Socially|Mundane

There is often a lot of shrill whining and screaming at Linden Lab for things that need to be addressed on the grid. And I have always said 'hey, Linden Lab is listening, have a little faith here."
Two examples are this:

It had been requested again and again that when you teleport to another location, make it easy to return to where you teleported from. There are time when you inadvertently TP do a location and you didn't mean to. Then, once day, without any hype or fanfare or even announcement, for that matter, I noticed in the WindLight "preview" that Linden Lab had actually implemented a link-back to where you had teleported from whenever you teleport to somewhere.

The other, more dramatic example has to do with selling land. For the longest time there have be unscrupulous 'land barons' running robots in Second Life, (a.k.a. 'bots',) that would snatch up any land placed for sale that met particular criteria.

The issue with the landbots had to do with people moving land from one account to another. A simple transfer, thus selling the parcel of digital land for a mere $1 or, a typo where an individual intends to sell the land for say $75000, but ends-up leaving a zero of the end.

In the old days this didn't matter much. However, landbots are practically instantaneous and work far quicker than can any human. The problem: the owner of the bot either would not return the parcel to the one selling or would extort a profit.

Cries to Linden Lab went full force about this issue.

Then, one day, without much fanfare at all (I don't even recall any kind of announcement,) I suddenly notice while goofing around my own estate that selling land now brings an additional warning, asking if you are certain you want to sell your parcel for the particular amount and to whom (anyone or a particular person.)

This put a stop to the unscrupulous land baron "thefts" as they were called. Which, ironically, I believe also played a major part of the recession in digital land prices along with the dumping of new land by Linden Lab.

But, I digress.

My main point here is, Linden Lab does see what we ask for. They do pay attention and try to implement our requests if it is feasible, especially if there is some kind of exploit that can be considered harmful to the residents at large, or that simply makes the grid easier and better and more convenient.

The thing to remember is that as open as LL is, they don't go announcing everything they are working on. There is a lot of 'announcement' that falls through the cracks and go unannounced. Thus, it may appear that Linden Lab is either ignoring us, or dragging their feet painfully slow. When, in fact, they already are on the issue behind the scenes.

{Note to Linden Lab: I am still waiting for you to fix that damned alpha sorting issue you broke a year ago. That is the most irritating f**kup to date as far as I'm concerned.}

So, because LL is so slow to communicate the simpler things, and sometimes the bigger, more important things (such as never letting anyone know they were even working on a solution to the landbot-theft issues,) does it come as any surprise that on the Second Life bog that they announce this:

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 12:01 AM by: Hamilton Linden
"This is a historic day for Second Life, and for virtual worlds in general. IBM and Linden Lab have announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another."

Note the date here. This is old news. This story, with photos and video has been reported again and again in the Second Life and technology blogosphere.

Now hold-on a second. I am not blasting Linden Lab for posting old news. I am simply using this example to let you, my dear reader friend, know that you really should cut Linden Lab a little slack. They aren't the quickest to respond to things and there are reasons for not responding publicly to some things at all.

For example, I can see the legal reasons they never made a public peep about the landbot-theft issue - but still worked to resolve it; read: Mr. Woebegone lawsuit.

The point is, Linden Lab cannot always turn on a dime for a number of reasons. They are slow to respond for reasons that make sense, or simply fall through the virtual cracks and it's not necessarily because they are lazy.

In fact, as an Information technology professional myself, I personally take offense when idiots proclaim such things, no matter who they are slamming: Linden Lab or anyone else. I'd rather LL just remain quiet and focus on the issue, rather than stop working, take the time to properly write an announcement, then go back to working and then repeating ever few days. 'Status reports' just slows things down.

I have no doubt there is a huge stack of announcements Katt Linden is anxious to start spamming the blog with, however, those announcement must be vetted legally, reworked, rephrased and so on, and likely must also pass muster with Linden Lab's Public Relations people.

Which, to me, explains why this old news is only now seeing the official light of day.