Dear M Linden

First of all, thanks for writing back after all these years! Yes, for at least four if not five years, Second Life residents have been sending open letters to the Lindens, protests, manifestos, petitions, and demands. They've collected 5 signatures or 50 or even 5,000! No one has ever written back! Oh, sure, there might be a blog post that tangentially mentioned some big protest or letter, or there might be an Office Hour (there used to be town halls) where the Lindens would pretend to be your buddies and crack jokes, but nothing dignified like a "Dear Resident" letter. Of course, you have to wonder, if we are in this simultaneous streaming 3-D world together, why do letters have to be written?

Oh, I quite realize that compared to other games, LL is worlds apart in communications with customers. We all remember that famous cartoon photo that showed residents launching a blimp over a wall into the EA.com compound with a message, because it was impossible to get them to respond. They never came inworld or answered. In fact, after six loyal years with the EA people, all I'm getting with the TSO shut-down is a coupon for $15 for another one of their games, and a bill hitting today that in fact makes me pay for non-existent service as they are shutting down July 31st. Don't let that put any ideas into your head!

I asked another Linden if you would even be having office hours, and was told in surprise that CEOs can't be expected to do that. Oh? Well, Philip did. And I'm afraid I'll have to preface my remarks by saying that I remain loyal to Philip. I'm not sure why. I have little in common with Philip as a person, and I think on most major life views, we differ significantly. Still, I feel there is a sense of shared vision of a world that Philip was able to impart to a wide variety of people, sometimes even by accident. I think anybody who went through the earlier years with Philip will be like a gosling bonding to whatever seemed to walk like a mother duck regardless of whether they are a "match". Anyone new will feel like an interloper to the goslings.

For a long time, residents bitched about how wackydinghoi crazy-hippie fatty-huffing outrageous extropian insane the Lindens are, although of course they don't really fit that description for the most part. But there was this sense created especially by land barons and big business content makers that some grown-ups were needed, button-down executives who would run LL more like a real office without all this Summer of Love stuff like the Love Machine and the Big List of Things to Do -- optional -- and "distributed decision-making". I don't know if you are hacking away at any of that stuff so inherently part of the culture of Lindenness, but I think most people running an office would start by beating that back -- it's not productive.

Yet now that somebody -- you? -- is making changes at the Lab we can see (but which you aren't talking about), people come to grips uneasily with the fact that when all is said and done, Second Life is a trademarked product of a software company, not a world, and those making it are removed from whatever world the residents were told was "your world/your imagination". The changes I refer to are things like the survey on the log-on screen or extensive customer-service surveys.

A sense of the big plan comes through in the interview with Hamlet nee Linden Au even more than your own letter. When I see that you are "consolidating" your three markets, I naturally wonder if we in the "social" part, relegated to third-class status, are going to be consolidated out of business.

Here's what's said:

“We’re working on three things really intently,” he said. The first is “solidifying our proposition for what we’re defining as our core markets.” That includes the traditional personal user of Second Life, which is typically someone in their 30s, as well as the “enterprise segment,” which addresses the many corporations that use Second Life for conferencing, job fairs and other business applications. And finally there are the educators that use the virtual world as a teaching tool. “I think 18 of the top 20 educational institutions in North America are in Second Life and doing wondrous things,” Kingdon said.

And here's what's wrong with that: it implies that the "inworld market" is merely a lot of personal end-users who are socializing, in their 30s, here for the cybersex or more PG activities of socializing -- and that's it. Then there are the "enterprise segment" which implies the "outworld market" of people using SL for job fairs and business applications like training. Then there's education. And nothing in between or overlapping or connecting these things *except Linden Lab*.

INSTITUTIONALIZE YOUR OUTREACH TO INWORLD BUSINESS PARTNERS

But wait just a minute here. You forgot who is paying your tier. And that is inworld business -- inworld business not even listed in your core constituences! Once again, your world view, like Philip's, frankly, or other Lindens who think people like me run "neighbourhoods" has utterly failed to take into account what *pays your bread and butter*: inworld business serving all three segments, but primarily the first segment. You view them as only "end users" and treat them accordingly -- mere customers that come and go of whom 1 out of 10 retain. We are the retained, and retaining, and as a large class of people, you need to look closer.
I myself am merely a small business out of all of these businesses and don't represent them. It's up to you to reach them.

That means all the people with "positive monthly Linden flow". These aren't personal users; if they are like me (and I'm a small one), they have at least 1,500 customers at any given day they are serving in a wide variety of ways with land services, event space and organization, content sales, promotion of community affairs. And if a small business can do that with only about 16 sims, think what is being done by those with 100 or 1,000 sims -- who are still on your books as mere "end users".

