[sldev] Re: "But your IP wouldn't be safe"

[Dale Glass]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 09:08:51AM -0700, Chance Unknown wrote:
> since your target is SL, the people most argumentitive about privacy
> concerns are the bored lonely housewives that sit at home looking for cyber
> affairs. of course they want their identities masked. they dont get that
> kind of privay when looking for a hookup at myspace or facebook.
How about people who do business?

People do things like running servers that talk to say, in-world vendors.

If you figure out their IP address, you could cause some major trouble
very easily. 


> 
> are there any demographics that places these particular consumers in the
> primary seat driving development? it has been demonstrated over the past
> number of years that the paying customers (private islands) dont tend to
> have influence over development, so why should an even smaller cluster of
> customers be the ones responsible for driving design goals?

It's not that they don't drive development, it's that they CAN'T (or
think they can't) drive development.

For instance, people told me they requested the "mute visibility"
feature *years ago*, and LL said they can't/won't do it. So they gave up
on it. Normal people can't "drive development" for things like that,
because they have no effective way of forcing LL to do it. Sure they
could quit, but who quits over something that's not critical? And even
that would almost certainly fail unless done on a very large scale.

But, now that we have the source, I'm pretty sure that with time this is
going to change, when normal users figure out what it means. I wouldn't
be surprised if people started contacting the developers of features
they don't like and asking to drop them. And unlike with LL, single
developers are small enough that a dedicated group of users could beat
them into submission.

IMO, private islands aren't entirely the same thing, because they're
small, and because I imagine that people selling stuff want to keep
their customers happy in the first place.

But the day 1% of the 1.7M active users decide that they don't like
your stuff... well, I think that will be an interesting one.



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