Ghost week - or how I got my 10th Linden Bear

In retrospect, this problem has probably existed for quite a while now, and I simply did not notice. But let's start at the beginning of this rather unusual week, my first really longer interaction with Linden Lab customer service, and it 's - spoiler - happy end.

It was exactly a week ago, on Saturday, that I noticed that I can't change skins anymore. Since this is not something I do all the time, and since my Belleza Jake V2 avatar does not support proper Baked-on-Mesh (as I thought at the time), I assumed I was being clumsy. On Sunday morning, I tried it again - realised I am not clumsy, realised it is NOT a problem of the mesh body since it happens on the system body as well. So I filed a ticket with Linden Lab support.

My avatar seems somehow messed up. I can't apply skins or alphas. I took off ALL mesh bodies, switched back to a pure system body, but regardless what skins or alphas I wear, it still shows my last skin. Also the eyes - which have no alphas applied - are hollow. I relogged several times, I cleared cache, I tried different viewers - to no avail. See the attached screenshot: This look should be impossible, and in fact, you should not be able to see me at all.

With the usual tickets I file every once in a blue moon, it took 2-3 days before someone replied. I was rather surprised, when at the same time (Sunday, mind you), one Kady Linden got back to me. Even more surprised was I, when I read that she indeed found a problem in my inventory:

I was able to locate some corruption in your inventory that may be contributing to the issues you are experiencing. I have initiated a script to repair the corruption, which may also clear up the issues you are experiencing. In order for it to work properly, it is very important that you log in using the Second Life official viewer. You're welcome to resume using your regular viewer of choice after the repair has completed.

What followed was a detailed list of step-by-step instructions, which boiled down to me having to use the official viewer, go to a quiet region, let myself be logged in for 20 min, then clear cache, then log back in.

I followed her instructions to the letter on Monday evening, unfortunately, it did not help. I did it again. And it did not help. What it did, however, was made things worse. The end result, as sent it to Kady, was:

Hi Kady,
thank you very much for your help. Unfortunately, it only solves half of the problems.

I did as described - the inventory loaded fairly fast, I waited 20 min, cleared chache, relogged - but the problems persisted. In fact there was even more, since I could not access any outfits or wearables anymore, neither attach nor detach.
I repeated the process (yes, with the official viewer), and afterwards, outfits were back. But still some problems are still there - in fact it seems there are MORE problems now. The following is the status quo:

- other people see me as cloud, regardless what viewer, regardless how long they wait
- when I log in, I am a cloud to me - only if I go into "edit shape/apperance", my body and clothing materializes
- whatever skin or tattoo I try, it does not show up, I am shown as grey body
- when I go into "edit shape/appearance", my skin and such show up - but as soon as I exit "edit shape/appearance", I am back to grey

Can you kick the servers again please?

This was all rather underwhelming, and very very annoying. This is how I saw myself during that time: Clothing loaded (after going into 'Appearance' mode), but no skin or anything loaded.

And this is how other people saw me, regardless how long they waited.

That started a daily conversation with Kady, who was really helpful during the whole process, and solution oriented. At one point she asked:

I am still seeing some corruption in your inventory, so will run the fix again. However, for troubleshooting purposes we wish to login to your account and investigate the issue further. You do not need to provide us with your password, and there is no need to reset your password afterwards. Let us know if it is fine with you for us to proceed with this measure!

That was kind of freaky. The avatar is a rather personal thing, but of course I wanted (and needed) that problem to be fixed. So I agreed that she could do it - and she even asked what times are convenient for that. Gina actually caught her in-world driving my avatar once:

[08:11] Gina Glimmer: Hola! [08:16] Peter Stindberg: This is Kady Linden. I'm working on Peter's account for him. Please message him later 😀

Eventually, Kady had to give up and escalate my issue to the dev team. 

Dear Peter,
Your case is now in the hands of the developers. Hopefully, we'll get some resolution soon, but please do know that it can take a few days, realistically.

The developer team never got back to me, however, on Thursday evening, when I logged in (with sinking heart), to my huge delight, all was back to normal.

They never told me, what it was. Even Kady didn't know. Technical-me would be rather curious about it, but I get why they don't tell you. All is back to normal though, so that's what counts.

I am impressed by the outstanding service the Lab provided otherwise. Kady communicated clearly, extensively, didn't give the impression to consider me stupid, and seemed to see it is some kind of challenge as well. I had a small chat in-world with her, when I asked her for her Linden Bear, and she hinted at being a longtime SL resident herself (they are not allowed to disclose their non-Linden identity). So she "gets" SL, and she realised what a nuisance this issue was for me.

I am also surprised how much this affected me. I could have chatted with friends, I could have scripted, but being a grey alien to me, and an orange cloud to others, took the fun out of it, so I barely logged in during that week. An interesting experience.

Oh well, all is good, and bear #10 is in my collection.

 

 

The 2500 prim skeleton

Approximately 2500 prims were used for the huge Leviathan skeleton on the new Ahab's Haunt sim. Of those 2500 prims, quite literally only a handful are sculpts. All the other prims are regular prims. Not a single prim I found is larger than 10x10x10 meters or - in other words - this humongous build was constructed without a single megaprim.

The skeleton was built by "moles" - content creators contracted by Linden Lab. It is a safe assumption that the moles know what megaprims are, and how to use them. At the same time finding a Linden build (or Linden contracted build) that uses megaprims is like searching a needle in a haystack.

I am not a pro builder, but my guess is that the leviathan skeleton could probably be built with 75% less prims if megaprims could have been used. And probably with 90% less prims if sculpted megaprims would have been an option. This means the asset browser, the SL databases and the viewers of everybody coming close to that island would only need to store, transmit and render about 250-350 prims, instead of 2500.

To understand the (I assume deliberate) decision to not use megaprims, we need to take a step back. Megaprims were never regularly available in Second Life. Initially, the SL viewer limited the maximum size of a prim, and some clever person managed to circumvent this restriction and injected the first batch of megaprims which then got handed down from builder to builder. As a result, the check for the prim dimension was included in the server side, and megaprims could not be generated anymore. A while ago, a bug in the server code made the creation of megaprims possible again, and the second wave of prims became available. At the time of this writing, there are about 36,000 megaprims known and available in SL.

There is all kinds of rumours regarding megaprims. They allegedly cause lag. They allegedly steal sim resources. They allegedly influence the physics model badly. They allegedly are illegal and can get you banned using them. Indeed, the status of megaprims is a fuzzy one. Linden Lab never outright forbid their use. Neither did they take technical steps to restrict the usage. But also they never gave the "green light" for their usage. Megaprims are tolerated, but not loved. And because of this, Linden Lab will be careful not to set a precedent and use these prims in their own builds.

Update February 8:

[11:24] Silent Mole: It's true! Mole builds don't use megaprims.
[11:26] Peter Stindberg: Thanks! Can I quote this?
[11:27] Silent Mole: Yep.
[11:29] Silent Mole: Andrew Linden is the company expert on megaprims. His office hours are at Denby (213/45/34) 11:00 - 12:00 Tuesdays and 16:00 - 17:00 Fridays.

