Introducing Judy Linden

And please stop spamming the Email-accounts with adverts for XSTREET AND ONREZ.

Thanks
Anny

"every kid over the age of 14 has an e-mail account and most have some kind of online gaming account..."

Yes and many of them are in SL causing problems. I hope with the out with the old and in with the new , this will bring positive some changes.
I agree with the previous post about people making these " throw away" griefer accounts.
People come in and get griefed and they do not come back. A real life business will be less than impressed if they become griefed or have some gorean leading a bunch girls through the board meeting on a leash. There is an Age verification system in place that LL has talked about for the last year but does not enforce. Maybe the new guard is replacing the old ones who did nothing and has allowed SL to become such a mess.
In any case, judging on how things are in world, things can only get better.
Welcome aboard Judy and the best of luck to you.

No reason to age verify. No one uses it I can go anywhere I want without it.

Brett Finsbury

"every kid over the age of 14 has an e-mail account and most have some kind of online gaming account..."

Yes and many of them are in SL causing problems.”

So what! They are here so who cares?

Welcome, Judy.

In addition to your official job, you have another important role: telling Mitch when he's full of it. To do that, you'll need to spend a lot of time in-world to really appreciate what SL is, is becoming, and can be.

For example, it's not all about the latest shiny demo Mitch saw at the Media Lab. In fact, almost nothing has been about any of those, ever, but it's easy to be distracted by the blinkenlights.

Another example: Pragmatists are no panacea. They have a nasty habit of being pragmatic. They expect stuff like service level agreements, negotiated discounts, acceptance of purchase orders, backwards compatibility, far-in-advance notice of changes or planned outages--to say nothing of high-overhead marketing. By all means, go for it, just don't base any profit projections on the educational and corporate markets.

I can't stress enough the need to fence-off time for yourself to spend in-world. It will never be the most urgent thing to do, but is always the most important.

It would be nice if she could do this, but no one bites the hand that feeds them.

"Mitch Import" remember.

I second those who have invited you to really experience the in-world environments and communities of SL.

But all I really ask is that, as you set LL's strategies, that you ensure

a) we are always able to log in consistently and when we desire
b) that the in-world services work consistently as we need them to.

Sounds simply really - and yet Linden Lab has miserably failed these past few months on these basic points. I won't delve into my thoughts on your purchase of x-street apart from to say I don't trust your motive for it.

Just remember, while this is a fun and creative social networking tool, your resident customers and businesses have events and livelihoods depending on you offering far better stability to the platform.

welcome aboard. Don't be distracted from what should be LL's core functions and objectives. Let your customers grow and expand the world - and do everything to encourage it. As Lindens, you must continue to invest in the platform that makes the communities possible, rather than driving them yourselves.

QFT (Quoted For Truth)

Expansion into non-Western markets is key. Hundreds of thousands of users in the Middle East, Africa, and India are basically untapped by LL. While most of them speak English, it would be nice to see Arabic and Hindi supported by the software.

(ETA: And I agree with the person from South Africa about PayPal. The day that LL sets up direct deposit to credit/debit cards is the day that it significantly expands its user base.]

The answer to your question, How to get more people inworld and engaged with the expereince?

Answer: The quality of the experience is driven to some degree by the control of what people can create, the ease of creating it and the quality of the textures (making the experience even more real. I would extend partnerships for enablement to Adobe, Newtek (lightwave), Poser, etc. the tools and plugin's for these content and action tools. What would the expereince offer if everyone could simply create custom textures for the many shapes of objects? What if the sequence for creating a sculptie and getting the right texture mapping was much simpler and and end-to-end documented solution? I don't have a long list of ideas here, but you would expand the creative options, for users, draw in more graphics development talent, and the extenal products would gain a larger customer base opportunity. I see a mixture of these tools being used to create some incredible photos on flicker of SL situations, yet they had to use mixed media to accomplish the look. I play with all the tools mentioned, the the enjoyment of SL grows as you can influence your SL experience with higher quality content and animation controls. Another area that is a bit harder than it should be is creating tiny prims. You need to work around the limits the standard editor provides. Could the newer viewer platform offer an advanced editor with more controls for tiny prims (and other workarounds you need to know about) to get the inworld objects more 'real'? I know avoiding complexity is important, so the base editor should not be made 'more complicated'but by extending to an advanced editor you avoid breaking the ease of use for the editor we have today.

