Linden Lab – Page 187

March 7, 2012March 7, 2012

Land – The Financial Frontier

Linden Lab are no longer reporting economic stats,as reported by Tateru Nino here, but personally I’d long gone off Linden Lab’s stats and found myself far more interested in Tyche “Statto” Shepherd’s stats. Tyche regularly reports stats over at SL Universe, as well as running her own site from where you too can access the data, at GridSurvey.com. There are loads of stats to be found over there, including details of Tyche’s awesome census data:

43.0% of Mainland owned directly by Linden Accounts (Contiguous Mainland is 6723 regions including Linden Home regions).
6.7% to 7.8% of Mainland by area is abandoned parcels (details – 2nd Jan 2012).
56.5% of Private Estate regions are Full Regions, 42.9% Homesteads & 0.6% Openspaces (details including top 20 Estates – 29th January 2012).
Monthly Tier Estimates – Private Estates c.US$4.842 Million, Mainland c.US$1.008 Million.
As of December 2011 38829 Linden Homes are occupied (details – 2nd Jan 2012).

Stats galore and more fun to be had on that site but the survey that gets most attention from Tyche is her weekly grid size survey and this week’s doesn’t make happy reading:

“48 hours late in reporting but still based on Sundays figures – Anyway this week the grid shrunk by 196 regions, Private estates had a net decline of 183 whilst Linden Owned fell by 13

Total number of Main Grid regions is now 30188 ( 23058 private estates & 7130 Linden owned) 126 new regions were added and 40 returned to the grid, with 366 regions removed (30 were renamed and 6 came and went since last report)”

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March 6, 2012

Widget API Should Be Extended For Websites

There I was looking at Second Life API’s, when I stumbled upon the Viewer Web Widget API. I actually got these working under Firefox, they wouldn’t work under IE9, I had it working in my header and then after pondering why it wouldn’t work with IE9, I realised, it’s for third party viewers, not webpages!

This raises the question, why can’t websites have these API’s or widgets? I mean it would be cool to be able to have upcoming events advertised on Second Life blogs, of course it would be better if you could drill down and pick events for your own region or group, but these widgets for the destination guide and upcoming events are very nifty.

Having feature rich advertising like the events when you login stands out in many ways.

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March 2, 2012March 2, 2012

The Shared Experience Needs Linden Lab Leading It

March! Wonderful month as opposed to February, which is basically a month of Tuesdays. March brings hope, colour, warm air and for those of us in the UK, weather forecasts of wintry showers. March should also be a month where Linden Lab themselves decide to engage in some spring cleaning with their communications.

Rodvik has blogged on last names not returning, I’m not going to blog about that, Inara Pey and Hamlet Au are doing a fine job on that front. However there are aspects of that blog post that do tie in with this blog post, communications, consistency and discussion.

Rodvik invites discussion on his Second Life profile on the issue, other Lindens use mailing lists, the forums, user groups, which will always be Office Hours to me but they like to call them user groups these days. There’s a distinct lack of consistency, it’s not that Linden Lab don’t communicate at all, it’s that their communications are fractured, inconsistent and missed by way too many eyes. I don’t like posting on Rodvik’s profile, unless it’s along the lines of bemoaning Darren Bent’s injury that means he won’t play for the mighty Villa again this season. However Rodvik likes discussions on his profile.

I’ve long been criticial of Linden Lab’s lack of communication, however now that we have the new TPV policy upon us with Linden Lab taking up the baton of shared experiences, it’s about time that Linden Lab realise what sharing is all about too. Sharing means posting stickies in the scripting forum to the LSL Portal and pages on functions and events. The functions page is an excellent resource, it tells you about new functions, depreciated functions and poular requests for functions that haven’t been implemented, this is extremely important stuff. Kelly Linden does engage quite well to be fair, in the mailing list and the forum but links such as those I’m talking about point people in the right direction, I’ve stumbled across these links, they should be being promoted in large letters for people who want to script and it shouldn’t have to be Kelly who posts links to useful resources.

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March 1, 2012

Received Items Update and Survey

I was about to write a blog about communications and shared experiences, but that is on hold as I rush out the news that Linden Lab have updated their blog post on Received Items with the following information:

“UPDATE: Feb 29, 2012

We’d like to thank everyone who has provided feedback on the Received Items Beta. We will be launching Direct Delivery without redirecting any other objects to the Received Items folder. (Direct Delivery purchases will still be sent to the Received Items folder). We will be soliciting additional feedback on Received Items by contacting Residents who respond to this survey by 5pm PT March 1, 2012. We will do our best to speak to as many of those who participate as possible as we move forward with work on this feature.”

The survey is quite brief, which is just as well as because as I’ve just discovered it I’m hearing in my head “FLASH! FLASH! I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the earth!”. Actually in this case it’s around four hours! OMG! Dispatch War Rocket Ajax!

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February 29, 2012February 29, 2012

These Really Weren’t The Droids I was Looking For

Second Life has a very diverse community, or should I say collection of communities, because we’re not all one big happy family, some of us loathe each other … actually like a real family, but much larger! Anyway it’s not hard to see why Linden Lab want to tap into this wide ranging appeal of different experiences by asking people to submit blog posts. However it’s also very easy to accidentally stumble into matters you weren’t expecting, which is what happened to me yesterday, this was not what you’d call a Daniel Linden predictable experience.

So there I was keeping up with the latest news on the third party viewer policy discussion and reading a post over at New World Notes, which linked to a post by Emilly Orr. Now this is where degrees of separation get awfully short, because whilst being a nosey parker and reading other posts on Emilly’s blog, I found myself going to another blog of Emilly’s, which is all about massive boobs .. from what I could make out! Prim boobs for clarity and it looks pretty mature rated rather than adult rated. From third party policies to boobs in three easy clicks, this is what makes Second Life great.

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