Top 5 Requested Second Life Features

Caleb Booker is a metaverse developer and a professional writer on the topic of virtual worlds. I stumbled across a guest post of his on Hypergrid Business, which was originally published on his own blog. Caleb claims that in discussions with business/educational clients, the following 5 things were repeated over and over as the most urgently missing ones in Second Life:

1. A collaborative whiteboard
2. A PA-System for voice chat to assign an "open mic" to persons
3. Separate voice-channels in different floors of a building
4. Realnames for avatars
5. File Transfer between avatars

The thing with these 5 requests is that they are highly biased towards a specific purpose. I personally know of a handful of whiteboard applications. I think voice conferencing is best realized with 3rd-party-offworld tools. As is file transfer. And as far as realnames are concerned, I recently stumbled across Xerox' SL presence and they use names along the lines of "FirstnameLastname Xerox". But I digress.

While I am sure those 5 might definitely be pressing issues from a business point of view, I can't accept them in their absolute approach as THE 5 most requested features for SL. In my point of view, the 5 most urgent things are:

1. Inventory Loss
   It is an unacceptable situation that inventory gets lost in the first place. And the reports of lost inventory and the Lab's reaction to it - which almost come at a weekly basis - are plainly said a disgrace. I really can't understand why inventory gets lost at all. But if it happens, I can't understand why the Lab is not able to restore it easily. I have seen people leave SL over losing their entire inventory. I have friends who experienced multiple inventory losses. I have friends who followed the knowledge base steps meticulously, only to hear from the Lab they should in the knowledge base upon which the support person simply closed the ticket. Inventory not only has a monetary value (in many cases substantial) but also a commemorative value. WHY DOES INVENTORY GETS LOST AT ALL?
2. Teleport
   Why do teleports fail? Why do they sometimes fail so drastically that you crash? Why do I appear perfectly ok to my friends after a teleport for up to minutes, while on my end still the odometer bar crouches slowly? Why am I sometimes completely immobile after a TP? Why do I sometimes need to do a 3-way-teleport to reach my destination? Why can't I sometimes not teleport at all to a destination, but a log-off with subsequent log-in to the very place works?
3. Scalability
   The landlady of my home sim built a club there a while ago. Unfortunately it is very successful. Which means that when there is an event going on, the rest of the sim lags horribly. Which is annoying when you try to build or have a business meeting. Prims won't rez, scripts crouch. And we're only talking about 25 people on the sim. The adjacent sim is usually empty. Why do empty sims not contribute their resources to full sims? Why do 25 avatars throttle a sim down, why do 40 avatars turn a sim into syrup? Why can't we have 100 or 200 avatars on a sim AND have smooth motion and quick rezzing? Why is a sim limited to a processor core, instead of requesting as much processing power from the SL grid as it needs?
4. Prim Sizes
   I want to make prims in any arbitrary size. Allowing sizes larger than 10m - with full support - would make building so much easier and efficient. It would be so much more efficient for the prim economy too. It would even reduce load on the asset servers.
5. IM Subsystem and Inventory Transaction
   As I wrote back in November, almost every inventory action results in an IM behind the scene, and this is the reason inventory transactions routinely fail. Besides that, the current IM/chat system has a whole lot of issues annoying residents on a daily basis.
   

Yes, I am aware that this is probably not the top 5 requested features, but rather the top 5 requested remedies.

What are your top-5 requested features or bugfixes?

Avatars United - where is the beef?

In a surprising move Linden Lab has bought the web portal "Avatars United". In April 2008 now retired blogger Vint Falken presented Avatars United (AU) as "Facebook for virtual personas". While I never was much of a fan of Facebook - and the current (and repeating) controversies about privacy concerns prove me right - I do use the social business networks Xing and LinkedIn with good success. A social network for avatars that bridges te gap between purely in-world presence, blogs and email was an intriguing thought so I signed up.

Avatars United never really fulfilled my vision and expectations. There were certainly a lot of good ideas, but at the same time they fell short in many aspects. The site used to be slow, features were not intuitive or buggy. Also - despite Vint's call for action to SL avatars to become the largest group in AU - it never reached a critical mass.

Other services stepped in. Flickr holds now the largest community of SL avatars for photo sharing, despite efforts of Koinup and Snapzilla to offer more SL centric services. Blogger and Wordpress hosts the majority of SL centric blogs, Twitter and Plurk have huge communities of SL avatars despite more specialized latforms like Ning or even SL centric platforms like rezzed.net (defunct), moolto (a Ning site) or ProfilesLive (aka SLProfiles) offering better tailored services. There are avatars on Xing, LinkedIn and even on Facebook, who is currently undergoing the second wave of ethnic cleansing regarding digital personas.

Avatars United - forgotten by many and dwarfed in usage compared to any of the other sites above - now got the huge boost from Linden Lab. The cards have been reshuffled, the game is open again.

What does Avatars United offer today:

1. Microblogging
   The "Shoutbox" allows you to publish short blurps of thoughts which can be seen by your contacts or everybody else seeing your public page.
   Who else offers it: Twitter and Plurk are the platforms used most by SL avatars, but also avatar forums on Ning, rezzed.net, moolto and others offer this.
   AU implementation: Solid, but lacks cross-connectivity into other services like ping.fm
   Killer feature: no
2. Photo Sharing
   You can create albums and upload photos to it. Other users can comment on the photos and "like" them.
   Who else offers it: Flickr is the "mother of photo sharing services", Google has Picasa as probably #2 in the market. Koinup offers specialized services for SL avatars and has a nice followership. Snapzilla is specialized on SL avatars as well and is widely used.
   AU implementation: slow and offering no advantage I can see compared to other sites.
   Killer feature: no
3. Blog
   AU allows you to create your own blog entries, as well as to subscribe to other's blogs and to comment and "star" posts.
   Who else offers it: Wordpress and Blogger as the most popular services, but also communities like Ning.
   AU implementation: straightforward and spartanic, but missing again important connectivity features.
   Killer feature: no
4. Feed Reader
   The opposite of the AU-blogs is the function to aggregate blog sources you read in a web based feed reader. With the idea of AU as dashboard, you could read all your favourite blogs from within the AU page.
   Who else offers it: ther eis a plethora of standalone feed readers - as web service Google Reader is probably the largest one
   AU implementation: extremely slow and buggy, claiming perfectly validating feeds as not being proper ones
   Killer feature: no
5. Plugins and Gadgets
   AU offers the functionality to include 3rd party plugins into your page, adding more functionality. Right now the number of plugins is small, but since AO offers support for Google's OpenSocial standard, there will soon be more.
   Who else offers it: Facebook, LinkedIn and Xing all offer plugins, there is also a number of plugins available for the iGoogle homepage. Ning offers plugins to a certain extent.
   AU implementation: I have not tested this yet
   Killer feature: maybe - no other SL/avatar centric platform offers this functionality. It depends on how this feature gets adopted by the community, but this could be a winner.
6. Currency model
   While the basic functionality is free, certain features need to purchased with AU "coins", where 500 coins equal roughly 5 US$ or about 1500 L$. It seems that 3rd party plugin developers can charge "coins" for these too.
   Who else offers it: Google Apps offers commercial widgets for one time or repeat charges. No SL oriented site I know offers this.
   Killer feature: maybe - for social websites it is the clearest revenue model I saw so far, and it depends on the attractiveness of the offered features. And of course with the new owner Linden Lab, an integration of the "coins" with L$ would facilitate the success.

Bottom line

Where is the beef? Right now I don't see it. While I definitely will continue to use AU, right now I see no compelling reason to prefer it over my usage of iGoogle, Blogger, Plurk, Twitter and Flickr. However AU is in a great starting position now. With a more responsive server platform, and with essential cross-connectivity features added, it might become a true dashboard for avatars. Let us pipe in our photos from Flickr and Koinup. Let us mirror our blogposts from Wordpress and Blogger. Let us Tweet and Plurk from the AU interface or get support for ping.fm. Let us rate XStreetSL items within AU and create wishlists. Let us mirror our in-world friendship relations in AU and see who's online. Add a landmark sharing service.

