Monday, May 16, 2011

Tech: Group chat is broken. Complain or solve?


Group chat  is broken.  Complain or solve?
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by Selby Evans
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Mister Acacia is complaining about group chat:  
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Thinkerer Line:
Complaining about a problem is more popular than fixing it.  And last longer.
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Group chat is broken.  Has been broken for years. Complaints:
  • Chat lag so bad it rearranges the conversation
  • "Unable to open..."
  • "Unable to send your message.."
  • And a new one, yet to be noticed 
That new one points a way out.  You can't connect to your friends on InWorldz or other VR places.  That's not something you can expect the Lindens to fix.  Not even if you still think LL can fix the other ones.
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I don't think LL can fix any of these.  If  LL could fix the problems in the legacy architecture that handles group chat, LL would have fixed the problem long ago.  My guess is that LL will resolve the problem eventually by moving the process out of the SL system and onto the web.  If they don;t act soon, however, it may be too late to matter.  Because Facebook has another solution.  
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The Hobo Helpers group in Second Life has already set up a corresponding Facebook group: 
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Facebook now has Hobo Helpers in Second Life
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As of now, we have not tested the group chat, but we can use the group chat there if we find that it works better than the inworld group chat.  Our main interest is in making it easy for new residents and prospective residents to contact us.  People do not have to be inworld or even registered to contact us.  
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There was a time when most hardware could not accommodate the Second Life viewer and a web browser at the same time.  In the early days (2005), when I opened a browser from the viewer, a lot of stuff got saved to disk before the browser opened.  It took too long for me to do it casually.
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That was then.  This is now.  I have several gigs of memory and almost always have Facebook open while I am running the viewer.  If I run into chat lag in a group I talk with a lot, I will be suggesting that we open up a Facebook branch and use that for chat.  My guess is that Facebook will not have problems with chat lag.
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BTW, my friends on InWorldz can join the FB group just as easily as I can.  
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