We are what makes up the world because we pay for it.

If the enterprise segment now makes up more of your bottom line, fine, we can know our place. But what grates is that in fact it doesn't. Many of us have more islands than IBM, Cisco, or Samsung. IBM has bought more OpenSim sims than SL sims -- do the math. If we have more islands than them, then...it might be staying that way. Pay attention.

The blatant neglect of this inworld business sector, the continual refusal to recognize its existence not only hurts or perplexes; it angers. People who make it happen for most of the the 60,000 concurrent log-ins *inworld* ought to get more respect, reconition, conscious planning -- hey, feting even. Concierge group parties are all well and good, but they imply "end users" and not land barons or content creators.

You as the senior leader of Linden Lab have to create a channel to this community that currently does not exist, and staff it properly and have inworld meetings on the vital issues of land value and IP protection -- that's all there is to it. There is the AWG -- for the script kiddies and IBM hobbyists. There is SL Devs which is for consultants and corporations focused on the outworld market. There is the educators' list and all the special help and encouragement education gets. But there is no outreach, program, dedicated Linden for inworld business, except "Community Affairs" which is planning mainly for newbie retention and structuring the end user experience, not thinking to the next level of businesses that serve them inworld.

Inworld business makes at least $45 million profit for you, and makes $45 million for itself. All you seem to be doing is trying to grab at the inworld profit stream by presiding over price dumps or sanctioning experiments that threaten value like the interoperabilty group or installing rival state-run corporations like LPDW competing in the development space.

STOP HARMING INWORLD BUSINESS BY NEGLECT AND MISTREATMENT

And here's where I'm going to put it to you very brutally, M Linden: even if you think your future is in education or enterprise, you are mistaken. They will provide some business, but the true future of a Metaverse with grids is in partnerships with other businesses. You will be judged by other potential grid partners by the way in which you treat your inworld business partners on the grid now -- and that's us, and you kick us in the teeth. Your future lies not merely in profit from your own series of transactions to sell land and currency; your future of expansion lies in the extent to which you can attract smaller or larger businesses to partner with you to use your platform for their own profits, not only yours. The extractive and instrumentalist attitude you have taken to us, who have paid your high tier and suffered through your broken patches all these years is noted. Open source? Sell software as service? Your track record with your existing business partners inworld will be reviewed. If you only worked to destroy our businesses by too much attention to your own bottom line (land glutting); if you don't care about *engineering* the protection of our IP (see AWG), then what good are you *even to yourself*?

Do end users pay more money to Linden Lab than land barons? No, because they don't buy premiums, they buy money, and they pay island resorts for their rentals -- or to a lesser extent, mainland rental agencies like me. Of the 88,000 premiums that seem only to be discouraged now, in fact many are top tier-payers.

Is the balance shifting, so that big enterprise accounts, especially now that they are asked to pony up $25,000 for year long service contracts, more important to LL's bottom line than their legacy of inworld businesses? Oh, perhaps. But it is those inworld businesses that make the world. They provide its content and colour. That's not something being done by IBM. IBM is not working for the world or "the community" in any but the narrow sense of a tiny clique of geeks following their interoperability experiments which they view as "the community". But they aren't sponsoring concerts or art work or even, from what I can tell, putting in their nickel to a tip jar on the Relay for Life Track. And why should they? They already gave at the office...in real life.

Inworld business is hurting now, not only to a tapering off of new accounts and the land glut, but because there is a feeling that those people who do belong to Second Life aren't returning due to a variety of difficulties -- billing, performance, over-demanding Windlight graphic card demands.

And...LL isn't really caring, because they have moved on to their next fad, which is education. And of course educators likely overlap with the inworld business community as they may rely on it more for goods and services -- I can't tell (corporations do tend to stay in silos and hire contractors to build for them and then leave).

A symbol of that overlap of core customer constituencies is Fleep Tuque's Chilbo, deliberately situated on the mainland despite the difficulties, and renting out land to its community members and encouraging events and content inworld overlapping with outworld educational activities.

EMPOWER THE GROUPS THAT ALREADY RETAIN NEWBIES, AND ENABLE THEM TO ADVERTISE

While you say you care about user retention, and even started this A/B test having some newbies completely bypass the discredited and ineffective Orientation Island, what was really required was something more radical -- shutting it down because the HUD is broken, the obstacle course orientation too frustrating, and the methodology not one conducive to learning.