The opportunities are exciting for sure. Now it comes to show the SL residents the beef.

The many faces of Peter Stindberg across the grids

Beauty is only skin deep - and nowhere this saying is more true than in virtual worlds. The appearance of our digital identity - the avatar - consists of a handful of sliders for the shape and the skin that is pulled across it.

I recently spent more time again on OpenSim based grids, and you will likely see more posts about that topic in the future. A year ago I took my first glimpse into opensim grids - and was quickly sobered due to the quickness and bad performance of those alternatives. But things have changed over the past year. Stability has become much better. Newer viewers offer features addressing the issue of accessing various grids. And so exploring new frontiers outside of SL becomes a less frustrating and more exciting endeavour.

Over the three years I have spent in SL, I have subtly tweaked my avatar many times. I am quite happy with the (preliminary) end result. Peter Stindberg is a male, without doubt, but not one of the stereotype males featuring a barrel chest, no neck and ridiculous proportions that more remind of the incredible hulk than a human being. I am rather short for a guy (still transformed to atomic world sizes my avatar is 2.15m tall), slender with a hint of adrogynity. Above all, my avatar is proportioned, with legs and arms and torso in the right lengths and widths. The slight unshaven look, the curious eyes and the not-too-toned look comes from Hart Larssons wonderful PXL Jude skin. And my signature haircut is Luth from ETD - an older style but I like the messy look.

It's only natural that I want to take this appearance with me into other grids. Of those I tested only Reaction Grid gives you a halfway decent avatar (with halfway decent prim hair and AO) to start with - the other grids give you the standard Ruth female avatar.

Transferring my shape was the easiest task. The Imprudence viewer allows you to export your shape into a XML file (provided you have the necessary rights to the shape), and reimport it again. This was a quick task, and after a few minutes my 4 personas in other grids had the same body like my SL avatar.

Skin and hair however proved to be difficult. Except for the Rezzable grid (which is basically only a playground/testing-grid) I found some freebie shops in all the other grids, usually providing me with Eloh Eliot skins which - in doubt - I could upload myself too since Eloh hands out the Photoshop files. However, while Eloh's skins are nice, it is not what I wanted. And it is even sadder with hair, because what you find in the freebie boxes in terms of male hair is rather pitiful.

So I contacted Hart Larsson of PXL Creations and Elikapeka Tiramisu of ETD and explained my situation and asked for a license to use their creations in another grid:

Lately I am exploring more and more 3rd party grids, and of course I want to have a consistent appearance across grids. Therefore I would like to ask you for the terms and conditions of a license that would allow me to use .... in other grids too.

I know from a content creator perspective this is a touchy issue. What I am asking for is a license tied to my person only - I operate by the same name in all other grids. I don't expect to get this license for free either. In terms of security I can only offer you my public reputation though.

[... Explanation how it could be done from a technical point of view ...]

I understand fully that this might be quite a tough request for you, but I ask you to think about it with an open mind. Please let me know if there are any additional questions you might have, I am more than willing to answer them.

Hart Larsson got back to me a day later. He has already investigated a bit into 3rd party grids but is rather reluctant. The surprising argument was that he fears more theft in these grids compared to the Second Life grid. His argumentation was along the lines that in those 3rd party grids good content is rare, so someone who comes there wearing a good skin is more likely to get copybotted than in SL. I personally think that a copybotter would rather go into SL to "harvest" and then upload the items into a 3rd party grid, but I have to accept Hart's concerns. He promised me to think about it - I have not yet contacted him again.

ETD's store assistant contacted me a little later. She thanked me for the notecard and the extensive explanation, and was glad I liked the ETD hair so much. However she said that a request like mine is out of her room for decision, and that Elikapeka is on an extended hiatus from SL. She promised me to pass my request along, but also mentioned I should not set too high hopes into a positive answer.

A look into the future

When I look into my crystal ball, I see that some time in the next 18 to 24 months we will be able to freely travel with our Second Life avatars into 3rd party grids. Probably only a few at first - most likely the academical Reaction Grid - but it will become more and more. Initially we will be able to travel into those grids with our appearance only - shape, skin and the items we wear. Eventually the rest of our inventory will follow and we will be able to change clothing or rez furniture in a foreign grid. It is inevitable, and content creators will not be able to prevent this.

I expect there are more people like me who want to explore 3rd party grids already today, and who want to do so in style using an as close as possible replica of their SL avatars. And who are honest enough to want to do this officially.

There is a window of opportunity here for content creators to branch out. The opensim based grid InWorldz has a currency model and an inworld economy already, where 500 IZ$ equal 1 US$. Other opensim grids plan to introduce an economy in the near future. Those content creators who will adopt grids outside of SL first, will be the ones who become successful there.

My advice for content creators is:

• Grant your customers licenses to use your creations in other grids
• Open stores in the more prominent 3rd party grids to establish a presence
• Team up with other designers and buy a sim in the more popular other grids
• For grids without an economy, offer your customers to pay you inside SL with L$ and deliver your items to them in the other grids

There is a market out there you are missing out on. Adopt the diversity and branch out to have success in the future.

A look into the even further future

In 5-7 years from now, Second Life will be the backbone of the Metaverse, providing an infrastructure with protocols, storage databases and API's. Individuals and corporations host their own sims on their servers. Similar to renting webspace today, you can rent simspace in the future, in datacenters connected to the SL backbone. But if you so desire you can also host your sim on your home machine and connect it to the SL grid. The currency of the Metaverse is the L$ - the money transactions handled by Linden Lab which acts as the bank of the metaverse. Linden Lab offers a credit card that taps into your L$ balance and with which you can make purchases in the atomic world. For these services, Linden Lab asks the usual charges banks ask for transaction. However the L$ will become the first truly globally accepted micropayment system, obsoleting PayPal. Not only will you be able to load books on your ebook reader and pay for them with L$, you will also be able to download video on demand or music with L$ and you can seamlessly watch them either on your internet enabled TV or your sim in the Metaverse.

XStreet and me - a personal analysis

I have not yet made my mind up on the upcoming XStreet SL changes. I see where Linden Lab comes from with the announced changes, and I think this is not all bad. I also see where Linden Lab goes to with these changes, and I am not sure whether I like it. I heard many good arguments against the canges from residents and merchants. And I heard many good arguments for the changes, also from residents and merchants. What I am sure of is that the changes were certainly not a majority-wish, as the Lab wants us to believe. At least not a majority in the sense of the majority of people. Maybe a majority wish in terms of amounts sold...

In the process of making up my mind whether I am for or against the changes, I looked at my own XStreet SL listings. This has, in fact, been overdue, so that is a good thing that I now got forced to do it.

Regular Merchandise

The good news is - all of my items sell. Even the most expensive one - Plywood Man - sold 12 times this year, giving me 1508 L$ of revenue. Instead of the 5 L$ commission, there will be another 120 L$ per year to keep this item listed. However if I only sell 2 in the next year, I already make a small profit. Two other items, my Celtic Cross and my Dasher, are also in the "green zone" and will continue to generate a profit, even with the new charges. However the Lab will get 786 L$ share of those items (same amount of sales anticipated), instead of 182 L$ prior to the changes - so 604 L$ more for the Lab.

