Gavin Hird
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Blog Comments posted by Gavin Hird
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All other opinions aside, the web profiles do objectively seem to be an order of magnitude slower to load than the old profiles.
It may be a justifiable tradeoff for some other functionality, though then we're back to whether waiting 8 seconds is worth a Facebook "Like" button, which seems to be the only added "benefit". Are there plans to extend the web profiles with further functionality, so the choice of a web platform is essentially a matter of easy updates?
This is just pure speculation, but it would stand to reason group functionality including group chat could load in webkit inside the viewer. However, if this is how they plan to implement the UI of it, it is a total clash with the rest of the viewer and actually makes it even harder to master the environment for new users.
I looked at how much a profile actually loads in terms of data, and it will be in the order 700k to 1 meg depending on the size of the profile pic. This is very inefficient compared to the old profile that only loads short, efficient text strings in addition to the picture. Javascript was a good portion of the data that was loaded.
To make a better experience for web-based profiles, which at the back-end makes sense, would be to make widget floaters that match the rest of the viewer UI all implemented in html5. We have multiple examples of such widgets both in Mac OS X and Windows 7 that could serve as inspiration.
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Darren,
The web profiles work was not done by Q Linden's area - it was done by another (the SOCIAL team). Q's area is much more open than many other areas of LL and you can find out more and even attend meetings that they hold - see details here.
We have been over this all before in the forums multiple times:
For far reaching changes having meetings for a few select simply does not cut it.
We, the residents, want to be INFORMED and CONSULTED before the fact. BEFORE a single line of code is written! So we - the paying customers can say no, this is not the way we want to have things around here.
Throwing our privacy on the boat is one such change that residents should have voted on.
To illustrate what is happening with the profiles, type "site:my.secondlife.com groups" into Google search and watch how Google has started caching and indexing those profiles.
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A couple more questions:
- Does this mean that only the G section of the marketplace can be browsed by a non logged-in person over whom you have no control of age or maturity preferences?
- What about gift items? Will it only be possible to gift items to an account that has the same maturity level as the product in question?
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Will these guidelines be detailed enough to also apply to goods sold in-world? I mean there is no point i locking them out of the marketplace if they can purchase the "forbidden fruits" in-world.
Edit: It will seriously disadvantage marketplace merchants if the same goods can be traded on G parcels, yeah?
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Lets face it...LL isn't going to take your whining and complaints in to serious consideration. They stopped doing that a few years ago. Let LL do as they will. Its their product, not ours. We own NOTHING in or about SecondLife. Lindens even tell us that in the TOS. SL/LL is not a publicly traded company. Therefore, none of us are true stakeholders or shareholders and none of our opinions really matter.
If you think that the content creators and sim "owners" are not stakeholders, think again. There is no way Linden Lab could supply the content currently available in SL with own staff. SecondLife would be closed in the blink of an eye if the content providers pulled the plug.
Do you for a single moment think that Apple's App store would be anywhere without the thousands of content developers trading their apps in the store?
The big difference is that Apple keep their developers both posted, informed and involved in terms of their roadmap, technologies and APIs to put into the platform. They do it under NDA, and so could LL do when secrecy are required. Actually Linden Lab needs a proper developer program and developer conferences. That would help advance the platform, and keep investors and developers from guesswork and being subject to the whim of the week.
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IAll this fussing is silly if not out right stupid. If you still do not feel that SL is safe, then cancel your account and there is nothing to fear, but I am sure you will find something if you have to make it up.
To ask people who are concerned about privacy issues to beat it, is rather disingenuous and does not contribute anything to the debate.
I don't know what part of the world you are from, but both from a personal and European perspective, Linden Lab needs to recognize that most European countries have privacy legislation that is much more restrictive in terms of disclosure to 3rd parties, and if marketing the product in this part of the world, they also need to observe and follow the legislation in Europe.
Also, springing such issues on residents through a beta is either which way you see it, not the right way forward. If you are to introduce a "feature" like this, you do it in a controlled beta /test and not just dump the entire profile database out for grabs on the net like has been done now. The information has been live on the website long enough for many to have had time to crawl it and start using it – most likely to everyones disadvantage.
