Press Conference

The Lindens did something they've never done before Monday: they held a press conference *themselves* in world. Plenty of other companies, whether Sun Microsystems or CNET have held pressers in SL, but this was evidently a first for the Lab. If you want to get a perfectly serviceable wire-story type of account, go here to my colleague Xavier Mohr's story at SLReports.net.

But let me tell you the back story -- and also how it *felt*.

You wouldn't believe the static it caused in the little ponds of Second Life, with Nobody Fugazi's fanboyz letting it be known his street cred was now amped by him not being invited, and Jessica Holyoke fussing and fuming repeatedly in office hours about why she and other Herald reporters weren't invited and how they could get invited etc etc.

Robin Linden somewhat took the luster off any notion of in-grouping by noting first that the function was primarily directed not at "real-life press" but at "inworld press" (short bus stops outside at the dam, folks) and that "Prokofy had been on the list all the time." Of course, we remember it differently. (My God, just spent an hour searching through the old forums, what an eye-opener!). But aside from all this backing and filling about the genre and its participants, let's see first what they *said* and then whether it's a good format.

Regrettably, I got there about 25 minutes late because I first had trouble getting logged on normally then couldn't pull up the sim "Abundance" in the list (a Linden sim) -- turns out it was hidden -- and they get to keep stuff hidden, even though that system was ended for everyone else. Factlet one gleaned from the press conference! Then, the SLURL wouldn't work -- figured the sim filled up. Finally Melissa Linden TP'd me -- and then the usual wrestle with voice, and unfortunately becoming an annoyance to others who then heard double typing clatter from me -- from my inworld puppet typing (can't get turned off once again,) and from my RL self with the mike not muted. DUH!

But through it all were the calm, reasoned tones of James Linden, a fellow I had never met but had always admired for his normal, clear, helpful posts on the forums (remember the one about IP addresses that finally put an end to that idiotic forums debate about dynamic and static IPs?)

SCORE: LINDENS 10, REPORTERS 7

James Linden was dressed in what I called MMORPG Master Mufti (a kind of inside joke because ordinary clothing should look like street clothes, but his RL garb would be the exotic thing in a setting like SL). Another Linden appeared as a kind of toad; Robin was lost in thought listening to her Jiminy Cricket conscience perched on her shoulder.

There were just too many Lindens -- the score was about 10 to 6 I would say, and I only recognized Draxtor and SLNN among a half dozen reporters whose names I didn't recognize.

SINCERITY AT A SPIN OPERATION

James talked ably and reasonably about these new changes to the SEARCH which the Lindens are wheeling out, soon, better go get the patch and test it now and complain before they set it in stone: .

Just like you used to have to do with Soviets, I sent a list of questions ahead of time -- this was optional, as you could ask them live, too. But I wanted to make it very detailed and even citing JIRA items -- about the non-transferrable items showing up in search, the classifieds mixing up in search results, etc.

One of the ways the Lindens try to maintain or regain calm, possibly for themselves above all others, is to say "It may seem like we're doing this world-shattering new thing, but we're actually just doing the same thing we've always done, only a bit better." That always *sounds* good but one simply doesn't have confidence in them.

But the mode of the press conference, which involved no conversational style, a somewhat formal presentation, and then some longish questions from those of us who did step up to the plate (but of the type meant to get more material for an article, rather than to take part in "a debate") yielded something I've never felt I've had from the Lindens all these years: simple sincerity.

Now that might sound UTTERLY counterintuitive, but here's how it works: if you've ever had the privilege to meet Philip in real life, well, it's like meeting Tesla -- the hair standing on end from having just put the wrench in the socket and blacked out all of Hudson Street in Manhattan. You have these really earnest, intense conversations, but...sort of the way show biz people do or something, or kids seeing if they can out-riff each other talking about something cool. That is, sincere, but complex-sincere.

Or take Robin -- when you talk to her, in Real or Second, you feel as if you have been heard, and as an extra bonus, you have the welcome feeling -- so often completely absent in the Linden experience -- of having talked to an adult. But...you feel managed. Capably managed, but still...managed -- as is befitting a consummate manager.

Any of a score of other young coding kiddie Lindens or liaison Lindens range from goofy to insolent to dour -- but the experience always has that synthetic feel that SL often gives one, not surprisingly. It's tough to be sincere in a fake world.

