2010 has been an eventful year, which much turning up, much going away, much being promised and some being delivered – all accompanied with the usual passion and angst and joy and tears that makes SL such a living, evocative environment.
Things kicked off with an address from Mark Kingdon (remember him?) in which he laid out his vision for 2010 and took credit for some rather odd “achievements”, which I commented upon at the time, as well as announcing various new features to come – including Viewer 2, and the promise that search will be fixed! He also passed comment on a new “viewer directory” and “content seller directory” as well as a new Gateway experience and – in what caused mucho alarmo – promises of what appeared to be further pushes towards Second Life being “Facebooked”, including the ability to use real names and New social tools that will enable Residents to find and make new friends, and entice and invite existing friends to join by sharing the richness of Second Life.
Some of these predictions came to pass, not all of them in the doom-laden manner people were predicting – although several did cause avoidable upset; others seem to have been passed to one side – possibly fortunately, given they smacked of potentially benefiting only those that could afford them. Chief among the former was the arrival of Display Names – which *is*, whether people like it or not, pretty much was Kingdon was referring to when he spoken about people having the choice of using real names or fantasy names in SL (given that you can just as easily use your real name as your Display Name as anything else); and despite the hue and cry that preceded the arrival of Display Names, it *has* actually enhanced SL. In terms of things falling by the wayside, the “content seller directory” is a prime example – and this is perhaps no bad thing, as commented upon in my response to M’s post.
Kingdon’s post was followed a few days later by one from Frank (F Linden) Ambrose – and the difference couldn’t have been more apparent. I make no secret of the fact that I admire Frank: he’s always been forthright and honest on matters, and his post on the 7th January 2010 was devoid of spin and laid things out exactly as they were – and took responsibility for things that had gone “wrong” – a rare admission indeed from a senior Linden, and one that I personally felt, wasn’t entirely warranted in the circumstances.
January also saw the first of the Linden departures as Katt Linden slipped away, her role supposedly taken by Mark Wallace aka Wallace Linden, who stepped up as the Conversation Manager. As with Katt, many thought Wallace’s appointment was something to do with establishing two-way dialogues. Sadly, Wallace quickly showed he was inept at even touting the corporate line in one-way communications, as he arrived and did the conversational equivalent of aiming a large calibre hand gun at his pedal extremities before pulling the trigger – getting a lot of people very upset over an apparent decision by LL to potentially indelibly link RL and SL identities.
February saw the heat turned up even more on the issue of conversations and the ability to openly communicate with the announcement that the old forums were to be done away with because the software (vbulletin – one of the most widely used tools in the world) was “not up to it” where LL was concerned. The angst from this still has not fully cleared, given the replacement software is still buggy (doesn’t work on all browsers, frequently misses posts, etc), and was – in what was to become the hallmark of Linden Lab’s methodology for 2010 – rolled out in what can best be described as a half-arsed fashion that not only saw it riddled with bugs – but also devoid of basic features one would expect from forum software because – basically – they still had to be coded! There wasn’t – if you can believe it – any area for general discussions – something that lead Lexie Linden to start arbitrarily stomping a bloody big foot on any threads she felt were “inappropriate” – which frequently added up to those critiquing LL, which others praising the company were allowed to continue unhindered. Some much for “encouraging conversations”…
February also saw the acquisition of Avatars United – which many saw as a continuation of the trend to “Facebook” SL. However, as I commented at the time, there were a certain logic to the acquisition and if LL handled things correctly, AU could potentially be a useful tool. Sadly this was not to be: little or no overt investment was to be made in AU, which was left to wither on the vine prior to being culled is September.
What was more insidious in terms of the Facebooking of SL was the blatant pushing of SL users into Facebook that occurred during things like the Valentine’s Scavenger Hunt, in which the big prizes were only available to those willing to join Facebook.
Mark Kingdon came in-world at the end of February to address a selected group of residents and attempted to allay fears concerning where SL was going as a platform, and what he had to say went some way to revising my opinion of him, it has to be said – it’s a pity he waited until May to do so again, this time via MetaMeets TV – and by then, it was probably to late; but I’m getting ahead of myself…
Right at the end of the month came Viewer 2 and the Third Party Viewer Policy – both of which caused much angst: one because it really was pushed out far, far, far to early; the other partially because someone in LL hadn’t bothered to actually read the document they’d written and partially because those outside of LL were determined to make a mountain out of a molehill. Thus was set the drama points for March and April.
