Philip Linden's roadmap

Corporate spin

I think Philips blog is great. Do I expect miracles? Hell no, but I believe that they are steering towards the right direction. Phil's blog was hugely outdone by Cristalle's response. I hate that she didn't get in on time. It was a very nice change to the usual nonsensical ramblings that are posted in the comments section. I don't even waste my time reading them anymore.

Maybe I am strange but I liked the post and found the old Mission statement bit focused on people consuming way too much. The new one reminds me of something I believe about how creativity and imagining a better world is first step in improving the world.
The only problem is people being people bring their prejudices, greed, and darker natures with them.
Sometimes its easy to get caught up in very dark vision of world where everyone is exploiting everyone for the next Linden or dollar, that either you prey or a predatorial type of mentality where there is group of those with value and those society sees as disposable, throw aways.
I have struggled with this concept of reality for long time.
Second Life has given me a chance to met new people, have new experiences, to envision another reality that involves people being caring, helpful, striving for more beautiful reality where flowers and trees are formed and I am not blasted by noise, pollution and all the ugliness of first live unless I go looking for it.

I'd love to see some focus away from the 'commercial' aspects of SL and more on fun, entertainment, and just plain ol' nice builds - and a pox upon ad farms.

Whilst it's nice to see Philip still enthusiastic about 'his baby' ... but I still wonder whether, in the end, real world crap is going to get in the way of all the potential that SL has.

Broccoli

I attended the launch of Windows 95 in the UK a Microsoft venue, and yes at that time I appreciated the roadmap ahead for personal PC's had changed for ever.

Ditto virtual worlds, yes in the future I cannot even begin to totally comprehend the possibilities that may exist, which may even include total electronic immersion within a VR world to the point where the brain cannot tell the difference between what is computer generated and normal reality aka The Matrix.

As I said before if you live in a slum with no hope or prospects and you were offered the alternative of a virtual paradise, that option might actually be quite attractive…think about it.

BUT that is one alternative for the future; today we all have to deal with the current reality of Second Life. One point that struck me was the sheer number of frustrated comments on both the blog and here; clearly many folks want to participate in this vision of the future but are hampered in doing so. That does indicate desire and need.

Putting aside software issues, of which I am not really qualified to opine, if I were a Linden employee or shareholder my own main concerns would be the issue of financial fraud on the grid. Let that get out of hand and the authorities will close you down. And then the VR future will not be Linden

"The only problem is people being people bring their prejudices, greed, and darker natures with them."

SL is wonderful.
I see it as an amplifier for creativity.
It's a bit like giving someone a bicycle in RL. They can go further faster with less effort.

It can also be used to amplify the bad side of people. SL is a world in which everything can be scripted. It gives the malcontents and the spiritual pygmies a power to intrude into our SL lives to an extent unimaginable in RL.
SL may have started as a techie playground but the influx of 'consumers' are easy targets for scammers and griefers.
It's perverse therefore that SL does not have ways of identifying and dealing with bad behaviour in a timely manner.

And a thoughtful post it is!
We can only live in hope that in the particular circumstances of the CEO making a rare Blog posting that LL's antennae will be out picking up on any responses anywhere. The SL Forums would be an obvious place to look.

"It's out of control."
Yup!

People who complain about losing precious business hours, and thus real dollars, should consider getting themselves a cute little puppy or kitten. Or maybe even both. Coz it might make them less sad a person (<-- yes, yes, pun intended).

Not bothering to read all the comments, sorry! But, Ann's was exactly what I was thinking. Oh.. they REALLY need a Blog Dog to keep people from posting things like this at the absolute wrong time. Last thing we want is a 'heart-warming good-feeling' speech.. when we can't even get into SL for various reasons.

I skimmed it to make sure that nowwhere did it say, "We're selling SL to.." or "We're closing our doors," and that was pretty much it. As usual, it was just Phil being Phil.. meaning clueless about the actualities of SL.

Reading it made my eyes bleed.

