Massively^™

Sharp-eyed Wildefire Walcott has spotted (and we've spent the last few hours checking and verifying it across a number of accounts) that the profiles of Second Life accounts that have no payment information on file are excluded from the new Linden Lab search system.

More specifically, if they have publish-on-web checked, their profile is available through the web-service, but it certainly appears as if the search system does not index the contents of their profile (for results, search-weighting purposes, relevance or anything else).

Cristiano Midnight is not a happy bunny. You see, he runs SL-Universe and (more particularly in this case) the part of it called Snapzilla, which is sort of like flickr specifically adapted for Second Life, where hundreds or thousands of snapshots are emailed from Second Life each day in an email format called a postcard.

Midnight's problem is that the postcard format suddenly changed, causing a whole lot of images intended for Snapzilla to go in the trash. Midnight had to work pretty hard to figure out what the changes were and adjust the software to work with it. You might think, "Meh. Linden Lab can do whatever they like with the format. They don't have to warn anyone". Perhaps - but actually they specifically promised not to do that after a previous snafu with IMs. We'd be pretty ticked off in that position.