Gray Of The Lab From San Francisco

I was exploring the glorious streets of Meauxle Bureaux, home of The Linden Department of Public Works. I was strolling along, minding my own business, when a horse drawn carriage pulled up alongside me, the door opened and a voice ordered “Get in, your presence has been requested“. Cautiously, I entered the carriage, only to find myself immediately blindfolded.

After a journey of not inconsiderable time, I was bundled from the carriage, taken through a door and sat in a chair, “Gray of The Lab from San Francisco sends his regards“, a voice whispered in my ear and then the blindfold was removed. The room was in darkness but slowly illuminated with light. I heard footsteps, a woman’s footsteps by the sound of it. My hunch was correct as shortly a woman stood before me.

“Xiola Linden, Second Life Lead Community manager, pleased to meet you. The word on the street is that you want to ask questions,” she said.

Somewhat taken aback, I wondered where I was. Had I been taken to the top secret location that the Lindens deny exists, Area 51 style, was I in LindenWorld? I asked the woman claiming to be Xiola if she had ever been to the top secret LindenWorld HQ that us mere mortals can’t visit?

“If I told you, I’d have to ban you. 🙂” she replied.

This told me two things, one was that I was not in LindenWorld and two that this really was Xiola Linden, only a lead community manager would talk of the ban hammer in such a fashion. The further fact that I’d met Xiola before confirmed the truth, I had been smuggled into a secret location, to conduct a secret interview with Xiola Linden, which I am now at liberty to be able to share with you all.

Xiola Linden has been at the forefront of Linden Lab’s renewed vigour for good community relations, she can be found on Twitter, Flickr, the official Second Life blog, at inworld events and more. Whereas it would be grossly unfair to give Xiola all the credit for these renewed good community relations, she is certainly a star attraction. However what of the team itself, I asked Xiola how many people are in the community team?

“We have a small dedicated community team whose job is to focus 100% on our communities, but there are many people outside of our team whose jobs of course include caring about about the community, interacting with users, and keeping their eyes peeled for community-related issues. It’s good to know too that many Lindens spend time inworld on alts (I know I do!) so you may be interacting with a Linden and not even know it.”

Continue reading “The Mystery Of The Secret Interview With Xiola Linden”

Today’s Phoenix Firestorm question and answer session regarding the future of Second Life has been filmed and is on youTube. I will also in traditional style embed the video at the end of the post. I will point out that if you’re looking for a chat log, this blog will not include the droids you’re looking for. However the lovely Inara Pey may well provide a transcript in the near future.

The session was hosted by Jessica Lyon who was assisted by Lette Ponnier and featured guests Gray of the Lab from San Francisco (AKA Linden Lab’s Director Of Global Communications Peter Gray) and Oz Linden, Director Of Open development at Linden Lab and chief Second Life man now that some of Linden Lab are working on the new virtual world space. I will hereby label Oz “The Man Behind The Curtain“, because he is bloody important now in terms of Second Life, not that he wasn’t important before of course, but now he is really really important. Oz is the man behind the scenes, pulling levers, pressing buttons and keeping the magic in Second Life and things will stay this way as long as people believe in Second Life. Oz points out in the discussion that this was a position he really wanted, which is very positive indeed.

Anyway on to the discussion, it runs for almost an hour but if you don’t have that sort of patience you only need to watch the first few minutes to hear Peter Gray reiterate that Second Life is not closing down, Linden Lab have no plans to close Second Life down, investment and development will continue. Rumour has it that if you play this part of the video backwards at the correct speed you will also hear the phrase “The Tier is too damn high” uttered”, but I haven’t been able to confirm that!

Oz makes an early point that is one I’ve long agreed with, people criticise Second Life because they care about Second Life. Oz also talks about the challenges of working with a smaller team and admits that in some ways this is helpful because it helps the team to focus on the important issues. Oz also confirms that whereas the team working on Second Life are smaller than they previously were, it’s still a significant number of people. Oz also adds that the numbers in the team may be dynamic, some people working on the new platform will at times be called upon to work on Second Life and vice versa.

Oz talked of the new experience keys beta, the fact that Linden Lab really are working on improving group chat including hardware upgrades for servers. However there is no quick fix here, it’s going to take a while but they really are working on this. Another part of the team are working on improving the web framework in the viewer where they are moving from webkit to the chromium embedded framework.

There’s also news that they are working on improvements to texture and mesh loading speeds as part of the HTTP Project. Inara Pey touched upon this in her Server Updates blog post.

Continue reading “Phoenix Firestorm Q&A Session On The Future Of Second Life Featuring Oz & Pete Linden”