Linden Lab fails to advise, Snapzilla suffers

Cristiano Midnight is not a happy bunny. You see, he runs SL-Universe and (more particularly in this case) the part of it called Snapzilla, which is sort of like flickr specifically adapted for Second Life, where hundreds or thousands of snapshots are emailed from Second Life each day in an email format called a postcard.

Midnight's problem is that the postcard format suddenly changed, causing a whole lot of images intended for Snapzilla to go in the trash. Midnight had to work pretty hard to figure out what the changes were and adjust the software to work with it. You might think, "Meh. Linden Lab can do whatever they like with the format. They don't have to warn anyone". Perhaps – but actually they specifically promised not to do that after a previous snafu with IMs. We'd be pretty ticked off in that position.

You see, way back when, Linden Lab promised Second Life users that changes to externally visible formats (like instant messages routed to email, and snapshot formats and so forth) would never go ahead without advance warning of the change, to allow third-parties to adjust their software without risking significant interruption.

So, how come this one fell through the net? Was the promise forgotten, or was it poor organization?