Reading Radar

Back when it was announced that Big Spaceship would be working with LL to “transform the Second Life Experience,” a lot of people made comments regarding Big Spaceship, or rather comments about who they weren’t. Namely, someone that anyone had ever heard of. At least not anyone who is a resident in SL. Well, ok, no one that I could find. Still, I figured I’d give them the benefit of the doubt, and see what came of it. It seemed to me good enough that LL was willing to get help where they needed it, and clearly UI and non-confusing user experience is one area where they need it.

So when Kat Linden posted that they are testing the new Second Life homepage this week, I thought “yay, let’s see it” and trundled off for a look. Here’s the screenshot she posted:

Crap Mariner eloquently shared his thoughts. I don’t know if I was as overtly hostile, but I guess I wasn’t too kind in my comments I posted in the SL forum thread on the topic. I said:

Please take the “flirt” thing and the woman with boobs that could each fill a sim off … SL has a reputation as it is.

I hope it didn’t cost too much.

Looking at it again, I still think I’m right… this is like a photo album slideshow, not a product or company homepage that’s designed to convey what the product is, and help the world know what to do next or why they’d even want to. It’s confusing. It’s black, as cm/ls pointed out, and it’s wide. And it uses Flash. Crap didn’t point out that using flash on a homepage is another sin, so I will. It’s stupid and unnecessary, especially if this is the result.

There is no focal point. Your eye zooms off to each side of the page looking for boundaries, and there aren’t any. It hurts to look at and try to make sense of.

Based on this one look at their product, Big Spaceship should work for facebook. Jumble and clutter are mandatory there.

I subscribed to a new podcast this week after seeing it mentioned on twitter. Voices in the Machine, a podcast by Caledon residents. Their self-description:

Voices in the Machine is a podcast by, for, and about Steampunk explorers in the virtual world of Second Life®, published biweekly by Radio Riel: Real Radio, Your Reality.

I listened to episode one partly last night and finished it up on the way to work today. I like it. They did a good job of explaining some of their basic background as relates to Caledon, and did some discussion of the Openspace nonsense. They were professional and well spoken on the matter. They’d done some testing on Openspaces themselves and they put forth their assertion that LL is definitely not lying about seeing performance issues with heavily loaded openspaces. FINALLY, SOMEONE WHO UNDERSTANDS THIS!! I’d recommend them for that alone!!

Fortunately, that’s not the only reason to recommend them. I still have a couple episodes to go to get caught up. The only noticeable need for improvement was on audio quality, but it wasn’t that bad. All new podcasts start off needing a little work there, and look, I’m still messing with mine. A couple sections had me struggling to hear Gabrielle Riel compared to the others, otherwise it was an immaterial fact.

Really looking forward to getting caught up and hearing new episodes come out. It may be a fairly targeted podcast, but I think even non-residents of Caledon and those who don’t particularly get into Victorian era roleplay will find it interesting. I really like new podcasts in and about SL that have something to say, and not just a need to speak.

Ok, now this is cool. Dusan Writer points out the horribly named Viwogeo, from a link provided by Pais Kidd.

Basically the premise is that if you have a build in SL that mirrors a RL location, it can go on this map so that the RL map location links to the SLurl of the SL build location.

Got all that? Yeah, confusing in words, but simple and really cool in practice. Check it out.

What? Nothing in Kazakhstan? Or even CANADA!?! Come on, I know those crazy Canucks have something in SL. Come on… add the SLurl to the Viwogeo map… you know you want to! I mean, come on, Wichita, KANSAS has one for crying out loud.