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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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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Rod Humble Moves Linden Lab Forward, But He Shouldn’t Leave Second Life Behind

I’m seriously having to drag my mouse away from add to cart on Steam where Football Manager 2013 is seductively glancing at me… well it’s more than a seductive glance, it’s winking, fluttering its eyelashes and licking its lips … I must resist, I mean it destroys your social life, it’s too time consuming these days … wait they’ve introduced a new classic mode which makes gameplay quicker, like in the old days, beta will be available any day now if I pre-order and resistance may be futile …

Now when I was a lad I knew more about the people behind games, people such as Paul and Oliver Collyer, whom brought us Championship Manager and are still part of the team now that it’s called Football Manager. Going back further into my childhood I knew who Kevin Toms was, he wrote a game called Football Manager for the Sinclair Spectrum, which I loved, the speccy game is not related to football manager 2013 in any way, shape or form.

Then there were people such as Ron Gilbert, Peter Molyneux, Jeff Minter yadda yadda yadda. However I had never heard of Rod Humble when he came to Linden Lab, by the time Mr Humble arrived my days of reading magazines such as Computer & Video Games, Crash for the ZX Spectrum, Amiga Power for umm, The Amiga or PC Gamer were long behind me. However those in the gaming world do know Mr Humble, when an article appears in gaming related sites, you see comments from people asking why is Rod Humble is at Linden Lab.

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