You also thoroughly notify and discuss in advance with your customers when making major changes like this. Then you take feedback and act on it before going live. My feeling is that the beta process at Linden Lab at times are completely out of control. I find it rather discomforting that they have no published roadmap of where this will take us. Everyone who have invested in SecondLife are stakeholders in this, and we are not consulted or informed.
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What about the people who are married in RL and "partnered" or married in SL, without the knowledge of their RL spouse? Granted they're being dishonest, but do you really want to risk wrecking hundreds of RL marriages? What about the children?
You folks REALLY did not think this one through ... and you didn't ask those of us who must bear the consequences, which as one resident has noted, could extend even to death.
Child avatars could also face some really interesting quality time facing neighbors, colleagues, family and others if their profiles get linked to RL individuals and identities.
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My concerns are less associated with privacy, but more to do with those of us on low bandwidth connections - waiting 10-15 seconds to see a profile is not very good.
A function that was more or less instant, has been demoted to the speed of molasses on a slow line, typically as you say, taking 10-15 seconds.
To open my profile, the browser gets sent a total of about 530 kb of backgrounds and javascript excluding my profile image which was 241 kb. This will quickly add up to a meg for every profile lookup if you add ads to the equation.
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Um...on the web profile: why would I want this line listed as one of the primary pieces of information about me: "Payment Info:Payment info used"?
You don't!
That (showing if you are a paying customer or not) in combination with your picks and groups can be used to build a marketing profile of you that later can be used in directed marketing in-world, or even RL if they manage to combine your SL and RL identity.
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Anyone else seeing no change when checking off show favorites on login? Not getting them in the drop-down.
I can't even check it off. The setting is grayed out.
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Ugg. WHY O WHY do we have to click MORE constantly to see our information??? Extremely frustrating.
Try edit a classified or pick. Very convoluted.
But 2.5 is faster - noticeably. ...when you don't try to do any work. They shall have that!
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Not talking about in-world scripts. The new public profile that is accessible without login can be crawled by anyone who want to harvest the information, including that I have made payment transactions on this service. THAT is a big difference!
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Couple of interesting things about the information publicly accessible in the profile (accessed when logged out):
The internet field in the old profile is now displayed as homepage in the profile. Information that has been put here can easily be used to connect your profile and avatar to real life information. I for instance am the domain owner of the web address that was in my profile, so the connection was super-easy to establish.
Why is the information Payment Info Used visible on a public profile? This can be a vector to chase down my financial information. This info has nothing at all to do on such a page.
EDIT: Come to think about it, the information Payment Info Used on a public profile can be used to data mine which avatars spend money in SecondLife, and then in combination with information in your groups and picks be used for directed in-world marketing. NOT good!
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For the profile suggestions you mean? ... or the snapshots.
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Have you changed the aspect ratio of the picks pictures again? All my pictures seems horizontally squeezed.
In the new web profiles the ratio is 1:1 - previously it was often 4:3.
So 1.4 million profile pictures (active users) needs to be redone.
I bet the snapshot tool still defaults to 4:3 aspect ratio images.
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- the web profiles are produced by the Social team not the Viewer 2 team - what is happenning is a strategic decision by LL ...
Then the Social team needs to start socializing with the residents to get a handle on what they want their second social life to be like.
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On the privacy issue, you need to rethink the structuring of the profiles:
- There could be a small public section that was always visible on the web, with the rest of the profile being internal to SecondLife.
- There could be a "view full profile" link on the public one, and if clicked by a non-logged in person, it would direct you to the sign up page like so many other sites that has "sensitive" profile information do.
- In addition there could be an adult section of the profile which was only visible to SL residents who had checked to see adult content in their preferences.
- I would also like to see all alts of a primary being visible on a profile in-world. This would sober up the use of alts, and to a large extent prevent misuse of such accounts.
You need to be sensitive to that profile information such as group membership and picks can, if disclosed as being linked to the real person behind the account, be damaging to career, personal reputation and even life (i.e. a person acting out being gay in SecondLife, for which there exist a death penalty in his country of residence.)
You cannot expect people to thin down their profiles to nanny state in-world, and by that I mean hiding all group memberships and removing picks from their profile, in fear of what is disclosed on the internet.
