If people tagged their own plots, then LL could incorporate search, and then provide results that way. Similar interests and groups could naturally clump together.

I also have asked Linden Lab over and over to automate transfers, moves, and name-changes of sims. If these were at little or no cost, we would see people organizing and affiliating more often with each other on private islands.

I’ve talked about the need for different planned areas, when Linden Lab started up Zindra:

http://www.secondtense.com/2009/03/linden-labs-red-light-district-idea-re.html

… as well as speaking about additional privacy and anti-harassment tools.

There’s a lot of tools Linden Lab could deliver to allow users to do planning themselves. They haven’t. I agree with the concept of the need for city planning with virtual worlds. I may disagree with the implementation by the game-gods (and past attempts that failed by Linden Lab are my proof) but fundamentally, there needs to be a better way to plan and cohabitate a virtual world.

It wouldn’t hurt if Linden Lab promoted more than just sex, nowadays, either.

I made call for the design of a platform of roads, streets, and urban planning ideas akin to what “built” the 20th century US.

check ancient 3dpoint blogs for details…:)

anyhow. um. good to see youve now got it.:)

but dont worry, the next web 3.0 VR VC vested kids will forget it as well….

and the full of it earther catalogers will make it so…

so when can we expect the AR blogs? dusan:)…i think(balm) will be doing them in a month;)

And AR will be the summer of 69…again;0

never trust a burning man, or those who celebrate them:)

If all we do is pay attention, all we’re doing is staring, really. By acting with intention, however, we’re putting one foot in front of the other towards, hopefully, a better future (or the future which was intended, in any case).

But to act with intent requires that we be both rooted in awareness of the present moment (attention) and in a larger context or value system.

This larger context in which we make decisions in the present moment is, well, very meta of me I suppose, but is the place from which attention and intent finds its meaning, whether that meaning is “everything is an illusion”, “first do no harm”, existentialism or whatever else you want to frame it under.

Back to the metaphor of the park – it contains a million moments of attention and intent (a source of happiness, as you say) but it also contains a larger architecture against which those million moments are framed.

Virtual worlds are hobbled by a lack of that larger architecture. I’d actually look to games, landscape architecture, anthropology, or, well, anything other than the ideology of code if I wanted to think about what those larger framing narratives might be against which we could bring our attention/intent and subsequently find that happiness which is never around the corner or down the road, but which we’ll find wherever it is we choose to be.

I believe lasting success and happiness in life primarily boils down to paying attention. Without attention, no matter how clever one’s actions or creations, you still get a product of reaction (or worse, delusion) that is not based on actual experience.

It’s not enough to simply react fervently and claim to be “embracing change.” Living in attention is the only way to really understand what is happening in any aspect of daily life, and to thereby act in thoughtful ways that support positive growth. Real or Virtual.

It seems to me like they had sort of parallel road maps. And they got it wrong. The idea seemed to be this:

- Work on shopping. Shopping and the virtual goods economy was the one consistent thing SL could brag to the press about. Thus the purchase of onRez and XStreet and all that (and the massive error of trying to eliminate free items).

- Do some stuff with voice. The billions of hours of voice was the other thing they could brag about. Except – well, none of what they did WORKED. (Avaline anyone?) And voice is STILL BROKEN!!!! (By the way, I blogged about this and even had the guys from Vivox approach me. And yet, voice is still a crap shoot at best – “will I connect to the voice server?” “why is your voice so loud and mine so soft?” “why does it cut out like that?” “oops, lost voice, need to relog”.

Why can’t voice work like Skype? Give me a BREAK, it is STILL BROKEN!!!!! (And adding voice morphing? What was that – trying to distract us from the layoffs?)

- Launch a new first hour experience and a new viewer….because the new viewer was supposed to be the start of a whole new ‘feature set’ – those irritating side panels were supposed to link to Avatars United and the Marketplace and a new and improved search and groups and who knows what else.

See, I think they actually have a backlog of innovation but the whole thing got STUCK because Viewer 2.0 was a disaster.

And don’t sugar coat it. Viewer 2.0 was the biggest error they’ve ever made. Not because it’s sooooo horribly bad as a UI, but because it’s bad enough that they can’t launch all the other stuff that was supposed to be in the pipeline BECAUSE of it.

Groups, for example, I strongly suspect, were supposed to be overhauled through some sort of connection to the Avatars United system….the groups and social networks you set up in AU were supposed to become features you could scroll and read and interact with through Viewer 2.0.

But Viewer 2.0 was a flop, because most people won’t use it, it launched with broken search, and it changed your outfits on you! And seriously, that’s a major horror!

And because most people won’t use it, the innovation which is Shared Media has no legs right now.

So…while I’d accuse them of NOT making the changes we’ve asked for, I think they planned to try to improve a lot of those things, but their sequencing was backwards, and they’re now facing this plugged up bottleneck caused by 2.0.

Hmmm. I’ll have to do a follow-up post, this time keeping it, um, a little more pithy.

My point about Mitch and open source/open systems wasn’t that SL should have continued to follow the path of open source, but that what happens in the Valley is that the values which the gray beards and VCs espouse get thrown overboard at some point.

Tech is the god. Innovation is the value. Open source and information wants to be free and the Whole Earth Catalog are the hymn books.

But then at some point all of that stuff gets thrown overboard.

(And I can’t really see how those values should exist in the first place. I still, after all this time, find it beyond me how companies can be launched with no revenue model, grounded solely in technology, with no clarity around who their customers are supposed to be).

The day Mitch said:

“But charm and character are yesteryear concepts. Because charm and character are eroded as people bring pragmatism to virtual worlds.”…..

is the day that the values with which SL was started were tossed over the side of the ship because infatuation with tech, with systems, with innovation and tinkering now needed to be put on the shelf and Linden Lab needed to become, um, more pragmatic.

It’s the SHIFT that’s I was pointing out as the betrayal, not the betrayal of open source or whatever values Mitch thought he was supporting when he supported SL.

In these calculations, the “pioneers” are the sacrifice, whether they believe in closed economies and IP protection or open source and copy/left.

The value of these systems, it seems to me, isn’t the tech or open source code, it’s in what PEOPLE make of it.

In any case, I didn’t mean to sound like I was saying “if only SL had followed the Kapor mantra of open source”.

All I was trying to point out was that at some point the users who DON’T EVEN EXIST YET and the need to monetize or cash out or whatever become the over-arching basis of everything that happens next.

Well… not writing profanity-laced repetitive flames is a big mark in Dusan’s favor.