Hey LL, A Mobile Friendly SL Website?

[Oct Oyen]

I was talking to a small group mobile phone generation (aka millennials) about SL at a party recently. They don't know much about SL, naturally they took out their phones to look for it. But they quickly lose interests by the slowness of loading and navigating traditional website on mobile devices. I think LL can benefit from having a mobile friendly SL website, and even marketplace too. I'm sure some of SLers would love the idea to be able to browse MP on a mobile device.

[Parhelion Palou]

It would be helpful if LL had a mobile-friendly website, but I doubt it will happen. They seem to have enough trouble keeping the current one running.

 

[Syo Emerald]

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Parhelion Palou wrote:

It would be helpful if LL had a mobile-friendly website, but I doubt it will happen. They seem to have enough trouble keeping the current one running.

 

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Second Life is not a website.

[Bobbie Faulds]

The website at secondlife.com is what it is. Look at it slowly on a smart phone or tablet or actually sit down at a regular computer/laptop if you want something faster. Since SL really can't be easily played on a tablet or smartphone, no need for the website to be mobile ready. It's not really a website per se but your dashboard for taking care of your account. You have your friends list, your groups, links for purchasing Lindens, links to your account history for both purchases with Lindens and your money purchases. It also has links to other things you need to manage your account and to the SL forums. It would be nearly impossible to make that vast functionality easily accessible on a limited smartphone. 

Why does everything have to be reduced to something you can look at/use on a smartphone or a tablet. You wouldn't expect to play WoW on a smartphone. 

The Dashboard handles too many functions for it to be reduced to a smartphone app.

[Freya Mokusei]

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Bobbie Faulds wrote:

 The Dashboard handles too many functions for it to be reduced to a smartphone app.

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I doubt this. If so many banks can provide dashboards for smartphones, there's certainly no trouble in doing the same for the SL website. Is nothing special, about the fanciest thing secondlife.com does is AJAX, so the functionality's already mobile-possible.

I wrote my own mobile-friendly 'dashboard' (if you like) for Second Life that lets me do land management, permissions handling, code reviewing, note-taking and SLURL bookmarking, snapshots and social stuff (even some kinky stuff!) all from my cellphone, so that I can continue living a busy milllenial life and also spend a lot of quality time closely monitoring SL, as well as using it as a basis to share my activities in-world with those around me in Real Life. I'm not the only one with solutions for doing this, by a long way.

How about this application? Change your own, or your friends' clothing to a preset with preview image by mobile device! Organise groups, arrange your accessories. Scroll through your wardrobe with a fingertip. MAGIC.

Worth also remembering AjaxLife, by Katharine Berry. A whole viewer that could've run on mobile!

Even without new features, there's quite a lot online through the main site, especially some of the help pages. There's also the Wiki, my.secondlife.com, could even argue a case for search.secondlife.com being mobile-friendly. There are, at least, SEO benefits in doing so and who could turn away 'more eyes' to see into our world?

 I find this line of argument in general fairly faulty. It's well-documented that in the US, a huge chunk of online social activity takes place via mobile. Sure, SL itself won't run on mobile because of arcitectural limitations (and authority-level short-sightedness) but does this mean that the high number of users who expect to interact with SL in the same way they do all their other online social stuff have to instead chain themselves to a computer to send messages to those in-world or make payments to other residents? Why's secondlife.com stuck in the dark ages compared to say, Steam or Teamspeak? Both of those are 'PC focused' platforms that have full functionality on mobile - even though, obviously, you can't play Steam games on your cellphone.

Now, if you wanted to argue that the primary SL demographics probably don't follow modern usage curves in technology I'd be more persuaded. If you claimed that there's probably no incentive to move functionality onto mobile I'd believe that, too. Is no secret that the SL userbase skews older and less mobile than other social platforms and I could probably believe that there's a reduced need for mobile compatibility due to the userbase having grown-up with the idea that PC's were necessary, and LL isn't looking to grow (and largely doesn't) with the mobile generation.

Am fine with SL functionality being a product of the age it evolved in, and being [somewhat] understandable decisions in where to spend developer resources, but don't see the value in twisting narratives to pretend SL couldn't gain a lot of usefulness for its users and relevance for younger audiences if they worked on their mobile offering.

[Rhonda Huntress]

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Bobbie Faulds wrote:

You wouldn't expect to play WoW on a smartphone. 

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[Parhelion Palou]

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Syo Emerald wrote:

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Parhelion Palou wrote:

It would be helpful if LL had a mobile-friendly website, but I doubt it will happen. They seem to have enough trouble keeping the current one running.

 

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Second Life is not a website.

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The OP was referring to SL's website, not SL itself.

[Oct Oyen]

Bobbie Faulds pointed out the many benefit of having mobile friendly website, especially for an online social gaming company like LL.  A mobile friendly websites are a brief version of the full website, it just need to have enough information to tell visitors what SL is and be able to register new members.

How does a company advertise on mobile devices if it doesn't have a mobile friendly website? It's not that hard to create a simple mobile friendly site for marketing purpose. I think LL needs actively make its presence known in the mobile world. SL survived the first VR worlds wave that came and went years ago. The second wave of VR worlds is on the horizon, with mega players like Facebook and Googles. It's great LL is working on Sansar, but it needs to build its brand and grows the users base. You can't do that without tabbing into the mobile world.