SL is lacking things - is LL going to get out of the way and let us do them?

SL is lacking a couple of things. For example,

- a better currency purchasing interface
- in world object search engines

Linden Labs needs to commit to a release date on these features or get out of the way and encourage their development community to do them.

If they don't, then they are not 'working with the community' at all.

How are we supposed to build for SL when they could easily roll over anything we do? We need a >clear< roadmap, otherwise the community can not invest intelligently in SL.

A lack of a clear land target price is another example. SL has alienated future investment in SL because they did not communicate a clear target price.

(No, don't make the facile assumption I'm a complaining land baron. I was never affected by the reduction in prices, because I knew LL was going to act like a uncoordinated elephant)

If they just sent an instant message to the top 10 land sellers and said "Hi, we're targetting a 2/m2 land price in 3 months" 3 months ago, people would have had time to adjust.


The fact is, benchmark and ebay founders are investing in SL because of their ability to cooperate and focus the energy of their community.

However, by not communicating clearly what they're going to in certain areas, the community becomes very much afraid of working with them and it is unlikely they're going to continue to invest.

Well, according to Cory (or somesuch) in the permissions debates, both of those features are coming.

LL's never been great about meeting any SORT of release date. But they're not standing in the way of people creating these things in world. Why would you think they are?

Most of Linden Lab's bigwigs are at the State of Play conference. Dunno how long it lasts, but don't expect much of anything to get done for the next week or two.

LF

Stop complaining and buy a private sim.

i think not

In some circles.. that would be considered insider trading.

Why on earth would they do something like that?

ouch Juro. that's true.

it's a lil bit rude to go around demanding Linden does stuff, especially when you don't know what they plan to do, and especially when it's only your opinion of what they should do. for instance in my opinion those things aren't all that necessary. i can think of alot of things i'd rather have than those. so for me sl sure isn't lacking them. anyway using the word please would help alot.

(sigh)

Before criticizing what I am saying, please sit down and think through what you're going to say and what I am trying to point out.

Things are not getting made in SecondLife or people are getting screwed because LindenLabs is not providing a roadmap of what they are doing.

For example, I wouldn't mind developing an application to develop outside of SecondLife for LSL so you don't have to be logged on. I was also thinking something to develop prims would be nice as well.

But the fact is .. why do these things if LindenLabs is just going to end up doing them sometime? There is no way you can compete with the platform developers. MS taught us that a long time ago.

Without a roadmap, as third party developers, we can't build for the framework.

SecondLife is supposed to be about focusing the energies of the community. If the community doesn't know what's going on, they can't focus their energies.

As for the 'insider trading' thing, they would obviously post it in the forums so everyone else would see it as well. I am surprised I had to explain that.

They are doing this already in some form, and are working on doing it in the future it seems.

Read:
http://secondlife.blogs.com/prompt/
http://secondlife.blogs.com/ops/
http://secondlife.blogs.com/philip/

I think a general "what we are working on" is good to have, but for different reasons. My big want to know whats going on is to plan for upcoming changes with current things, not ditch plans because LL is going to do the same.

LL is constantly planing new things, and not all plans are near-term-future, so giving a layout of what they're *going* to do isn't really helpfull, because they might not actualy work on it till 2006.

Also think of this, LL is constantly working on new things, if they release feature x, which is basicly the same as your product x, they won't *always* be working on feature x, where as you can in contrast work on product x as much time as you want to dedicate to it.

This was all covered in one of the white papers, developers can-not keep up with users in alot of aspects of creation, because they don't have the time. This is why most of SL is user created.

Take the Linden Snowboards, those were released, but haven't really been constantly updated with new features since(to my knowledge), you could easily create a snowboard that blows the linden one away.

I don't see why anyone would stop making something "just cause the lindens are basicly doing the same thing".

However like I said before, being informed of upcoming changes would be nice so we can bend our scripts to be compatable so no one gets screwed (idealy this would be avoided in other ways, but anyway), or a new feature you can take advantage and have a product ready on the update to take advantage of it on the same day (wouldn't be too smart though since features can be buggy without warning on release day).

It would be neat to see what LL has planned for the future, which they currently are doing somewhat through the blogs.

Hmm, the ops blog is cool. Haven't seen that before.

I think it would be handy if they publish their dev schedule. I used to have them (I assume all dev teams do) with my dev teams. They have priority, vague deadlines, brief task descriptions. Just a spreadsheet or an HTML web page.

It would also have far off ideas as well that are being considered with brief notes about blockage / prioritization.

I can't think of how this would cause them grief. Obviously nothing is written in stone, but clearly communicae just can't hurt.