Third Party Viewer Rule Changes: The Lab’s Reality Check

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Feline

Unpacking Skyboxes
Once upon a time, back in the boom times for Second Life, the vision was that SL would lead to the 3D internet. Remember that?

Then a lot of other stuff happened.

The Lab chased the dream. They hired M Linden, who led the Lab toward luring in additional corporate dollars. The US (and world) financial markets fell apart. There was no corporate interest in Second Life Enterprise by the time it released. The Lab outsourced development of a viewer and ignored usability input, releasing it on a dismayed and frustrated user base. Mitch Kapor gave his infamous speech at SL5B where he reminded the user base that they were “people who feel that they don’t fit” and that the Lab’s focus was on a different customer base. The users who had believed in Second Life for five years felt unappreciated by the Lab.

Meanwhile, something else was going on.  A handful of people were writing alternate viewers for Second Life. Long before M Linden arrived on the scene, the Lab made the viewer code open source. With that as a basis, people were happily churning away customized versions of viewers. Most people used the Lab’s viewer, since that was what they downloaded during the registration process, but suddenly the word spread like wildfire. If you download the Emerald viewer, you can make women’s breasts jiggle! Almost overnight, this third-party viewer had 6% of the user base. The viewer added other features, both helpful and occasional controversial. Somewhere in there, the percentage of people logging on using this viewer meant that the viewer’s developers gained a kind of tacit control at the Lab, since breaking their viewer could potentially run off thousands of users overnight. the Emerald project imploded spectacularly due to  developers doing things with the viewer undisclosed to its users or the Lab. But the migration had started. Even with Emerald gone, much of the user base continued to want third party viewers, especially with much of the user base rejecting the Lab’s viewer 2.0 user interface. Third party viewers continued to provide alternatives that many users strongly prefer, putting a huge amount of control in the hands of these third party viewer developers.

An example of this is the advent of mesh in Second Life. This new content type arrived with promise of great things to come, yet could be seen only by the fraction of the user base using the Lab’s official viewers. There was no way for this feature to reach wide adoption until the popular third party viewers integrated it, too. It might take the Lab longer to churn out new features then the third party viewer developers, since they surely go through formal, auditable development and quality assurance processes, but once the features are released, they landed like a thud until the TPV developers joined the party. That’s a huge amount of control to allow in the hands of people who aren’t the Lab’s payroll.

Back when the Lab thought Second Life was going to be the 3D web, the idea of third party viewers made more sense. If SL was to be like the web, you couldn’t very well say you could only use Internet Explorer to access the web pages. But times have changed. All that other stuff happened. And the Lab long ago gave up being the 3D web and is content to be a walled garden. The lab had a reality check: walled gardens don’t require third party viewers. Walled gardens are easier to run, as a service, if the Lab has more control. It’s easier to make new customers happy in your walled garden if third party viewers aren’t adding features that the Lab’s viewer and servers don’t support.

It’s a reality check, really. In that light, the third party viewer policy changes that Oz Linden announced this week aren’t so surprising.

The first announced 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.

New users find the “don’t show me online” control, but people keep finding them online anyhow. This is not a good customer experience, especially not when they have been logging in to appear offline on IM systems for years. Predictable user experience is important. The Lab’s solution: No more displaying the true online status of users. This feature was a popular one in Phoenix, and I’m sure it caused a lot of angst and drama. The llRequestAgentData() function is also being essentially neutered. It will stop returning values of true (online) unless you own or created the script. On balance, this is a good thing. It’s going to cause a lot of inconvenience, especially with the bazillion legacy scripts out on the grid that rely on it. It’s a shame this wasn’t resolved, before the idea became so entrenched in some heads that it was acceptable to ignore user preference, or maybe the LSL call might have been preserved. The crystal ball is cloudy about that.

Additional policy changes:
2.i – You must not display any information regarding the computer system, software, or network connection of any other Second Life user.
2.j – You must not include any information regarding the computer system, software, or network connection of the user in any messages sent to other viewers, except when explicitly elected by the user of your viewer.

In short, no more viewer tags. Conspiracy theories abound on this one, but the harm to it is minimal. You won’t be able to tell at a glance whether someone who is asking for advice about how to do something in their viewer is using the same viewer you are. That’s probably the biggest downside, and it’s easy to overcome by asking, “Hey, what viewer are you using to try to do that?” Having taken heaps of verbal abuse about my choice to use the Lab’s viewer 2 instead of Emerald/Phoenix, I think this is a good thing. It’s bad enough that new users may end up Ahern. They don’t need extra abuse due to a tag over their avatar’s head that says “I’m not using the viewer to which you have a near-religious attachment.”