Even the newbie distributor is a broken concept that some geek on LL's staff is stubbornly clinging to against all facts -- a randomizing script that dumps newbies haphazardly according to the concept of randomness (which isn't fair in such a relatively small sample) rather than a serializing script (which I supplied to Blue Linden!) that would dump newbies uniformly throughout the system; precisely because there aren't too many locations such that the serial would rotate outside a 24 hour cycle (no doubt it is that geeky literalism about abstractions of how "random" and "serial" work and insistence on "planning for scale" (which always hobbles SL) that is harming progress on this right now.

There are newbie helping groups like NCI and resident-run orientation sims either on existing Linden Land or private communities -- they all need to be empowered, not coopted, to do what they do and demonstrate to you that it is better (by inclusion in the A/B test or even simply monitoring, without any sort of brutal 30-day requirement to "perform" or be dumped from the newbie stream). In fact, I always have to marvel at how when LL has done these retention tests before involving residents, how rigged they were, with residents who were linked by teleports from HI or OI being subject to rigorous demands of performance within 30 or 90 days that the Lindens never subject themselves to, as they have left a terribly broken OI languish for 2 years.

In replying to Hamlet, you focus on justifying why progress isn't being made on transporting objects and assets (land terraforming shapes can be copied and reproduced just like scripts and textures, of course) as if to cave to the demand of the opensourceniks. The real question is: how will you protect the intellectual property of those assets you are in such a rush to transfer?! What is the plan, indeed? Mere hand-wringing and pious pronouncements from Hamilton Linden on the blog about how you will "not design something that enables violation" and will "take care" with IP just simply does not cut it. We need to know the positive plan for how you will really protect IP through software. Yes, *through software engineering implementing the marking of permissions*, not telling us to call our lawyers.

FOCUS BETTER ON INVENTORY LOSS

It's good that like Philip, you are focusing on performance and crashes. Those aren't really the concern of most people outside a tiny and noisy geek constituency, however. Most people absorb them into their routines -- truly. What is more important than crashes is *inventory loss*. Little is being said about that anymore, including from the self-same Hamilton Linden who once took on this chore vocally -- and then disappeared with it (in fact, the ever-Polyannish Torley Linden even tried to close off the JIRA demanding inventory bugs be fixed and inventory be recovered merely because Hamilton said essentially "we're working on it and have fixed one little thing accountable for some small percentage of losses". Inventory is still often lost. It is especially lost on rolling restarts because of all the corrupted sim restarts that lose all the builds on a restart. This happens constantly and not everyone has the persistence and access in Concierge list to keep banging on Lindens to reset sims -- which they don't do on the mainland as a default unless you can overcome their unwillingness to see that their corrupt data on the server is at issue.

Is your "significant" registration process in fact due to a flood of people from EA-land (Sims Online) pouring into SL now in significant numbers because that world is shutting down August 1st? Type "Sims Online" or "TSO" into the search and see how many groups and avatars are coming from there.

You *do* realize that many people simply can't learn from videos. They might watch them, even, just to see something displayed, but they can't learn from them. A significant number are totally turned off by Torley Linden, as well.

AGAIN, ENABLE ADVERTISING OF SERVICES ON OI AND HI!

They also can't learn from the knowledge base, which is clunky and wonky. They can sometimes learn from very short FAQs on a website that is itself better searchable than yours is. But the way a lot of people learn is by one-to-one teaching. That is why there is such a huge mentor program. My own feeling is that the Mentors should be shut down as corrupt and ineffective. Putting a time-out on their membership and requiring time-outs so they do not run rackets are good ideas, but empowering those groups that already help newbies by *enabling them to advertise their services on welcome areas* is vital. When you are ready to overcome the years of anti-commerce that Philip always felt about the welcome experience, call me. I will buy an ad. So will other people. It's a revenue stream for you. Create an ad network run by Lindens on Linden land where the eyeballs really are, and you will start to deal with the scarcity of advertising space in SL of which ugly ad farms are a symptom, not a solution (they attempt to get eyeballs by spamming numerous sims rather than getting effective advertising on actual trafficked sims that have real people).

DO NOT REMOVE TRAFFIC

While we're on the subject of traffic, a big shout again NOT to remove traffic metrics displayed on land visibly to all, and NOT to remove traffic as the element that sorts SEARCH/PLACES. I've amply documented and debated this in voluminous numbers of blogs and JIRAs: search/places/sorted by traffic is the engine of the economy, and is not gamed as so many mistakenly believe. Look carefully at those screaming the loudest to remove traffic: they are people who themselves use bots and hate the arms race caused by other sex clubs and malls using bots, and want traffic removed completely. The solution is to regulate bots and create more ways that people can show their genuine like of venues. A top places of people's picks would be more valuable in one respect than traffic, although as gameable. Still, it can be tried as an experiment. Meanwhile, the gaming of traffic will end when advertising is more available -- make that happen, and regulate ad farms so they do not devalue the mainland.

