Linden Lab – Page 133

December 19, 2013

The Trouble With Search

Linden Lab have issued a call to arms with a recent blog post about plans to improve SL Marketplace search. There’s a survey link in the blog post.

Search has been done and redone and done again in Second Life. There’s only so much you can do with search relevancy because people are gits when it comes to trying to manipulate search results. In Second Life we’ve seen the use of bots to increase traffic and therefore relevancy. We’ve seen the age old classic of using search terms that have no bearing on what the parcel or marketplace listing offers.

I can recall in the 0ld days, possibly whilst it was still XStreetSL, people using white text on a white background to hide keywords that were not remotely related to the listing. People abusing the system, unsettles any search engine and unfortunately, people will abuse the system.

Then there are issues that are pretty unique to the SL Marketplace which are caused by the system itself. The free listing forever policy means search results are cluttered with lots of old content that has been created by people who are no longer active in Second Life. There’s an argument for keeping content around, old content doesn’t mean bad content but content should ideally be tied to an active avatar.

Then there are issues such as demos and colours. Demos are an important tool for customers. Different colours offer different options for customers. However they should not be individual listings. Different colours and the demo should be available via one item display. This would make browsing stores on the SL Marketplace easier for a start.

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December 18, 2013

Andrew Linden (AKA Employee Number 2) Leaving Linden Lab To Join Hi Fidelity

Daniel Voyager, Inara Pey and Nalates Urriah have all broken the news that Andrew Linden is leaving Linden Lab. They all provide good coverage, if you want my coverage read on! My coverage owes a lot to Hamlet Au Of New World Notes. In particular I’ve taken material from the following post by Hamlet (which is certainly worth a read) :

Meet Andrew Linden, Last of the Very First Lindens (UPDATED: Richard Linden Still Thrives Too)

Andrew, AKA Employee number 2, has announced he is leaving Linden Lab, tomorrow, December 19th and will be joining his former college pal Philip Rosedale at Hi Fidelity. The word on the street is that Andrew will not be revealing the true identity of Governor Linden or the current location of Magellan Linden as he makes the short journey from Linden Lab to Hi Fidelity. However it is widely assumed that Andrew will become the artist formerly known as Andrew Linden and be transformed into Andrew Meadows in his new role.

Andrew Linden is important, very important. Andrew’s Second Life profile states that he was born 11 years six months ago, however he was at Linden Lab longer than that, he was there in 1999 when Linden Lab hadn’t even decided to develop a virtual world. Andrew was there when, according to the Second Life Wiki, Linden Lab were a hardware company involved with research and development in the field of haptics. However Linden Lab decided they needed a virtual world to test their hardware and haptics became consigned to the dustbin of Linden Lab’s history.

Andrew was the person responsible for giving avatars the ability to fly, which was apparently because Linden Lab wanted to save time creating walking animations.

Andrew was largely a C++ developer for Second Life, but took time out to look at holes in the world, literally. In the snapshot above he’s looking for missing prims. Andrew regularly talked to users at office hour/user group meetings, providing the link between developers and users that many appreciate and which is unfortunately largely lost in the new Linden Lab.

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December 16, 2013

Bots, Communication Limits And Why Web Based Group Pages In Second Life Still Have Potential

Communications in Second Life have long been problematic, this is largely because there’s so much communication going on, this is a good thing by the way. Some people consider Second Life group chat to be broken, indeed there’s a webpage that asks Is Second Life Group Chat Still Broken? Other people login to a load of group messages and basically ignore them because they can be annoying.

In a thread over at SLUniverse, Darien Caldwell has brought to people’s attention the fact that Linden Lab have changed the bot policy, largely in terms of communications via bots. There is a temptation to raise the issue that there has been a lack of communication regarding a communication policy but I won’t go there!

The policy appears to have changed on December 11th and the new policy can be read here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Bot_policy . The page states that bots can add to the Second Life experience but that as each IM, chat message, inventory offer and group invitation creates load on the servers there comes a point where excessive use can cause problems for other users.

This all sounds quite reasonable, that is until you see that the limit where a bot’s communication is excessive appears to be at a much lower limit than would be applied to an object or regular avatar.

