Comments on: The Fast and the Furious: Second Life on the Autobahn

By: Prokofy Neva

Prokofy Neva — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:17:13 +0000

>Imagine being able to code a tab for event management and it has all kinds of functionality in it for changing a sim, bringing in external media feeds, sending out polls, or whatever – and the code for that tab, being pulled from a Web site with in-world data calls and scripts, could be updated from the Web itself, which then allows calls to the world, etc.

Dusan, can you STOP gulping the Kool-Aid for just one second and LOOOOK at the damn viewer!

None of this fabulousness you are warbling about is there now, nor planned for the future.

Coding special functions on top of a BROKEN Event search is absurd.

You can’t click on a field in SL anymore and search for what’s happening at a certain time. THAT IS GONE. THAT IS BROKEN.

Where the hell were YOU during Beta that you couldn’t see this, and denounce it?!

By: Prokofy Neva

Prokofy Neva — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:15:08 +0000

This is appalling stuff, Dusan, shame on you.

I’ve taken all this bad thinking up here:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2010/03/chchchchchanges.html

I’m with Samantha on condemning Gwyn for claiming that criticim is “infantile” even if I don’t share her enthusiasm for opensource. Breaking Search so that it only points to Linden properties is what is “infantile”.

BTW, this Kool-aid on OAuth is misplaced too, it really really better than Ordinal’s setup.

By: Samantha Poindexter

Samantha Poindexter — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 02:35:42 +0000

Gwyneth: Sorry, I don’t agree that it’s “immature and infantile” to take issue with the fact that Linden Lab has, after choosing one path at a fork in the road, decided to change its mind, hop the curb, and drive pell-mell through the woods to try to get to a different path. The first path — staying out of governance as much as possible, open-sourcing all the infrastructure, and becoming one provider of sims in a much larger marketplace — was and is preferable to what they’re now attempting, which is to retroactively batten down the hatches and try to control all aspects of their virtual world.

I’m all for opposing viewpoints, but a bit of respect might be nice. (No, adding “with due respect” to your characterization of the opposition as immature and infantile doesn’t actually make it any more respectful.)

By: Samantha Poindexter

Samantha Poindexter — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 02:24:23 +0000

Miss Orr: while I don’t think the new Twitter functionality qualifies as an amazing technological advance, it does differ from Miss Malaprop’s device in that it doesn’t require you to share your password with anybody except Twitter, or to set up a relay script on your own server. (I trusted Miss Malaprop with mine in the serene knowledge that she wouldn’t misuse it, but I believe she would be the first to grant that this was not an optimal practice.)

By: Metacam Oh

Metacam Oh — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 01:38:49 +0000

I like the new viewer, I really do, it’s just more “Heavier” on my computer, and shared media is an amazing add on but brings my SL experience to a crawl. Running the old viewer and the same flash/video in a firefox window wouldn’t cripple my computer like that so I hope Linden is working on that issue.

By: Emilly Orr

Emilly Orr — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:50:51 +0000

There’s a lot of disappointing information in this post, though as always, I thank you for writing it, and for asking the hard questions.

I only have one minor comment for now–since Ordinal Malaprop invented TweetBox, many of us have BEEN using Twitter from Second Life. Why do they laud THAT as such an amazing technological advance?

By: JeanRicard Broek

JeanRicard Broek — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:03:18 +0000

There are a number of great comments here regarding the new 2.0 viewer/browser platform. The fact is; the new viewer is now a richer platform like SL itself. I believe the Lab intended it to be that way. They will not need to build everything. For example Dusan’s ideas about making the slide-out side-panel usable by outside developers with plugin apps from HUDs to whole applications is great. Gwyne certainly does “get it” when she says.
“What does that mean? The “SL experience” will be much less a release after a release of new viewers, every time something needs to be tweaked; but the “viewer” will become more and more a framework for plugins”

The major issue I still have is just how slow rezzing things has become and the 50 avatar limit for a sim will need to disappear if concurrency grows. The complaints about rez lag are not going away. SL is stable but slow and waiting to rez is the killer to fun and “shopping”. The current “user experience” is akin to playing football with your legs tied together. Hopefully new HTML vendors and asset stores outside LL will solve the problem.

By: Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » The Fast and the Furious: Second Life … | Portal site of Second Life and metaverse"MetaLog-meta log"

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:21:44 +0000

[...] So the profiles as we see them today, we wanted to surface as much information as we could at once, … [...]

By: Eris

Eris — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:33:51 +0000

Have to agree with Daniel, trying to shoehorn everything into one interface is the main problem with the beta and every previous client. New users login expecting iPhoto and get presented with Photoshop, it’s crazy.

Seems to me, since we’re being driven (against my better judgment) into the web, that there’s a logical and natural division that could be drawn. Give simple stripped-down access into SL for social or casual use via a web-browser (achieved through plug-ins or clever future use of HTML5 if that’s possible) and keep the (free!) full-featured standalone client for the creatives and more immersed user.

Apart from a few glaring errors of judgment in the beta client I’m generally really positive about it – but this one-client-fits-all approach is never going to please everyone, let’s not waste any more time even trying to achieve it.

By: Dusan

Dusan — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:19:56 +0000

I’m really relieved about T’s comments, and I think the Lab and the community in general supports Daniel’s point about different viewers for different needs. I won’t get into a discussion here about the registration of third-party viewers, but clearly while this will limit choice, I think it will do so (mostly) to the benefit of the community – there will still be options, although innovation may slow down because someone hacking together new functionality may feel a chill at the registration process. But overall, there will still be what I think of as ‘channel choices’.

What’s even more intriguing to me is all that ‘real estate’ on the side of the viewer, and Esbee skated around the question of whether it could be used for anything else: what I’m talking about are the tabs on the right side of the screen, and I can’t help wondering why one of those tabs couldn’t be a “HUD tab” or an “educator tab” and the tabs could be coded by residents and because they’re Web-based we could have a whole new layer of application development where we’re building apps for the viewer ITSELF without having to drill down into the source code.

Imagine being able to code a tab for event management and it has all kinds of functionality in it for changing a sim, bringing in external media feeds, sending out polls, or whatever – and the code for that tab, being pulled from a Web site with in-world data calls and scripts, could be updated from the Web itself, which then allows calls to the world, etc.

So the answer might end up with a spectrum from different viewers for different use cases, PLUS an application layer inside the viewer itself, based on allowing people to “code the tabs”.

(Which might, like Shared Media, include stuff driven or attached to enterprise or on-line applications, whether Sharepoint or Facebook).

So, I’m really relieved to hear T’s comments – there was something about the messaging around Snowglobe that left me totally confused and I’m glad for the clarity as well.