It gets critical with my 2-prim-couch. This items is based on a 5-prim freebie, which I trimmed down to look exactly the same but save 3 prims to clever prim parameter and texture repeat selection. I set that item at the more nominal price of 5 L$ and since I listed it back in the day 183 people thought these are 5 L$ well spent because it saved them 3 prims. Up to now, Linden Lab got no share of the sales of this couch. In the future they want 3 L$ for each sale and 10 L$ each month, so I need to sell 60 copies in order to break even. Unfortunately it only sold 53 times last year, and since it is not really stylish anymore, I will most likely delist it.

Promotional Items

The next two items are listed for 0 L$ - freebies. Those two items are actually a good example for promotional items as Linden Lab states. I do not give them away for free because I am such a nice person. I give them away for free to raise awareness of my in-world business and find new clients. Up to now, Linden Lab gave me free advertising - now they want me to pay for it. Of course I would have preferred to still have it for free, and I do not really buy the explanation that the running costs are so high. However 1188 L$ per year is easily affordable for my business.

There are two problems however:

1. Freebie listings will not be searchable anymore and can not be put into suitable categories anymore - they go into a special freebie category. This makes it basically unusable for me. Potential clients find my Language Kiosk in the "Business -> Signs" subcategory. They will certainly not look in a freebie category. And those who will look in a freebie category, are usually not the ones requesting my services. If it is a promotional tool, and if I have to pay 1188 L$ per year to keep it listed, then don't give me a worse service than before!
   
   
2. Even without the first item, I would not keep TWO items listed. Both have basically the same aim and effect, so I would only keep one of those. Sorry, LL, not 2 x 1188 L$ for you.

Another solution would be to set a price for those promotional items. If I set them at 1 L$ I can assign them to whatever subcategory I want. However I would still need to pay 3 L$ commission on them, so I lose 2 L$ per sale. With a projected amount of 200 sales a year the cost would be 12 * 10 L$ monthly fee + 200 * 2 L$ commission after sales = 520 L$ - or almost exactly 50% of the intended cost of a promotional item. Sounds like a no-brainer.

General Considerations

I mentioned in the beginning that I understand where Linden Lab comes from. XStreet SL is like the Wayback Machine for Second Life. There are thousands upon thousands of obscure items. Admittedly there are thousand upon thousand of outdated items like pre-sculpty-age shoes. The fact that listing items without cost was a blessing and a curse. There is a lot of - well - trash on Xstreet. There are countless grossly overpriced items. But also countless very good items, items from philantropes who give them away for free as community service, as well as items from content creators that never bothered with shops and just developed for fun. Many of those merchants have panicked in the meantime and pulled their stuff. Which is an immense loss - even from a istorical point of view.

A second consideration is that Second Life does not have an effective object search! The closest that comes to an object search in SL is in fact XStreet SL, exactly because of what I said in the last passage. To be honest, searching in XStreet is a pain, but at least you can do it.

How would I have done it?

Accepting the assumption that XStreet SL needed changes at all, there still would be things I had made better:

1. Linden Lab claims that the changes were wanted by the majority of users. There are reports that this is somewhat of a euphemism. Fact is that those changes affect definitely way more merchants than got involved in the process. The proper way would have been to send a survey to all merchants on XStreet SL, and a second survey to all people who made at least one purchase in - say - the last 3 months on XStreet. This would be in my opinion the only way to get qualified feedback.
2. One approach would have been to automatically disable items that have not sold in a certain amount of time (6 or maybe even 12 months). That way, the "clutter" (as LL calls it) would be gradually removed. Merchants could manually reenable those listings - and maybe this would be a place where a monthly fee would apply.
3. A better distinction between promotional-freebies and philanthropic-freebies could be found. Someone whose whole XStreet inventory consists of 0 L$ items is certainly not promoting his regular merchandise with them. Someone who has 50 hairstyles on sale, and 50 associated demos is clearly promoting them, but is probably not in a position to pay 4950 L$ for all of them. Why not extend the functionality of XStreet with a "deliver demo" option? Maybe as charged-for option?

My bottom line

From my point of view it is not the end of the world as we know it. I can subscribe to some of the motivation behind it, but I think there would both have been better ways to get a true majority vote, as well as better ways to implement some changes.

I will not pull my items from XStreet SL, as it is still the major web platform. I will adjust my inventory to minimize cost and maximize effect - something every sensible merchant should do. Linden Lab will get more money from me - no way around that - but less than they probably thought they'd get.

I definitely got the motivation to seriously consider alternatives - but not to abandon XStreet SL. The alternatives will be used to widen my exposure and give additional revenue.

What is your take on the changes?

Why inventory transactions fail, and what you can do about it

[SL blogs are shaken up by the questionnaire Pink Linden sent to Xstreet SL merchants. Among many other things, the survey asked whether merchants would pay a premium for guaranteed deliveries. As far as I know, this is the first time for Linden Lab to publicly admit that failed deliveries are a problem.]

Everything is an Instant Message. Not only if you send an IM to a friend, no, things like teleport requests, force teleports, teleport acceptance, teleport rejection, friend requests, friend acceptance, friend rejection, object IMs, busy response IMs and so on and so on. My friend Katharine Berry counted them once and came up with 40 different types of IM's in SL.

Inventory offers are - behind the scenes - IM's as well, and this is the reason why so many inventory transfers fail!

During our work on the Designer Showcase Network, Rika Watanabe and I encounterend a surprisingly high number of inventory transactions failing, and after some digging we found that this is a common problem for other delivery systems like Subscribe-o-Matic or even XStreet SL. There are a few scenarios, where failed transactions can happen:

Case 1 - Recipient is in "busy" mode

• Sender is an avatar
  Never fails, object (or notecard, texture, etc) can be found in "Trash" folder, sender gets a "... is busy" notice.
• Sender is a "Buy" object
  Never fails, bought merchandise goes to where it is supposed to go (its own folder or the matching system subdirectory)
• Sender is a scripted object (e.g. "Pay" object or "Touch" vendor or subscription system)
  Always fails! The scripted object uses llGiveInventory, which does not have any feedback functionality. A paid for-purchase will be irrecoverably lost, and what is even worse, the merchants transaction history will show no anomalies.

Case 2 - Avatar is offline - no capped IM'S

• Sender is an avatar
  Never fails, upon login of the recipient a blue box appears via which you can decide to accept or decline the delivery. An IM is generated "Xyz sent you inventory" - those IM's go to your offline email address if specified. Those IM's also count toward your IM cap.
  
• Sender is a "Buy" object
  Not possible when you are offline
• Sender is a scripted object (e.g. DSN dropbox, S-o-M or XStreet delivery)
  Never fails, upon login of the recipient a blue box appears via which you can decide to accept or decline the delivery. An IM is generated "Xyz sent you inventory" - those IM's go to your offline email address if specified. Those IM's also count toward your IM cap.

There is a limit to how many IM's an avatar can receive while being offline. I did not find an official statement as to how many IM's it takes to cap, several discussions on forums and the JIRA suggest that the cap will happen after 15 IMs. While you still get offline-IM's that you received something, what you actually find in your inventory is different:

Case 3 - Avatar is offline - IM cap limit reached

• Sender is an avatar
  Oddly enough those mostly work. Sometimes you get the blue box to accept, sometimes you don't get the blue box and the inventory offer goes straight to the matching folder. An offline-IM is being generated.
• Sender is a "Buy" object
  Can't happen when you are offline
• Sender is a scripted object (subscribe-o, XStreet dropbox, Deliverator, DSN, etc.)
  Always fails! While you receive an offline-IM, the objects are nowhere to be found and can't be recovered. What makes it even more annoying is that the transaction logs of the sending systems have no way of telling whether you actually receive the inventory offer, or not.

