Long Road Behind, Long Road Ahead

For those of you who missed it, Philip recently made one of his rare appearances on the blog, talking about about Linden Lab's new mission statement which now reads "To connect everyone to an online world that improves the human condition" and SecondLife's future in general.

His post is quite ironical in two ways.

One is the the mission statement's use of the word connect. The post was made on a day where SL was unreachable for almost 24hours for many residents and if you look at the Linden blog today and scroll back, you'll see a series of posts about connection problems every single day between the 17th and 24th of November. In fact today is another rainy Sunday on which I wanted to toy a bit with the source and even spend some time in-world, but the only results I got was were "Login failed", "Site is taking too long to respond" and "503 Service not available".

The other bit of irony in it is the title of the post: "Long Road Behind, Long Road Ahead." Philip certainly is a visionary and his vision is surely what made SecondLife possible in the first place. But it occurred to me recently, that a lot of friction and frustration between Linden Lab and the SecondLife residents, may be caused through a difference in focus.

I do not want to go into the spiritual or philosophical arena too much, but there are many schools of thought, who are beginning to discover, that happiness is rooted in the here and now, while constant focus on the future or past tends to create angst, frustration and dissatisfaction.

SL Residents naturally are focusing on their experience in-world right here right now. Personal tolerance levels obviously differ, but nobody can live on a vision of a better tomorrow, if tomorrow never comes. On the other hand, over the last months if not year, Linden Lab seems to have worked based on the idea, that at least this next thing, is essentially required to keep them ahead of the competition (Philip quotes Voice in his post and Torley currently and tirelessly beats the drum about how Windlight will improve the depth of the experience).

Looking back over my experiences with SecondLife as a developer and pondering Philip's post made me aware how different this kind of focus is inside and outside LL. Probably the most prominent example of this is the status of issues on the bug tracker when they are marked as fixed internally. For a Linden developer such an issue is dealt with and finished, on the outside it means it's still unfixed here and now and circling in an orbit of Linden Lab's internal procedures, slowly descending towards impact on the official version. Looking at the JIRA and searching for issues marked fixed internally currently yields 159 results for the viewer. Technically they are marked as resolved, which of course reflects the Linden view (or the view of the devs who go to office hours), but it is obvious, that the same (the issue being resolved) is not true for residents.

Don't get me wrong, the developer's standpoint is legitimate, it is their view and experience that the problem has been fixed, but there ought to be someone understanding and tending to the gap between developers' and residents' point of focus and experience. Torley might be this person, feeling the gap (welll, when he's not all excited about Windlight), but regrettably his influence on the whole process seems to be close to zero (invariably, when he posts on JIRA that he's forwarding some issue or finding to the devs, subsequently nothing much is happening) . Look at MISC-124 on the JIRA if you need an example.

I was recently sent a transcript of a Linden office hour, where an interesting statement was made by a Linden: "... but my understanding is that the [Nicholaz] fixes that haven't been incorporated mask the real problem rather than address it."

I don't want to go into details about my individual patches here, but what my changes always do is to address a problem quickly or at least increasing the chances to address it. I think I never submitted a patch which made things worse. Even if they had the potential to push a crash towards another place in the source (by adding a check to make the program flow pass a crash point but with the possibility of failing later) they never made the source less readable or less reliable. However, this is somewhat besides the point, because even if they were nothing but band aids, they had an immediate effect, which obviously is felt by a lot of people.

But again, it mostly outlines the difference in focus between residents and LL.

Here is an example: Two of the first patches I did were submitted in mid May. One is a minor issue of no real importance (layout of the texture debug window), the other had some major impact on memory use. Both are a nice example of what I am trying to say. When I submitted them, someone inside LL said that the issues would be addressed in a different way with a more general redesign in a later release. Now (over six months later), one of the two is still open, the other is fixed internally. I don't really care about what's the state of these on the JIRA, but today both still affect end users in exactly the same way as six months ago in the official version and release candidates.

Another example like this is the Chatterbox. The Lindens have said that they will address the problem. They way I understand their line of reasoning (although this purely speculation), it means to put (off) the solution into a basket of general GUI redesign (a project which seems to be in Linden orbit for some time now).

In a blog post a week ago, I was answering a question by JayR about the difference in quality of my viewers in comarison to the Linden ones. I tried to provide an answer in that post, but I now think I missed an important point there. A good part of the answer, as I see it now, is "... because I focus on the here and now."

How long does it take Linden Lab to replace a broken light socket? About six months. Because there are currently plans to completely renew the electricity in the house anyway, which you will understand takes some time, thank you for your patience.

I think what many residents are tired of, is hearing the word later. Maybe not all, but certainly many who are using my viewers. Living based on visions works for some time, but it is part of the human nature, that experience happens in the Now. Which incidentally is the part which is missing from Philip's headline.

A developer can draw his now-experience from designing and implementing visions, but users are living an entirely different perspective. Successful companies in the Web 2.0 area are giving their users/clients meaningful and satisfying experiences, which then may serve as a solid platform to add the excitement of visions.

I don't know if I'm right in all this, but a blog post with ramblings like this is what you get on a rainy Sunday with login failed and 503 service unavailable :-)