When many Second Life users espoused acta non verba (deeds, not words) to Linden Lab, they didn’t mean ‘stop talking’.

Certainly, of late, the Lab has been chock-full of deeds, and has been iterating rapidly on features and bug-fixes. There are even rumours of efforts to improve customer service, but the Lab doesn’t want to talk about that.

In the last 19 days, the Lab has made three blog posts, communicating with the community. Only one of those has been about something that the Lab was actually doing for the users’ benefit.

Make no mistake, the Lab does indeed seem to be doing things that it believes will benefit Second Life and Second Life users. But like Justice, it must not only be done but be seen to be done.

As far as conversations with the Second Life user community goes, the Lab is simply not involved. Those conversations are being driven by other people, such as New World Notes, Daniel Voyager, the Alphaville Herald, Second Thoughts (if that’s still going), and dozens of other bloggers (myself included).

Linden Lab, basically, is letting everyone else have its conversations with Second Life users, and that leaves the Lab underrepresented in conversations that it should more properly be leading.

Yes, the Lab is getting quite a lot done lately, but when you’re struggling with some insulting doofus in customer service or dealing with pernicious group-chat problems, you’re probably not even going to notice a lot of that unless someone tells you where to look.

And right now, the community’s attention is being directed by pretty much everyone but Linden Lab. I’m pretty sure that that situation is to nobody’s particular benefit.

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Tags: Acta non verba, Community, Daniel Voyager, Linden Lab / Linden Research Inc, New World Notes, Opinion, Second Life, Second Thoughts, The Alphaville Herald, Virtual Environments and Virtual Worlds