Why Aren’t Linden Lab Talking To Us?

So, after a break from blogging of Avril Korman like proportions, I’m back! However unlike Avril, I’m not back with a challenging and epic blog post to create a great deal of discussion and my break has largely been a result of just wanting a break. There are many interesting issues I could blog on, Shava Nerad (Shava Suntzu in Second Life) has an interesting campaign about Google + and their profiles rules. However it’s Friday night here in blighty and I’ll end up singing Safety Dance if I blog about that.

So let’s look at what’s been happening on the official Linden Lab blog, on July 21st they blogged about Mesh and on July 28th, they blogged about Mesh! Now don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to Mesh, indeed during my break I’ve been playing with Blender and volunteered one of my regions to be put into the Mesh RC Channel. However, there are a couple of other things that seem to have happened in the last week, new profiles have gone live and the hidden avatars feature, that I blogged about back on July 5th appears to have gone live, I haven’t checked it but the settings are in the latest viewer.

First of all new profiles, I generally like them, however I am not a fan of seeing the feed by default, even though I like the feed:

You can share your feed on other social networking sites such as Twitter if you like. However let’s get my Ciaran the critic hat on, as I said I don’t like feed being the default on someone’s profile, when you’re looking for information on people you want to see what they’re about in the first place and there will be plenty of Second Life users who have no interest in the feed. Then there’s the issue of there being no easy route back to the Second Life website from what I can see and there’s no easy way to get to your profile from your dashboard on the Second Life website, from what I can see.

My profile is here, if you want to see your own the URL is https://my.secondlife.com/ if you’re logged in to the website and if you’re not logged in to the website it’s https://my.secondlife.com/firstname.lastname where firstname and lastname are the first and last names of your avatar, if you’re a newer resident you may not need firstname and lastname, I can’t tell you whether you need to resident as a last name because Linden Lab aren’t blogging about it. I also can’t tell you if there’s a profile api so we can use scripted devices to update our feeds inworld because ….. yes Linden Lab aren’t blogging about it.

Now I mention the api because even world of warcraft has a profile feed for avatars, but their feed is read only and lists recent achievements, that could have potential via systems in Second Life in a roleplaying environment to be honest, but (and it’s a big but) that sort of thing would be more useful if we could control who reads which posts by group, or you know circles…. yes Google do have some good ideas, it’s a shame they won’t embrace pseudonyms though!

The other issue Linden Lab aren’t talking to us about is the hidden avatars feature whereby if you set your parcel to support hidden avatars (in this case you untick the setting) then people outside your parcel won’t be able to chat in open chat to you, or even see you and you won’t see them, the setting is definitely in the viewer:

I haven’t tested this feature on the main grid to see if there have been any changes since it was made available on the beta grid, but why on earth won’t Linden Lab talk to us about these things? Have we upset them? Are they too busy to talk? I miss those epic blog posts where loads of people complained about a feature, it was engaging! Now it’s more guess work and again, will there be LSL calls available for these features so people can quickly turn them on or off? For example imagine you’re a landlord and you rent homes, you could build into the homes a script to allow your tenant to turn hidden avatars on or off if there was a LSL call avaialble, but I don’t know if there are any LSL calls for this! I could go look on the wiki I guess … but it’s Friday night!

Both of these features have potential, both are in the early stages of introduction, some people won’t like the feed but for those of us who do, we can send updates and we can act like we come from out of this world and leave the real one far behind!