The following is intended as a summary of questions asked and the responses given during the March 7th discussion between Jessica Lyon of the Firestorm / Phoenix Team and Oz Linden from Linden Lab. It is not intended as a word-for-word transcript, although all comments have been taken in context and direct quotes are given in quotation marks.
The discussion itself can be seen in full at Treet.tv, and timestamps for the various questions are given below for those who wish to list specific questions / answers as asked / given. The recording is not of the greatest quality, and there are some breaks in the audio, which have also been indicated in the summary below as and when appropriate.
The conversation kicked-off with Oz announcing the Hippotropolis Theatre Design competition, which has received low-key promotion from the Lab itself, before turning to a more regulated Q&A session. Questions themselves were a mix of those penned by Jessica herself based on comments and feedback from both other TPV developers and the user community as a whole, and questions forwarded to her directly ahead of the discussion.
(4:47) It is understood that LL have spent time researching why people use the Viewer they use, and the Policy changes may be a partial result of the research. Could Oz elaborate on the research itself?
LL carry-out ongoing research about Viewers in general, including user testing. This comprises bringing-in experienced and (more usually) novice users, provide them with a rough script of tasks to follow and then observe how the users complete the tasks. The tests are recorded and all control motions, etc., captured. However, it is limited to using the official Viewer, and is not performed with TPVs.
LL also carry out surveys – LL are able to track both people who routinely use SL and those who may sign-up and then only log-in once or twice, and they do follow-up on these (where sufficient RL information is given) and try to find out more information on their experience with SL, etc.
Of late, a lot of focus from these areas of work has been on discovering what it is that people find attractive or unattractive about SL, what makes them want to stay, what were the good or bad things about their initial experience, etc.
(07:56) Where any of the policy changes a result of that research?
No. Not primarily. The Viewer tag situation did come up, but wasn’t the subject of focused research so much as anecdotal discussions with new users and observing what happens to them. LL does have a concern about whether anything any user experiences is understandable given that SL is a very complicated environment in which the learning experience is ongoing. So part of the effort has been about making SL itself more uniform and understandable.
(09:45) Policy change 2.a. iii: “You must not provide any feature that circumvents any privacy protection option made available through a Linden Lab viewer or any Second Life service” – this applies specifically to the Phoenix True On-line status, which uses an LSL function call (llGetAgentStatus), and LL have indicated they may be changing the function itself to respect privacy settings (audio break up)
(The first part of Oz’s reply is also impacted by the audio break up) There are some aspects of the permissions systems, both current and potentially in the future for which enforcement in implemented in the Viewer code and which may or may not be implemented in the server code. As privacy is seen as important by both LL and users, it has been decided that if LL now or in the future have a privacy protection mechanism that is implemented primarily in Viewer code, then TPVs need to be respectful of that & need to collaborate with LL in the implementation of the feature.
The LSL function itself doesn’t respect privacy, and LL posted to the JIRA (SVC-4823) on it regarding changes they were considering in order to bring it into line. As a result. they have received a lot of feedback which includes a lot of useful use case descriptions, with people spelling out precisely how they are using the function. in perfectly legitimate ways.
As the proposed change would disrupt these uses, it has been put on hold and are looking carefully at the supplied use cases and looking at the right way of addressing them is. It is hoped, and while chasing-down the use cases is still ongoing, that most of the cases in which the function is used is as a result of other issues within SL. While it may take time to chase down all the issues, it is hoped that doing so will eliminate the needs for the workarounds that currently use the function. Once this has been done, LL will then look again at the need to change the functionality of the LSL call without having the very severe impact.
LL are not sure how things will shake out overall, and it is liable to be some time before things are clearer in that regard, but LL are not (my emphasis) going to break the function any time soon, and will discuss the matter via the LSL scripting forum when they are in a position to issue an update, although it is suspected that an update to various in-world objects will be required, with the hope that such updates will be simple and straightforward.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
Thanks for this. It does alter the way I feel about the TPV policy change, at least tentatively. Thanks to Oz for doing it.
Three things struck me: one is that the LSL change has been put on hold. I had no idea of this, and I would be willing to bet that most people concerned about it don’t know, either.
The second was Oz’ statement that viewer usage number are no secret. As far as I know, they *are* secret, and this ranking of viewers by use is the first I’ve seen.
The last thing is that he said that users have resistance to change, and gave as an example that when the sidebar, etc. were added to the viewer people complained, and then when they were removed people complained. I don’t think this can be counted as “resistance to change”. It’s just people expressing a preference.
Otherwise, it was reassuring and interesting. Glimpses into LL are rare, and this one was fairly extensive.
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There has been a lot of misinformation circulating vis-a-vis the TPVP changes and knock-on effects that is taking time to correct (the most noticeable being the initial knee-jerk reaction that the policy changes halt *all* TPV development).
That llGetAgentStatus is being looked at again has been known in some circles for a while – although admittedly, it is probably most widely known by those Watching the JIRA. Jessica made mention of it is last week’s Phoenix Hour broadcast, but again, the news might have been lost amidst all the issues around that meeting – sim crashes, sim restarts, stream breakages and poor audio.
In referring to the Viewer use numbers, I think Oz was saying they were no secret in the context of the TPV developers – remembering that it is Jessica asking the questions. Usage numbers are regularly discussed in the TPV developer meetings, and are published in the meeting transcripts and as such are known, but again not in the platform-wide context you and I would regard as “well-known”.
Where change is concerned, I think it fair to say a little of blame resides on both sides in many cases: there are times when LL doesn’t really disclose what is coming down the road, and so when things do happen, there is a fair amount of sturm und drang. Equally, and I have to agree with Oz, even when changes are announced and trumpeted well ahead of time, people state their opinion in such a forceful manner it does come over as outright resistance to whatever is going on. As such, it is fair to say the LL need to manage their side of things a little better – although they have made improvements in the last 12 months, and the user community needs to sometimes needs to consider changes being proposed / rolled-out with (dare I say) fewer histrionics.
