Just another unauthorised virtual world fansite
So I was trying to download the http project viewer, I have no idea what this project viewer entails. On attempt 876 it finally downloaded, well it wasn’t quite that bad but I’m having ISP issues. I ran it and couldn’t login, but I don’t know if this is due to the project viewer not working or whether it’s my ISP.
However I did notice thatThe Garden is now getting publicity on the message of the day, do they still call it message of the day? I took a look at The Garden here.
The expected premium offer has arrived, A discount on a quarterly membership of 50%, meaning it will only cost USD$11.25 … I think! Now, if you’re cute with the Lindex, you can get someone else to pay for this in three months time, if the L$1000 bonus is included, you can get someone else to pay for this and have enough left over for a coffee from a company who may well divert the profits to avoid paying tax, but that’s a whole different ball game.
There’s also a new premium gift, as announced on the blog. A new airplane, with which you can fly in a premium only airfield. Personally I’m not that keen on the concept of premium only areas beyond sandboxes. I think it’s a good idea to give premium members exclusive early access to places, I’m not so keen on exclusive perks like airfields or even the wilderness. However if it works in keeping people premium, then fair play to Linden Lab.
Premium membership isn’t that bad a deal, you get 512m tier or a Linden Home, with mainland parcels so cheap these days a parcel may be a better option, Linden homes have restrictions on events and those parcels can’t be group owned, which means you may miss out on some features. On top of that you get a stipend of three hundred Linden Dollars, unless you’re a returning oldbie whereby it may be four hundred Linden Dollars, although if you’re a really old returning oldbe, it may be five hundred Linden Dollars. I don’t know if they still put you back at your original stipend level, they certainly used to.
It started with a tweet from Toxic “Machinima” Menges, Linden Lab are looking for a community manager. The successful candidate will need to know how to use Twitter, as well as having an awesome blog. They will also need to be happy, which right away makes me deeply suspicious, shiny happy people laughing, it can’t possibly be good for morale.
Joking aside, this is one of a few interesting job vacancies being advertised on Linden Lab’s Careers page.We’ve had some good community people in Second Life, Blondin for example, who was pretty damn awesome, then there was Amanda, who ended up being Blondin’s boss, I’m not sure what happened to Amanda, there was a bit of controversy but I liked her because she could be quite blunt when needed, so could Pink, whom I also admired from afar, not generally when I was talking to her, but you know, needs must, you can’t play the seeker of truth and justice and be biased in favour of the management! I’m going off on a tangent, back on track!
Other eye catching vacancies include:
Customer Relations Representative – Technical support side of matters by the look of it and making sure technical support and engineers talk to each other. I work in technical support, getting techies to talk to support is a challenge, trust me, techies often like to fix things, they don’t always like talking, indeed some of them like sitting in darkened rooms with the heating set very cold and mumble at you, whereas support requires an ability to be called names and not take it to heart and then call the techies names for not talking to you.
Director Of Customer Support – Looking after lots of aspects of customer relations and technical support, they could cut out the middle man here and hire Cyn, or Robin, or Catherine, although I’m not sure how much experience they have in some of the required fields, all three of them quite frankly rock …. ok so I confess that’s not a qualification for such an important position but come on, bring them back! I know Cyn wasn’t the most communicative of directors outwardly and that Catherine appeared to have a shoe fetish, but there’s room for people of that calibre and experience. Robin certainly has lots of game industry experience.
Virtual Currency manager – This one is interesting to say the least. this is specific to the Linden Dollar, hmmm, what are they planning here? This is the sort of thing Zee would have been involved in back in the day but I don’t think it’s at the sort of scale Zee was at in terms of management structure.
Continue reading “Linden Lab Seek Customer Relations, Virtual Currency And Community Staff”
Back on October 23rd I took a brief look at the new Communication Hub User Interface Project Viewer. At the time there were a few issues with it, but one of the issues was that the IM window looked just the same as the Chat History window, that has now changed. The IM window still looks like the IM Window .. as one would expect, however the chat history now looks like the IM window but with pages to go back and forth, so you can view your chat history. I’ll explain with pictures:
IM Window
Chat History With Pages
Note the pages indicator, so now chat history also looks like a chat history!
So LL have announced a competition to give feedback on the new proposed Marketplace categories, via a survey in order to win the prize of 2,489 Linden dollars you will need to get creative with suggestions for the female skins sub-categories. There will be five winners and the winning prize can pay for a month long front page Marketplace enhancement.
There are rules and regulations to be aware of, as there should be with any reputable contest! I think the thing to appreciate here is that the Marketplace team are responding, this isn’t how I’d like to see them respond to issues and as Inara Pey points out in her blog post on a recent announcement that meetings with merchants aren’t on the horizon, the marketplace team aren’t exactly winning friends and influencing people with their communications strategy.
However the competition is here for those who want to have a say about the proposed categories and a competition adds a bit of fun to the process as well as bringing some engagement to interested parties.