Rod Humble’s impromptu Twitter session last night will have delighted many, confused some, and left Scylla wondering what’s so good about Twitter! Mr Humble responded to quite a few tweets in the space of around an hour, Witchfinder General, Inara Pey, pushed Rodvik on basic mode in the new viewer and had praise for the new user signup process, in the end it was deemed we wouldn’t have to throw Rodvik in a river to see if he sank or swam, he took the feedback well and didn’t turn anyone into a frog.
Of course the big news was: “Aston Villa Avatars by default for all users confirmed ;)” … ha! Take that Stokey Suella Ember!
Of course the above was a joke, I mean about the Aston Villa Avatars, Suella really is a Stokey, I’m not making it up! However Mr Humble’s Twitter session really exemplifies a more relaxed attitude to communications from Linden Lab.
As I said earlier, some people won’t like it, some would prefer these communications to be on the official forums, but the beauty of Twitter is that the 140 character limit means people need to get to the point, in the forum, where discussion would be deeper, it would take longer for anyone to respond, however even in that regard we have seen some improvement in communications. I’ve seen feedback, event posts and links posted by LL staff including Oz, Blondin, Amanda, Lexie, Brooke, Torley and others.
However all is not sweetness and light, the blog is becoming a bit of an irrelevance, this is partially because the rate of blog posts has dropped dramatically, and partially because it’s simply not well presented, new blog posts get buried, people don’t notice them, indeed the last few blog posts I’ve noticed have either been via seeing a Tweet or Blog Bot over at SLUniverse posting about it.
Then there are the user groups, which are falling by the wayside for some reason. User groups can be extremely useful, I don’t really like seeing them cutback so drastically. Amanda tells us that some will be merged, others pulled because of lack of interest or going for more private feedback. This is part of the learning curve of the new user group system but I like to see Linden Lab employees engaging inworld with residents.
However overall the vibe from Linden Lab seems more flowery and positive lately, which maybe should make us wonder what they’re upto! However the traditional bad news month of November is still quite a few months away yet, so enjoy it whilst it lasts!
Rather than concentrating too much on where Linden Lab are communicating, let’s just be thankful that they are communicating somewhere, of course they will never please all of the people all of the time, but let’s keep them talking.