Inventory transfer success matrix
	Busy	Offline Non-capped	Offline Capped
Avatar sends	ok	ok	sometimes
Buy object	ok	n.a.	n.a.
Scripted Object	fails	ok	fails

The culprit in those failed cases is the unholy union of the llGiveInventory function in the LSL scripting language and the IM-based delivery system. The function only gets a recipient-ID and an inventory object, however it has no way to check whether the transaction was actually successful. It's basically a shot in the dark, and given the vulnerability with capped IM's as shown above, can only be described as incomplete.

In theory a script could check if the recipient is only, thus avoiding the capping problem. This approach has two drawbacks:

1. Scalability
   A script only delivering items when an avatar is actually online might end up with an immense backlog of deliveries and ultimately meet memory issues
2. Busy
   There is now way to find out whether an avatar is busy from within an LSL script

What can I do to avoid inventory transaction loss?

There are a few things each of us can do in order to ease the situation. In case of XStreet SL (or similar services) purchases, the easiest thing is to make sure you (or the recipient) are actually logged into SL and not-busy during the time of purchase.

For systems like DSN, Subscribe-o-Matic, Deliverator and other services that send you objects at a schedule you can't influence there is only one way to raise the success rate: avoid capped IM's!

A few methods:

• Leave "spammy" groups, e.g. groups with a lot of group notices
  A group like FashCon can easily reach your capping limit on a Saturday evening within 10 minutes because of the massive amount of group notices. In case you can't leave the group (e.g. because it is a land group), at least switch off group notices. The notices are still available in the groups archive for a while.
  
  
• Unsubscribe from lists with high activity
  I was signed up to some Subscribe-o-Matic systems where there was almost daily a new notice from the shop owner. While it is commendable that the merchant keeps such a close communication with their client base, this actually adds a lot to IM-capping. In fact lately I am very reluctant to subscribe to a SoM or Hippo-Group at all, and have unsubscribed from many as well.
  
  
• Reduce offline-messaging objects
  Many scripted objects can send their owner various status information, for example security orbs if someone has trespassed on your naughty skybox. Usually those devices use the llInstantMessage function which - right - sends an instant message that would add to capping if you are offline. With llEmail exists a slightly more complex mechanism, that instead of sending an IM sends an actual email to an actual off-world email address. A script could even be designed to detect whether the recipient of a notice is online and use llInstantMessage or offline and in that case use llEmail. This should become a level of expectation to scripters to help avoid capping IM's.
  
  
• Ask your friends to cooperate
  Many people send IM's or objects to friends who are offline. The intentions are meant well, however those IM's and transactions also add to each person's IM cap count.

Anything else that can be done?

Yes, there is, alas not by you or me. There is quite a lot that can be done by Linden Lab, and it is up to us to raise awareness.

• Create an alternative to llGiveInventory
  What is needed is a way to get some feedback if the inventory transfer has actually succeeded. Yes, this is far from trivial and requires many, many behind-the-scenes changes, but don't tell me it can't be done! The most drastic change that needs to happen is ...
• Get rid of the IM-based transaction system
  ... because then object transfers can be operations within the database itself (instead of database -> IM system -> database). The detour through the IM system is probably only to give the recipient a notification. Otherwise it would be a simple copy or move operation in the asset server database.

In the recent survey, Pink Linden asked whether merchants would welcome a system that guarantees delivery. Yes, of course we would, but not at a 15% premium. Inventory transfer is a basic functionality of SL, and to say it bluntly - it is broken! Fix it! Asking a premium for guaranteed delivery strikes me as - well - unethical. I think it is Linden Lab's obligation to fix the functionality that is there, and not ask money for a workaround.

I actually wonder what Pink Linden has in mind? The llGiveInventory function, and the problems I described here, can't be selectively fixed. Either they work for everybody, or they keep being broken. So a certified delivery is most likely just a method to request a redelivery, and then it gets complicated when transferable items get sold (hat tip to Rika for that thoug).

Anyways, please, Linden Lab, fix llGiveInventory and the assorted functionality now!

And everybody else, please vote on this JIRA which deals with the issue.

Thanks!

Your world, your imagination: the transgender debate

In a world where you can be whatever you want, can you be discriminated against for living out your true gender? What if your true gender is the opposite of your biological one?

Imagine growing up with the permanent feeling something is wrong. Imagine feeling more and more alienated by what role society has in stock for you. Imagine feeling your body change during puberty in a way that not only confuses you (we all have that), but in a way that repels you, that feels utterly wrong. Imagine the shocking moment when you finally realize you are trapped in a body that is not yours. Imagine admitting this to your best friend, your sibling, your parents. When you think "Mom, I'm gay" is bad, try to imagine how it feels to say "Mom, I'm a woman inside".

People who experience this are not sick perverts or demented. People who experience this and still live - the (teenage-)suicide rate among this group is shockingly high - are facing obstacles us "normal" people can't even imagine. Maybe you have read reports about illiterate people, and how they live a life of humiliation, shame and hiding/pretending. This gives you a little idea what a person growing up and living in the wrong body has to endure.

Second Life attracts these transgendered people. The road they need to take in the atomic world is a tough, hard and long one. In Second Life, they find a breathing space and some peace, and can be who they feel they really are. In Second Life they find other transgendered people, they find advice, they find community, they find resources. I doubt there are statistics about it, but I guess a transgendered person probably is at a much lower risk of committing suicide once they have found SL as their safe haven.

I am blessed with the friendship of 4 transgendered people in Second Life. While only one of them openly states it on the profile, the others came out to me after building and fostering the friendship for a long time, building trust until - without any need or force - they told me this intimate fact about themselves. The stories they told about their teenage days, about the trouble they faced with their families, about being torn between keeping up the appearances and not being able to live with the situation anymore sent chills down my spine. One of them had sex reassignment surgery (SRS) performed many decades ago. Another faces SRS in the immediate future and the last two have no plans for SRS yet.

All of them have fairly conservative views on sexuality and feel offended by pornography and share the view that SL at large is pretty much oversexed. To them, the current message when accessing mature content on XStreet SL, is a slap into their faces:

You are about to be redirected to Xstreet SL Uncensored.
The adult content within this site is intended for ADULTS ONLY (18 years of age or older). If you are not of legal age or do not wish to view materials of a sexually-explicit nature or you are offended by transgender images or topics, then please click CANCEL now.

I am not going as far as to claim that Xstreet SL meant this message as a deliberate insult to transgendered people. But it is the same thoughtless discrimination we face so often in the atomic world. "If you are not of legal age or do not wish to view materials of a sexually explicit nature" would have been more than enough to bring the point across. Instead, whoever wrote this added the reference to transgenders and thereby lumped the whole transgender community together with pornography and sexually explicit material, tarring them with the same brush.

Yes, there is a thriving community in Second Life built around the idea of sexual activities involving hermaphroditic people and anthropomorphic creatures (Shemales, Futanari), or the ideas of of androgynity, flowing gender boundaries or a (in some Asian cultures mythical) 3rd gender (Ladyboys). The vast majority of the people active in those communities have no gender issues in the atomic world. It is likely that Linden Lab had this group in mind when they phrased that unfortunate disclaimer, but by doing so, they discriminated and insulted the first group, the transgendered members of our society.