Bots are now supposed to send below 5,000 messages a day. Now at first glance that may sound like a lot, that is until you see that Linden Lab consider a message sent to a group as one message per recipient. This suggests that if a group has say 10,000 members then a bot could potentially be considered to be abusing resources if it sends one message to that group as that could potentially be 10,000 individual messages sent, which would be double the policy limit.

Now this is where things don’t quite add up. If it’s considered bad for a bot to be sending 5,000 messages a day then really it should be bad for anything to be sending 5,000 messages a day. I suspect that bots are being used to abuse the messaging system and Linden Lab are trying to discourage their use in communications. This policy certainly does that.

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December 9, 2013

Nobody Does It Better, Makes Me Feel Sad For The Rest

Nobody does it half as good as you, baby you’re the best.

Second Life has long had strange issues, for example there is an issue known as “Prim drift” whereby a prim does not seem to be in the location where you last left it, or prims mysteriously seem to disappear and then reappear, it seems there may be an explanation for this!

The Guardian breaks the news: Spy agencies in covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online gaming. Allegedly, The NSA and GCHQ decided that they need to infiltrate The Horde in World Of Warcraft and human avatars in Second Life. Furries everywhere celebrate smugly at this news. This does possibly explain why The Horde seem to win more often than not in the Warsong Gulch battleground in World Of Warcraft.

Not surprisingly Linden Lab haven’t responded to The Guardians requests, The Guardian claims :

“Microsoft declined to comment on the latest revelations, as did Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life and former CEO of Linden Lab, the game’s operator. The company’s executives did not respond to requests for comment.”

However in the land of Azeroth, there has been a response :

“The California-based producer of World of Warcraft said neither the NSA nor GCHQ had sought its permission to gather intelligence inside the game. “We are unaware of any surveillance taking place,” said a spokesman for Blizzard Entertainment. “If it was, it would have been done without our knowledge or permission.” “

I’m sure that the NSA and GCHQ are delighted that their covert efforts went undetected by the GM’s in World Of Warcraft, I mean it would be far more embarrassing for them if Blizzard declared “Yeah, our GM’s knew all about it.”

However the article does suggest that Linden Lab were talking to the security services, indeed it seems Linden Lab tried to sell a use case of virtual worlds as being a place where you could observe the behaviours of non US citizens without leaving the USA. I’m sure those agents who quite enjoyed the idea of leaving US soil to observe the behaviours of non US citizens were a tad miffed about this, although wild speculation that they joined the PN or griefed sims with giant penises to wreak revenge over this suggestion have been strenuously denied. The article claims:

“In May 2007, the then-chief operating officer of Second Life gave a “brown-bag lunch” address at the NSA explaining how his game gave the government “the opportunity to understand the motivation, context and consequent behaviours of non-Americans through observation, without leaving US soil“.

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December 9, 2013

Private Sim Losses Swell Due To Large Estate Closure

So last week I blogged that private estate losses were slowing down and that losses were around the teen to high 20’s mark per week. Now just to prove me wrong, this week Tyche “Statto” Shepherd reports:

“A net loss of 63 regions this week, Private Estates down by 69 while Linden Owned were up by 6”

However I do have a defence here, this change in pattern of net losses is due to the departure from the grid of 47 sims owned by Beach Front Realty, if you exclude that then this week’s losses would have been in line with the recent net loss pattern at around 22. There are still 16 sims owned by Beach Front Realty on the grid but the company have announced that all their sims will close by the end of December.

A notecard sent by Beach Front Realty stated:

“Dear Beach Front Residents:

The company of Beach Front Realty will regrettably be closing its doors effective immediately. Tiers will not be excepted on behalf of the owners at BF. All tenants will have a until the end of December to relocate to a different company.

For your convenience, we have located a reputable company that are willing to take our residents with a warm welcome. This company has been in business since 2007 and we assure you that you will be pleased with the new owners of the Estates.

The Estate name is called: Tribe Estates

The owners are as follows:

Alexxa Despres

Driftwood Miles

Please contact them as they are aware of the transition.

On behalf of Kandee and Breeze we want to take this chance to thank each and every one for the loyalty you have provided throughout the years. And would like To wish you all a Happy Holiday Season.”

I have been on friendly terms with Driftwood Miles and Alexxa Despres for quite a while, we used to joke around at Jack Linden’s office hour so I’m glad to see that they are trying to help out with soon to be homeless residents. Tribe Islands are good people.

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