Rodvik Linden has replied to a thread on the SLUniverse Forums on 30th March 2011, called My not so humble suggestion and Open Letter to Rodvik. Rodvik Linden talks about his top three priorities for Second Life for 2011 including service, lag and usability. It’s really nice to see Rodvik is reaching out to SL residents/customers on SLUniverse Forums and Twitter.
Rodvik starts by mentioning this…
But what you probably care about is what those experiences have taught me about how our customers experience Second Life and what we need to focus on to make things better. I covered some of it from a very high level here: Introducing SL Viewer Beta with Basic and Advanced… – Second Life
Service, lag and usability are the three short-term areas we are focusing on. Usability will be the most immediately noticeable. Less noticeable, but very, very important are customer service and lag. I want Second Life to work and work well. For merchants, experienced residents, creators and newbies.
As a company, we have a ton of very cool initiatives* in production or close to being ‘green-lighted’ that I want to get to being excited about, but I do not give us as a company permission to talk about those things until we have world-class customer service, a modern usability framework and a great operating service.
That will not take that long, and we have already made progress on the customer-service side; I get a regular report on our wait times and the added resources are making a big difference. I hope it is being felt.
Usability includes not just things like Basic Mode and an improved UI (yes, learning from TPV’s and other software) but also discoverability for locations and people (who want to be discovered; of course, we are also fully committed to providing privacy controls for those who do not).
Lag is a large set of items, but possibly the most important issue. It just all needs to work better and better. This is a combination of short- and long-term technology, plus policy choices that can help.
Anyway, at the risk of being a broken record, those are my three priorities. As we knock them off, I hope you will feel the difference, and then I will feel more comfortable talking about larger, more long-term initiatives that I think will be truly jaw-dropping. But right now, we have a lot of old fashioned running a good business stuff to do.
Speaking of which, I should get back to it right now
Thanks for writing.
I am off back to work now.
Rodvik ends by mentioning the following things will be coming soon to the SL platform. My predictions puts the following launching sometime between early-mid April – late May 2011.
soft body physics, estate-level settings for Windlight, and mesh import are coming sooner rather than later.
Yay, can’t wait.
Daniel Voyager 