Tools and Technology

It is hard to believe that even basic Human Computer Interaction principles were considered in implementing this, and I find it incredulous that having had similar feedback from the Beta viewer this change was pushed live in its present state.

 

I'm beginning to agree.  They didn't intergrate this well on the dashboard yet. And they didn't changes our resident profiles in search.  http://world.secondlife.com/resident/b6d530b2-d5d4-46e2-9443-3b7f738aab05

So what is the point of having our search profiles with links that say "View Full Profile in SL" while you made the profiles web-based. Roll this back to beta, and clean it up.

No error message, i can see the writing, but no pictures :-(. Sucks, lmao

Sounds like you are running Vista. Might have to add my.secondlife.com as a trusted site.

Flickr's an option now too.

I'm hoping we'll see more soon. I'd really like to link up my YouTube account.

Aww.. thanks.. just added.

Linux version worked like a charm - and I really liked the Twitter integration in the web profile!

It's nice to see so many bug fixes too - stability is getting better all the time, and that's really a main issue. Thanks for all the good work!

Starting from friends list, I (on a Mac) right click on a friend and select profile.

1) It takes too long to load the profile. As somebody said above, it should be as fast as loading any ordinary web page.

2) The window opens with my friend's URL but then switches to my URL and loads my profile. #DEFECT!

I see the same defect as your #2.

Loading a profile first time typically takes 14 seconds and somewhat faster on subsequent loads.  On my MBP with screen resolution set to 1440 x 900 the profile window covers about 55% of the screen area, that is way too big. With webkit in the viewer, they could have made a html based widget (floater) that was much less intrusive and consistent with the rest of the interface.

I see the advantage of using html for these functions particularly at the backend (I have suggested it many times in the blogs), but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. The advantage is of course it can be fixed without updating the viewer.

Agreed on the aspect ratio. People will have to update large amounts of profile images at L$10 a pop ;-)

I'm glad to see that the privacy settings are in place now. I actually did not expect this to be taken care of that quickly. Great!

But under what project/section/area do I file a jira for the new profiles? Under 'Second Life Viewer'? Under 'Second Life Website'?

I need to file a jira since saving privacy settings in Safari (at least for windows) do not work. When I try to save the settings, all I get is a new page that says

{"status":"ok","message":"The settings have been updated"}

 

But nothing is actually saved.

Whether it works in Safari on the Mac, I don't yet know.

- Luc -

It sounds like STORM-927 may be rearing it's ugly head again for some Mac users. Allegedly this was fixed in 2.5.0 Beta 3, but it sounds like some may be seeing this issue again. (Blythe Topaz seems to be having that issue).

The whole concept is just....why  use a web browser when you're in a virtual world? This is like Avatar United 2.0, completely useless, other than it would gives SL web site a false increase traffic stats. It doesn't even load  in the inwolrd browser for me. I'm turning off the auto update LOL.  Please bring back the inworld profile, and don't fix things that's not  broken. And do fix things are, such as Marketplace and inworld search  engine.

This is getting from bad to worse. 2.0+ is pretty to look at,  but UI is very poor and commands in the menus are organized in a such  none logical manner. I've been using 2.0 every day since it was released  and I still find myself searching for certain functions. UI makes and  breaks metaverse, just look at what happened to Blue Mars. They insisted  on using their "unique" UI when majority of users disagreed with it. A  pretty viewer with confusing UI will not retain new users. LL, please  hire real UI pros and apply KISS method.

Yet another reason for staying away from viewer 2. Why do LL keep not fix the real problems - such as lag?

 

Its like redecorating your house when the roof is still leaking

Yet another reason for staying away from viewer 2. Why do LL keep not fix the real problems - such as lag?

They are fixing the lag that they can fix, but lag is such a huge boiler plate term for what amounts to many many many individual issues, and you can suffer from any number of them at any time. Thy will never be able to make the lag just vanish, but they can refine what they do to limit it as much as possible.

Can you address a number of things?

1. Why is this out of beta?  Moreover, why, as a 2.4 user, was this just FORCE installed on my system?

2. The web profiles are not functional.  They don't contain Picks, they don't let me edit anything, and since there are no Picks, I can no longer use this as a workaround for the broken Search function.

3. Why is the authorization token on search still permanently broken?

Meh, I guess it's back to the third party viewers if I want to actuall do anything in SL.

i really don't like this new system of profiles... it's slow... if you need to tp someone who's not a friend for a lucky chair you need too much time to see his profile... better give the possibility to use either the old profile view (was so nice on the right board) or the new... i prefer the old one

Adding more features just causes more lag - its been much worse since the display name nonsense came in- other worlds manage better  but user experience doesnt seem to be a priority for the developers, they just seem to like developing new toys to play with.

LOL.. you took the words off my mind!

 

 

 

why changing something that already works? why dont working on things that dont do?

(even V2 viewer is a bed idea anyway i think) please dont start all with asking why and its so cool. I just dont like the client. point

I've read most of this thread and think I must be missing something. I can see absolutely no use whatsoever for web based profiles.  SL is its own world, a Second LIfe, not a chat line, why would anyone ever want to look at my profile, or anyones come to that, on the web?  Pointless gadget that serves no purpose at all for the huge majority of SL users I'm afraid.  Hey ho, coffee time :-)

Can you address a number of things?

1. Why is this out of beta?  Moreover, why, as a 2.4 user, was this just FORCE installed on my system?

2. The web profiles are not functional.  They don't contain Picks, they don't let me edit anything, and since there are no Picks, I can no longer use this as a workaround for the broken Search function.