The outrageous lack of action on the ad farm infestation is the biggest killer of mainland business and devaluator of all the hard work that land developers do. It is a big stab in the back of your inworld business partners. Stop it! There is no reason in hell you can't regulate this as spam and disturbance of the peace, and make good on your May policy that said extortion would be actionable under the TOS -- you have stopped enforcing this policy and they are all back.

STOP COMPETING WITH YOUR OWN CUSTOMERS INWORLD

We still make this world, even though you are trying your damnedest to undermine us by competing with your own customers in projects like Showcase, where you select only your favourites, often with no evident justification; LPDW, where you sell developed land and rent themed sims in direct rivalry with land barons who do this; and all your other projects involving selecting one tiny group of residents to pit them against all the rest (resmods on the forums; SL Views; SL Certified; SL Devs; SL Certified Merchants; etc. etc.)

Ciaran Leval said that retention in the first hour is all well and good -- but then what? It's then people need something to do, and frankly, the overwhelming majority of them are not going to go to a scripting class or a real-life digital arts class at their university. Quite frankly, I have to say that if this educational boom was the real cultural upheaval that you imply, we'd see numerous students' blogs. We don't see any. We see educators and more to the point, people selling consulting and educational software to educators. When I go shopping for hair or prefabs, I see people in the first category of social end-users, not students or teachers, and not businesses. If you want SL to be a collection of silos of people doing serial processing of their own affairs, that's what it will be -- but I thought it was supposed to be a world. A Better World?

Comments

[Ann Otoole]

M Linden would indeed do well to study writings such as this one and then go do or have some research done by people not influenced by Linden Lab (or affiliates) to see what is really going on. Then M could compare reality to what he is being told. Then M can undergo the process of determining what the motivations are behind the limited information he is being provided. After all he is new so he only knows what he is being told. Once M has a feel for the politics and personal agendas involved he can then decide who will be part of the future of Linden Lab. I know I would not appreciate being given a restricted range of information intended to guide me in a direction that serves the personal motives and agendas of a select few people.

I would love to see LL undergo the process to get into IPO position. The SOX compliance alone will necessitate a complete makeover of the Lab culture and values since nobody could do anything without it having been first planned and approved and every configuration action anyone takes on the system(s) be logged and reviewed. Even direct (Non back end system or sl client, I.e.; SQL Query tool connections) database accesses would have to be logged and reviewed. Not too sure the Tao could survive the SOX Compliance transition without some major restructuring. I guess we are safe from IPO for a very long time. Not to say a non public, perhaps even foreign, company couldn't pop up and buy the entire deal. (My how the face of Secondlife would change if a Dubai interest bought it and brought Muslim ideology into play.)

Yes M needs to get involved and get a feel for how the wheels turn in SL so as to understand exactly where all that tier comes from. I think it would be interesting to see the metrics on where the money comes from. How much tier paid via selling L$, how much from CC charges, How much L$ is bought with CC charges, how much L$ is sold and shipped out of secondlife via paypal or checks. How much land is bought via selling L$ and then using the USD balance for Island or Mainland purchases. These would be interesting metrics. Exactly what butters Linden Lab's bread. If it turns out the overwhelming majority (90% or more) of tier comes from CC charges then I can understand how the Lab may not consider in world businesses relevant (even though there would be no secondlife without the in world businesses).

[Prokofy Neva]

Ann, if a year ago, Glenn Linden admitted that only 15 percent of private island sales were from the outworld corporations, I don't think we magically saw this double, or even remain the same or grow slightly!

They are touting education now because that's where there have been new purchases of islands that are non-end-user and non-inworld business.

If each and every account is tagged as follows, I have no doubt where the bread will be seen to be buttered:

o end-user
o inworld business
o enterprise
o education

This isn't an endless dbase chase through 12 million records.

As you noted, you start by checking CC purchases of currency and tier.

Take the positive monthly linden people, and calculate how much is being sold to pay for tier, and how much is being cashed out of LL.

Naturally the offsite PP payments for rentals are not factoring in and there's an awful lot of that, I bet the NMC educational empire is all offsite, and many island empires are all offshore banking.

I'm confident that today, and for some time to come, you will see that the people paying the most tier are:

o rentals businesses, mainland and island
o content businesses
o non-profits or break-evens helping newbies or engaged in inworld art, music, etc.

Let them calculate it and prove me wrong, that's fine, it will still come out as a big sector they can't afford to step on.