THE WEIRDNESS OF VOICE

Voice was supposed to help that, but Voice doesn't work -- of course, I mean, as a genre. People aren't using it. Oh, it's not because it's humiliating to hear a 50-something female voice coming out of a 30-something male avatar body -- I'm *so* over that -- but because to hear any real voice coming out of any avatar is just, well, damn weird. You can't have it on like Skype, which gives you the feeling of a hands-free communication experience leaving you able to push prims, type to people and take care of their requests, etc. -- it's a kind of divided attention. The SL Voice instead seems to rivet your attention -- you are constantly try to listen for it, place it, adjust its knobs and talk into the strange ether. You keep wanting to tug it off, and say "Can't we just talk on Skype?" Somehow, we're conditioned to adjusting to voice coming off a headset, from a Skype, and somehow placing the mental image of the person very lightly over in the corner, not intrusively, and then looking/doing other things. But to have Voice coming all around you, and to see these avatars without facial expressions that you can't really look at or touch, is to make a kind of itch you can't scratch.

Even so, the benefits of Voice shone through: you could tell that James, while a bit exasperated with all this rigamarole thrown him by cranky residents and pesky reporters, was talking sincerely.

OBJECTS IN THE SEARCH SEEM CLOSER THAN THEY ARE...

I had asked before hand, and added to it during the presser, about the problem objects set for sale showing up against people's will -- VRW 3071 and 3072. In part this is addressed with the bug patch to eliminate the mistaken flag showing something that isn't transferable still for sale merely because it was once sold. So now you can get in and uncheck those -- but first you have to go around putting all your parcels in search to see what will turn up on them, sort of like looking for cat urine with a flourescent lamp.

James said a very interesting thing, that simply put paid to all the idiocy on the JIRA, all the fanboyz vexation on there, all the nonsense coming from skeptical and curt Lindens like Steve Linden: while the search was populated for the initial round with all objects already set for sale, henceforth, going forward, anything you put out for sale that does NOT have "show in search" ALSO checked on it WILL NOT SHOW.

So pay attention again, it's subtle: if originally, all objects set to sale and on a parcel checked off to show in search would show in search; henceforth, you must not only set the object to sale, but also check off "show in search" on it.

Now, that's a truly elegant and brilliant solution! It means you don't have to worry about TVs to deed, items you're testing, mistakes you make -- leading to a new generation of object-bots to snarf everything up. But more to the point, it's a compromise that makes sense. It's not my ideal -- I'd be for opting in everything only. But it's good enough. In fact, I hope it holds, as there is significant resistance against it.

The drive merely to populate the search troubled me, of course. Why the greed? Why the rush? People will help and put stuff in search. It's not going to be a problem. No need to artificially stuff it.

CLASSIFIEDS MIXED UP IN SEARCH RESULTS

Next, I took on the issue of the classifieds mixing up in the search results, that is, there is a sidebar of the top 10 or so classifieds for a search key word, but also within your results are strewn hundreds of classifieds of any price, whether $50 or $50,000. That just seems to entirely defeat the purpose of buying a more expensive classified ad, if anyone can just camp up their traffic (traffic is still *a* metric, though not *the* metric for search) or get lots of people to put them in their picks (another metric newly used in search). I just cannot see any logic in it; indeed, I suspected it was social engineering to give the little guy a chance.

James answered matter-of-factly that there was no element of the search that was socially-engineered to his knowledge (we might disagree with that if we had a very, very detailed convo about this, but there it is). He said that above all, Linden Lab would not wish people to stop buying classifieds because it's revenue for them. So, he said, they would watch the click-throughs and if it seemed that there was some loss, they would revise it. This seemed faintly reassuring, but the hit to the economy could be big, and the response by Linden slow. I still maintain that the removal of merited traffic as the organizing principle is going to have a very big and negative impact on many merchants, and the economy as a whole.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

Like p2p, the sudden rush of more shopping as people find more weird little objects will seem to bring a cash inflow at first, and more wild shopping and impulse buys, but then the weirdness of the metrics, and the fact that so many people aren't getting their wares showing up and don't know how to show up anymore, and will still cause some to suffer big losses in sales, and that will offset the gain -- just as with p2p, the loss of rezzability upon landing and missing texture issues, etc. came with it, as did the loss of telehub mall value, which was a great thing because it was a democratic open place where anyone could rent merely for a price, not by having connections to divas and get in the public eye without special treatment.

This rocky road to adjustment, with some winning the search lottery and some losing, will make some lose confidence, and that's not a good thing for the merchant class, which is already feeling terribly put upon just because SL doesn't *work* and they have so many problems already with copyright theft, bugs, etc.

THE SEARCH LOTTERY AND THE SOCIAL ENGINEERS

Search Places made sense before, when you could plug in a key word like "rentals" or "prefab" or "men's hair," and find perhaps several camped-out gamed places at the top, but then other places that had real traffic, and go to them simply. Now, what you see just doesn't parse. Why isn't Barnesworth Anubis in the top 10 under prefabs? If he is in the top 10 barely with "prefab" who are these other people nobody has ever heard of who are higher up? Sit with it awhile and try bunches of stuff, and you just become more and more puzzled. Did this or that company have more picks or a higher-priced classified ad, since both go into the search?