Now that we are nearly 24 hours in with no further Linden feedback, I am reminded of two more suggestions. These are very broad objectives, but very important if you wish to engage your residents and have them as partners in any meaningful way.

1. Responsiveness: When I make constructive suggestions at present, I feel like I am writing them out, placing them into a bottle and setting them adrift. I have no clue who if anyone will ever receive my suggestions. That is problematic if you want to keep the good ideas flowing.

2. Transparency: In some ways, issue 1 is symptomatic of issue 2. Your best bet for sustainable growth is word of mouth advertising from your existing user base, but that requires the good will of that user base. Linden Lab is a private company, so of course there are some trade secrets that need to be protected, but the opacity of the current culture seems to go beyond the reasonable protection of secrets. One thing that would be very nice to see is a development roadmap. You have some very talented and technically savvy residents that could offer great feedback if you made even a basic version of this public.

Welcome Judy.

My concern is that Linden Lab is walking the road like Microsoft more and more.

Some facts.

SL has ~30,000 regions x monthly tier + the sales + etc etc.

Somebody is getting very ritch here. I don't mind, however...
We are talking about a virtual world right?

Emmm 1000 USD setup + 295 USD monthly tier for air that is very limited too?
Every commercial business has to create a financial mass and profits.
I'm sure LL has some costs on labor, servers and infrastructure, however ... some math can be done.

I don't... really don't see any added value for SL for any purpose at all in our lifes, sorry.
I have been playing and stayed because i have been able to gain serious real dollars. Since LL doesn't produce anymore... it's over.
Other than that it is 80% porn, kinky, freaky, geeky, brutality, complexity, too many bots these days.
Some say "isolated people have a chance to connect". The way i see it is that they only get more isolated in real life.
SL usable for business? Not really, despite the make believe.

Stays... as an entertaining platform.
Well, my personally guess is that it is getting old by now.
To my analyses, the product life cycle is on its retour.
Sure, a core of players will stay and less newbies than during the peak of the plc, and a hard crash in January 2009.
It needs a major overhaul or something totally different to my opinion to attrack and handle a million concurrent users, well start with 500k. Then we would have something.

I hope you will succeed the support to realizing it... long way to go.
However, my fear is Microsoft like practices... Not innovating, but penetration in all possible lean and mean ways.

I just hope that people will get priorities in rl more right.

I wish you all success !!


Btw, the statistics webpage has been pulled down since a few days... any particular reason?

These will help make building and coding in SL more powerful.

One is a LLShowWebText(string url, integer side) command which fetches text from a website and renders a JPG of the text on one or all sides of a prim. This would enable people to have bulletin boards and notices without 200 prim signboards.

Another is adding the ability to gauge where on a prim a user touched. vector llGetXYTouch(integer side) will return the X and Y coordinates of where on the prim the touch was from 0 to 1.0. This will allow decorative controls with multiple capabilities, games, rotating knobs, and virtual controls which change with the menu choices.

Finally would be an addition to the particles. Create llAnimParticleSystem([]) to create animated particles, simply adding the structure of llSetTextureAnim to the end of the list. This would enable fancier particles making for better fires, more realistic stars, wild party lights, incredible smoke and unthought of possibilities. Since both functions are already in the viewer, it wouldn't be difficult to add the animated blit operation to the particle blit.

Also Judy, I apologize for my short tone with you yesterday. That was not a nice way to introduce myself. I will cross my fingers that you can create some lasting good change in how LL runs SL - a thin hope, but a hope nonetheless.

Isolated people are isolated whether they have SL or not. Giving them another method to connect to the world doesn't change their physical situation. The telephone didn't turn people into hermits. Neither did radio, television, or the internet chat rooms. SL has one additional advantage in that it has the potential to give disabled people the chance to have an actual life in virtual space that is denied them in RL - a literal Second Life if you will.

And if porn is all you see, then you need to widen your field of view. There is so much that is really nifty and fun that doesn't involve prim A or slot B.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlDetectedTouchUV

But I like the animated particles (though it would probably be better implemented by adding a new list element, PSYS_ANIM for example) and I'd still like to see a sculpty version of llSetTextureAnim.

Welcome Judy, always nice to have another green being inworld.

An inworld interactive whiteboard would be useful to say the least, hey maybe even get Smart or Promethean to sponsor the item.

