Recent Changes....

[West Habercom]

Just wondered how everyone feels about the new changes.... the ones I refer to are the new profile pages on the web site, and also the new search (All).

 

I don't like either one.  i wonder if I missed a memo. Did LL even ask their "customers" what they wanted, or has the "Voice of the Customer" concept flown out the window?

[Lillith Dotcheva]

I like the changes maybe not as much in the search but the other changes like the feeds are really neat

[Chronometria]

Why do we need a feed when we can actually talk to people in world, or in a chat group?

The reason facebook has all this is because thats the only way to talk to people, it doesnt have  a virtual world attached to it.

[Opensource Obscure]

new social network is awesome.

it's obviously very useful as you can now talk with other SL users even when you aren't logged in-world.

don't need it? go to https://my.secondlife.com/settings/privacy, set "Feed" to "Nobody".

[Opensource Obscure]

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West Habercom wrote:

Just wondered how everyone feels about the new changes.... the ones I refer to are the new profile pages on the web site, and also the new search (All).

 

I don't like either one.  i wonder if I missed a memo. Did LL even ask their "customers" what they wanted, or has the "Voice of the Customer" concept flown out the window?

---

I can't see why you think that anything ran by "us" would work.

Second Life is used by many, many kinds of different users, in different contexts, with very different needs. Sometimes what some users need is opposite to what other ones need. Sometimes -like with the new social network- one simply can ignore those features he doesn't need. 

Linden Lab has to develop and evolve Second Life taking into account all of those different needs. If they think a new feature will benefit a large enough number of users, they have to develop that feature. It's irrelevant if some other users don't need that feature. They won't use it.

[Kyoka Setsuko]

Opensource, maybe the reason West asks if LL even consulted members is because LL does, to some extent, have a tradition of asking its members things.

You might remember logging in to SL to find a screen asking if your "SL experience has gotten better or worse, and why" with a comment box for reasons. I don't know whether LL actually ever read even a fraction of these, but it was an interesting concept nonetheless, and can help the regular user to feel like their opinion matters.

In an interview I found on youtube, the original founder of SL used to give similar questionnaires out to his own staff, asking whether he has gotten better or worse as a CEO, with a comment box for explanations. He said it helped to really make things sink in- things that if people had off-handedly told him individually, might not- but when you're sitting there staring at 4 or 5 unrelated people all giving the same feedback, you know they're probably right.

I'm not always in favour of democracy. Maybe people don't really know what is best for them... but if enough users do become unsatisfied, they may leave.

Personally, I hate the new search so far. I find the Browser window ugly and feel it doesn't fit in at all with the SL User Interface.

Furthermore, I find it slower to load than the original Search Window, more intrusive on my SL Window, and I find the actual search results to be crappier.

Searching a resident's name under People used to produce a long list of people with such a name or similar names. Now it is a real pain just to locate such a list.

Similar issues exist for all the other searches I have tried. I find my searching seriously hampered.

I don't believe SL is actually pulling up different results, I simply think they are being displayed differently- and I do not like it.

Another beef if I have with the Search is the images (animated images if I recall) that are pulled up during search, and all the unnecesary banners and information that needn't be there. They contribute to my lag/slow loading and it is frustrating for someone who sometimes has a slower computer and tends to freeze/crash frequently. Just pulling up the new Search can send my Viewer to a freezing halt- old search never did this to me.

And yes, I have more or less ignored the social networking element. But my issue is less so with unnecessary features (the more features the better so long as they don't clutter things), but rather I do not like the new search at all so far. And I don't believe it's because I am "just not used to it yet"... though that may be the case.

It's been at least a few weeks (I think?) and I still hate the new search.

[West Habercom]

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Opensource Obscure wrote:

---

I can't see why you think that anything ran by "us" would work.

Second Life is used by many,

many kinds of different users

, in

different contexts

, with very

different needs

. Sometimes what some users need is opposite to what other ones need. Sometimes -like with the new social network- one simply can ignore those features he doesn't need. 

Linden Lab has to develop and evolve Second Life taking into account all of those different needs. If they think a new feature will benefit a large enough number of users, they have to develop that feature. It's irrelevant if some other users don't need that feature. They won't use it.

---

You're right and that is why it is called "Voice of the Customer". If you don't do one, you'll never know what those different "kinds", "contexts" and "needs" are.  You do your VOC. You hash through all the information.  You learn all about your customer, then you pioritize the features that the customer mostly would prefer to have AND makes sense business wise. Otherwise you risk losing a large portion of your customer base.  I don't see how LL can develop and evolve SL without this information.

