In rather surprising (to me) news, Landon Donovan won’t be part of the United States Squad for this summer’s world cup in Brazil. The 32 year old striker who has been capped a staggering 156 times will have to watch the world cup at home.
However better news for another Landon, with Landon Linden explaining the reasons for some of the recent woes of the Second Life service. This is the sort of blog post I like because it explains some of the difficulties the service experienced as well as pointing out some of the reasons, warts and all.
This blog post exemplifies why I have been so critical of Linden Lab’s lack of communications over recent years. Yes the subject matter is sore and yes users have had a hard time of it, but sitting down to explain why helps customers understand that the Lab are aware of the problems and are prepared to make moves to rectify them.
The blog post explains that the root cause of the problem was created a decade ago. This also highlights how difficult it is to maintain a service as dynamic as Second Life, what worked a decade ago is simply not the ideal way of going about things today and again the blog post explains this well:
Our intent at this point also is to remove the identifier assignment service altogether. It not only was the ultimate source of this outage, but is also one more single point of failure that should have been dispatched long ago.
A lot of the gory details are in the blog post and there’s also an apology. This really is an excellent blog post and I’d love to see more regular updates from Landon and the team, on issue whereby there isn’t as much mayhem but there is progress.
When Ebbe Altberg arrived he promised greater transparency and this does seem to be happening, long may it continue.
I fully agree. I also appreciated that post a lot. It’s good to know why things happen and what the Lab does to deal with them.
Indeed.