Bring Torley back to the main blog, he should not be buried away, this was a very bad and counter productive move.

Appoint a Linden who represents inworld business, someone who has a clue about what is going on inworld, too many of Linden Lab's decisions are made by people who don't seem to have a grasp on the market inworld.

Appoint a Linden who represents resident concerns inworld, someone who will take onboard the existing resident experience, I see a lot of moves being made for the new resident experience, don't forget about your existing residents.

Welcome Judy!

As you can read in the past 5 pages there are a lot of sl-residents with ideas and suggestions.....my only suggestion in this is: do something with it!!

Welcome Judy! I can think of two pieces of low-hanging fruit right now, simple partnerships, that would augment the inworld experience for many.

1. LSL Editor is an offline scripting tool developed by a resident. It is extremely valuable, and its creator would like to spiff it up to release as an open source project, as well as get some compensation for the thousands of manhours that he's poured into it. He is collecting donations, but it is going slowly. LL could cheer and invigorate the scripting community, which provides so much that makes SL lifelike, by picking up this 20-30K tab. But, do NOT purchase the tool - it is well suited to open source development.

2. MediaMaster is a music locker service used by many SL residents. It permits residents to listen to their own music collections inworld, thus making their homes much more homey. It also permits them to personalize the atmosphere in their stores, and provide party mixes. LL listed it as a source of music streams in a previous blog post. It is shutting down shortly, if it hasn't already. A startup originally targeted at the general music networking marketplace, it currently does not have a high enough number of users to attract the sort of advertising revenue it would need to compete in the arena of youtube. The property is now solely owned by its CTO, who has stated that he cannot keep it going. As a general market music service, it has failed. It is well suited, however, to a virtual world media service, and could easily interact with SL to provide much more valuable inworld media services.

Dammit, I said in a post last month or so that I had given my last piece of free advice to LL. Well, best-laid plans and all that!
.

I am horrified at the personal attacks made on this blog. I raised the subject initially because , like thousands here, Torleys vidtuts were an inspiration in SL and certainly kept me engaged during my newbie months. You may not agree but do not crucify the man. He remains a potent character and is currently an ignored asset.

Welcome aboard Judy. Recommend that you invest in a good suit of body armour and uber-weapons.

I agree

I'm not getting into the personal issues but I agree with you very much about his blogs and being an ignore asset. Get him back on the front page.

Hi Judy =)

Just do what you been hired to do and you will be fine.

All the "Residents", actually customers who pay a LOT of money, really need is a system that actually works as advertised.

When LL decide that they are going to release a new viewer with a problem with sculpts that is well known, that is not a system that works as advertised.

Also, there are many people here who have paid a lot of money in island setup fees who are watching LL slowly edge us out of the market, we are not blind or stupid, we do know that LL wants to be the only landlord in SL.

Please stick to doing what LL was set up for. Supplying a platform where the people who use it can make a world of their imagination, NOT Linden Lab imagination.

The whole world of SL, apart from a few plants and a few toys, was made by its users, LL seems to have forgotten that small fact.

Hi Everyone,

Thanks so much for the warm welcomes and great feedback. Over the past few days I've been cataloging all of it, sending along some of the feature ideas and input to our product team, and definitely listening. A couple of thoughts as I absorb all of this:

1) Technical stability and scalability is a big priority and we are investing in this. Sounds as if it might be useful for some combination of Frank/Brian/Howard/Joe to do a more detailed blog on our various initiatives in this area. I'll see if I can make this happen.
2) Innovation not just must-dos! It is also important as many of you pointed out that we also need to invest in new products/features/innovations that enhance your experience and ability to generate revenue if you are a business and/or land owner. There are some exciting products in development, and we may be a few months from discussing them in more detail, but I've forwarded on all the great input from this forum to our product team.
3) International payment methods. All I will say here is watch this space! This is a priority for us -- to help our residents pay with the method they prefer, be they in South Africa, China, or Germany.
4) Listening to residents. I love the idea of better resident representation or a person responsible for systematically engaging the community. We need to think about the best way to do this, but thanks for the input.
5) Land and pricing! Always a challenge but now that land, and how we best serve our residents' needs with land, has a dedicated team around it, hopefully we can push on some of the ideas and concerns you have raised.

Thanks again for the great input and welcome. See you inworld!