Socially|Mundane

Prokofy Neva noticed what many of us did and wrote a great article over at the SL Herald about the 26th group Concierge clients of Linden Lab received.

Now, love her or hate her, it's a good article. Finally, she writes for them again as, in my mind, their stories are ridiculously amateurish and intentionally written to cause friction and sensationalism. So are many of Prok's writings. But at least Prok can write.

I am not a Linden lover. But I do respect them and the gargantuan task they have, a delicate balancing act in many of what they do. Constantly being beaten up by the whiners and 'better-than-thou' crowds, especially in the blogs, and definitely in their own Second life blog.

Here is an excerpt of what she wrote in that article:

The first thing they did was make this the 26th group. 26th! How can you have 26 groups!!! In every office hour, on every JIRA comment, at every real-life meet up in the back of the bar, the Lindens have told us that we can never never never ever never ever ever ever never have more than 25 groups. Because. It would be too many calls to the data base. Yet...here they made one at the drop of a party hat.

Linden Lab is ridiculously transparent is what they do. But they also are not.
There has been shrill screaming about the 25 group limit for the longest time.

I understand why many want more groups. My stand on it is "deal with it." If they raise the limit to 50, you'll want 100. They raise it to 100, you'll want 150. The limit has to be placed somewhere.

Now, I said they are transparent. Just read the SL blog every day - you'll get more information than any other 'media' company is willing to divulge in terms of communicating directly with you or about internal workings.

But also they aren't. They don't divulge everything... either by choice or simply by not thinking of it. For instance: when people asked for some kind of "back" link after a teleport. It's here now and it just appeared out of nowhere.

Many other requests and 'shines' have been answered this way.

As for the 25 group limit - and I have no inside knowledge about anything and Linden Lab - it was explained that there are technical issues. Knowing intimately how computers and databases work, I concur. However, for the concierge party this last weekend, the Lindens decided to create a group for the purpose of access to the party sims... and, I think, as an experiment.

First, there was no invitation to the group. If you are a concierge member, you simply logged-in one day and found yourself to be a member. So, this was handled at the back-end.

For some (many?) it turns out this was the 26th group they are now member of.

it also is the largest... an unheard of number of people in the group. Prok counted 6727 people. On the day of the party, I counted almost 7300. I believe Linden Lab is considering the request to raise the group limit seriously, but not making that public knowledge.

I believe if they can do it, they will. And this was some grand experiment. To see just what the load on the system might be, how well communications in the group would go and so on. Pokofy even reported that a vote proposal took ten minutes to finally appear after being sent.

And that's with only 7300 peopl in the group. Okay - so that's a lot of people in one group. But how did the back-end handle it? I don't think we will publicly know. But I'm sure the lindens were watching... and taking notes.

if the group limit is raised, that could mean exponentially more groups and group communication... and load on the back-end. So, I suspect this was, partially at least, a test of sorts... to see just what would happen. If not intentionally a test, definitely something they kept an eye on as a 'side benefit'.

Go read the article and gain two things: first, see that someone at the Herald actually can write, and on a good, interesting subject. And two: see the rhetoric that follows, which is why if you love the "Star" and "National Enquirer" type of tabloids, you'll love the SL Herald.

Second Life Herald: Tier Nation: The 26th Group

Tags: SecondLife, SL, Group Limits, Prokofy Neva, Linden Lab, Concierge