 

And as Kyoka said, there was a time when you at least felt like you were part of the evolution of SL by at least asking for opinions.  Many of the earlier features were created with the customer and customer input in mind.

 

 

[Honey Puddles]

I'd rather have a fake Facebook or Google+ for SL, than have SL people getting in trouble for using fake names on Facebook and Google+. I'd rather LL brings facebook functionality to SL, than drags SL users kicking and screaming to Facebook to use their functionality there.

Honestly.. I'm not sure I have any USE for the technology, but it's nice to finally have a place where I'm allowed to use it as Winter Ventura. I like Twitter, so this isn't that big of a change really. So far it's actually proved to be kind of entertaining, although only a small number of my friends are using it yet.

But the technology is still in it's infancy, and it's way too early to start calling it "useless". Admittedly, there are some issues about whether the system allows users you've muted to post comments on your profile, and some small bugs relating to it's crossposting-to-twitter function works. But I think, given time to work out the kinks, we'll find that there probably *is* a place for this technology in our Second Lives.

The "Reccomendations" function that matches you up to people who share your interests is probably the coolest part of this, but it's quickly becomming obvious that we need to be able divide up our friendlists to make "groups" or "circles" of friends. (hopefully with the ability to overlap circles for friends in multiple subsets). I'd like to be able to make an "Interesting people" group, and a "people I actually care when they log on or off" group.

[Lyra Blackthorne]

I don't care about the online profiles either way except for one item...sharing your profile should be a opt in or out choice.

My SL is only a business venture, not a social platform.  If I ever did decide to socialize I will make my own friends; do not need LL to add me to some lonely hearts club,shopping for someone to hang with me. In hopes of preventing this I have left my interest blank.

Search...well, it is so broken.  Imo, LL is so focused on prevention of gaming the system they forget that the end product should work.  It is pretty pitiful in just about every way.

[Ishtara Rothschild]

I don't even care anymore. Of course this isn't anything that we actually need, unlike the ton of things that we've been asking for and don't get (such as a decent alternative UI for viewer 2, which is kind of urgent now that mesh is here, or an SL grid without all the bugs that were already around in 2003), but why even bother complaining. Might as well go outside and shout at the sidewalk.

All that I'm asking for is that I'm at least informed about new features and LL's arbitrary decisions at some point, but it seems that even that is asking too much. People can now write $#!+ about me in my very SL profile? Yeah, whatever, I'm sure that will lure the facebook crowd in droves. But please communicate with us, your loyal customers, even if we are no longer your target group and you detest us as much as you hate your own product. I've searched the blog for "feed" and couldn't find anything. Even M did a better job at customer communication than R does. Talk to us, and, for the love of Cthulhu, make this kind of thing opt-in instead of opt-out.

[Pamela Galli]

That's an understatement. Very poor job communicating. I have no clue where these profiles are. I guess V2 related? Now, if you can actually contact (or pay)ppl inworld without opening a browser, yay -- but I was under the impression you could not.

[Blueray Darkes]

I've heard that LL are going to phase out viewer 1's, I'm currently using Phoenix as its the best viewer out there. Simple, oldschool love it. Firestorm on the other hand I tried to use that even watched a tutortial on how to make it more like viewer 1, course the whole thing failed its still too viewer 2ish for me and I can't use it. I don't want all these fancy tabs, I don't want the constant mess of viewer 2 seems to be... All I want is a viewer that resembles the old viewer and is easy to use, without opening up browser windows for absolutely everything. Go back to viewer 1 already! If they do phase out viewer 1 where does that leave us who can't get our heads around the obnoxious layout and horrbile laggness of viewer 2? Out of the game?

 

Safe to say for me I won't be able to play Secondlife anymore and I put a lot of money in to my SL, and a lot of people that feel the same as me they'll log out and never come back. Say byebye to the old schoolers, welcome to the new generation which isn't that big a population right now.

[Chelsea Malibu]

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Chronometria wrote:

Why do we need a feed when we can actually talk to people in world, or in a chat group?

The reason facebook has all this is because that's the only way to talk to people, it doesn't have  a virtual world attached to it.

---

This is my thought as well.  It really looks like someone needed to figure out a way to compete with FaceBook, etc.  Which it what confuses me the most and it still seems like Linden Labs does not know what they want SL to be.

First we where a "build your own game" platform, then it became a social community, on it's own where the Labs was able to ride the wave, advertising that content creators could come here, maintain IP rights and sell their creations.