I personally (my opinion only) believe that the Lindens are working very hard to stabalize the grid. I met one the other night and he spent one solid hour with me trying to figure out the physics problem in the sim that we were in. The sim kept going off and on line all day long. He said that he was looking for something that was animated or bumping into each other. There was no griefing going on there. He told me that *yes, things have been a mess and everyone at LL is working many long/late hours trying to get it fixed*. He said that if he couldnt find it, his only choice was to roll back the time, which he obviously had to do because nothing was to be found.

It was 3:00am in the morning for him and I told him to go to bed. We may never seen them in world but now I know they are there working their little tails off for people like you and me. I take my hat off to the Linden's and say *Thank you* for giving me such a delightful place to spend my spare time.

/me wraps her arms around the Linden and says *it was lovely meeting you and thank you for all of your hard work*

How sure are you it wasn't posted by his assistant 12 hours after Phil had left the office to organize is Thanksgiving break?

Can we have one in SL, would it work?

I thought was intriuging.

I find the change to SL's goal to be ".. to improve the human condition", the most interesting aspect of all. Because my experience is that SL demonstrates, once and for all, that the number one cause of the human condition is.. other humans. And SL isn't going to change them all.

I am not quite sure what you mean. I have no idea when it was written or actually posted. I met this particular Linden on 11/20 at 2:00am in the morning and was merely giving him a *hats off* for working so hard for us.

Since there's no official "side of road to drive on" in SL... we'd be driving on the left, the US players would be driving on the right, and there'd be some horrible crunch somewhere in the middle.

Be fun to try though if you had a spare sim lying around.

Broccoli

Make vehicles and sitters phantom.
If the roads ever got to be heavily used, that would be required even if everyone drove on a particular side of the road. Rather, if everyone even *tried* to drive on a side. It's quite difficult at times

Make everything phantom. That would ease the Havoc load.

/me flies up looking downward waiting for the splatter.

In a way its good news because the frustration is due to not being able to be inworld which means there is a lot of desire to be inworld. It means people are busy and have plans...and I suspect the focus on stability is for those people as they are likely very productive in SL.

Yes, I had one help me too and it turned out that my ducks were set to phantom and physical at the same time! Two little ducks! and the sim turned to glue.

QFT

perhaps i am cynical, but it looks like pr hot air to me.

hi Philip Linden

[comments on your 'roadmap' blog are now closed]

people will put up with pratically anything if they know what's happening -- it's the not knowing that causes much of the frustration and the anger -- if people have the facts then they can make decisions about what to do -- if people don't have the facts, it leaves them feeling they're not important enough to be told the truth of the situation -- telling people exactly what the problem is and what's been done to resolve it means it becomes a shared problem -- this is a simple and effective way of demonstrating LL's consideration towards the SL community

[as an example, if you're familiar with them, think DreamHost, an employee owned company that's been around for 10 years and hosts half a million web sites -- their general philosophy (and delivery problems?) aren't so different from your own -- they deflect large amounts of potential criticism and customer bad feeling by being completely upfront about their frequent problems, what's causing them and how they're being fixed -- their often humorous appoach is not to everyone's taste, but they do have a magnificently loyal and supportive customer base who, rightly or wrongly, share a firm belief that DH really do care]

the "Second Life Login Issues" post (Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 10:17 AM PST) gives little information other than that the system is down for many people (which of course they already know) -- if "The Ops Team has identified the cause of the present Login Issues" then say what it is -- share the info -- most people are interested because SL is important to them -- it doesn't necessarily have to be a detailed technical explanation (tho many of us would find that of interest), but it should be sufficient for people to understand exactly where the problem lies, and what is being done about it -- there has been no blog update on this currently unresolved issue for 9 hours -- a few minutes to write regular updates (at least every couple of hours) which thousands of people want to read has to be worth the little bit of extra work

of course all this presumes that the techies working on the problem are also prepared to share their high status info with other Lindens -- if they're not, then i'm sure you understand our frustration

i could also comment on the SL website, but enough's enough - let's leave that for now

Hi Loren and welcome to the forum

I think you'll find the Linden monkeys don't actually read this forum, unfortunately. But thanks for sharing your thoughts with us