Attention LL marketing - IMVU is after you

[Coffee Pancake]

Calling Cards and friends are one of the oldest parts of the SL infrastructure, that folder in inventory is special and received almost no attention, ever. It's really not valid to bring it up at all in a discussion about new user accessibility and usability. Getting caught up in the weeds like this is why the new user experience retention outcomes has barely changed in a decade.

SL is hard ---> Look at all this complexity ----> Look at this one specific archaic thing.

SL is hard. Yup. Most things worth doing are. SL's biggest block is that it requires users find their own fun.

5 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

Does Catznip have 10 ways to access the friends list with overlapping friends systems one located in chat and the other in the default peoples window?

Catznip isn't Firestorm. On purpose.

Edited February 3, 2021 by Coffee Pancake

[Drayke Newall]

6 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

Except said response was not to Silent - I simply refuse to quote some people and you're one of them.

You've already hit on the reason we have Calling Cards ion the first place and yet still insist they have no use ... They exist exclusively to be used as a method to bring up a user's Profile to facilitate communication and can be transferred as an asset to another user - this is often done though Note Cards.

It's not rocket science.

Am I against adding in a dedicated list of such? No. I am against replacing the existing feature/function.

There is a difference.

Did I say anywhere that they need to be replaced? I said, most people don't know what they are used for so either hide them unless they are requested to show - i.e. you use that feature or add them to the people window so that people can see that they are separate from the friends list but still a contact. The latter being the better as it keeps all contacts in the same area.

I assume you got confused in my response to niran and it derailed from there. When I said to niran that they should be given a function it was in relation to a purpose for everyone and providing a reason why they should stay in the inventory. Niran's viewer specifically needs the calling card in the inventory so a person can drag it to the favourites bar, thus providing a purpose for them being in the inventory and being a physical object.

When I said they were from a bygone era it is specifically in relation to them being in the inventory and needing them to be in the inventory to hand out. You may think needing to physically drag out to someone a 'card' and have them accept it is needed, I on the other hand (unless it provides an additional function like Black Dragon Viewer) don't see the difference between handing it out physically and having a menu option of 'give your calling card to x' and then it is the people window as a contact. Simply put a menu can serve the same purpose as dragging the physical object out.

[Drayke Newall]

24 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Calling Cards and friends are one of the oldest parts of the SL infrastructure, that folder in inventory is special and received almost no attention, ever. It's really not valid to bring it up at all in a discussion about new user accessibility and usability. Getting caught up in the weeds like this is why the new user experience retention outcomes has barely changed in a decade.

But the thing is I agree with Solar in that having a separate contact list away from 'friends' is needed. I just disagree that it should remain in the inventory unless absolutely needed due to a differing function relying on its physical presence.

There are many social platforms or games that distinguish between a friend and a mutual acquaintance. SL should offer the same but just in a common place so as it doesn't require opening differing windows.

The new user part of it is simply due to it being in a different place than someone would expect a contact to be, hence having it in one place is better for all and keeps it simple and makes it a feature that already exists but brings it to the forefront and not hidden.

Quote

Catznip isn't Firestorm. On purpose.

LMAO. As I said I don't have the default viewer installed only firestorm and black dragon the latter of which i know removes a lot of clunkiness and chunkiness of the default viewer, so wasn't sure if the same friends system existed from the default chui system or just firestorms oddities.

I will have to download Catznip and give it a go.

Edited February 3, 2021 by Drayke Newall

[Rowan Amore]

14 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

SL is hard. Yup. Most things worth doing are. SL's biggest block is that it requires users find their own fun.

This is it exactly.  It was hard for us all when we joined.  The difference being that today, everyone seems to want instant gratification.  I was older when I joined.  A totally different mindset from, yes I'm gonna say it, the younger generations.  I didn't come here expecting anything.  Not money, not to be entertained and since I don't even game, I never expected it to be easy.  

Even after all these years, all the stumbling around at first was well worth the time spent.  

Could it be made simpler and easier to use?  Possibly.  Should it be?  Nah, there are far better things they should be working on than reworking a working viewer.

[Solar Legion]

And you seem to be confused as to what I have said. Nowhere have I said that the function should be limited to dragging the Calling Card out to hand them to someone.

I described how merchants (especially) use them when packaging their products.

Right now you can right click on someone nearby and hit Give Card ... and it gives them your Calling Card. Your proposed function might make it easier to send them out if one is experiencing lag or misses their chance to directly right click the intended avatar nearby but that is about the beginning and end of the usefulness.

[FairreLilette]

10 minutes ago, RowanMinx said:

The difference being that today, everyone seems to want instant gratification.  

I sometimes wonder if it's just that for the younger crowd, instant gratification or if it's much more complicated. 

I often wonder do people who use SL have a higher IQ than some and are better at figuring out things, or to put it another way are people who do use SL better do-it-yourselfers?   

I also think with so much to learn with SL, and one can almost learn all the time, if also some users might not like that because they are too shy to ask.  Most of us (I'm not saying all) would probably say we have some degree of shyness to ask "how do I ________________ (fill in the blank) questions from our friends.  But, what I've encountered even on day one of my SL is there are always people willing to answer a "how to" and then when it's explained it's really simple, and then the next question the answer is simple to do and so on and so on.  I also use Google and YouTube to find out how to do things in SL and it's pretty generally all around simple.  

