Reflection: Interacting with LL inside/outside of SL

This is not a bitch or a rant. More of a reflection and a discussion about SL as the Metaverse. Why is it recommended to contact LL staff outside of their own SL universe? I understand that it's necessary if you can't login. But, if the system is working, why aren't the LL staff available through their own SL software?

If it's because the system is lacking some feature or is difficult to use for collaboration, maybe SL needs to be continued to be used by LL staff so that they can improve it so that it can be used. I've always expected that if there was a problem, bug, suggestion, etc. that I wanted to communicate with LL, then I would do it by contacting a LL employee inworld. I would only contact LL via RL communications if there was connectivity problems.

What are your thoughts?

I'm with you. Here are five of my favourite words to throw into the fray:

Eat your own dog food.

Jek

My guess is that's a distraction problem. It's easier to read an email, being able to focus on that for however long it will take, than to deal with 3 dozen things at once in world. Almost every time I've spoken av to av with a Linden in world, there have been crowds of people all trying to get their attention. Not just for assistance, but just for attention. (I guess they're SL's version of rockstars, with groupies just waiting in the wings. Only in SL are people so willing to throw their undies at Geeks.)

It must be very hard getting anything done in that atmosphere. However, an in-world Help Desk would be great.

Right. Then why not modify the software so that they can be inworld, and reduce the number of distractions?

The point I'm working towards is that anything they can do to improve their use of the Metaverse on a daily basis will improve the experience for everyone using SL.

Having been bombarded with IMs myself, I'm sure it is very difficult to do anything in SL that requires individualized attention over a near-term period of an hour or so. Again, I don't know what is so difficult about picking up the phone and dialing, but since you asked the question - I'd say they are busy enough with all the drama fights and usual chicanery in-world that their attention span is severely limited.

Email or phone seems the best choice, you get to relate to someone without much distraction.

How can you control how many people would contact you? Unless you agressively filter, which would work counter to their purposes anyway, you know, having to be in contact with a user base ranging from the clueless newbie to the die-hard-drama-queen with 'issues'.

Well, using the phone kinda detracts from the SL-Is-Not-A-Game Idea. If LL has to resort to using the phone for improved communication, then that points to a lack of something in the SL interface. If other groups or businesses want to use SL as a new platform, then you'd want to ensure the SL interface provides a complete experience rather than serve like the "business-card" websites of the past.

I guess a better way to put this is that the feature set that would be required to support this level of interaction is probably better spent on solving existing bugs. Also, the telephone works now, and provides a more personal experience at the moment. Perhaps one day SL will expand their 'common carrier' status and open up like the world wide web has, but until then we'll just have to use the tools at our disposal to interact with Linden Lab.

Maybe I'm just old fashioned but I agree about the phone. I've always found picking up the phone and talking to someone directly gets you to the bottom of a problem much faster than sending an email or IM. Not specifically talking about LL. This is also something I have noticed at work. The person on the other end of the line is much less likely to blow you off like they can an email.

Here is the wikipedia article for those who don't click links! ...

Didn't we discuss this a few months back, I know we did. The answer is because they're on IRC, prefer IRC, and IRC is perfectly good for chat so why would they need to use anything else but IRC. Second Life is not a collaborative tool, like IRC; it's a game, a toy, and a world. Please, stop trolling the forums stirring up trouble.

IRC chat rooms are much better for that kind of thing anyway.

I actually try to use SL as much as I can as an environment for communicating with Residents. I even have an inworld office (just do a Find under Places for Pathfinder and you'll find it).

The biggest problem is IMs. When you IM someone, there's no way for you to know how many OTHER IMs the person is currently dealing with. And as a Linden, it's common to receive tons of IMs regarding all kinds of issues. This leads to having an IM window open and trying to triage a ton of blinking tabs, timeslicing your consciousness among many different people.

But there's a solution. When I'm at my virtual office inworld, I frequently set myself to "busy." I then set my "busy" message to something like:

"Hi! I'm at my inworld office right now. If you'd like to talk with me about something, please come on over (just search for Pathfinder under Places and you'll find a landmark)."

When someone IMs me, they get that message. If they really want to talk with me and visit the office, they can actually SEE if I'm already talking with someone. If that's the case, I encourage them to just wait until we're finished. This allows me to focus on one person at a time, and allows the use of socially meaningful visual cues to better mediate conversations in general (I can see if people are typing, other people can see if people are talking in groups, etc.).

Overall it works pretty well. Sometimes I'll just "sit" at my inworld office and leave SL running in the background. If I hear someone typing inworld, I know that there's a person in my office and I bring SL to the front. I think SL is ideal for synchronous and focused conversations using this method.

For dealing with asynchronous issues, I think email is always better. And naturally, there are many times when I need to focus on email or writing or research and cannot be distracted. During those times, I just log out of SL completely.

I have the honor of being friends with a persn that is currently releasing a game and working with them during the beta of the game. I also talked often with the other people in charge of running and creating the game. The biggest issues they had was documentation (saving of logs), attention (IM's), and general work that they needed to get done. Part of the reason I think the tools are not in the game client are simple best stated as secuirty reasons. With the recent hacker incident that occured obviously you would not want residents to be able to get into the personal LL records. Also as Pathfinder stated I imagine they get a ton of IMs and some are probably for things out of thier realm or fans. Take all the IMs you get for your "business" and multiply that at least ten fold. Your buisness is a small little corner of SL, the Lindens buisness is ALL of SL.

As stated elsewhere the prefered contacts methods was via forums, email, IRC just becuase it was easier to manage and document problems that way as the information was easily converted to another system. Also logging of said converstations incase of accidents are alot easier as well in those systems.