The Labs then opened it up to free memberships and the resident count went through the roof, mostly since these free accounts never terminated as paid accounts would.  Before the free accounts, we have less than 300k residents.  Usually no more than 5,000 where online at one time.

Once they got the resident count up, their PR teams quickly developed message the to gain the interest of mainstream marketers. We soon say the Electric Sheep, Millions of Us, RiversRunRed, Mountainmiester Media and many others move into SL with massive real world clients.

Once they realized that this was not what they thought it was, they left, just as fast as they came in and LL began to work more on making SL a stronger creative community.  Better builds emerged and new talent spawned greatly increasing the commerce of SL and somewhere during all of this, the banned gambling.

Once gambling was gone, new funds coming into the system slowed by nearly 40%.  Commerce has become saturated and trying to generate revenues became far more difficult combined with a bad search engine, competition and less dollars to compete for.

Today we seem to now be facing yet a another direction as Philip tried to figure out how this will go.  Keep in mind that during all of this, the virtual world is still an experiment in many ways.  We are in fact, paying beta users.

My concern is that many of us have put a lot into this with the notion that we know where this is going but today now see yet another idea and clearly it's design is to now make this a social community like facebook and others.  In the end, this is what we already are.

These are "cool" features and Philip loves "cool" features.  You easily get this from his keynotes at SLCC and other conferences where I have seen him speak.

I commend the labs on their pro-active development however, do we know what they want this to be?  And moreover, while this is going on, we still have a system that has stability issues.  Telephotos are hit and miss.  The exchange goes offline regularly and the asset system is still having issues.  Yes, many of these have improved which is a good thing however, it's still not optimal.

What about increasing the land size of a Simi? Or creating better tools for builders such as direction lighting? I think we could come up with many.

And now the their new CEO Ron Hubble has made a commitment to be more 'community invloved" we have seen little change in this area.  Blondin Linden was to run the Adult Grids community board and left shortly there after being replaced by Amanda Linden.  She was gone within two weeks and the new person in charge hasn't even logged into the private adult forums that Blondin set up.

So the questions remains, what does Second Life want to be when it grows up?

 

 

[Darren Scorpio]

Of course when we feel LL is not listening or when we don't like a change they have made we like to complain and cry and just plain out whine, but when they DO listen and DO make great changes that are positive we like to look the other way and not give credit where credit is due. 

Yes, web-profiles with a social network are useless and a dumb idea.

Yes, the LL viewer has more bugs than improvements and it is still unstable. 

We can all agree on many of the negative things, but has anyone stopped to appreciate the new changes that are now available that many residents have been wanting?

For example, when LL decided to let the teens into SL everyone complained how it was possible for a teen to cam into other people's land and "watch them" doing the naughty. We all have been wanting REAL privacy in our own homes and LL DID listen and has added a new parcel privacy setting that allows all avatars inside your parcel to be completely hidden (attachments and all and even chat) from anyone outside of the parcel. This is a great improvement and nobody has given LL credit for this.

What about age verification? in the last couple of months many people complained that age verification was failing and couldn't verify. On this forums precisely, some residents had talked about how hard it was to age verify in SL when other Adult porn websites irl only asked for a "Yes I am 18+" checkbox. Well LL DID listen to you and made the age verification just as easy.

I am one to be very vocal when LL comes up with some idiotic idea like display names for example, yet it is important to give LL credit when they deserve it, otherwise there is really no reason for them to ever listen to us. 

[Kasya Sciavo]

Are you for real, or trying your best for 'Shill of the Day'! :matte-motes-big-grin-squint:  Mind you, you certainly have some stiff competition in this part of the forum.

Go back and read Ishtara's absolutley 'spot-on-the money' post.  Then read yours, again.

As for the new unbelievably stupid age verification system; when I heard about it just the other day I was actually stunned.  As if ANY 13-15 year old is going to tick the 'not adult' box now!!  The whole thing is fast becoming a joke. 

Indeed, as Ishtara says, the contempt LL have for their own product and long term residents who pay their very wages, and seemingly Rod's drooling worship of all things groovily social networked confirms our worst fears for this once great virtual world.  

 

[Ishtara Rothschild]

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Pamela Galli wrote:

That's an understatement. Very poor job communicating. I have no clue where these profiles are. I guess V2 related? Now, if you can actually contact (or pay)ppl inworld without opening a browser, yay -- but I was under the impression you could not.