I agree that M is getting political information that is agenda-setting, of course, but perhaps he has his own outside backstops to get a different picture from the industry at large.

[Clubside Granville]

Lots of good stuff Prok. Lots of good stuff we've seen before. The regime changes, but do they listen.

Just a couple of things since otherwise I'd create a much less coherent post of equal size:

Education: are they insane? As someone who's career is developing educational platforms, Second Life makes no sense. The hardware requirements are too steep, developing relevant content is too time consuming, and after that you're left with in-world discussions/lectures. Yeah, sign me up for that. Education is a huge market in K-12, but SL don't hunt for that crowd. That leaves *cough* higher education. Big money. *cough*

Linen Lab is profitable? (An aside: doesn't it still irritate you every time someone writes "Linden Labs", especially supposedly Second Life-oriented or "professional" news sites?) Wow. Shocker! Actually, no... computer hardware costs continue to shrink, and LL was never on the cutting edge there to begin with. Do they pass the savings on to us? Nope. Sure, a drop in "setup" fees on islands, which equal about two times the cost of the associated hardware they claim actually runs four simulators. What a joke. This is also my problem with OpenSim: why develop against a Second Life codebase hopelessly lost in a sea of crapware, poor code, poor design, a with the most essential piece of the code (Havok) being a commercial product? They're riding tier-paying customer's backs to profitability while cutting them no breaks as you said.

Oh well, Im far too irritated to go on. Shouldn't our Second Lives be free of First Life's irritations?

[Desmond Shang]

I share a lot of these thoughts, Prok.

Lately though I've got some very good reasons to be hopeful, especially with regard to Company cooperation, inworld businesses and the economy.

In a month or two here I should be able to show you exactly what I'm talking about - right now I need to make sure I'm getting the right picture.

* * * * *

I'm not sure I agree with you on the traffic stat, however.

For a few weeks some merchants I know had some non-traffic-stat influenced sales - via the RC client if I recall correctly. Where keywords really did reflect what was sold in their shops and ranked places by content fairly accurately, regardless of the number of camp bots.

Long story short, it helped them dramatically. Perhaps we keep traffic as a number, but make it so camp bots don't drive up search relevance. There really are some people who lose big because of these bots.

[Prokofy Neva]

Desmond, that's pretty lame, hinting that you have some sort of inside dope or some trajectory you see that you can't talk about. What, the Lindens had you test Havoc? And? This inspires confidence?

Camp bots need to be paid for and regulated, then "traffic infusion" will die down. It isn't the big thing you imagine. Your friends' story is the one anecdote like everybody tells one anecdote.

If you don't want to hear this from me, you will hear it from the economy worsening substantially if traffic is removed. It is already hurting as the positive Linden flow numbers show dramatically, and that's a reflection of the Lindens already monkeying with search and killing it off for a lot of people outside the camped/bot circle.

[economic mip]

"Quite frankly, I have to say that if this educational boom was the real cultural upheaval that you imply, we'd see numerous students' blogs. We don't see any. We see educators and more to the point, people selling consulting and educational software to educators."

I do not know why this really stuck out at me, perhaps it is because of the line I have heard over and over again, "Our teachers are into this, and we are not". It just seems a bit strange to me that this is the case, and I imagine that with time it will change as the idea of a class in a virtual world becomes more commonplace. I really think that part of the problem is that the Lindens are only supporting four languages at the moment, and um not everyone in the world speaks these languages. A central Mexican professor I know recently lost about half a sim, because as I understand it his bosses could not find enough information on Second Life to justify the higher tier prices for the next school year. He abandoned the land because he needed to get rid of it fast, and did not understand his other options.

[Rebecca Proudhon]

LL putting corporate and "education" above "end-users," is just another attempt at delusion and a death wish.

The corporate world do not need avatars in business meetings and "education," already has enough problems. Serious people in either of these sectors will look at SL as a distraction for employees--little differnt from people wasting time online instead of working. Online conferencing or educatiuon can already be accomplished far easier then by using 3D avatars.

The real SL market is the individuals who want to just play, be social, be creative, possibly make an income and the area SL REALLY should be focusing on is the GAME market--the biggest potential of all.

SL as a place where creative people can create their own MMO's/RPG's within SL would have the most potential, were they to focus on eliminating lag, fixing concurrency problems and making it secure.

People like to play and be creative. Business and Education need avatar meetings, like they need a hole in the head. LL is hallucinating if they think these sector's presense in SL are anything more then temporary experiments, led by rogue employees who are trying to get other's intheir company to drink the kool-aid or to see if they have any markets in SL they can capitalize on.

Instead of focusing where they should, they are focusing on the idea that SL is a web replacment.