But, anyhow, I wonder for those who find it too difficult if they just are not good self learners nor ambitious enough to look things up on Google or YouTube or their shyness is also a hinderance.

Plus, with the instant gratification thing, I know a lot of the younger crowd just wants to plug into a phone and be instantly voice chatting or something like that.  So "instant" is a part of it too.  

They should have a poll for newbies where they could make lindens and ask them questions of what they like/don't like, etc, then maybe more would be known there.

[Drayke Newall]

27 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

And you seem to be confused as to what I have said. Nowhere have I said that the function should be limited to dragging the Calling Card out to hand them to someone.

I described how merchants (especially) use them when packaging their products.

Must be the products I buy, but have never received a notecard from a merchant containing their calling card well at least not since xstreet was bought by Linden Lab. Not saying it doesn't happen but would be rare. Most just say any issues IM 'x' person.

But then again I think notecards need to be improved as well. But not going to get into a random pointless argument with you about that as well.

27 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

Right now you can right click on someone nearby and hit Give Card ... and it gives them your Calling Card. Your proposed function might make it easier to send them out if one is experiencing lag or misses their chance to directly right click the intended avatar nearby but that is about the beginning and end of the usefulness.

We will just have to agree to disagree, sick of arguing with you on petty things. I believe they shouldn't be visible in inventory away from the actual people window you're forever going to argue that they should because of x,y,z so lets just leave it at that.

[Solar Legion]

Sure, we can agree to disagree.

[lucagrabacr]

I'd say if they do, it would somewhat backfire and get people who never knew about SL to begin with find out about it, and those who do look for SL to begin with would see past their pitch

Interesting decision by their marketing though, I rarely ever saw a company in the virtual world / social media niche making direct shot to another and for very good reasons, it's usually a thing done by their users

[ChinRey]

On 2/1/2021 at 6:33 AM, Solar Legion said:

IMVU can do the things it does inventory and clothing wise because it is a simpler set up than Second Life - all of the "avatars" there are prebuilt "models".

For those who want to know how much simpler, this should give an idea:

It's not the whole story since IMVU hides a lot of it's resource use in various background processes:

But even so, there's close to a gigabyte of difference in RAM usage and it seems it's all about content handling. 1.2 GN RAM is actually quite low for SL, I took this screenshot while I was high up in the sky above a sandbox on beta, onyl surrounded by a few of my own houses. I've seen numbers close to 2 GB in more normal SL surroundings.

 

[Janet Voxel]

Of course IMVU is after Second life users, because the truth is they're losing their users to Second life. I meet a lot of people that have come from IMVU, but I've yet to see someone say "Screw this, I'm going to IMVU!" on Second Life. There has to be some reason for this and I'm thinking it has nothing to do with ease of use or free coins to buy what you want.

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, Janet Voxel said:

Of course IMVU is after Second life users, because the truth is they're losing their users to Second life. I meet a lot of people that have come from IMVU, but I've yet to see someone say "Screw this, I'm going to IMVU!" on Second Life. There has to be some reason for this and I'm thinking it has nothing to do with ease of use or free coins to buy what you want.

IMVU is very puritanical and regularly deletes adult content from users inventories it designates "UFI" which is Unsuitable For IMVU. Some creators there slip content through the peer reviewed process onto the marketplace but it eventually gets found out, reported and then deleted system wide. Plenty of people there have lost significant amount of monies over the years that way and while some do eventually make the transition to S/L, many like the girlfriend I talked to an hour ago, have tried S/L but just couldn't get the hang of it and wind up staying there putting up with the content purges. It is the easy access to adult content that is the main attraction for those of us who come from there. Some who come to S/L never go back and some like myself, keep a presence in both. There are advantages to the community there which are better then S/L and vice versa, so for some of us it is not an either/or thing. Imvu tends to be easier for breaking into the social life and that could be simply because private IM's are only accessible for VIP members so there tends to be more chat in local. When it comes to user retention in S/L, I am of the opinion that we lose loads of noobs here because so many places have noone talking in the local chat. The noobs think everyone is afk so wind up leaving and not coming back.

[Silent Mistwalker]

19 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

We are talking about things where the context menu shows things that are not necessarily usable at the time and appear greyed out.

Example would be when you click on your own avatar and see 'derender+blacklist' despite it never in most circumstances being selectable.

I don't seem to have that problem in FS. Didn't have it in PH or EM or the LL viewers either. Or any of the viewers I've used. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edited February 3, 2021 by Silent Mistwalker

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

I don't seem to have that problem in FS. Didn't have it in PH or EM or the LL viewers either. Or any of the viewers I've used. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The only one I can think of is when you try to edit scripts in an item.  If you can't set to not running from the build menu that option is greyed out.  Can't think of any others offhand.

[Silent Mistwalker]

2 hours ago, RowanMinx said:

The only one I can think of is when you try to edit scripts in an item.  If you can't set to not running from the build menu that option is greyed out.  Can't think of any others offhand.

