Should We Be Looking To Streamline Messaging?

So I’ve reached that age whereby I listen to BBC Radio 4 when driving to and from work. Tonight I caught a part of Digital Human, where Alexs Krotoski was investigating whether we were all becoming techno-fundamentalists, which makes a change from people being called techo-communists.

The part that most caught my attention was email, or more to the point, how bloody annoying it gets. Email is a curse at times, people hit and run with email, especially when it’s a work email, personal emails often have some substance to them, with work emails, we set out of office replies, which were once frowned upon as being wasteful, now they’re expected. Some people are apparently setting out of office emails that tell people the email will be deleted, which is a step too far in my eyes but I understand the point to a degree, the person isn’t there to handle the email.

Another issue was to do with mobile phones and how people often set them to airport mode when they’re out of work, because if they don’t, the messages keep coming. Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to Second Life and the joys of messaging.

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Private Regions Down Almost 10% This Year

Image Should Be Here
Graph Of Sims

The image above is a bit difficult to read here, but it’s a graph of sim losses since January 1st this year, published here with kind permission from Tyche “Statto” Shepherd, for the full sized image click here. The graph is from this post over at SLUniverse, where Tyche updates us regularly on the state of play with the land mass. The latest post (a new one usually appears over the weekend) points out that the grid is lighter to the tune of 2353 private regions this year, which is around 9.9% of the total number of regions recorded on January 1st.

Estate losses are painful, to owners and renters. TheRoyal Properties website currently displays the following message:

Sadly, due to so many avatars not making payments as promised, Royal Properties has had to officially close its doors. Enjoy your journey… I only wish it would have worked out for me to…

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Unintended Consequences

Sometimes in life, we use things in ways they weren’t intended to be used. Then we become accustomed to that usage and get miffed when we’re told changes are being made to make us use those things in the way they were intended. This appears to have happened with the Jira AKA bug tracker, following an announcement in September.

I’ve used the Jira as a knowledge base in the past, and it was a bloody good one. I’d search for an issue, see something that looked similar to my issue, read the report and sometimes find a solution! Hurrah! Now I can’t do that for new issues, the thing is, the Jira was never advertised as a knowledge base. However it was a useful resource and now it has been nerfed.

I went to the Jira today, and was rather impressed when I was told my time settings didn’t match and quickly unimpressed when I found that I can’t see new issues, search will turn up old ones so there’s some knowledge there still, but that knowledge will become obsolete over time in many cases.

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Marketplace Wounds Can Be Healed But Surgery May Need To Be Drastic

I’ve been playing the latest World Of Warcraft expansion, Mists Of Pandaria, recently. The starting zone introduces you to the wise Master Shang, who offers wisdom and tells you that something is wrong with the world, he is seeking aid on how to fix things. Does this sound familiar? The solution in the end is rather drastic, very risky and takes a lot of healing.

Which brings us to The Marketplace. I’m not going to go into all the current woes, Inara Pey’s blog post and a forum thread or two, will do that for you. Suffice to say there are many unhappy bunnies, merchants and customers.

Someimes you need to stop digging. The Marketplace is suffering all sorts of woes, I’m sure people at Linden Lab and on The Marketplace team are tearing their hair out and beavering away trying to come up with a fix, but it may be time to think again and look at another big overhaul.

I’m sure there will be groans at such a prospect, but sometimes you need to rip it up and start again.

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