---

 

What I've managed to piece together from various forum posts -- which were all made by residents, not by LL employees -- is that people can visit your profile on https://my.secondlife.com/pamela.galli, and, after logging in, leave a message on your personal "feed". Unless I'm mistaken, their messages can be read by all other residents and might even show up in your inworld web profile (not sure about that, since I don't use a viewer with web profiles).

Also, you will be informed about new feed entries via inworld IM, which will add to your overall IM spam and increase the likelihood that your messages are capped. All this is can be turned off in the Settings tab, but it's enabled by default and nobody has bothered to tell us about it.

[Void Singer]

good things:
new feature for social users

Neutral things:
no control settings (quickly fixed, so the speed cancels the misstep)

Bad things:
no announcement, or instructions
bad defaults (violation of expectation)

[Ishtara Rothschild]

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Darren Scorpio wrote:

Of course when we feel LL is not listening or when we don't like a change they have made we like to complain and cry and just plain out whine, but when they DO listen and DO make great changes that are positive we like to look the other way and not give credit where credit is due. 

---

That's quite condescending. "We" do no such thing. I and others provide customer feedback and voice our justified criticism, whereas you berate us and call it whining.

PS: I do give credit where credit is due. For example, I've commended LL for the new simplified age verification system that might repair some of the damage that was done by ghettoizing the adult RP community and ruining the sales of adult content merchants. That was a step in the right direction for once, but only after LL took ten steps in the wrong direction. But I don't think that anybody at the Lab has read my positive feedback. Just like my less positive feedback, it's all lost in the void (sorry Void, if you happen to read this. I don't mean to single you out ).

 

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Darren Scorpio wrote:

For example, when LL decided to let the teens into SL everyone complained how it was possible for a teen to cam into other people's land and "watch them" doing the naughty. We all have been wanting REAL privacy in our own homes and LL DID listen and has added a new parcel privacy setting that allows all avatars inside your parcel to be completely hidden (attachments and all and even chat) from anyone outside of the parcel. This is a great improvement and nobody has given LL credit for this.

---

Definitely another small step in the right direction. But just as with the new age verification system, it's not enough to undo the damage and loss of confidence that was done before (in this case by officially allowing and encouraging minors to join the adult grid).

All in all, this does little good. Explicit adult activities do not only involve avatars. A lot of adult furniture items rez all kinds of naughty prim toys on demand, and there are animated prim dolls of all sorts that substitute for an avatar partner. All of this content will remain visible.

And of course this setting won't keep adult merchants from selling their content in M-rated sims that border on G-rated ones. They chose these locations for a reason and sure wouldn't want to hurt their sales by disabling kids from seeing their adult content vendors. It would do a lot more good if LL were inclined to enforce their policies, but instead they tolerate these places and ignore abuse reports. A voluntary "hide my avatar but keep showing all the unattached naughty prim stuff" setting is just not enough.

[Pamela Galli]

Thanks for the link Ishy -- had no idea that I had a Home page like that. Why would they just not send everyone an email, if everyone is going to be affected? Hopefully Rodvik was unaware that they launched it without notice.

[Void Singer]

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Darren Scorpio wrote:

Of course when we feel LL is not listening or when we don't like a change they have made we like to complain and cry and just plain out whine, but when they DO listen and DO make great changes that are positive we like to look the other way and not give credit where credit is due. 

Yes, web-profiles with a social network are useless and a dumb idea.

Yes, the LL viewer has more bugs than improvements and it is still unstable. 

We can all agree on many of the negative things, but has anyone stopped to appreciate the new changes that are now available that many residents have been wanting?

For example, when LL decided to let the teens into SL everyone complained how it was possible for a teen to cam into other people's land and "watch them" doing the naughty. We all have been wanting REAL privacy in our own homes and LL DID listen and has added a new parcel privacy setting that allows all avatars inside your parcel to be completely hidden (attachments and all and even chat) from anyone outside of the parcel. This is a great improvement and nobody has given LL credit for this.

What about age verification? in the last couple of months many people complained that age verification was failing and couldn't verify. On this forums precisely, some residents had talked about how hard it was to age verify in SL when other Adult porn websites irl only asked for a "Yes I am 18+" checkbox. Well LL DID listen to you and made the age verification just as easy.

I am one to be very vocal when LL comes up with some idiotic idea like display names for example, yet it is important to give LL credit when they deserve it, otherwise there is really no reason for them to ever listen to us. 