There is an entry on the bug tracking system (JIRA) where you can vote to have the XStreet SL message changed. I urge you to cast your vote there. Do it for my 4 friends, do it for the countless others out there. These people deserve it! Click here: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/XSL-17

Thank you!

P.S. This is my 200th post on this blog, marking a bit over 2 years of SL-blogging and almost 3 years of being a SL resident. I was struggling for days what to write for the 200th post. I can think of no better topic than this to mark this milestone.

Update:

Infinity Linden added a comment - 18/Aug/09 02:30 PM
Thank you everyone who brought this issue to our attention, and to all who have shared their opinions in this matter. Linden Lab recognizes that our community is enriched by Second Life's transgender residents. It was never our intention to single out a segment of our community in a negative way. We have removed the offending clause from our disclaimer and offer our sincerest apologies.

The Linden Lab Ecommerce Team

Authors comment: during the discussion, Infinity Linden has identified herself as transgendered.

Betting with Trinity regarding Linden Lab actions

Back in January Linden Lab announced to take over Xstreet SL and OnRez, and I had some heated discussions with my friend and SL sister Trinity Dechou about future developments.

While we both agreed that the major reason for the XStreet takeover was the control of the Linden Dollar exchange run on that site (and its eventual blending into the LindeX), we disagreed on sales commissions. Trinity assumed that in order to make XStreet even more attractive, the commissions will fall, while I was (and am) convinced that LL would be foolish to plug what turns out to be an addition to their portfolio of L$ sinks (upload fees, tier, partnering fees).

Another area of speculation was the limitation on group slots. Linden Lab keeps telling us that the 25 group limit is deeply coded into the structure of SL and that changing it is far from easy (which does not keep them from occasionally granting 26 groups). However systems like Subscribe-O-Matic have effectively taken away the pain of the group slot limitation and basically taken away any sense of urgency for the matter. While we both agreed that incorporating a SoM like system into SL would bring a whole bunch of benefits, Trinity could not agree to my speculation that rather than making a system of their own, following the XStreet/OnRez example LL simply buys Subscribe-O-Matic. She rather suggested LL will implement a two-tiered system of their own, with "real groups" as we have them now, and "watered down" groups used for announcements etc and no limitation to the number of them.

What happens if an anglophile and a Scottish lass strongly disagree on things? They wager! So on January 22 the following bet was placed:

Peter: I bet 100 L$ that by August 1st LL has bought Subscribe-O-Matic. And I bet 100 L$ that by August 1st we still have commission for sales on what used to be SLX.
Trinity: I bet 100$L that by August 1st LL won't have bought Subscribe-O-Matic and instead will have introduced their own two tier group system. And I also bet 100$L that by August 1st commissions on what was SLX will be gone.

As defined by the conditions of the bet, tonight at midnight SLT the time runs out. And as far as things look like, my beloved sister Trinity owes me 100 L$:

• We still have commission on XStreet, and while many changes have happened to the system - and some obvious ones (like unifying the XStreet balance and the in-world L$ balance) are down the road, there were no indications that the commission will fall. Unless this changes in the next 22 hours, it is a full win on my behalf.
• Linden Lab has not bought Subscribe-O-Matic, nor are there any indications or signals they will. So this is a full fail on my behalf, however...
• ... Linden Lab has neither introduced nor announced nor showing any hints that they will touch the group system in the foreseeable future. On the contrary, they still claim extending the 25 group limit will turn SL in a screeching snail if ever extended due to database issues. So this is a fail on Trinty's behalf too, and according to the conditions nobody wins this part of the bet.

There is still 22 hours to run, and the folks at Linden Lab are known for surprises. But I think I'll be 100 L$ richer by tomorrow.

Interpreting statistics in your favour - Second Stindberg boosted Snowglobe success

Today, Philip Linden posted a nifty little graph showing how many users use the Snowglobe viewer - a project initiated by him.

On June 23 I blogged about the Snowglobe viewer and announced it on Plurk - now look closely at that graph. Doesn't it make a significant jump from the 23rd on?

Truth to be told, on June 24 there was the official announcement of version 1.0 on the Second Life blog. And as much as I like the idea that my blogpost and Plurk had a little to with that sudden pike, the effect I had would be most likely dwarfed by the effect the official post had.

But this is a nice example how you can interpret statistics in your favor...

Two years Babel Translation

"Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides," American writer Rita Mae Brown once wrote. Those who recognise the power of language realise that much can be achieved by wielding this power wisely.

Second Life is a world that depends very much on language, more so than the so-called "real world": content creators communicate with customers through words on vendor ads, notecards, and IMs. Language therefore becomes crucial to communication. The content creator who is able to employ language to do his bidding will forge a stronger connection with his customers and see greater rewards.

The nature of SL has meant that people all over the globe and from all walks of life are populating this virtual world. The diversity is such that less than 50% of residents claim English as their first language. Babel Translations was founded with the vision of helping content creators to fully take advantage of the power of language in order that their business might reach as many potential customers as possible and have the greatest chance for growth and success.

Founded in June 2007 by Peter Stindberg, over the past two years Babel has established itself as the premiere translation and copywriting agency in SL, bridging the language gap between content creators and their customers. While its core business focuses on language translation services, Babel has also branched out into associated services and business solutions, offering assistance to content creators wishing to establish a business in SL.

Thus, the company not only provides language translation services for all kinds of documents including specialised texts like license agreements, covenants, and terms of service; it also offers consultation and copywriting services. Stindberg and his team work with content creators to not only translate, but also create and develop texts that will fit into a business's marketing strategy, thus spurring the business's success and growth. Product descriptions and advertising texts can be written or edited to match a specific user group and audience. This ensures that a content creator exploits the power of language to its fullest potential, for the greatest reward.

With a team of well over 50 translators, Babel is able to provide translations in languages such as English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and many others. To ensure that the service is affordable, pricing is oriented at in-world (not "real life") rates. Furthermore, all the translators are themselves residents of SL and therefore understand the culture as well as the context of the communication taking place; this places them in a unique position to be able to effectively bridge the language gap between content creator and any potential customers.

In March 2009, Linden Lab officially recognised Babel Translations as one of the official Second Life Solution Providers. This award further demonstrates that Babel has come of age as a company that is reliable, efficient and fills a crucial role in the virtual world we live in. The importance of Babel's work has been recognised by content creators behind brands such as Adam'n'Eve, Mechanized Life, Calla Hair and Botanical, all of whom have benefited from Babel's services.

However, Babel's focus is not solely on businesses and content creators. No document is too unimportant to translate, no piece of writing too trivial. Babel not only wishes to help content creators forge stronger communication with their customers, but desires to draw various SL communities and residents closer together. The company is therefore proud to announce its participation in the sixth SL birthday celebrations, SL6B. It is a significant landmark for Babel to be able to celebrate its second anniversary in the same month that Second Life turns six years old.

Babel's presence at SL6B will celebrate the richness that the various languages in SL can bring to a resident's Second Life experience. As "Your partner in the written word", Babel aims to raise the awareness of the language gaps that create chasms between various communities in SL and to educate visitors on the necessity of bridging these gaps.

First Look: SL Dashboard

When I checked the transaction history for the store alt, I got an invite to test the new SL Dashboard. The first impression is graphically appealing and reasonable fast.

The single elements can not be moved around as one would expect. Also the opened/closed setting is not persistant between sessions.

What I like is the direct integration of Xstreet SL under "Merchant Tools". What I dislike is that the Transaction History takes a lot more screen real estate.

