New CEO Rod Humble (Rodvik Linden) has received a warm welcome after his first blog post. As others who are more eloquent and elegant have said, there’s nothing earth shattering about the blog post, but it is a refreshing and almost humble (I couldn’t resist!) post.
Rodvik talks of immersing himself in the world, and shows pictures complete with toga. He talks of building, scripting and creating his own little piece of Second Life, let’s hope he can continue to build from the ground up and put himself, or someone on his team at least, in the shoes of residents because one thing that stands out as the older Lindens have left is that the newer Lindens are employees firstmost and foremost and whereas they can’t all be Torley, it would be nice if more of them went through the processes that we residents go through in terms of change, policies and that bloody awful search system.
Which reminds me, a recent Phoenix office hour relayed the news that Linden Lab will soon be making the viewer 1 search system unavailable server side. This makes some sense of course, viewer 2 is the future, love it or loathe it and making the search system a separate beast to the viewer means search upgrades don’t require us to install a new viewer. The only problem is that V2 search is still not fit for purpose, most generally land search which should be shot, the only reason I still fire up a 1.x viewer is because land sales search is vastly superior in viewer 1.x and if you want to go exploring you don’t have to keep starting search all over again, when Linden Lab sort that out (which they should have done months ago) then they should start losing viewer 1.x features.
Where was I? Oh Rodvik, yes it’s good to see him immersing himself and I do think he’s the right man for the job, his CV suggests he is and I liked his “Toys not games” slogan that Crap Mariner pointed out. That’s a perfect fit for a Second Life mindset.
However I would like to see some things offered by Linden Lab that I have to go elsewhere for, one being hosting PHP databases. The reason I’d like to see Linden Lab get involved here is that I would like to see an achievement system developed, but not one that encompasses everyone in Second Life, if I could create an achievement system on my sim I’d like to be able to tie it into profiles, as World of Warcraft does. Why should Linden Lab get involved here? The issue of consistency, if I have an achievement system and someone else has their own, the way they look and operate would be consistent on profiles across Second Life.
As for hosting, add a price to my premium membership and charge me for it,. that way my system is dependent upon Second Life operating and not dependent upon some third party host, it keeps me engaged with Linden Lab and should also help with security issues and good practices across the board.
Another issue is NPC’s, these aren’t currently easy to implement, you need a bot in many cases and bots require a login space, working towards a system with good functional NPC’s that have consistent performance issues across the grid could lead to many great and interactive places popping up to help user retention and open new markets.
However all of that would take time, even if it were feasible, for now, I’m pleased Rodvik is here and speaking to us.