Peering Inside: The Second Life year in review (part 6)
Linden Lab policy, business, staff and announcements
Linden Lab has been busy. Not actually very communicative, but busy. While there have been a lot of communications written this year, it seems that all of the major ones have required additional clarification due to being vague or ambiguous.
We might gently suggest that if an announcement requires one or two clarifications to follow it up, and still leaves a majority of affected people confused, then perhaps the original announcement needs more work.
- Linden Lab's exclusive hand-and-eye pendants were franchised out.
- Linden Lab confused users with an email that looked like a phishing scam.
- Linden Lab launched the Resources Directory. Do you even remember that it exists?
- More continents rolled out.
- Users discovered performance problems with an update, and were castigated by Linden Lab and threatened with being banned — right up until the point that it was discovered to be a genuine problem. Again in March, Linden Lab smacked down users who were reporting an almost identical problem after an update, but again, discovered that the users were correct when they eventually looked at the data.
- The Land and Concierge staff opened an inworld office. Eating their own dog-food, as it were.
- Linden Lab debunked a rumor about Solaris. Although it turned out later that they were mostly wrong in that.
- A memorial was set out in Plum to commemorate Second Life's early adopters (those who were in before April 2003).
- The gambling ban on July 25 which was widely presaged to spell the doom of Second Life and of Second Life's economy, and ... err ... didn't, although Ginko began to collapse seriously at this point. It was widely speculated that this was because of an FBI investigation, but Linden Lab says that this was not so, and that it was solely their own initiative in order to comply with law.
- Linden Lab raised the floor bid on mainland auctions by 25%.
- The total number of premium accounts fell for the first time (but not the last) in August.
- Linden Lab outsourced their accounting to CGS.
- Linden Lab launched the Second Life Grid website, drawing a distinction between the platform and the world running on it.
- With little advance warning, European users started getting charged VAT.
- Linden Lab used user-created content for marketing, not only failing to credit the creators, but actually editing to remove the existing credits — not for the first time, either.
- Linden Lab staffers clashed with users on a number of occasions, demanding that certain offending content be removed, but refusing to identify which items of content.
- Linden Lab and IBM announced the formation of a group to collaborate on virtual world interoperability standards and specifications. This is not expected to happen quickly.
- Linden Lab stopped responding to emails, switching to support tickets and their unreliable and slow PR channels only.
- Linden Lab progressively removed the "owned by its residents" from marketing materials and web-pages.
- Catamount Ventures sold ten percent of their stake in Linden Lab for more than 500 million dollars.
- Linden Lab's governance team began regular inworld office hours.
- Chinese media reported the opening of a Linden Lab office in Beijing, but Linden Lab has hedged as to whether it is an office, a partner, an agent or something else.
- Philip Rosedale suddenly spoke up in late November and spoke at length about Linden Lab's mission statement. To this day, nobody can figure out quite why. Two months later this was followed up with another post reiterating Linden Lab's focus on stability and happy customers.
- The volunteer-team opened up a blog of their own.
- Cory Ondrejka (CTO) is let go from Linden Lab, over differing management styles.
- Linden Lab starts offering account statements. They're a bit rocky at first, but the bugs are sorted out fairly quickly.
- Linden Lab issued warnings about fraudulent currency exchanges — of course, there's no real way to spot one.
- Linden Lab issued a vague policy against certain classes of ad-farms. Easily misinterpreted just the policy announcement caused problems of its own.
- Linden Lab moved to stop fraudulent island transfers/sales.
- Linden Lab changed sim pricing and capacity for void/openspace simulators.
- Linden Lab continued to weight the new search system against bots and mule accounts.
- Linden Lab surveyed on reactions to vanity names.
- Philip Rosedale announced he would be stepping down as CEO and stepping up as company chairman when a replacement was chosen. That replacement turned out to be Mark Kingdon.
- Linden Lab clamped down on trademarks above and beyond the restrictions permitted by law, and gave everyone 90 days to comply. The actual posting was ambiguous and many felt it was insulting. The new policies also significantly disagreed with the traditional set. That 90 day grace period expired yesterday, so today also marks the first day of enforcement, and that promises to be interesting.
- Philip Rosedale appeared to testify before a Congressional Subcommittee about Second Life and virtual worlds.
- Linden Lab lowered island prices, and the resulting lower costs caused angry outrage that took them by surprise.
- Linden Lab finally hired a communications manager, Kathleen Craig, formerly of Millions of Us.
- Linden Lab announced that Popular Places would be replaced by the Showcase, chosen by an editorial panel, but refused to divulge their editorial policy.
- Linden Lab proposed flagging searches for spam-control or inappropriateness.
- Linden Lab changed billing providers, but refused to say who their billing provider was, why they changed, or when they changed. It's a secret.
- Linden Lab accidentally loosed megaprims, and spent the next week doing pretty much everything but communicating with users about it. In light of previous statements, the change appeared to be an intentional one, so Linden Lab's silence on the matter was considered particularly offensive.
- Linden Lab abruptly took management of the fifth anniversary celebration away from users, who had spent the 12 months planning the event, citing fears of possible legal restrictions. That anniversary is, as we've said, today. Organizers for the sixth anniversary are hoping to avoid the involvement of Linden Lab next year.
- Linden Lab deleted the accounts of (reportedly) seven in ten of German teens in Teen Second Life. Linden Lab declines to discuss the matter.
- Linden Lab released new newbie avatars, commissioned earlier in the year.
- Linden Lab yanked a ton of content, apparently as a part of a DMCA action, then responded evasively calling the whole thing an accident and indicating that it was fixed — but reports are that the content remains broken.
All in all, a pretty poor year of communications, particularly with regard to policy. Many users feel that the last six months particularly has seen a sharp decline in effective communication from and by Linden Lab.