“No Worky”
by prokofy on 03/05/07 at 5:09 pm
By Prokofy Neva, Community Affairs
Metaversal malcontents mashed-up in Maryport.
Cory Linden held a town hall today in response to Project Open Letter, an initiative by Cristiano Midnight that claims already 3,805 signatures to a protest about Second Life’s poor performance.
“No worky,” somebody commented on the Concierge Group at about 2 pm SLT. I had also come to the conclusion that the Lindens’ metaversal byproduct to their software development, known as “the virtual world,” was grinding to a halt. No teleports. No search. No map. No friends. No classifieds. Hard to know how to get any work done…
“Looks like it will be a sparsely attended Town Hall,” somebody acidly replied on the list. Yet by flying, walking, teleporting, using friendship cards, somehow the area was filled to capacity by 2:15 pm.
Like flies splatting up against the windshield, your faithful correspondent and other reporters like virtual media mogul Tao Takashi were barred from entering the too-full sim of Seascale, part of a 4-sim configuration where the Lindens hold their town halls. Seascale tapped out at only 33 avatars; the other 3 each had 40-42.
A motley crew of metaversal malcontents queued up in Maryport outside the Linux club on the ramp to the bridge to Seascale. A terse Jesse Linden told me there were no repeaters, and no streams, and that we would have to listen via the Linden Townhall Closed Caption group — whose group IM, of course, wasn’t working.
“You’ll have to use the Closed Captions for the Deaf,” I explained to everybody bunching up in Maryport. “Although they’re the ones who are deaf, of course,” I quipped, indicating the refusal of the Lindens to keep open the forums, provide repeaters or a stream for such an important town hall, or even to make sure that WordPress doesn’t cap at 100 replies to every blog.
Flies against the windshield of a full sim.
Tao Takashi SOL in Wetheral outside Seascale.
Trying to get the transcript of the meeting was near impossible, as the Group IMs are one of the things that are broken. As people found they had to type something in the group to get any chat at all from it visible, and as Jeska and Torley womanfully tried to keep pasting what Cory was shouting, all kinds of typical group busy-bodies kept shushing those saying “is this group working? I can’t see it”. Typical SL bedlam.
I was trying to load my Torley Linden Watermelon launcher to lob in a few to Seascale, while struggling in the lag to answer Reuben Millionaires, as unconnected as the rest of us outside in Maryport, that he would also have to tune into the Mass for Shut-ins the Linden Townhall Closed Caption Group, when Apotheus Silverman of slexchange.com arrived and offered helpfully to try to dispatch an unmanned autopiloted 747 into the townhall. Then all of us seemed to freeze or crash…
I did gather from the bits and bobs floating back from Pooley that there is one piece of very bad news, IMHO, though the usual vocal minorities will be gleefully gloating and vindictively telling their fellow residents to “adapt or leave if you don’t like it”.
In conjuction with the upgrade of the search function, says Cory, traffic metrics will be completely removed from Second Life land parcels.
Like the whack on casinos, this will have a huge impact on business — but not in the way that the gleeful gloaters imagine, and in ways where the damage will not be immediately felt, until everybody starts to realize, oops, there goes all those “positive Linden flow” businesses still numbering only a few hundred.
The gleeful gloaters would like to get rid of traffic because they feel it is “gamed” and the top 20 places use gimmicks like camp chairs to stay on the top of the traffic list. That’s supposed to fool vendors into renting the merchant space there in the belief they will get sales. This formula is used with very widely divergent degrees of success, but now it will be removed. Yes, we got all that, it’s gamed…by a tiny percent of the thousands of people who use traffic to manage land.
RL companies also have been deeply embarrassed to find their traffic is very low on their costly developed sims. I saw 177 on the Crayonista sim last night for example. They’d do anything to get rid of that tell-tale metric that reveals their actual lack of use even by themselves, let alone their lack of popularity in the world at large. Forseti Svarog of the Electric Sheep and others have been actively agitating to get rid of traffic, calling it “broken,” which is the tekkie term for “I don’t like the way it works, and it doesn’t serve my interest”. Yes, we got all that, the still 10-15 percent of island owners in Second Life who are RL businesses don’t find that this system that serves the other higher percentages of inworld businesses is advantageous for them.
Traffic for the rest of those in business not using chairs or serving RL interests in fact is a very valuable management device. It makes an otherwise-broken SEARCH PLACES function with some sense, by arranging any key word by ranking trafficked sites. It also helps manage and develop group land, as you can constantly get feedback about what parcels aren’t working and need to have content changed to increase traffic, which is merely another name for “feedback about how land is used by people” once you get away from the religious zealotry surrounding hatred of it for prudish reasons of hating camping, malls, and clubs, or ideological reasons for being an unsuccessful RL business in SL.
Whatever resident-based or corporate-sponsored traffic metrics now become available are likely to require expensive scripts, expensive tabulation, or expensive managers — one more big blow to the public world that was more accessible to all, with public utilities like traffic metrics. Unless someone can prove this is really the biggest draw on the Lindens’ database, more than “hide my status on line,” many will not see it as justified, and will see it as an unreasonable cave to various lobbying forces.