And here’s the biggie:
2.k – You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer.

This means no doing things like extra attachment points until they’re supported by the main viewer, since not everyone will see the world the same way. I fondly remember the Emerald/Phoenix extra attachment points. I politely pointed out to someone that her avatar’s wedding ring was floating about half a meter in front of her torso, and I received a withering tirade about how I needed to get onto her viewer because the one I was using was obviously inferior. (Way to win friends and influence people, isn’t it?) Features visible to one set of users and not another divide them into the haves and the have nots. Second Life is the Lab’s service, and they don’t want to see haves and have nots among their user base. And they especially don’t want to be pressured by users about why so many people (using a third party viewer) can see or do something that users of their own viewer can’t. That’s understandable. It looks like they are also trying to move back to the model where more of the viewer code patches come from the customer base. I’m not sure whether that’s feasible after the amount of goodwill this move is going to burn, but that’s for another reality check.

Overall, this reality check is about one thing: the lab taking some of the slack back up from the reins that have been allowed to dangle loose for a long while now. To continue the metaphor, the only question is where they plan to steer the wagon once they get the horses back under some sort of marginal control. The mass adoption of third party viewers tore those reins free, and it looks like they’re trying to disincentivizing the TPV developers to try to work on a migration back to their own viewer. Or at least tending their own closed garden.

So SL won’t be the 3D internet, just in case you hadn’t noticed yet. I think the Lab finally has. That might actually be a good thing. In the meantime, though, the weather forecast calls for a 100% chance of dramastorms while this shakes out, so please don’t forget your umbrella when you venture out onto the grid.

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The Benefit of Customer Service

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Feline

Behind the Counter

Once upon a time, on a virtual world far, far away, there was a noob, who looked nothing at all like the avatar in the picture above, except that she had black hair and blue eyes. Oh, and the same shape. So… yes, it’s a story about me as a noob.

I was doing what I do best, wandering Second Life, and I happened into a store where I bought some discount priced clothes. The room next to the clothes had jewelry, and I wandered in, and I absolutely fell in love with one jewelry set. I bought my first non-freebie jewelry that day. In retrospect, it wasn’t all that expensive, maybe $L200, but at the time, it seemed like a huge expenditure of Linden dollars when I was using my stipend.

So I was upset when the necklace didn’t fit my shorter-than-standard avatar. It floated up nearly to her chin! I was flustered because I had just spent all that money but couldn’t wear my new prized possession.

Well, I had mad noob skillz and knew that if something said it was modifiable, I might be able to move the bits around to make it fit. I checked, but the necklace was no modify. Disappointed, I decided that maybe I could ask the creator if he could help me. I wasn’t sure what he could do. Make me a modifiable version, maybe. So I sent him an IM.

I wish I still had the chat log from that conversation, because it was probably the most patient anybody has ever been with me in my life. The content creator explained to me, in IM, how to adjust no-modify attachments. I was embarrassed not to have known something so fundamental, but he never talked down to me or got impatient, even though I took a lot of his time to help with something related to an inexpensive purchase. That is customer service, above and beyond the call of duty.

I have quietly shopped from the creator ever since, both for myself and for alts. I have referred business to him. I have sought customized work from him. He never knew why.

Last week, Chris went to him to buy rings, and he asked for them to be customized to not be full bright, because I don’t like full bright objects. In the process, we discovered a SL bug where some formerly full bright objects appear full bright in some regions and not others. This content creator came out to our home to troubleshoot the issue and followed up afterward.

That’s what I call customer service.

But even better, I finally got to thank him, as a four year old avatar, for the kindness and patience he showed to a rather clueless noob who didn’t know that you could adjust no-modify attachments. Now he knows how customer loyalty happens.

So thanks, RH Engel. You’ve been my go-to guy for years because you are willing to go the extra mile, for noobs and SL middle-aged alike. That’s the difference between people who create objects and leave them set for sale and people who actually care about their customers, and you’ve got it.

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I Never Thought This Day Would Come

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Feline

Shadows

I have used Linden Lab viewers exclusively for a very long time now. In over four years on the grid, I used Emerald for about a week when it was fairly early in its development and set it aside, and I never went back. I knew there were a lot of very useful tools available in the third party viewers, but I perservered without them. I put up with nasty remarks of people trying to “educate” me about how the third party viewer they used was so much better than what I used. I knew that they could find information faster than I could. They could find useful information that I had no way to access. But I stubbornly kept using the lab-issued viewers.