I've only seen that happen when there's been an issue with SL. I've always been able to set a script to not running.

But...

now that I think about it, I may have been doing that in the script itself and not in the build menu. That particular one might have something to do with no mod permissions though. I think that is one that is grayed out in the build menu when the script is no mod. 

*pouts* I dun wanna log in and check... maybe tomorrow. Nah, who am I trying to kid? 🤭 Someone *grins at Solar* is bound come along and correct me if I'm wrong. 😋

[Drayke Newall]

5 hours ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

I don't seem to have that problem in FS. Didn't have it in PH or EM or the LL viewers either. Or any of the viewers I've used. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Things like this highlighted in Red. The Pie menu has the same, just looked where when the same object was clicked options like 'wear' were an option still present greyed out and not selectable.

[Solar Legion]

43 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

I've only seen that happen when there's been an issue with SL. I've always been able to set a script to not running.

But...

now that I think about it, I may have been doing that in the script itself and not in the build menu. That particular one might have something to do with no mod permissions though. I think that is one that is grayed out in the build menu when the script is no mod. 

*pouts* I dun wanna log in and check... maybe tomorrow. Nah, who am I trying to kid? 🤭 Someone *grins at Solar* is bound come along and correct me if I'm wrong. 😋

Ping and ....

You can't even open the script if you don't have modify permissions on it, let alone reset it.

[SierraStyles]

I was on IMVU before I was on Second Life..Their target market is teens and twenties, at least when I was there. Its not as interesting  as Second Life,either..

[Coffee Pancake]

On 2/3/2021 at 12:04 AM, FairreLilette said:

I sometimes wonder if it's just that for the younger crowd, instant gratification or if it's much more complicated. 

It's not instant gratification. SL has lots of that.

It's direction.

Nothing in SL is telling you what to do, where to go, who to talk to, what objectives to peruse, if there even are objectives. 

Progression exists, but it's infinitely diverse & open ended to the point of being aspirational rather than a linear path from Ruth to a better avatar (as one simple example).

Giving new users direction by way of aspiration is probably the best we can hope to achieve in terms of optimizing the new user experience.

 

(As an aside this does perhaps explains why SL has always had a strong D/s undercurrent / subculture. Bossy people FTW)

[lucagrabacr]

Made a video about it

It might have also been caused by their recent company relaunch and management change, I don't think the old IMVU people or any other considerate virtual world platform would do this kind of thing

https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/25/imvu-relaunches-as-together-labs-raises-35-million/

[Coffee Pancake]

4 hours ago, lucagrabacr said:

.....

Generated captions for that video are hilariously bad, it mishears almost every instance of "Second Life"

[lucagrabacr]

15 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Generated captions for that video are hilariously bad, it mishears almost every instance of "Second Life"

What did they say LOL

[Arielle Popstar]

On 2/2/2021 at 7:46 PM, Solar Legion said:

Do I need to be more specific? No. I'm a general user. I use a variety of programs ranging from Photo Editing (for touch ups, resizes and conversions) to general purpose music players.

Even the Operating System (Manjaro Linux) and Web browser I use (Brave) lists a variety of options in both the traditional window menus (File Et Al) and the right click Context menu. Oh yes and the File Manager (Thunar) has the exact same behavior.

You aren't a general user being you use Linux. Clunkiness and lots of text are its forte and feels intuitive for linux fan boys and girls. That probably sums up the problem with the viewer UI's in that it has been designed by linux geeks and users rather than by Window designers for Windows users even though linux users are only a small percentage of those logging into S/L.

Its not that the IMVU viewer is dumbed down but that its been designed for a Windows gamer.

[Silent Mistwalker]

16 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

Ping and ....

You can't even open the script if you don't have modify permissions on it, let alone reset it.

I know what you are saying. What I was saying is you can "open" the script (maybe not in inventory but in a rezzed object) and even though you can't modify the script itself, you can still do such things [from the build window as well on the Content tab (last one on the right)] as reset the script on a no mod script. That is something LL has to allow or people would be even less inclined to stay in SL if they have to re-rez scripted items every time the server hiccups or something else goes wrong. I've been resetting no mod scripts for years. If I recall correctly, the other function is Refresh on the Content tab. So some things do need to remain visible while grayed out because at some point the owner of the object may have the necessary permissions to use those functions or have some sort of workaround like the Reset and Refresh on the Content tab (except those are never grayed out to my knowledge).

Edited February 4, 2021 by Silent Mistwalker
every time! where the hell did everything come from?

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

You aren't a general user being you use Linux. Clunkiness and lots of text are its forte and feels intuitive for linux fan boys and girls. That probably sums up the problem with the viewer UI's in that it has been designed by linux geeks and users rather than by Window designers for Windows users even though linux users are only a small percentage of those logging into S/L.

Its not that the IMVU viewer is dumbed down but that its been designed for a Windows gamer.

The SL viewer is and always has been predominantly developed on Windows, by Windows users.

The Linux version of the viewer (back when LL developed such a thing) was a port of the Windows version.

The IMVU viewer is displaying a vastly simpler data set. It's not dumbed down, it was dumber to start with.