3. Why is the authorization token on search still permanently broken?

Meh, I guess it's back to the third party viewers if I want to actuall do anything in SL.

• https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-1814
• https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/STORM-927

Do either of these look like what you're seeing?

The Web Profiles is cool and very good when we use it's with a web browser, but i found it's not usefull to have that in the viewer, is there a way (via debug setting or other) to view people's profiles in the dashboard like old release ?

Thanks.

What's this? The viewer still has display names, side bar, and web profiles? Why, this doesn't seem like a stpe forward at all! It almost seems like LL is trying to see how far they can go in the wrong direction before there's nobody left!

I love how you added a somewhat hard to find settings page for web profiles, with a "I want my profile to be available on the web." checkbox that, although you can uncheck it, it becomes checked again the next time you refresh the page.

Someone is doing an excellent job at making sure everything is just the right amount of annoying.

    ********************************************
      -----  OUT OF SERVICE  --------

DUE TO LINDEN LABS WEB PROFILES
    ********************************************

Is what i think of this addition with out a choice.Wants an OPT OUT!

And they cant even create a link to it form your dashboard,

There is no way to re-enable the old profiles in Viewer 2.5 - but they may reappear in a TPV at some time.

I wonder where the online indication in the profile has gone, there is no option now to see if a storeowner if online or offline for example if he or she isn´t on your friendslist...or am i doing something wrong? And one more thing, WHY do we have to still suffer with the GIGANTIC camerapanel , the old one was small, blue and transparent and really good to work with. Please make it smaller in the next version, we only need the arrow button and zoom button on it!

Ok just a question. Are the people who are saying here they link to facebook, flickr and twitter, linking to human accounts or accounts for your avatar? I'm really curious. I just can't imagine presenting Second Life information to the world, particularly that people I work with might see. I have all these social sites except Facebook, but I wouldn't dream of mentioning Second Life on them. Of course, I don't play Facebook games either, so I guess I'm out of the playing loop.

I like the new profiles a lot better than the last 2.0 one. But they don't even compare to the pre-2.0 profiles for usefulness or ease of use. Little about V2 seems to be about ease of use as far as I can tell though. I do like the faster performance, but imagine how great that would have been if they had used it in 1.23. I fear Second Life is only concerned with the new fads of social networking. They have a good start on it as we can see with the tolerance of the IP-bottom-sniffers. Privacy is fading and soon Second Life will be farmville and mafia wars--oh wait, is already kinda is, isn't it.

I don't see the point of the web profile. It seems completely useless

 

The point is, you can be searched on the web, not just inside SL. For networking, it's a huge plus.

I'm sure that's why the majority of people joined Second Life, so that they can be searched on the web.

It's too bad people can't just find a site on the internet that's made for networking.  They could call it like, Facebook or something.  Oh wait.....

 

ROFL

Web profiles... are they better than the old profiles?

I looked at the example web profile of Q Linden, no disrespect to you Q, but the profile is rubbish.

The page seems to be a whole lot of wasted space.

The profile pic is tiny, more akin to a postage stamp than a photo.

From what I can see there's only the 'About Me' section, again it all seems cramped and compressed into a little space.

Other tabs seem to be gone, pity because I find 'Picks' tabs to often be the most useful'.

Oh, there's a large space for a banner, which LL is currently using to promate the sale of advertising space.... perhaps, this is the real reason for web profiles... LL can make lots of money us selling ad banners, that we'll be forced to look at everyday.

Personally, unless you can make web profiles better than the old inworld ones, I'd give it up as a bad idea. In their current format they just suck.

When I'm in a virtual world, I want to stay in a virtual world, don't find ways to take me out of it. I don't want to forced to see ad banners, I don't want to be directed to RL facebook pages or any other stuff that spoils my own little virtual world experience.

There seems to be various reports of the speed of which the profiles load. Some say fast, others say slow.

I have made a breakdown of where the bits and pieces of my profile are loaded from.

11.2 kB from  https://my.secondlife.com/widgets/

86.8 kB from  https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js

192  kB from  https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.6/jquery-ui.min.js

                     https://api.mixpanel.com/site_media/js/api/mixpanel.js

81.8 kB from  https://d1979ns0fqtj19.cloudfront.net/assets/common-*.css

126.9 kB from https://d1979ns0fqtj19.cloudfront.net/images/backgrounds/body*.png

24.3 kB from  https://d2mjw3k7q9u8rb.cloudfront.net/assets/common-*.js

241 kB from   https://my-secondlife.s3.amazonaws.com/users/gavin.hird/sl_image.png?1297372081

18.9 kB from  https://my-secondlife.s3.amazonaws.com/users/gavin.hird/thumb_sl_image.png?1297372081

29.6 kB from  https://my.secondlife.com/gavin.hird

33,9 kN from  https://secondlife.com/app/image/

A total of 846.5 kB of which only 72 kB come from LL servers (or their domain.)

We see the bulk comes from amazon servers (cloudfront.net is a front-end to those) in addition to a sizable block from googleapis.com

I wonder if we see different load times simply because the bits from amazon is not geo-cached, so it is served up to users in Europe and outside the US via a sub-optimal and slow network path.

We have seen the same in iTunes where content is cached in Akamai servers around the globe. If Akamai thinks you are in the US, the content will be served from a US server and is very slow to load here in Europe.

So the question is, does the viewer kick off the requests for the profile load in such a way it seems like it originates in the US and therefore all content is served from there, rather from a cache location close to the receiver?