On other topics, Cory basically had to say that LL is hiring a lot more programmers, and is already throwing 69 percent of its devs at the problems. Meanwhile, we’ll be forced to conclude that the remaining 31 percent are busy making new laggy things that will themselves becomes broken soon and require more dev time.
“Charge!”
The bridge to the future Metaverse, where many of us will be left behind.
P.S. I wonder why Cory Linden advertises in the web page section of his avatar profile a service called Campire Now, a business chat group on the web. Must be due to the group chat in SL being no-worky…
UPDATE: And here’s the transcript of the Q&A’s for those lucky enough to get on the Blog with questions and get through the queue to Cory.
Rebel Television
May 5th, 2007
Traffic and classifieds are not the only tools available. Word of mouth, brand building, and visibility all lend towards your target market arriving at your shop. Now, I do think Cory sort of threw the baby out with the bathwater with this announcement. But the sky isn’t falling (well, it’s in a perpetual state of falling in SL, but somehow chunks of moon shrapnel never rain upon the ground).
Prokofy Neva
May 5th, 2007
Im in ur internets, seeing ur rapes and assaultz
We all know namecopying on the internets = being mean, being mean is bad. Assault is also bad and so is rape (actually its alllllwight), Therefore namecopying = assault = rape. I must post my finding on my newspaper-wannabee blog to make myself look smart.
My logic is over 9000, fear me for I will call you a creepy stalker if you resist. Bow to me for I am the queen of all the seriouse business in the internet tubes.
Profoky Tubgrrl
May 5th, 2007
Btw, that last line wasn’t posted by me.
Prokofy Neva
May 5th, 2007
Rebel,
Re: “Word of mouth, brand building, and visibility all lend towards your target market arriving at your shop. Now, I do think Cory sort of threw the baby out with the bathwater with this announcement.”
Ok, go ahead, run your business just on that alone, as if you were deep in the dark Middle Ages, with men in tights, like a MMORPG game, oops, you are…
He threw out the entire bath tub with this one.
Artemis Fate
May 5th, 2007
“Once removed, how will one judge the list of websites that will suddenly srpawl across my screne? How will I know “Ooh, almost assuredly camping Chairs or Gambling or Whatever there, I’ll go over here” or “Oh, this store looks neat, and has very lower traffic so is probably new”. These are choices and decisions actual people are making using the system as it exist. Remove it and you remove a source of information that the people utilizing SL for the actual ‘stuff’ of SL, the Cyber-Sex, the Yiffing, the Horseback Riding, Blowing Things Up, Chatting, Dancing, the Gorean RP, the crafting of Giant Robots that Look cool for the Sake of Lookign Cool and so forth, are using.”
You’re right! If only there were some way to put in some sort of “keyword” to search for what you want, instead of that old outdated traffic only search. Perhaps the Lindens ought to make a system where you can search for places by this, “keyword” if you will, like camping, horseback riding, blowing things up, chatting dancing, and gorean RP, and get a list of
results.
“Artemis, we already long since got your point: as an IRC channeller, tekki, builder for the Sheep, blah blah blah, you have a different set of views than me. But you’re not “right” any more than you believe me not to be “right”. Get over yourself.”
Let me translate for the people who don’t speak Prokofian:
Translation:
>>”Artemis, I don’t really listen, but I think you go to IRC, and you build for the sheep, and therefore i’ve decided you are evil and what your views are based on who you’re around, not what you say. Therefore you’re not right, because I am the just crusader of light. Get over yourself.”
“This is a fact. They are embarrassed. It’s been discussed all over the Internet. If you missed it, well, you’re oblivious, and now that you work for one of these metaversal agencies, suspect in your claims.”
Translation:
>>”This is something I made up, but am so deluded I can only see it as a fact. God knows I couldn’t quote a source or two, being the super-journalist I see myself as. So i’m just going to perpetrate it as a fact and then throw some insults out as my source, that’s how journalism works right?”
“I promote my viewpoint, yes, I can be reliably depended upon to do that : )”
Translation:
>>”I never change my mind because I believe I am always right. You can never be wrong if you believe yourself to always be right, sometimes in my case though I have to wish upon like, 20 shooting stars.”
“Truth hurts, Artemis.”
So does getting hit in the face with Manure
“Um, no, I assault them for trying to get rid of a public metric that helps the world just to kill the messenger of the news that yeah, newbies need jobs and want in on the economy, and that yeah, somebody other than Adam Zaius wants to be at the top of the classifieds list? hello? hell, yeah.”
Translation:
>>”I’m going to try to be demeaning and pretend like what I said is already a well-accepted fact, this largely makes me look ridiculous, but I think it’s a risk worth taking.”
“You aren’t making sense.”
Translation:
>>”What? Oh, sorry, I was talking to myself again.”
“No, traffic, when it isn’t gamed, which is 90 percent of the time on 90 percent of the lots, is fine as a metric, a good public measure of merit and and accountability. Hardly a game, that.”