This past year, it has not been fun to be a user of viewer 2. For some reason, people feel the need to take out their dislike of the viewer on its users. The vitriol they spew is sometimes shocking, especially when you stop to think that they are saying these things about you because of the software you use. People I previously respected made remarks to (and about) me about my viewer choice that made me lose some a great deal of regard for them.

Still, I kept using the viewers from the lab.

Until today.

I can’t take a single snapshot without crashing. I can’t open the snapshot window without crashing. Photography is one of the things that gives me great joy in SL. It is what has kept me inworld when people didn’t. Creating beautiful (or silly, or interesting) images is something I love to do. I have 4130 Second Life generated images on my Flickr photostream.

There was a period of about a year when high res snapshots were broken. I did without them.

There was a period even longer where any object with glow applied to it would appear in a snapshot with the glow offset from the proper location in the image. I worked around it.

But I can’t work around crashing to the desktop with every single screenshot. Do you hear me, Linden Lab? I can’t.

I feel a little like the battered spouse who feels foolish for having stayed so long. But like that battered spouse, I don’t actually want to go. I think, “Maybe next time will be different.” Then I log in, try to take a snapshot and am staring at my desktop again.

I go quietly about my business, and I’m not influential at all. I don’t expect the problems I have with the viewer to attract any particular notice. But the lab just lost a quiet, steadfast supporter of their software. I can’t be the only one.

(The snapshot at the top of this blog entry was taken in Kirstens S21. There was no postprocessing other than cropping.)

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The Zombie Welcoming Committee

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Feline

I wish to point out that I am not always serious.

Every idea I have for this blog is weighty and serious, and I don’t want it to be a buzzkill, so I thought I ought to include something silly.

Nowhereville, the region next to the one where I live in Second Life recently had a fundraising concert event to benefit the Alabama Red Cross. As part of that effort, they managed to get the spot into the destination guide and onto the message of the day. The event is over, and the promotion of the location seems to be done. But the new users seem to keep coming.

For some reason, by the time they get all the way to the mountain in Edloe, they seem to wind up in the room under the mountain, which I had left empty. That’s not very hospitable. After all, if you went into doors that looked like these…

…you would be expecting a welcoming committee, right? I had the prims to spare, so for a limited time, the new users wandering in will find a warm welcome interested in eating their brains.

Zombies in Edloe

 

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Residents: What’s in a Name?

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Feline

Reading on the Edloe Mountaintop

Love them or hate them, the Disney company is marketing genius. They know how to use language in such a way to set subtle, implicit expectations.

Disney theme parks don’t have visitors, they have guests.
They don’t have employees, they have cast members.
Their cast members don’t wear uniforms, they wear costumes.

Each of these terms has connotations without the organization having to explain them any further.

Which brings us to Linden Lab. I don’t think anybody is going to garner the Lab with the label of marketing genius, but somewhere, early on, someone decided to call the people who used Second Life residents. That was a pretty smart bit of marketing on their part. Let’s see what Dictionary.com has to say about the word “resident”:

res-i-dent
-noun
1. a person who resides in a place.
6. residing; dwelling in a place

That’s the literal, or denotative meaning of the word. The problem is the connotative meaning, the emotions and associations that the word brings up. While resident may literally mean to reside somewhere, it also makes people feel, as they do when they reside in a real life community, that they have set down roots in that place. They feel that they have a stake in is welfare, and they believe they should have a say in how things go in the neighborhood.

This last part is where things go wrong. While we may be called residents of Second Life, our rights are outlined in the Terms of Service. You know, those terms that you occasionally have to click Accept to log on when they make big changes, but also sometimes stealthily change when you aren’t looking. Those are all of our rights. Residency is not the same as citizenship. It doesn’t entitle you to a vote on things, other than the vote-with-your-feet of leaving, or the vote-with-your-dollars of not spending money.

This isn’t to say that people in the user community don’t have great ideas that shouldn’t be heard by the Lab. They do, and they should. It’s just that when there’s a business decision made that we don’t like (and I include myself in the “don’t like” column for a lot of the Lab’s past decisions), the hue and cry that the Lab should Listen To The Residents as if they were the combined force of the major voting parties is just ridiculous. The Lab is going to make business decisions. The user base are going to cringe and try to tell them whey they are shortsighted, because the decisions are perceived as being made out of ignorance of the needs of the users. Ultimately, though, the Lab does what they think is in their own interests, not mine or yours.