James conceded that on the Internet at large, it wasn't customary to put classifieds in search engines. Both he and Jeska cautioned this was a beta, as they always do, and they were still working on it.

"We don't have an interest in socially engineering classifieds...if we were malicious, we'd try to extort more money to make them pay more," he said.

"If we think it is damaging, we'll be making changes," said James. He advised residents to write to [email protected] (I can hear the cynical guffaws about that one!) And that's vaguely reassuring -- but it's a moment in time when a hands-on tekkie Linden like this can still be wheeled out for a press conference -- instead of a suit who would spin it 10 times more and explain it 20 times worse -- it's a time when the window is open and we can still hear the fairly authentic voices of these people who made our world.

That moment won't -- can't -- last. They will either get very much bigger and stay the kind of thing they are, a software engineering company not especially notable for customer service, or they will IPO or open-source and go very much into the background doing something unexciting while others become the main actors. It's a point when reporters should show up, whether they perceive it as a spin cycle or not, because it is likely less of one now than it will ever be in the future, especially as they become more slick at doing it.

NO GRAND EXPERIMENT

"I didn't get a sense I was in a grand experiment" that was going to change the economy, James finally said to me trying to fend off my long questions. That is, in making an improved search, he apparently honestly didn't see it as having any big impact on the economy. Well, it's nice to hear that he hasn't done anything *deliberately* malicious, and that's good, but...here's a company that could blink and dismiss $70 million Lindens of business on October 31 by planning maintenance that day.

"A search engine is not built and populated overnight," he said by way of justifying the immediate inclusion of so many things. "We're trying to make it more even."

What's troubling about all this isn't James or the other Lindens, who are likely doing their best. It's rather the concern that while Linden Lab had internal deliberations, informed by whatever SL Views input or random blog reading or hearsay they developed -- they didn't enable the community to have this deliberation or even notify people sufficiently. They just simply don't see themselves as governing a world needing democratic input and free feedback -- they see themselves as a company with a world-product as we all know. It really is a kind of new human relationship that hasn't ever been rendered in quite this form before, say what you will. There are, for example, the kind of very intense services that say, a doctor might provide a patient, so that their science is immediately interactive, but that relationship is constrained by all kinds of customs and protocols. This very intimate relationship of living inside a product made by people you can constantly hear from but in all kinds of haphazard and often unsatisfactory ways isn't yet structured with any kind of acceptable culture. It seems to me that the press conference is as good a format as any in trying to make this work better.

Comments

[Ann Otoole]

Perhaps one day I will understand why a L$2001 classified ad gets zero results while a L$1501 ad gets great results. In the old or new search.

I'm hurt by the new search. I will adjust. If secondlife becomes so unprofitable that i would have to pay LL to make things for people to have the option of buying on the odd random chance they happened across my items then I simply will no longer pay rents or tier in sl and will instead market exclusively on the internet.

But I don't see that happening. It is just a matter of spending all your time trying to keep up with the constantly moving LLSL cheese instead of creating wonderful content. Perhaps one day the brainiacs at LL will realize they need to make the cheese movements less injurious. We spend far too much time trying to deal with LL induced issues and changes as it is.

No New Cheese Please.

[Prokofy Neva]

Here's a link to Tao Takashi's write-up and my debate with him, and there's also a link to an mp3 to hear the whole thing, kindly made by Draxtor.

http://mrtopf.de/blog/secondlife/are-press-conferences-still-the-way-to-go/#comment-903

[Vargas Cleanslate]

oh my god, you have ANOTHER blog? isn't one place enough to decry the immorality of LL for not agreeing with you on every point?

[Wayne Porter]

Thought for the day- if proctology is a field in medicine dealing with diseases and disorders of the rectum, anus, and colon than Proktology must be?

[Prokofy Neva]

>Thought for the day- if proctology is a field in medicine dealing with diseases and disorders of the rectum, anus, and colon than Proktology must be?

Uh, perhaps a chance for you to shine on Google making a gross and stupid personal attack? I dunno.

[Wayne Porter]

LOL. What attack? Nothing gross about natural functions. Nothing personal about you, unless somehow you moonlight as a proctologist...or perhaps it is the crap writer in me using phonetics.

Really I never even finished the sentence. You did...I won't claim to know how you feel though Prok :)

It really was not an attack, but thanks for connecting it into a useful metaphor. It will be a great tee-shirt line.

I know, you won't have time to make one slapping me (idont know enough to deserve it)...and I am going to give you free brand exposure and make some L's. Seems like it is win win....

Just let the thread die and let's hammer on each either when we have better material...not that a tee-shirt line isn't bad....

hey just logged in and there was a Quick Time hack. Since I have a security background it is most logical (if I am a Prokofokist) that you would blog about it. Take it away Neva! Wayne dismissed.

best,
Wayne