March opened to both of these sagas – LL actually admitting that Viewer 2 really did need work and, after initially setting their faces against any changes to the TPV Policy, actually started cleaning-up the wording. While the rantings at both continued unabashed, some of us took them both as signs that perhaps some ears at the Lab were still receptive to the words of users. Even so the apparent push towards Facebook seemed to continue, this time with an advertising go-get “opportunity”, and despite looking to try to clam fears in one direction (the TPV Policy), LL seemed determined to tick people off with further tinkering and breaking of Search – the trend for 2010, while endeavouring to pass it all off as a “good” thing.
We also saw LL attempt to milk advertising by offering-up the Message Of The Day (MOTD), seen during logging-in, as advertising material. However, pitched at $4,500 USD, the idea was way out-of-pocket for the majority of SL content creators, and one had to speculate as to whether LL were trying to target “big business” advertisers, rather than actual platform users.
William Linden then had many of us in hysterics with this gem of a posting concerning the Second Life Enterprise “solution” (remember that?), which had so much wrong with it, it wasn’t hard to put down – much like LL would put down SLE in a few months time…
Script limits were announced in March – and I have to say, I think the idea is very worthwhile, even though very little appears to have occurred since. Possibly because Babbage Linden was one of those given the heave-ho around the middle of the year.
Elsewhere in the early part of the month, and not satisfied with breaking search, LL set about attempting to further alienate merchants, a move which came so soon on top of other blunders, I was seriously beginning to wonder if someone at the top in Battery Street had confused Toby Young’s How to Lose Friends and Alienate People for a genuine business strategy.
March also saw Azure close its doors, to be swallowed-up by Dreamland, something that caused varying degrees of upset.
Content ripping hysteria reached a peak in March and April, once again, with the forums filled with vitriol and those that would use it as an excuse to try to marginalise smaller merchants and businesses and gain cosy arrangements with LL. The entire situation was exacerbated by the arrival of the Gemini CDS and other “tools” designed to “help” combat content ripping, but which amounted to little more than thug-like devices put out by those intent perhaps more on causing mischief than with dealing with a problem.
March ended with the premature Viewer 2 beta becoming the very premature Viewer 2 release, together with the unveiling of a “new user experience“, which on examination was more cringe-worthy than fun.
April came in with the release of a new ToS which dramatically re-defined a lot of Second Life, and which caused a considerable amount of upset: Linden dollars ceased to be “money” and became “tokens”, land ownership was (finally) re-defined (albeit not fully), while the waters around what constitutes “content” got muddied. It saw the arrival of the Third Party Viewer Policy – which would undergo still further re-wording throughout the month.
For many of us, the new ToS raised questions as to whether the house was being put in order to facilitate a sale of some or all of the service – and indeed to question whether the senior management at LL had their collective heads shoved somewhere that isn’t prone to sunlight, such is their failure to understand their own users. The end of the month saw history turn a near-full circle as LL faced a Bragg-like lawsuit, one which is still grinding forward as I write.
May opened with more Linden spin – this time Esbee Linden claiming that Viewer 2 had hit a record 400,000 downloads in under three months; potentially a questionable figure when one considers that Emerald, the then most popular TPV had just scraped past 70,000 downloads in more than double that time – but not an impossible figure. Certainly, if one takes Esbee’s claims as accurate, then it tends to throw the claims that Mark Kingdon’s (still to come) departure was fuelled by Viewer 2’s “failure” (as some would come to claim) onto the scrap-heap; however you look at it – 400K in under three months *is* a remarkable figure!
Mark himself made what was to prove to be one of his last major public appearances in May, when he pitched up on MetaMeets TV – and said much that was, in fairness, positive and reassuring – although his proposal to sink some 70 sims into the promotion of “the arts”, together with the Linden Endowment of the Arts left a lot of people (myself included) somewhat worried as to what the hell was going on. Given what was on the horizon generally, it may have done the same with some people inside the Lab as well…
May also saw Sion Chickens pitch up as a finalist in the Linden Prize, something I personally found somewhat distasteful – and I was far from alone in this view. And while they didn’t win, it has set a distasteful precedent for the future – and I’m fully expecting to see a certain breed of bunnies promoted into the finals this year, sadly.
June arrived with news that faces were vanishing from LL. Again, the losses were attributed by some to the “failure” of Viewer 2 and the New User Experience – although, again, the former was hard to reconcile against the claim that the Viewer had been downloaded 400,000 times in three months. The Viewer itself got to 2.1, which saw some dramatic improvements and some unwanted (unused?) bells-and-whistles (aka “given Lindens your cash”) such as “voice morphing”. Whee.
LL placed a positive light on the restructuring (and if one looks behind the headlines, that’s precisely what it was) – but coming on top of May’s promise of more goodies, better communications, etc., many found hard to take anything said on the matter at face value starting that a 30% reduction in staff is bad and pointed to issues with financing. LL denied that latter, but did not help themselves when subsequent blog posts were to refer to them being “back” in the black….). As to the lay-offs, what many ignored was that during the previous 18 months over 100 additional staff had actually been taken on, most of them to work on now-defunct projects (e.g. SLE). Ergo, rather than being a massive “cut back” on staff, the lay-offs were and remain an honest reflection of LL’s refocusing on its core needs.
