Linden Lab have blogged about improvements to Second Life during 2012 and a look forward to improvements to Second Life in 2013. As a long term critic of Linden Lab’s every increasing ability to imitate a Harpo Marx convention when it comes to communicating with the community, I welcome this blog post. However the post itself highlights why Linden Lab’s lack of communicating is in itself a bad thing, because there are things within the blog post itself that haven’t exactly been highlighted well during the year.
They talk about new premium perks, which is something they have at least made some effort to communicate about. They talk about the advanced creator tools and pathfinding. These are two areas where I don’t feel there has been anywhere near enough discussion, these issues should be being blogged about.
They talk about the Good Building Practices Wiki, which is something I found out about from Nalates Urriah’s blog, not Linden Lab’s! Seriously, this should be something they promote, it’s a nice resource getting built there.
There’s talk of how 1,200 new and original entries have been added to the destination guide, but where was the push for what averages out at 100 a month new entries during the year?
Looking forward there’s talk of the open source project to bring normal and specular maps to Second Life, which should aid graphics performance in a rather large way. I can understand Linden Lab wanting to tread cautiously, but there has hardly been any official talk of this project between the blog announcement and this end of year address. Maybe they don’t want to promise too much or are wary of raising expectations too high.
Whatever it is, 2013 should be the year where Linden Lab put the community back into their communications, the silent movie approach is not remotely helpful.
There has been plenty of discussion. You just haven’t bothered turning up to the Linden user groups that occur EVERY WEEK.
Rather coincidentally I did go to a user group discussion the other day, the host didn’t make it though so there was no discussion.
User groups are small meetings Ash, even when they were far more widespread and popular, such as Jack’s, which I did go to pretty much every week, there were less than forty people in attendance, which being as that’s generally the mainland limit, isn’t widespread discussion.
I get more information from Nalates Urriah and Inara Pey’s blogs than I do from Linden Lab’s, that really shouldn’t be the case.
There are just four user groups left. the discussions continue to dwindle.
> User groups are small meetings Ash
It is a catch 22, if you do not attend; they are going to be small. This reminds me of people complaining about the lack of roleplayers on my sim when they leave only after a minute.
> even when they were far more widespread and popular, such as Jack’s
Was not that an office hour? Those were a different structure to user groups.
> which being as that’s generally the mainland limit, isn’t widespread discussion.
You cannot really complain about lack of resources to host meetings with far greater numbers when there is not a large demand. I can fully understand Linden lab not caring about investing resources in something that is not happening.
> I get more information from Nalates Urriah and Inara Pey’s blogs than I do from Linden Lab’s, that really shouldn’t be the case.
I get more information from user groups.
> There are just four user groups left. the discussions continue to dwindle.
I cannot really blame LL for taking things off like the “Adult Content” user group, which discussed “issues concerning adult content and other adult-related issues” where by users, were not really having anything to discuss with Viale Linden etc.
Nor can I blame LL for closing down the my.secondlife.com user group once they finished doing significant work on it, at a time when users were fairly vocal about issues with it, but after issues were resolved (such as the facebook like button), and the lack of massive changes coming up, they decided to close that user group.
I cannot blame LL either for “Viewer Evolution” user group being closed down, since it was consolidated into the open development user group due to the overlap.
Nor can I blame LL for closing down “Teens in SL” since the teen grid closed down…
The discussions dwindling? Not the ones that are still relevant in my opinion. The fact LL will cut out the irrelevant stuff is not a negative, it is saving on resources that can be put to better use elsewhere.
Office hours were not vastly different to user groups, not in any way, shape of form, user groups evolved from office hours, I used to attend plenty of office hours and then user groups.
The user groups that are still running were recently hijacked by merchants, because they have no user group and yet, when there have been commerce related meetings, and Pink ran them, they were very well attended. There is no user group for merchants, what happened was ugly and unhelpful but highlighted the lack of communication, I would hardly say merchants are irrelevant to Second Life.
There are far more eyes on the blog or forum, than there are with user groups, that was also the case when Linden Lab ran office hours, those who are attend are far fewer than those who use the blogs or forums, even if the server team updated the forums with links to the minutes of these meetings, they’d be extending their reach.
The server team have long done a fine job of communicating in the forum, it’s one area where decent communication is active.
To try and clarify here Ash, we used to have a lot more meetings, a hell of a lot and they were well attended, those meetings provide richness.
At the same time we used to have a hell of a lot more blog posts, those posts provide reach.
The user groups that still do exist are good, I’m not knocking them and I do read the minutes on the wiki, but they are not as good in terms of reach or informing the wider user base of new developments as the blog is and it’s Linden Lab’s lack of use of the blog that I’m mostly being critical of.
The discussions dwindling? Not the ones that are still relevant in my opinion. The fact LL will cut out the irrelevant stuff is not a negative, it is saving on resources that can be put to better use elsewhere.
However, on user groups in general, where do the people who used to attend the popular office hours of Robin, Jack, Blue and Blondin go now? How about those who went to Michael’s governance meetings? The issues that were raised at these meetings were extremely relevant and of concern to the community, these meetings were well attended, there’s no longer anywhere for the folk who attended them to go, yes the discussions are dwindling.