Look at it like a favorite bar. You drop by after work every day. Everybody knows your name. (“Nooooooorm!”) But the money you spend on beer doesn’t entitle you to a veto on the hiring decisions for the new barkeeper. The money spent on beer and finger food isn’t an investment, and you aren’t a resident of the bar. You’re a customer.

Dictionary.com again:

cus-to-mer
-noun
1. A person who purchases goods or services from another; buyer; patron.

The word customer has connotations, too. That there are responsibilities on both sides of a purchase or exchange of goods or services. I advocate using the word customer rather than resident, because it subtly repositions us from the user-without-rights “resident” to a user-who-pays-and-expects-something-in-exchange “customer.”

It’s a small distinction, maybe, but an important one. You aren’t just a resident. Don’t sell yourself short.

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My Tech is OK, Your Tech is OK

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Feline

Some debates are lost causes before you begin. I violated one of my personal rules by engaging in the Mac vs. PC debate this morning on Twitter.

That’s one of those things that, regardless of outcome, there is no upside. All it does is subtly erode the respect that each person in the debate has for the other as they hold an entrenched position in an unwinnable argument. I bowed out what I hoped was gracefully, and I should have also issued an apology to everybody who follows my timeline for wasting their bits and bytes. 

After I had come to my senses, there was a parting shot at what must have looked at my retreating back. 
“How many pieces of PC were designed on Mac? Lots and everyday many continue to work Microsoft but use Mac”

The thing I think that comment inadvertently highlights is that it’s important to choose the right tool for the job, even when it leads to irony. (Remember when it was reported that the Intel Inside commercials were created on Macs?) I was a Mac user exclusively back in the days when I worked in the publishing industry, because that was the right tool for that job. And I still have an iMac I can pull out when I need to do graphic design. It’s the right tool for the job. But when I need a lightweight portable to surf the net and do word processing, there’s simply no justification for me to pay the extra for that sexy MacBook air.

After all, you can drive a nail a lot of ways. You can drive it with a hammer, a nailgun, even with a shoe. So you have to decide what the right tool is for you. Lots of us see no need to have a nailgun. I certainly don’t have one in my toolbox. But other people feel that it is essential to efficiently complete their carpentry projects. Does that make me and my hammer deficient? Should the carpenter tell me “your hammer sucks” because he uses a nailgun instead?  

It’s all so judgmental.

Yes, it often gets couched in “helpfulness.” Someone wants to “help” show you the “best” way. But in the end, they’re really just showing you their way. Not necessarily helping you find the way that is best for you.

It reminds me of several encounters I had back in the old days in Second Life when Emerald finally got a lot of uptake. People on Emerald would see that I was on the LL viewer and would “helpfully” approach me: “Oh, you’re on the official client? You poor thing! That’s not the best available at all. Let me show you how to download Emerald so you can see boobs jiggle.” Meanwhile, they were running around with additional attachment points that, from my viewer, made their belly button ring appear half a meter in front of them. Jiggling boobs and extra attachments that looked good to them were “best” from their point of view. And not from mine. But no matter how polite I was, I would get the same, aggressive, helpful evangelism.

The Mac vs. PC debate is much the same. I respect whatever tools that you deem best for the job in front of you. Looking down on the choices of others — whatever they are — technological, theological, or personal — is a just a way to alienate friends, so I’m going to try to avoid that. 

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This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Feline

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed another in a series of pleas to Rodvik Humble on Twitter to fix a billing issue that a customer had with their Second Life account. Rodvik responded: “@GreenandWild Thanks for the heads up. Will make sure CS gets in touch with them.”

He did the right thing by delegating the issue to the appropriate department. But every time this happens (and this isn’t the first time and wasn’t even the only time I saw it happen yesterday), I wonder if it pushes the CEO away from using the communication channel. If it does, then nobody at the top is listening at all, and the customer base is back to the good old days of M.

I’m not trying to blame the customer. I understand that we all have communities and causes we care about, and when it’s our cause or community, we take up arms to fight for it. Having the Twitter account for the CEO must seem like a great place to plead your case. Because it’s your cause. And your cause is important to you!

But your cause is important to you. Your partner’s cause is important to him or her. Your neighbor’s cause is important to your neighbor. A mainland land baron’s cause is mission critical to their business. An estate owner’s cause needs immediate resolution for their island group. A Zindra resident’s cause is important to them. A Marketplace merchant’s cause worries them and they want it addressed, too….