Translation:
>>”Nothing makes for a good journalist like making up statistics on the spot!”
“BOY are you in for a surprise!”
I imagine so will be your friends and family when you have to tell them you’re schizophrenic, no…wait, that wouldn’t be surprising for them at all. Never mind.
“Who says anything about helping newbies? They objectively help newbies by paying them. But they help themselves by having those same payouts come right back in the form of casino takings or in vendor sales. But it’s all consenting adults, eh?
So, away with your net-nannying please.”
Translation:
>>Despite making the same claims against camping chairs, i’m going to wittily switch my view so I can attack my opponent for the same points that I made! Oh ho ho, Prokofy you are the clever one!”
“I’m chuckling to myself, since I know a great deal more about this than you do now, or forever, but it’s not important, you only look stupid making comments like that.”
Translation:
>>”I’m chuckling to myself, because I can never stop laughing. My cats keep telling great jokes to me. But also, it gives me time to be demeaning on a subject I don’t really have the right to be on. But hey, as long as I BELIEVE i’m a journalist and believe I know a lot about journalism, despite ALL evidence to the contrary, that still makes me a journalist right?”
“You seem to fail to grasp the point: journalism *of this sort* is just the ticket for a closed, controlled, synthetic world. Just the ticket.”
Translation:
>>”Can’t you see that I am the great and mighty savior of the metaverse? I mean, I don’t dress in these pajamas and carry around this wooden sword for nothing. My words help liberate countries, my insults are like sledgehammers to the walls of injustice! Remember those walls? The ones I created here when people disagreed with me! Oh if only you could see my glory as the only savior of this dark and twisted world. But one day, statues of me will be put up in every park, and no one will be allowed to say one dissenting word to my glory, oh yes, this will be the day of true justice!”
Prokofy Neva
May 5th, 2007
>Perhaps more to the point . . .does anyone know what the new search ordering algorithm is to be? If not traffic, what? Relevance? That would just spawn an avalanche of keywords, accurate or not.
Obscure, you’re just not GETTING IT. You don’t see that to keep asking questions like this is ABSURD. Because they do not tell you, and may not know that themselves.
They have NOT TOLD US this information. They should, of course, if they’re going to do something like whack the economy with a big stick to shake off campchairs and traffic in general but they don’t. They don’t care. The inworld economy is a by-product of what they are doing. They don’t really give a good goddamn whether search works. “Someone will make everything,” Philip Linden says impatiently. Sure, someone will make a search, someday. It will have a way of ranking, and that will be hotly argued about, and tweaked, or ignored, or it won’t matter.
And duh, because even those of us not tekkie enough to follow everything about algoriths DO realize that return by relevance/clicking/keywords will spawn avalanches of concentrated Google bombing, we are objecting to what they are doing. Because they are not demonstrably.
Only parody, satire, and polemicization — not some kind of wire-service straight journalism — works on a country like this where they make things in secret, keep you in the dark, change things that effect you profoundly without your participation AND get you to pay for all of this, with poor performance to boot.
If you want “journalism” go to Reuters or SLNN or wherever, and stop complaining about the style of community journalist that works for this world.
Prokofy Neva
May 5th, 2007
*They are not demonstrably *going to make something better, but will very likely make something worse.
Proof of my point: campchairs became worse, more aggressive, and more widespread AFTER they removed the Developers’ Awards designed to get rid of them.
Artemis Fate
May 5th, 2007
“Only parody, satire, and polemicization — not some kind of wire-service straight journalism — works on a country like this where they make things in secret, keep you in the dark, change things that effect you profoundly without your participation AND get you to pay for all of this, with poor performance to boot.
If you want “journalism” go to Reuters or SLNN or wherever, and stop complaining about the style of community journalist that works for this world.”
Yeah, it’s working VERY well. Most people think you’re a crazy jackass, and the rest just think you’re a jackass so assuming you’re trying for that, you’re doing a very good job. Now the Herald just needs some reporters to tell us what’s going on, not what they BELIEVE is going on.
The 9th Circuit
May 7th, 2007
Of course camping chairs are worthless. Anyone trying to somehow support camping chairs is utterly clueless.
All camping chairs do is eat up all of the resources of a sim with afk zombies. How anyone can muster up the energy to support this completely worthless piece of crap concept is either gaming the system themselves, is marketing trash masquerading for merchandise/product, or has no marketing business savvy/is too lazy to use their imagination to market their business without the help of an outside entity like LL.
I have an idea for you. Why don’t you grow a brain? hmmm?
Anonylol
May 8th, 2007
Prokofy, you are not a competent journalist. Stop acting like you have a fucking clue as to what you’re talking about.
This message is brought to you by the PN.
Hazim Gazov
May 9th, 2007
I’m sorry, the last poster was just a tad mentally retarded. He meant brought to you by ebaumsworld.com
Zmajrax
Jun 3rd, 2007
http://supergirlsex.info x
Hank Ramos
Nov 5th, 2008
You’re welcome prok!
My Universal Translator is also free!