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I agree with you there is no massive and immediate need for mesh at the moment, and as your rightfully point out, the learning curve and cost is rather steep. I'd rather see a better avatar mesh first and better animation of the avatar (like fingers/hands).
I also think it must be very clear in the mind of everyone that SecondLife is not a game. If you fall into that crack, you will quickly start making fatal errors. So hopefully the new CEO will be deaf on that ear, regardless of his background.
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Hi, and welcome onboard.
One of the first things you could poke at is to get the Mac version of the viewer listed as a free download in the Mac App store.
This should give you some decent exposure (store claiming 1 million downloads on the opening day) at a very low marketing dollar. It would be listed in both the Games, Lifestyle and Social networking sections.
... and while you are at it, make sure development starts working on the mobile version of the viewer now because also SecondLife must urgently get relevant in the mobile / tablet space that is rapidly developing/exploding. – Actually, in my head, that should be your #1 prio.
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Try Out the New Viewer 2.4 Beta, Now Available
A group blog by Secondlife in General
Please make the background download optional. To brute force a background download is a particularly bad idea for folks on slow, metered or mobile connections.
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Faubio.Alter wrote:
Only five percent of home computer users use Macs. Mac users aren't a "big thing".
Gee, thanks for your support. How many SL user are Mac users? How many of them are premium account holders? Where is your stats on that?
The point is not to do so much with Mac users, but with Linden Lab which (again) ships releases with major bugs in them.
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Anti-alisasing produce a totally garbled display on my MacBook Pro with NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M, so it must be turned off for the viewer to work.
It also set the graphics settings back to some default. Would be nice if it asked to keep the old settings from the previous version.
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Changes to Display Names Based on Your Feedback
A group blog by Secondlife in General
The entire approach seems to be rather complicated with double names all over. There are a few things we need to keep in mind with this approach:
- user identities on logon must be unique
- you have a need to register RL information about an account (for whatever purpose such as billing and age verify)
- you ideally only want one name to be associated with an avatar at any given time (the current proposal has 2)
- from a security standpoint, displaying the login ID is never a good idea
Fact: Every account is currently uniquely identified with a UUID and a unique login name
What if we toss the following into the equation (and this is a different approach):
- Create a SUUID (super UUID) that can only be registered to one RL person (industry standard verification) and that has a unique logon that is never shown to anyone else than the user and admins
- Every profile would be an alt of the SUUID, and these profiles have their own UUIDs that can hold an arbitrary name in Unicode. This UUID is thus a child of the SUUID
- On logon you log on with the main account logon, and then choose which alt you want to take in-world. This means you can have multiple logons to the account, but you can only take one instance of an alt in-world at any time.
- Residents will only see one name for an alt, but profiles will show the UUID in addition. You may want to enable a copy function that both copy name and UUID in the same operation.
- A search for a UUID would always go to the same profile regardless of name in use for the alt, and perhaps a name history of say 10 would be in the order for the profile. Clicking on a name, say in chat or IM will take you to the same profile.
There are several advantages to this:
- you increase security as the logon ID is never displayed to anyone (like it is now and in the proposal)
- having alts being children of a super UUID makes it possible to implement inventories that are completely portable between alts
- you separate display name from logon identity completely, and these are, in reality just a label
- you can, optionally, let people flag their display name as being a RL identity in their profiles (switchable by alt so you can have an official that can coexist with more anonymous profiles)
- this also makes it much harder to create alts for griefing purposes as they must be connected to a RL identity
Because of name collision in RL we have invented the SSN to separate people at times when you really need to know their identity. You can design the identity system around the same type of approach, letting the SUUID, in effect be the SL equivalent of the SSN.
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I am more surprised that 36% of landmass is homesteads. Would be interesting to know if there is a conversion of full estates sims to homesteads, cause if that happens, tier income should drop.
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Viewer 2.5 Beta Now Available
in Tools and Technology
A group blog by Secondlife in General
Posted
Not sure how much you achieve here but kick yourself in the teeth and get SL blocked in Germany.
Even within the union there is quite diverse legislation when it comes to these things, where i.e Germany for historical reasons have fascism legislation in place that no other country has.