---

I missed this, so Ill comment, some of do tahnk and praise LL when they fix things, or give us new features.... when we agree that they've been fixed, or the new feature isn't broken....

for instance, even though I dislike the slow and unwieldy nature of web profile, and don't really plan on SLUMming the new social features they just put in, I can see that it is a good feature for some users, and adds appeal to non-users, even if they did goof when implementing it.

on the same hand I see the new parcel "privacy" features as breaking with the nature and point of the world, and I know that one TPV devolper that wanted to introduce similar features and was shot down (whose advertising I heavily criticised) should rightfully be having a WTF moment about now. I personally think it's a poor bandaid for what was a mismanaged inclusion of 16-17yos on the grid (G regions should have been segregated not A, then all major complaints would have vanished).

similarly, I think that display names are a great idea, with a horrid implementation, and I can't really credit LL for age verification, after years of bungling it, when they chose to use the worldwide standard that's been in place for years before their atrocious decision.

 

yeah a lot of people focus on the aspects they don't like, or are broken, and forget to "wow, cool, thanks" for the aspects that are good.... but more often than not it's because the bad aspects take away from the good.

[Ha Jinx]

I'm actually looking forward to switching to a V2 based viewer, most likely firestorm obviously being that i'm a phoenix based user at the moment. I find the graphics on those viewers to be a thousand times better than "viewer 1" viewers. I can run shadows and graphics at max with zero noticable FPS loss. Plus that DOF thingy is cool... has firestorm added that yet? :matte-motes-tongue:

 

P.S ~ why is my avatar so tiny? how do i get a fancy one like the old timers?

[AriannaCarmen]

I think it's terrible that LL did this and totally agree with the person that said they don't bother asking the users what they want, they just barge ahead thinking they will get new users from FB.Facebook is free..those people aren't  used to spending money and from what I know, there are a ton of FB users that are computer literate enough to  sign into their e-mail and FB and that's about it.  If I want to interact with FB, I'll log into FB. SL is SL and nobody I've talked to wants to mix them. Maybe the teenagers thinks it's cool but I don't think  too many other people are happy about this at all. Most people are pretty outraged that LL has done this and it also seems the only people that like Viewer2 are the people who are new and never used any other viewers so they have nothing to compare it to.

LL needs to wake up and listen to all the problems and issues that the current users have been screaming about for years, and worse yet, some residents being professional programmers, etc. have told them exactly how they can fix an issue  and they ignore it when they are things that could and should have been fixed long ago. Instead I see LL excitement that you can now have a car or robot avatar. Oh, boy, just what I always wanted to do....run around SL as a VW. Are they appealing to 8 year olds?

Come on LL....listen to the people that are spending money in SL TODAY and spent money in SL last year and the year before. Let us easily back up our inventory to our computers so when a famous SL glitch occurs, we don't lose everything we spent REAL money on. Maybe people would spend more if they could safely back it up against sudden loss.  But when you know your entire inventory can be gone, never to be seen again, who wants to do that? Only people that don't know that can happen to them so easily. I've been told that LL has lost universities who weren't allowed to take content THEY created out of SL. How many people and businesses do they have to lose before they wake up?  It's just sad!

[Eileen Fellstein]

As soon as I heard about it, I immediately went and put my feed settings on 'nobody' and it's going to stay that way. This isn't facebook, nor do we need it to be IMO. I hate facebook, and I don't want it being part of my SL, in fact I just deactivated my FB account last week, fake name and all

To me, it's a richer world if my friends live here with me. That means actually being inworld and within seeing distance of my avatar to be interactive with me. Plenty of other text only based options are available if I need them. I really wish the time and energy would have been used to improve actual grid functionality and solve some of the bugginess that's been going on for weeks as mesh and the V2 age is ushered in.

 

[Linda Doune]

This is the ULTIMATE GRIEFER Tool!

Create an atl, or two, or ten, load up and tell someone you hate that they area a duffus-head, flood someone while eveyrone's unwanted news feed is OPEN.. every single avatar in SL is now open...

What sucks is that is that full open is the default, and such announcements will overflow our IMs and lock out legitamite messages....

GGGGGGGGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

 

[Eileen Fellstein]

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Ha Jinx wrote:

P.S ~ why is my avatar so tiny? how do i get a fancy one like the old timers?

---

 

It;s not actually the avatar that is any larger, it's the badge (a casing that surrounds the avatar and lets you decide what info to include) You can find it in your 'my settings'. Choose a default one or upload your own image.

 

I'm not an oldtimer. I'm only three