A public service announcement

For the record, I'm Tateru Nino. I'm a professional writer and I write about all sorts of stuff, including Second Life and Linden Lab.

Now, here's the important bit: No, I don't run Second Life. No, I don't run Linden Lab either. Nor do I work for them. No, I am not the right person to talk to insofar as demanding that I change a Second Life policy, or fixing a Second Life bug.

No, I can't unban your account. No, I can't ban someone else's account for you, even -- and I want to make this absolutely clear -- even if he touched your dolly.

Astonishingly, I also can't fix any billing issues you have or cancel your account or open a new one for you, or sell you an island ... so please stop sending me your names, addresses, credit-card information, and Second Life user names and passwords.

Seriously, people. Don't send me that stuff. Please stop sending me that stuff. The only thing I can do with that would be to steal your identity and run up your credit-card bill -- and I'm not going to do that. (Actually, come to think of it, that would be plenty of info to report your card as stolen, but I'm not going to do that either)

The people you want to talk to are called Linden Lab, and you can contact them via their support page (there's telephone numbers there too).

That this post even becomes necessary gives you some idea how far out of hand it has been.

Concurrency stats offline

The live data feed for Second Life concurrency is off the air. It went dark on the afternoon of Thursday, 30 April, and hasn't been updated since.

Normally, I'd think of this as just another glitch in the statistical feeds. Heaven knows, there have been plenty of those -- having some missing data is not uncommon.

The timing got me thinking, though.

You see, Linden Lab purged a whole bunch of inactive, never-logged-on accounts (somewhere around the 800,000) mark. And just prior to doing so, the feed for the total number of accounts went dark - and has remained that way ever since.

30 April, coincidentally marked the day that the Lab was going to start taking action against traffic bots. Everyone, of course, was expecting to see concurrency take a bit of a hit, though it wasn't clear how much of a hit. Hard to tell, though, because the concurrency stats went dark that very day.

I'd love to think this was a coincidence, but the available history makes that an unreasonable conclusion.

Mixed interests - balancing acts in Second Life coverage

One of the tricky things about reporting on Second Life is the issue of what stuff to cover. Hey, how tricky can it be? You just write about what people are interested in, right?

Yeah, you'd think so.

What people are interested in, though, isn't necessarily what you might think people are interested in.

If a user or organization is doing something super-awesome in-world, the odds are that the Second Life readers will mostly pass it over. Human interest stories and similar all get minimal attention. Okay, except for the occasional 'Why the hell are you even covering this stuff anyway?'

Hirings/departures at Linden Lab? Now that generates some interest. Other Linden Lab doings and policy changes even more so, and speculations about which way the Lab is going to jump next are right up there.

Top of the heap - the really grabby stuff? New release candidates.

...

I know, right?

My essential hypothesis sort of works like this... Viewers and stuff about Linden Lab and their staff-lineup and policies affects everyone in Second Life, directly or indirectly. Stuff that people are doing in-world though will axiomatically only have appeal to a subset of people.

Live music, and audio/voice events for example - that only appeals to a portion of the people I know. Likewise not everyone I know is a gamer, or necessarily interested in recreational activities. Not everyone is keen on shopping or networking.

Different interests, different foci, and that subdivides the community right there.

But if you stand anywhere in Second Life long enough, a discussion will start up about the Lab, or some particular Linden, or about some new policy or some enforcement action in-world (gone right or wrong). Talking about Linden Lab seems to be the favourite pastime of the majority of Second Life users, and there's an astonishing amount of misinformation going around.

Just yesterday I walked into an argument where a bunch of people believed that all non-G-rated content was being banished from the grid next week. Earlier that morning, someone was telling me how Linden Lab was merging Teen Second Life with adult Second Life today. Simple misunderstandings and misinterpretations run through communities like wildfire and feed on themselves. Sometimes people just spread tales to laugh at how far they will go.

Still, the Lab and its doings remain among the most popular talking points with users in-world, and that's something that's hard to ignore.