The middle month also saw more speculation on the possible future of LL – and while I point to my own post on the matter, others such as Prok Neva were speculating along the same lines. Oh, if only we’d known what was just over the horizon where Mr. Kingdon was concerned! Although, while he may now be gone, it cannot be denied that the ToS as it stands and the restructuring of both LL and SL as a service, still could enable licensing of the product if all else fails… The theories as to what was behind the restructuring did cause Kingdon himself to give something of a response.
The restructuring continued to reverberate through the month as the list of those departed continued to grow. I personally miss Blue Linden, if only because of our direct ties through the very enjoyable non-LL/SL conversations we shared. Unlike others, I was more than sanguine over Pink’s departure; she’d managed to alienate a lot of people in a remarkably short time and had on more than one occasion demonstrated a lack of – to be polite – tact in dealing with residents, up to and including threats to eject people from her Office Hours who had the temerity to raise subjects they wished to discuss but she did not (such as the Content Roadmap).
However, it was at the end of the month that the main bombs went off, as Mark Kingdon unexpectedly “pulled out” of the SL7B events, most of which would have gone off with more of a whimper than a bang had it not been toe Kingdon’s vanishing act and Rosedale’s “sudden” stepping up with something of a boyish, gee, golly, gosh, we got it wrong, soz, folks!” address which – with the benefit of hindsight – should have indicated that further palace changes were afoot, given what happened at the end of the month.
As we moved into July, the new Second Life Marketplace – which I admittedly broadly liked from day one, and continued to like right up to the point where it trashed all my listings just prior to going “live” (growls) – continued to cause much gnashing of teeth in some circles. Elsewhere was jubilation that the Big Bad Wolf called Kingdon had been vanquished by Prince Philip of Linden – although many of those celebrating didn’t seem able to grasp the idea that Rosedale never really “left” LL; he simply stopped being the CEO while continuing to Chair the Board, and thus potentially shared the blame for everything that was heaped upon Kingdon with scorn by users, as Kingdon was himself.
From my perspective, Rosedale’s first address while back as CEO wasn’t entirely inspirational. Nor did Blizzard’s announcement about linking game and RL identities – even though I’ve never actually played any of their games, and have little interest in them per se. Fortunately, the user outcry was enough to ensure the whole idea came unstuck – at least for the time being.
August arrived with more upsets and upheavals. In the continuing, almost blow-for-blow re-run of the Bragg vs Linden Lab case, lawyers for Linden Research sought to have the case brought by Evans et al similarly dismissed, something which gave a lot of us cause to blog. I also revisited Philip Rosedale’s in-world presentation, and still found a worrying theme of looking-other-the-shoulder-rather-than-ahead in his statements. Then came his presentation at SLCC, in which he finally announced the closure of Teen Second Life and the “merging” of some of it with the Main Grid – thus setting the stage for the major angst and upset that would see-out the year.
Many responded with shock and surprise at this announcement – but it is hard to see why; were people to stop looking at Philip through Rose(dale)-tinted glasses, they’d have seen he’s been wholly in favour of such a merger since November 2008 at least – and he went fully public on the idea in January 2009 at Metamonics, where he stated:
Generally, I think that the future of Second Life needs to be one where people of all ages can use Second Life together, and that’s the direction that we’re taking in our planning and our work… We need to stop creating isolated areas that are age specific and, instead, look at how we can make the overall experience appropriately safe and controlled for everybody. So that’s the general direction that we’re taking there. [edited for length by me].
The month also spelt the beginning of the end for Emerald, the popular third-party viewer. Despite the best efforts of a number of Emerald devs, it began to emerge that some asinine pre-pubescent plebs were determined to use the Viewer to their own ends, so much so that by the end of the month they’d managed to bring the entire Viewer down, with Linden Lab ostensibly banning it from accessing the grid at the end of the month.
Fortunately, not all the good work was entirely undone, as first Emergence popped up to provide an interim replacement for Emerald, to be followed in September with the magnificent Phoenix.
August also saw the announcement of Display Names – which Wallace Linden had done such a good job in shooting himself in the foot over earlier in the year – and of course, the announcement was followed by the usual angst about “enforced outing” of people RL identities, etc., and wild claims that it would be little more than a “tool for griefing”. So even when LL do something right…they’re in the wrong…
Sadly, despite the promise of Display Names, LL continued their hole-digging as well, by suggesting cutting the Concierge / Customer Support services was somehow a good thing. Please, no-one say “India” and “call centres” in the same sentence when Philip R is within earshot, or we’re all doomed.