I think Oz did a sterling job.
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We should remember that LL does not make any more money if someone uses their viewer instead of a third party viewer. While they might take some pride in having the “most preferred” viewer, at the end of the day what matters to them is that people are logging into SL and spending some money…no matter which viewer they are doing it with.
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Precisely – and hence again why increasing the market-share wasn’t a motivator for the TPVP changes.
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Maybe. I’m not so sure. The viewer to some extent controls how the user is directed. The first thing you see when you login with Firefox is usually a link to their blog or wiki. The viewer can provide immediate links to the Marketplace or destinations inworld that may be revenue generating. In many ways the viewer is to SL what the browser is to the web. Why do Google and Microsoft and the Mozilla foundation care which browser you use ? Because there is a lot of money to be made by corralling a user base in your browser (viewer).
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I don’t see the web parallel as you describe it.
Firestorm includes the ability to view the Destination Guide & Events pages (Phoenix, iirc actually displays the destination guide images towards the bottom right of the splash screen (it’s been a while since I’ve run that Viewer, admittedly)). Once in-world, users will be using LL’s search engine and Destination Guide regardless of the Viewer flavour. Similarly, Viewer-based purchases of L$ go via the Lindex regardless of flavour.
While other Viewers don’t have the market-share of FS/PH, all V3.2-based Viewers pretty much use the LL splash / login screen as does Singularity (4th most popular Viewer according to LL) and so on.
Currently, there isn’t a viable alternative to SLM that offers the range of products – if one exists at all. Apez was sold to Egoisme, but doesn’t appear to be in operation under either brand; MVX vanished; SLapt.me has gone; we all know what happened to On-Rez (there was another marketplace, but I cannot for the life of me remember the name, and nothing is coming up on Google), so there isn’t really a Marketplace out there to threaten LL’s dominance (and it would take time for one to establish itself sufficiently to become a threat).
In-world revenue generation will generate revenue for LL regardless of Viewer – it’ll come through tier and through cash-out commission.
As such, it’s hard to see the Viewer being a major determiner of revenue for LL beyond the obvious – getting people in-world in the first place.
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I read this, and I’m still boggled by why they’re so hurt about the online status indicator.
It’s such a big nothing, that nobody even thinks about, but they felt the need to make a vague, yet potentially broad-sweeping rule about it >_> It feels like they’re testing the water like they did with the Received Items beta – Push something out that they know we won’t like, let us RAEG all over it, and then come in for the knockout punch while we’re all tuckered out.
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The rule with regards on-line status was already there insofar as the Viewer was concerned long before the “on-line truth” status first appeared in a TPV (Emerald): people have the ability – and therefore the expectation – of being able to set some degree of privacy around their in-world time by broadly defining who can or cannot see when they are on-line.
Since its introduction in Emerald the Viewer-end “on-line truth” capability has rendered this ability and expectation null and void without any real justification for doing so. In asking for its removal, all LL are doing is re-balancing the scales of expectation based on the capabilities they provide for users within the Viewer code.
As to the Received Items beta, it is also clear that LL is actually listening to constructive feedback and seeking to improve the capability based on the feedback they have had to date. I can say this with confidence as I’m one of the people who supplied initial feedback and, as a result have been asked to review a further proposal on the capability to help determine if LL are understanding and addressing concerns correctly.
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“LL could conceivably achieve it simply by removing the majority of their Viewer development back behind the curtain, leaving TPVs forever in a catch-up situation.”
That is exactly what they have been doing. Huge gaps between code drops. The most recent one followed weeks of silence and while large, contained only bug fixes and tinkering.
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I thought Oz did a very good job of laying out what LL is trying to do and what it is not trying to do. Despite comments to the contrary, I think there is a huge benefit that LL sees in having the most used viewer in world. Simply put, their job gets a lot easier if they don’t have to worry about bringing the third party viewer’s along. I wonder if perhaps the situation has, by no fault on anyone’s side, reached a point where the current method of allowing TPV’s is broken. Both sides seem so bogged down in meeting the other side’s needs, that neither is really developing much.
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I’m not sure that the TPV dev / Lab relationship is/was “broken” – as Oz states, the relationship has, if anything improved from a state of “cold war” confrontation to that of mutual co-operation. Rather, I think this is purely as Oz states: a way to put a stake in the ground as to how Viewer development should be handled between the to going forward in order to help LL manage its business.
Demarcation like this way can usually be a good thing as relationship grow closer and more collaborative, simply because the dividing lines that were apparent during “cooler” times in a working relationship can get increasingly blurred and lead to direct misunderstandings – simply because things can be taken for granted or assumed on either side up to the point where someone says, “No.”, and real upset ensues.
The only real problems here are how LL announced the changes to the broader community (they didn’t), and for not adding a couple of very brief lines to the Policy that could themselves has helped prevent a lot of the subsequent misunderstandings around the intention of clause 2.k.
That said, I agree, Oz has done a really open job of sitting down and taking the time to address concerns and upset, and to provide insight into the Lab’s motives and thinking. Not just here, but in the forums and elsewhere.
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Very well put, and I hope you are right. It does seem as if LL is at least offering some opportunities for communication with TPV developers. Putting together a simple set of “rules for the road” for developers may bea good thing that will ultimately make development smoother for all parties. That would be my hope, as I worry about developers on both sides getting slowed down by having to jump through each others hoops. The clause 2.k, once understood, is relatively minor in my opinion. The problems, I think, began when users where having to get the info through their TPV developers instead of LL.
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Very well said, and I agree with 98.2% of everything you have stated.
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