If it would be possible to permanently delete elements and move elements it could actually quite useful.

If you want to test the dashboard yourself, but did not get an invite so far, simply add /my/ to the URL or click here: https://secure-web2.secondlife.com/my/

Snowglobe - a first look

Yesterday my SL sister Trinity Dechou mentioned the "Snowglobe" project to me, an open source approach initiated by Philip Linden. While the regular viewers are open source too, it takes rather long until fixes and extensions added by the community find their way into the official viewers. This causes quite a lot of frustration in the community and contributes to the perception of the Lab being "slow" or "uninterested", but basically has to do with the quality assurance procedures behind the scenes. The slowness of the Lab to adapt community fixes and expansions has led to a whole culture of alternative viewers for the more tech savvy residents: Gemini, Imprudence, Kirsten's Shadow Viewer and Rainbow Viewer among the most popular ones and even some old Nicholaz viewers still in use.

Project Snowglobe tries to shorten this process and to establish a very close cooperation between selected open source developers and developers from Linden Lab. This is intended to basically implement quality assurance on a submission level and a planned/steered development process. Instead of checking submitted patches and see the impact, a roadmap for development is used.

I have not used an official viewer in ages. I think during the 1.12 or 1.13 viewer release I switched to the Nicholaz Viewers which I would happily still use if not for the annoying sculpt bugs. So after that I switched to Imprudence, the viewer I liked best so far. Imprudence uses a very strict no-3rd-party-components approach, and as a consequence the graphic library used is significantly slower than in any other viewer. So reluctantly I switched to Boy Lane's Rainbow Viewer (previously known as Cool Viewer) - the viewer I primarily use these days. I have yet to check the Gemini viewer, which gets advertised for power users and has some promising features.

Getting back to an official viewer (or at least a Linden Lab released viewer) after that many months is strange. The viewer feels odd, and a lot of known functionality from 3rd party viewers is missing. However during my test-run I did not run into any issues.

What I can tell is that this viewer is fast. Right now Snowglobe has two major areas of change compared to a regular viewer: texture download via HTTP instead of UDP (and thus making textures being cachable in the net infrastructure itself) and a completely revamped map interface. The map is blazingly fast. The island screenshots come up in full resolution in instants. The reason for this is that the map tiles do not get queried from the SL servers, but gets cached on the worldwide internet backbone of Amazon (yes, the book guys). Texture rezzing seemed very fast as well, however I have no idea how much of this is the effect of a cleaned cache - I have to run experiments.

The overall impression was good, and I will certainly test it a bit more. It's too early for me to give a final verdict, and I am dearly missing some features I get with CoolViewer. But I encourage you to try it for yourself.

You can download the Snowglobe viewer from the project website.

ARC and lag revisited

I wrote about lag and the myths regarding ARC a lot of times in the past, and often referred to Gwyneth Llewelyn's one year old article on the issue. Today, Gwyneth has made an update to the article. Read "Anatomy of Lag" as a guest post on Ana Lutetia's blog.

Personally, I want to once again point out that the introduction of the "Avatar Rendering Cost" display was one of the worst things Linden Lab ever did. The ARC display has a certain informational character, however the (completely arbitrary) red/yellow/green tinting, and the way it was publicized turned it quickly into a tool for discriminating fellow residents. The ARC display does not tell ANYTHING about lag, not even anything about the capacity of the sim, but SOLELY about your own computer. However, seeing a red ARC number for a fellow resident makes some people... well... see red, and makes them feel entitled to criticize and even insult.

Would I be cynic or indulge in conspiracy theories, I would say the ARC readings and especially the color coding was made on purpose to distract from the real issues behind the scenes. But I don't believe that, I believe it was simply not thought through enough, and nobody estimated the sociological consequences a public discriminating feature would have.

More than ever I am convinced that Linden Lab would be well advised to get a sociologist into their team and run decisions by them and ask for advice.

Anyways, if you believe in ARC, read Gwyneth's article. And if you want tricks to reduce lag, read it too.

SL6B - Thursday morning happiness

Hello from the staff of SL6B! We are pleased to inform you that your exhibit was selected for the Second Life Birthday Celebration this year! However, *please note* that this does not yet guarantee that you will receive the parcel size you asked for. We are still hard at work determining exactly how to fit the puzzle pieces together on the land we have available.

This was the message I was hoping to receive for the past couple of weeks, and especially for the past couple of days as confirmations were expected for June 1st already. But this email made my day this morning, telling me that I will be assigned exhibition space at this year's 6th Birthday Celebration of SL. Once I know the final size I will have to think about a building and refine the concept I submitted to the Lab. Stay tuned!

You are hanging on a VERY thin thread

Hyang Zhao joined SL a month earlier than I did, in September 2006, and soon started to work as an official SL mentor, helping new users find their way around SL. Hyang is a community figure, well known to a lot of residents. Hyang is also a Premium member, paying hard currency to Linden Lab each month. Hyang comes from Russia, which makes some things more difficult compared to Western users, but Hyang takes it with a smile. The next software crash, redmapping or power/network outage might be the death sentence for Hyang Zhao, and she will never be able to get back into SL again.

Yesterday, Hyang changed her password on the SL website, something a sensible person should do every once in a while. Something went wrong during the process, a wrong click, a typo, something simple that can happen to anyone, and suddenly Hyang was locked out of the system. The options for password recovery given were:

• Last amount of US$ transaction
• Name 3 friends
• Answer security question

According to Hyang - who was in a state of mild panic when she IMed me - she answered the friends question but the system refused the answer. This lead to the request of calling a phone number in the US which is quite expensive from Russia:

Are you having a little trouble with your password or security question? We can get this straightened out by talking to you. Please call us: (866) 476-9763.

I started a live chat session with LL Support on her behalf, and they confirmed there is no way around phoning them:

LL Support Employee: The only way we can reset a password is by speaking to the account holder, so she will need to call us

Eventually Hyang called the US number, and got asked for the security question which - in her case - was what her favourite book is. She got it wrong. She entered the security question in 2006, and since then tastes have changed, new favourites were added, and she did not recall which book she claimed back then. Linden Lab Support refused to reset her password, even after Hyang identified herself with real name, address, credit card number etc. - no valid answer to the security question, no password reset.

This got me wondering, what my security question might be. I set it almost three years ago, and even thinking about it hard I can not recall what it might have been. So alarmed by Hyang's experiences I tried to update my security question, but unfortunately you can't do it yourself. So I opened a ticket and asked them how to do it:

Dear Peter, Thank you for contacting Linden Lab support.
In response to your query regarding changing your security question. This can only be done via calling us on the below telephone numbers and requesting this via the phone call. Kind Regards, Brian, Linden Lab support.

Hum. I better call them and have that sorted out. Hyang's experience shows that all that separates you from digital oblivion is that security question. So you better know damn well what you entered there!

Peter SoNotALinden - Analysis of an April's Fool Joke

Yesterday I announced that I will be joining Linden Lab as Peter Linden, responsible for the multilingual efforts at Linden Lab. Of course this was an April's Fool joke. The joke occurred to me spontaneously - I did not plan it in advance. I tested it in the Ch'know groupchat where Nikki and Callaigh promptly fell for it, so I decided to beef it up a bit and post it to the blog. I expected a few people to fall for it - but I was surprised how many people actually bought the story, or at least saw it as rather probable.