The conduit for communication with the CEO is so clogged with individual customer support issues that it becomes the head bitching post, and any sensible CEO staffs it out and walks away. If that happens, the userbase will have squandered a remarkable opportunity to get an ear at the top.

That said, I know full well that the Second Life user base will complain loudly on any communication channel they are offered if they feel wronged, especially since there are so few effective communication channels to fix problems once they get out of hand. How can the constant appealing of these issues directly to @Rodvik be alleviated? Anybody who has a billing issue or other customer support issue should have a clear escalation path available to them. It should be visible, documented, and responsive. A twitter account that is monitored by someone empowered to actually fix problems would problem be in order (@ComcastCares was an early case study for this), so that complaints on that service can be redirected easily to the correct channel and that people can see that responses are actually happening. If that happened, everybody wouldn’t feel the need to pull the coattails at the guy at the top for attention to many of the issues that are now being tossed his way.

I realize that the folks who have found getting the CEO’s ear to be effective are unlikely to agree with me. But the fact is, you have to use your access to the folks at the top wisely. It’s my opinion that it isn’t, and that can be fixed. Making such a cacophony that he tunes out doesn’t serve anybody’s interests. But that noise level may be, as your mother used to say, why we can’t have nice things.

(For the record, I’m not followed by The Man on on twitter as of the time of writing this post, and I’m not fishing for it. I’m just making an observation after sleeping on it and finding that it still bothered me.)

Edit: I’m still posting from my phone, so apologies for not having pretty pictures to go with this post. I don’t like walls of text, either.

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Breeding Unrest Among Friends

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Feline

I’ve watched some interesting exchanges on Twitter recently about Meeroos, the new breedable animals which are apparently in open beta on the grid. (Or something called open beta but is possibly not open any more because people didn’t already ask. But I digress.)  It’s pretty apparent that some jaded oldbies don’t like the idea of them, and they aren’t shy about saying so. This, of course, leads to people who love their meeroos taking it as a personal affront, and they feel the need to defend their pets. Hilarity ensues.

I’m a little fascinated at how polarizing these little prim creatures are. They make otherwise perfectly pleasant people say particularly ugly things to their friends who are on the other side of the prim breedable creature divide. Really, folks. Take a deep breath. You were friendly before this started. Is your friendship worth it over a disagreement over some prim critters?

The winner, of course, in the breedable animal race, is the creator of the system. Salome Strangelove, in her usual wisdom, breaks down the numbers in a great blog post, Meeroo Money. (Thank you, Sal. Your math is better than mine. Are you available for balancing checkbooks?) I don’t know who scripted the meeroos or how long it took, but it looks like the payday for it may be a pretty handsome one.

I personally don’t have any breedables. I thought about one of those kittycats that Callie Cline launched earlier this year, but really, all I want is to watch it sleep with the little heart-shaped pads of its paws up in the air. Not worth adding to my embarrassingly large collection of prim cats just for that. However, I understand that for some people who don’t actively create anything inworld, it provides a way that they can hope to go into some sort of a business, at least until that particular breedables market has its bottom fall out. The collective ADHD of SL users guarantees that it meeroos of today will be the scion chickens of last year. Having made the creator some money, some breeders some $L, and a lot of other hopeful breeders will spend a lot of food and time and not get a return.

As long as they enjoy the pastime, there’s no harm in it, right?

Maybe that’s the ultimate answer. Maybe these little critters are the Farmville of SL, destined to bring in the masses to coddle them and love them and….. well, maybe, if they can get through an orientation process, figure out how to get out of the basic viewer, operate inventory, wear group tags, buy land to rez their little animals… We aren’t ready for anything to be a Farmville yet in terms of drawing new users. But in terms of retention and things to do that might help boost the ebbing hours per user spent inworld? Maybe cute breedables will help until ADHD strikes again.

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Coming Soon, a Shiny New Blog

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Feline

I’m still sweeping out the corners and straightening the pictures on the walls, but this new blog is going to be home. I intend to talk about stuff on here both virtual and actual, the same way I do on Twitter.

When will I get started with a real post? Soon, I hope. I just need to finish the cosmetics so that I don’t burst everybody’s bubble and finally let on that I truly have no style, then I’ll be ready to get started. In the meantime, if you find this post hanging out here in cyberspace, feel free to bookmark and visit again soon. I will talk about more interesting things besides “Hello, world!” next time, I promise!

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