The greatest trick the FIC ever pulled was convincing the world they did not exist.

There are rumblings afoot regarding just whom Linden Lab are talking to and trying to appease with some of their recent changes. Let’s take a look at the recent initiative to standardise clothing descriptions. In the blog post Linden Lab said :

In order to make this easier for shoppers, we have worked with Second Life content creators to define a way to clearly communicate this to customers.

This seems completely reasonable to me, but there is a concern regarding just whom these selected Second Life content creators are, prompting Sassy Romano to post a thread in the merchants forum : Commerceteam Linden and the secret meetings :

So, let me get this straight… There was a “project” that merchants helped with (who?) yet not one single mention of this project or initiative mentioned here, in what should be considered one of the primary communication vehicles and now… NOW… LL asks that all merchants standardise on the outcome of this covert project when they were all but nearly all excluded.

Here’s the thing, Sassy has a point. Why wasn’t this discussed in the merchants forum? Where was it discussed? Who were the merchants involved? Where’s the transparency? I have been one of the few who sees the merit in this initiative and I do think this sort of standardised labelling is a step in the right direction, but surely the discussion should have been made more public considering it’s an initiative that Linden Lab want the wider public to embrace.

Then there are the changes to the transaction history page, which some now suspect is being changed in the interests of some of Second Life’s most successful merchants.

This view seems to come from the viewpoint that changes such as allowing people to view more than 500 transactions are useful of course for busier merchants. The thing being missed here is that if merchants are conducting that many transactions, then the system should allow them to see those transactions. So this is a change that is needed.

However, as some parts of the transaction history page are changing people are adding two and two and coming to five. For example the download option of CSV, rather than XLS or XML. I’m a fan of the CSV format as I use it a lot in my day job, it’s a very useful format for importing and exporting from various apps and scripts. People will have other workflows that work with different formats, but the problem many are having with the new transaction history page isn’t what LL are adding, it’s what they are taking away and then when they feel that part of the changes are for a small, albeit successful, group of merchants, they feel all the changes are being made in the interests of those merchants and those merchants only.

This doesn’t appear to be the case, LL are just looking to enable a more efficient page that caters to more merchants, but they are in danger of rubbing people up the wrong way when they make changes that only appear at face value to favour the select few.

In terms of whom LL talk to, it makes absolutely perfect sense to talk to successful merchants and region owners. However it would also be sensible to engage more with a wider variety of merchants for issues such as the transaction history page in particular and as Sassy Romano said about the standard descriptions for clothing, that discussion should really have taken place in a more public location due to its very nature of being about standards.

Linden Lab are upping their communications, but less cloak and dagger discussions in certain areas would be welcome.

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