Letter to the Lindens

Trout's "Letters from the Lindens" were hilarious, and I miss them. I can't match his style, but I thought it was about time for a periodic rant. So here is my letter TO the Lindens.

Dear M and Company,

How are you today? Seeing as how you're surveying residents and asking them how they like Second Life, and what could be done to improve it, I thought I would give you my views. Especially since you somehow forgot to send ME a survey.

Hmm. You already know we all want stability, and new features like shadows, and faster rendering. So I won't talk too much about that.

Instead, let's talk about your customers. Who are they? I know you've been trying hard to make SL a better place for corporate customers, and I think that's fine...as long as you don't lose sight of your bread and butter. As I've said in other posts, I think that SL has some very basic drawbacks for the serious business user, in terms of privacy, stability, and bandwidth requirements. But by all means, keep trying to attract this segment.

But while you're doing that, don't lose sight of your main customer base...us, the individuals who use SL for entertainment. SL may not be a great corporate platform, but it is a wonderful entertainment platform, and can be made even better without having to tear it all down and rebuild it from scratch. And the entertainment industry is not to be scorned...there is BIG money in it. Ask Sony, or Paramount.

You have, by accident or design, hit on a nearly ideal formula. A platform where users can create content, own it, and sell it to others. A place that has tremendous freedom of expression. A micro-economy that lets people live a lavish virtual lifestyle for only a few dollars a month...and that lets enterprising creators earn a financial reward for their efforts.

Don't ever lose sight of that. Sure, you want to make as much money for LL as possible...every company does. But if you continue to share a portion of that income by letting resident content creators siphon a bit of it off, you will be nurturing an incredible engine of growth. Your pricing should always take this into account...if SL merchants are able to pay their costs to you, and turn a reasonable profit, you'll continue to attract creative people...and in turn, many other people who value that creativity.

Land pricing, both purchase and tier, is the underlying driver. Lower land costs, and you get more people. Raise land costs, and you drive people away. Finding the balance here is the single most important thing you can do to insure SL's survival and growth.

The second most important thing is to preserve freedom of expression. If SL ever bans adult content, you will be signing its death warrant. See, for example, the long running thread in this forum on the possibility of merging the Teen and Adult grids. Your residents can't figure out a way to do that and still preserve the adult activities that draw a great many people...maybe even a majority of people...to Second Life. Even for those who don't engage in such activities...or do so only seldom...their existence lends a dash of spice to SL that you won't find in virtual worlds that adopt a Disneyfication strategy.

The third thing you can do is to improve the tools available to the content creators. Start by making a better avatar. A more detailed mesh, more attachment points, an improved animation skeleton, better facial expressions. This gives the content creators a better end product to make content FOR. Then, make it easier for the creators to use third party tools to make things for SL...tools like Poser (a more recent version than 2.0, please!), Maya, LightWave, 3DS Studio Max. Make it easier to import textures without distortion. Easier to import longer sound files, or sound files in other formats.

Finally, improve the business-related tools. Make it easier for a merchant to verify whether an item has been delivered. Fix the problem of losing items if a buyer forgets to deactivate Busy Mode before purchasing. Improve the permissions system, provide better copy protection for scripters and texture makers. Provide better inventory security for all residents.

Second Life is the best place on the web for entertainment, in this resident's opinion...and almost all of that entertainment is stuff we've made ourselves. Keep on facilitating that. Grease the machinery and let the creative talents of your residents loose.

Sincerely,
Lindal Kidd

Yeah, what she said!

Very well said and thought out Lindal. M would do well to post that on the bulletin boards in the LL office.

My hands hurt from applauding so hard for so long. Excellent job, Lindal.

Hear hear!

-Atashi

Lindal, are you going to put this letter somewhere where there's a chance it will get read by a relevant Linden?

What would you suggest? Putting it on a prim and waving it at someone's Office Hours? I figure its chances are as good here as in any other forum.

Hah... put it as a comment on M's flickr.

Anyone with a Flickr account, feel free to do so. Thanks.

You think she'd be able to sneak up on one enough to shove it up there?

I agree that 'bland' and 'corporate' should be two words/notions LL runs screaming from...

Making the main grid into a kid grid (it will not happen the other way round if the two are merged) is a great way to implement both those things...

Although I love SL Disney and so on, I don't want the whole place to be the happiest place on earth. Give me gloom and misery and shock for the spice it adds to life (within reasonable boundaries). Here and SL both.

Look through Jira and see what you can implement easily that would allow cool stuff to happen. Pay some attention to usre votes, but poll your developers and people like Torley about what cool things implementing them would let us do. You're looking for TASTY low hanging fruit, not just grapes with a bunch of foxes staring at them.

Materials, new scripting facilities, easy animation tricks, ...

Things that are cool but would take a lot of work, like flexy sculpties... I'd love to see them but add some easy cool stuff with every new release, to keep people excited.

good letter. one thing though, which took me a while to figure out, is declined inventory offers while in busy mode can be found in your trash folder.
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Inventory_Recovery_Steps#Inventory_offers_declined_while_in_Busy_Mode

Pissing into the wind.

Pie (Nihilism means nothing to me)

They go to trash if another avatar drops them onto you. If they come from a scripted object, like a "Pay..."-type vendor, Xstreet, or a notecard/landmark giver, they vanish without a trace.

And really without a trace: the script that tried to deliver the item has no way of knowing whether it worked or not, just as a script trying to pay money has no clue whether it succeeded.

It's amazing there's any in-world commerce at all under these conditions.

Is that even possible for a woman?

Definitely.

posted as comment on M's newest flickr pic, link is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mlinden/3339352600

My god, Lindal. You are my HERO!

I think there's a lot of other factors involved with land. For business users, it may just be a matter of, land is an overhead so less overheads are better. But for "house players", land may actually be a prestige good - in other words, it's good that it's expensive, because having it marks people out more.



By all means make importing things easier, but making it too easy to import while neglecting the in-world editor would be a bad idea. SL shouldn't be requiring people to buy $1000+ packages to edit things.

The best point in a great letter. If this ever happened, I'd be out of here immediately. I'm not all about adult content, but I want a realm that allows it.

I think I would add:


'You should strive to help creators protect their creations more. Before putting all that effort into crossing effortlessly into other vitual worlds, you need to address the problem of Intellectual Property Rights. Although you no longer ignore the issue totally, there is still so much you could do to send a message to all thieves that this is unacceptable!'

Noted, agreed. Here, the Geek and I between us HAVE some of these packages, so I would sure like to be able to use them to make things for SL. But the in world tools are equally, maybe even more, important.

Denial is not just the name of a river.

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