appointed VP of Marketing.
Avatars United was consigned to the dustbin of history. This wasn’t that surprising in some regards as Linden Lab had done little with it, it was however disappointing, especially as avatars from other worlds, most notably Eve-Online, used the site.
October
Tizzers won rumour of the year award for the Microsoft bidding for Second Life rumour, which was tweeted here. the rumour spread to sites like ZDNet, with respected tech author Mary-Jo Foley suggesting there may be something in it. Whether there was or wasn’t an offer, I don’t know, but the rumour certainly got tongues wagging.
Eyebrows were raised when a special promotion for Ozimals arrived in our inboxes. People wanted to know how the hell such a deal could be obtained for their brand. Around the same time Tyche Shepherd had reported that four new Ozimals sims had arrived on the grid ….hmmm.
Linden Lab’s back to basics campaign was in full swing with FJ announcing they were looking to reduce lag, increase texture loading speeds via HTTP textures, a new main grid deployment service, a new chat service (which I haven’t heard anything else about) and group limits to be raised from 25 to 40 …say what??? We’re back to some positives here after months of pretty gloomy reading.
Philip Rosedale announced he was stepping down as temporary CEO and going back to work at the Love Machine. The ship once again had no captain, this wasn’t so encouraging.
On the search front, there were unconfirmed rumours that large parcels were getting a boost in search. Considering how many search problems there have been this year, this added issue was not welcomed.
After Azure Islands had changed hands and JEVN had changed hands earlier in the year, it now emerged that Hippo-Technologies had merged with PM Sands.
November
Another odd change, inworld classifieds are to be restricted to 256 characters, nobody is quite sure why, nor is anyone sure whom these productEngine guys with awesome names like Grumpity are.
There was an intellectual property hoo-ha when Battlestar Galactica content was removed from inworld. Whereas I can understand why this was done, I still don’t understand why the corps don’t see the marketing opportunities within Second Life for such content.
Apez ran into financial and operational difficulties, with people unable to withdraw their monies for a while. CasperVend stepped in to help out but it’s still unclear exactly what’s happening.
December
Residents discovered problems with adding Paypal to their accounts and then found there was a new payment system in place. The new system will accept payments in currencies other than US dollars and is aimed at non US residents, however the lack of an official announcement has not helped here at all. The new system doesn’t currently accept Paypal.
The job losses continued with Jack Linden announcing he was leaving, whereas Joe Miller simply disappeared from the management structure.
However there was one positive staffing announcement this month, that of course of the new CEO Rod Humble, whom does seem to understand the challenges facing Second Life and his previous work and CV are encouraging, whereas Mark Kingdon was very good in helping us gain some technical improvements and stability, he did seem to do too much too fast, hopefully Rod Humble will take a more cautious approach but will realise that there’s still massive potential here.
So there we have it, my review of the year, as I said at the start it has been a difficult year and I will have missed many issues, there’s only so much time to review the year. We have lost a lot of good people including Blue, Pink, Catherine and Jack and many others who have put a lot of work into this platform, unfortunately I don’t have a full list of those who have departed but I wish them well.
Hopefully 2011 won’t be so topsy turvy, we need some stability now, here’s to hoping Rod Humble is the right man to deliver and that Mesh does bring the platform forward and doesn’t stifle creativity.
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