Clues that the story was not true:

1. Resident accounts who become a Linden do neither get cancelled or frozen - the person is free to continue to use their account.
2. Usually Linden Lab employees are rather discreet about the name of their non-Linden-account, and there are also very few reports of publicly announced resident-to-Linden promotions.
   
3. As Katharine pointed out, someone going to work at the Lab would not disqualify the work done by using phrases like "proper localization of the viewer" - though it is an open secret that certain viewer translations are abysmal.
4. Also it is highly improbable that a person whose position is more marketing-related will work on any changes to the LSL language.
5. One of the deliberately included clues which - from my perspective made the joke quite obvious - was the bit about analyzing the language used in Instant Messages. Nobody commented on that part, everybody seemed to accept that the content of IM's is accessible to the Lab. And most likely it is - but in that case it will surely not get publicly announced.

So I'm not a Linden after all - you need to stick with Peter Stindberg for a while. But why did so many people believe it, or at least did not outright rule it out? I was surprised at that for a bit, until it occurred to me that the core of my joke is highly probable.

1. There are about 40% of native English speakers in SL. and while it is true that a lot of the other users (like myself) manage English fairly well, localized content for them might be appealing.
2. It is definitely a good idea to become less US-centric and focus on other countries too. The Lab has made many steps into that direction, has a European office, made a lot of multilingual activities already.
3. Appointing a person who is familiar with the languages in SL and with the communities is definitely a good idea. On occasion I wondered how few Linden Lab employees actually seem to have a second life of their own.

So basically my joke had a core believable enough for many. I hope nobody is annoyed or angry now, or feels deceived. Thank you for all the comments - I hope you can laugh with me. and remember: it's not laughing about you, but laughing with you about the joke!

One journey ends, the next journey begins

The journey of Peter Stindberg has come to an end. This morning's email brought the final confirmation - the account will be put on hold. My journey will continue though - as Peter Linden.

Based on my experience with translation work in Second Life, I will coordinate the multilingual efforts of Linden Lab. This includes proper localization of the viewer into the major SL languages, creating multilingual versions of the Linden Lab blogs, creating language specific portals for each country and working closely with the communities in-world for those languages, but it will also focus on adding multilingual capacities to the Linden Scripting Language. Part of this will include work with the metrics group to determine a resident's language more reliably through behavioral patterns (which sims get visited, what language gets used in open chat and IM's) than the simple viewer language detection.

I thank all my friends and readers for their support so far, and I hope they will extend their friendship to Peter Linden as well.

Good bye - and hello!

Linden Lab and the blocked IM-to-Email

So there is big fuzz about the Linden Lab mailservers being blocked by the SPAM protection real-time-blacklist spamhaus.org - and of course the usual suspects try to blame it all on Linden Lab. And while it seems some configuration options on the LL mailservers might indeed be set different to avoid such problems, for me the real problem is with spamhaus.org

I had the dubious pleasure to deal with spamhaus.org in the past, and it cost me lots of time and energy and in the end a whole mailserver had to be moved to a different IP address. Spamhaus is known to be quite trigger happy and in their self-righteousness try to "educate" (read: coerce) mail service providers. Just search Google for "spamhaus blackmail" and you will find many more hits than a credible service should get.

Realtime blacklists are an efficient method to prevent the distribution of spam. But with my past experience, and with the reports from others, I can only discourage people to use the services of spamhaus.org. There are other services around, for example spamcop.net which relies on manual tagging of spam by other users.

But Linden Lab is NOT to blame for this!

Why I became Premium after 27 months in SL

Yeah, that's right, nobody is more surprised than myself. There must be dozens of comments on other blogs where I ranted what a bad deal Premium membership is, that the only halfway visible benefit is to be eligible to buy Mainland parcels and that this is a dubious benefit at best. And that Premium membership is really unattractive and a waste of money. So why did I change my mind?

What changed is my perception. When I ranted about Premium membership, I primarily had the Mainland parcels in mind. Paying almost 120 US$ a year to be able to buy parcels in a constantly changing, ugly neighbourhood seemed like a bad joke to me. But if you change the perspective, things seem more attractive again. In a recent discussion fellow blogger Uccello Poultry suggested to me:

"As for you not having a premium account, I can only encourage to you think about it more seriously. A successful and influential business owner friend of mine had a basic, No Payment Info on File account when another resident (falsely) accused her of stealing his product designs. Her account was canceled without a hearing or any reasonable recourse for appealing. She lost land and property of substantial value."

This made me think, especially since I had similar notions from two other people in a rather short time frame. Like it or not - Linden Lab seems to deal different with Premium and non-Premium members. As a non-Premium member I can't file support tickets, and can't call support. So I started to look at the Premium membership as a sort of insurance.

Another thing that bothered me was that Linden Lab wants hard currency for the Premium membership. All I ever put into SL was 15 EUR - and my personal situation does not allow me to spend the amounts each month some of my friends spend. My friend Rika Watanabe opened my eyes to the possibilities of the LindeX, explaining to me that Linden Lab first charges your US$ balance before they start to charge your credit card. Provided you have enough US$ balance on your account - and this can be filled by selling Linden Dollar on the LindeX - your credit card never gets charged. So I can - with only a little complexity - pay for my Premium with Linden Dollar. With this final piece of information, I sat down and did the math:

26.78 US$ quarterly Premium fees, thanks to Linden Lab's double taxation of European residents, equals 6990 L$ at an exchange rate of 1:261. I could game the LindeX a bit and probably get a better deal like maybe 1:259 but that hardly matters. In those three months I will receive a stipend of 12 * 300 L$ = 3600 L$. This effectively reduces the Premium payment to only 3390 L$. The bottom line is that I will pay 283 L$ per week to become a Premium member and have a direct line to Linden Lab.

Up to now, this only focused on the "insurance aspect". However I am entitled to get a 512 sqm Mainland parcel at no extra cost with my Premium membership. As ugly as Mainland is for the most parts, a Mainland parcel has a few advantages, the major one is that Mainland won't go away. My translation office and the GREENE concept shop are on a beautiful sim, of which I am resident since August 2007. It is owned by a company who has various other sims in SL, and managed by an employee of said company. For all I know, right this second the folks at that company might have a meeting and decide to stop their SL efforts. Or right this second my landlady might get an offer from a different company and leaves her current employer. I might log in tomorrow and the sim is gone. There is no guarantee it won't. However, Mainland will stay. So if nothing else, a Mainland parcel is a pretty secure server location for your SLX, OnRez, Apez and Hippo boxes.

But why stop here? Rika shared a few other interesting facts with me. I can donate my land to group and get a 10% bonus. Ivanova, my partner in GREENE concept, could donate her unused Premium land allotment to group as well, and together we could buy a 1126 sqm parcel with approximately 256 available prims - at no extra cost. This would make for a nice little rent free shop - provided a stable neighbourhood can be found. An additional benefit of group owned land is that it can be in arrears with tier payments for a pretty long time before being reclaimed - a fact that not a lot of people seem to know (and which can change anytime).

Finally I expect Linden Lab to make Premium membership a better deal in the short term future. It has been discussed that Premium members might be preferred access rights during high concurrency. I assume there will be other benefits as well like maybe lower upload fees or more land. I also expect the additional benefits will come with higher Premium fees. And since Premium accounts are known to be grandfathered I might get a better deal by getting in early.

Bottom line is: my perception changed from "why should I pay hard currency to buy an ugly Mainland parcel" to "for 283 L$ / week I get recognized better by Linden Lab, can file tickets and get at minimum a secure server location or even a small shop for free".

Sometimes a change of perspective is a good thing.