Linden Lab And Second Life Stability, Usability - Announce Early, Announce Often, Ignore Other Stuff

When 'Linden Lab Working To Beef Up Second Life Stability, Usability' popped up on my radar, I walked with a few pounds of salt. Anyone who has been in Second Life longer than 3 months has probably heard about increases in stability and usability from enough people to make their sculptie prim genitalia shrivel. It isn't that Linden Lab isn't trying to do this - I have good faith that they are - but the routine announcements of 'almost there' are not doing Linden Lab's appearance as much justice as they are supposed to. In fact, for people who have been around long enough, the response might be... 'yeah, right.'

But the stuff on Havok is interesting, and I do look forward to that upgrade should it happen sometime soon. As a software developer myself, I respect that this is not a simple task and I can imagine that the quality assurance will be a major part of the time before release. My thought: Take your time, make sure its ready. My other thought would have been, "announce it when it is in QA". I think many announcements from Linden Lab come from meetings where people are busy planning to do things - and this, of course, can make any company look silly if it takes longer than 3 days. What do I know? Linden Lab has a PR firm that they pay, and should be advising them on things like that.

The parts on Mono(nucleosis), which I see very little value in because I don't know the architecture that they are using, is interesting - this week alone, discussions on the implementation on Mono had some seasoned software developers (at least 80 years in combined experience) batting around ideas on the LSL scripting email list. I took part, and I have a strong aversion to anything .Net (DCOM in drag which is COM with lipstick). Still, it is what it is and C# is a pretty good language for non-concurrent environments. So the announcements on Mono are nice, but again - this was first spoken of years ago - before my avatar ever sat in a camping chair (and wondered what sort of people would do that all the time!). Again, this might be something worth announcing when it is in QA, not when it was a strange growth under someone's fingernail.

Then InformationWeek announced that Linden Lab was working on HTML-on-a-prim, and I decided that, "Huh?" was the right response. Daltonic Gin first announced the OpenSim HTML-on-a-prim. Of course, that isn't Second Life. Its just the same architecture that is open source and is becoming a technological threat to Second Life - perhaps because there isn't as much need to keep things as backward compatible, or perhaps because there is less bureaucracy. Whatever the reason, there it is. Its probably in the code base now, but I haven't checked in a while. Still - it worked. Since it is a competitor to Linden Lab, apparently, it makes sense that Linden Lab wouldn't mention it. But leaving that out of an article, well - that might be an oversight.

Then came the claim that Linden Lab was developing a lightweight client for text chat, instant messaging and voice communication. Aside from the voice communication, let me refresh a few people's memory. I mean, all is fair in business - but not acknowledging the work of 15 year old Katharine Berry is kind of low. Who is she? She's the young woman who wrote the AJAX client and released it in July of last year. Leaving this out of an article? Well - that might be an oversight.

And, of course, the 'promise of open sourcing the server code ' is reiterated 3 months short of a year afterward. Again, this should not have been announced until it was in QA. Open Source works on, 'release early, release often' - not 'Announce early, announce often'.

I think the Pretty Little Hype Machine (hi Sarah) needs to let the developers code and wait on them a bit longer before following the 'Announce early, announce often' paradigm. Sure, it works for Microsoft, but that doesn't mean it will continue working for Linden Lab. Granted, InformationWeek isn't the official Second Life blog, but... credit where credit is due.

Hat tip to the grid monkeys who are probably working their bananas off. Never mind the chatter out here, folks.