September finally saw confirmation of the arrival of “full” mesh capabilities in SL – something all of us should get to see on the Main Grid in 2011. Avatars United finally went bye-bye, something that, if I’m honest, wasn’t that much of a surprise given the lack of anything like development within the platform. Catherine Linden departed the hallowed corridors of Linden Towers towards the end of the month, and Terrance Linden revealed some more on the coming arrival of teens on the Main Grid. The latter did much to allay fears that had been voiced elsewhere and demonstrated that someone, somewhere inside LL was still actually using their head for something other than banging nails into a wall.
Elsewhere, the “gaming” of search by…LL… continued to cause upsets, as it appeared that small landholders were being disadvantaged with changes to the Search tool. At the same time, things appeared to be unravelling in the new SL Marketplace with content creators finding items being delisted, despite conforming to guidelines – and failing to obtain notifications of delistings.
October arrived with misplaced rumours that SL was about to be sold off – and none other than Microsoft was in the frame. While the rumours were apparently unfounded, Linden Lab then upset the apple cart in a different way by announcing the end of educational and non-profit discounts. Coming on top of the TSL closure announcement and the requirement for educational (“sponsor”) organisations wishing to provide a place for under 16s on the grid having to face purchasing sims – this must have come across as a royal kick in the teeth in some quarters. Certainly it gives the impression that financial gain is more important to LL than educational support. This month also saw the SL Marketplace go live – somewhat prematurely, perhaps – but in far better shape than, say, the forums or Viewer 2 at the times they were launched; so perhaps LL are learning a few lessons.
Eyebrows shot up with the news that Ozimals had apparently structure a promotional deal with LL and had apparently secured four “orientation sims” as well, leading many to wonder what the heck was going on…
Philip Rosedale bailed out as CEO…again…in October, which struck me as an odd time to go – right when the search for a CEO was about to start. One would have expected him to stick around a little longer in the post, given he had – in theory – presided over all the changes that marked Kingdon’s departure, etc.
Equally surprising came November’s announcements that both Brodensky and Grant Linden were no more. Both had worked tirelessly to try to make SL Marketplace work, and their departures so soon after launch did not send out a positive message. The question as to just who is actually minding the store had wider implications as stability within the Grid continued to decline through November – although LL doubtless have reams of figures that show the reverse to be the case. Reports of Inventory losses continued to rise through the month; people started reporting “old” issues such as sim freezes as people teleported in and out were again on the rise lag – while predominantly a client-side affair – started to massively increase, and so on.
As the month drew to a close, Apez, after all the rumours and speculation, closed its doors under what can best be described as “unusual” circumstances.
By December, the Linden spin machine had managed to gobble up even Terrance Linden, who had to date done a lot of good work in framing the TSL / Main Grid merger, but who really reverted to “typical” Linden form when talking to members of TSL. LL then caused many of us to ask if they really wanted our business and new changes to advertising where suddenly announced in terms of Classified Adverts and in an e-mail to residents.
In the run-up to Christmas, we saw the ToS revised ready for the arrival of teens; Jack Linden departed the LL camp – with moist-eyed farewells from some and muttered “good riddance” from others. I found myself caught between the two camps. And finally, we got news that SL and LL have a new Head Honcho: one Rod Humble, while Phoenix reached the end of the road in terms of “full releases”.
Overall, 2010 was marked by highs and lows. Search continued to be a thorn in may sides; it’s now been in excess of a year since it got *really* screwed up – longer, if you remember Mark Kingdon was promising it would be “fixed” back at the start of the year; a promise that has yet to be fulfilled. While the drama level was more-or-less the same, I suspect, as previous years, much of it seems a lot more protracted in 2010 than, say, things like the OpenSpace fiasco or the Adult Changes, which seemed to burst and roar among us and then die a natural death. This year, frustrations with Search, Viewer 2, LL’s unwillingness to engage with its users and so forth seem to have combined to keep tempers across the Grid bubbling at just below boiling point for a very long time. While this hasn’t seen the kind of outright bursts of anger and upset that have marked previous unpopular decisions – we’ve had no marches or rallies or overt protests “on the streets” – nevertheless the degree of frustration / resentment has in all probability been as high this year as in the last couple of years.
Once again, I’m not going to predict what 2011 holds; despite all the angst and upsets, I look at my Contacts list as see names that have graced it for the last four years are still there. I take this as a sign that despite everything that may be thrown at us by LL, we all still have faith in SL as a platform and hope for the future. Those are two very positive things to have – and they are what I plan to take into 2011 with me.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 