With thanks to Soft Linden, a unique look at an early iteration of Second Life, circa 2001, when it was still called LindenWorld.
Note: updated with copy from YouTube.
Month: April 2011
Sign-up pages and Basic mode of Viewer – working well
Figures collated by Tateru Nino (see below) show that the new Basic Mode of the Viewer have had a positive impact on user sign-ups, with a dramatic upward trend since its introduction at the end of March. The new sign-up pages, reported on yesterday, have had an even bigger impact, it would seem – and despite teething problems. The latter point was hinted at by Rodvik yesterday when he commented in a Tweet to myself:
Thanks, yeah should be fixed quickly. Even with those the results have been amazing.
This is a positive thing, and shouldn’t be dismissed as it demonstrates that without additional marketing and promotion, SL can generate user interest.
What remains unclear at present is how well the new Basic mode does at retaining users – and as Rodvik rightly points out, it’s going to be a few weeks before the figures on user retention become clear. Certainly, I’d still be somewhat concerned, as the “new user experience” leaves a lot to be desired, as Theia Magic and others have commented upon.
Rodvik has also indicated that the Basic Mode is to be enhanced over time; as I’ve previously mentioned, while some additional functionality would benefit the Basic mode, there is a risk that add too much, and the line between Basic and Advanced becomes so blurred as to be non-existent. Given this, I still hold to my position that it is the Viewer HELP functions that need to be overhauled, rather than simply dropping more and more into Basic (unless said “more” is modular in format and can be activated at a time of the user’s own choosing).
I’m really hoping that ears at LL are receptive to the idea of a more integrated HELP for Basic / Advanced modes; it would get a lot of people “over the wall” in terms of transitioning from one to the other a lot quicker.
Beyond this, the issue of orienting users once they are in SL does remain a problem. Some have called for a reinstatement of the mentors; others have called for a revamp of the welcome islands, etc., in line with some of the privately run welcome areas. From Theia’s reports, it would seem a degree of policing of the LL-run welcome points needs attention. It is a little ironic that the Lab is paranoid about adult language getting into the forums and the like – but anyone with Voice enabled can be immediately verbally abused on arriving in-world for the first time.
Personally, I’m confident that Rodvik is more than aware of what needs to be done – as does Bagman Linden. That the Basic mode has had such a positive impact is good news, and I cannot see anything other than it being capitalised upon in the coming weeks and months as more of the initial user experience is brought into focus and revised / improved.
(with thanks to Tateru Nino by way of Rodvik Linden)
Twittering with Rodvik
Yesterday evening, Rodvik Linden – LL’s CEO Rod Humble – popped up on Twitter and chatted with some of us there in what was another of the warm an open conversations that have been a hallmark of his time at LL so far.
I actually came late-in-the-day to the conversation, logging-in to Twitter to catch this from Rodvik, replying to a comment on things SL:
@SecondLie I think we need to put purchasing into Basic first 🙂
Given the Basic mode of the Viewer is something that has been occupying my thoughts of late, I Tweeted in return:
@rodvik how about offering a better “step up”, help-wise from Basic to Advanced? – pointing to my recent post on the subject, and:
@rodvik If you keep adding functionality to the Basic mode, won’t you end up with…the Advanced mode?
I’ve no idea if Rodvik went and read the post in question; but it sparked something of a short discussion on the Basic mode and the Viewer in general in which he responded very positively to all making comments. In particular, he tweaked my curiosity with a reply to my suggestion that perhaps the Viewer should be made more modular:
@InaraPey Maybe yeah. Bagman keeps telling me that would be a good approach.
Bagman Linden is Jeff Petersen, the Lab’s newly-appointed VP of Engineering, and I have to admit, hearing that he’s thinking along similar lines – and leaving my precious little ego well out of things – does raise my spirits, and it suggests that we just might be seeing a wholly new iteration of the Viewer at some point that may well achieve something Viewer 2 has so far failed to do. Going the modular route just – to me at least – seems the most common-sense approach to take; what isn’t clear is just how much effort it will take…
I also took the opportunity to both congratulate and tease Rodvik on the new Avatar sign-up pages. As reported yesterday, these are a superb step forward, but the lack of overall QA on their compatibility with all browsers really lets them down. Rodvik took the tease in good spirits:
@rodvik. The new sign-up process is very clean; hope the compatibility issues are sorted ASAP; they tend to defeat the hard work put in.
@InaraPey Thanks, yeah should be fixed quickly. Even with those the results have been amazing.
This comment is interesting, as it’s been stated that new user sign-ups are running as high as about 10K a day; although it’s hard to see this reflected in on-going concurrency, which has been dropping. I’d really like to know more as to what has been the effect of the new sign-up pages, and how badly things like new users ending up bewildered and confused by SL once they are here are affecting user retention.
Again, leaving aside any ego-boo I get from chatting with Rod Humble via Twitter, I found the time he took to address questions and suggestions as best he could to be refreshing and open. Of course, there is a temptation to bemoan the fact that while he is chatting on Twitter, the rest of LL seem to be engaged in an obstinate silence on their own Community Platform – but the fact is (and providing it goes beyond purely touchy-feely “niceness”), Twitter does offer an immediacy the CP lacks.
What would be good- and where Linden Lab are most definitely missing a trick – is in not having a Twitter feed or two on their own web pages. I really would recommend a couple of live feeds from the likes of Rodvik and Pete “Ballyhoo” Linden direct to people’s Dashboards would prove very useful in demonstrating to users that LL are communicating.
So how about it, Rodvik, Pete?
Sign-up pages overhauled
Linden lab, as pointed to by Daniel Voyager, has overhauled the new user sign-up pages, making them cleaner and more direct. Gone are the old static pages, instead, a newcomer clicking on JOIN NOW is taken to a page that displays the new default avatars, which can be previewed in motion (to some extent) prior to selecting the most preferred one.
Once selected, the avatar slides over to a page requesting you assign it a user name, before sliding over to a third screen where the rest of the default information required to create an account is displayed (password, e-mail addy, etc. – all of which are mandatory).
Michelle Leckrone has produced a nice little video of these initial steps, which can be seen below.
Following these screens, you’re given the option of going for a free account, or a Premium, as shown on the left; once selected, you reach a screen inviting you to download and install the Viewer, as “Your avatar is awaiting you!”
Overall, it is a clean, slick approach to the sign-up process, although it does have a few teething troubles right now, and it again demonstrates the mistake LL made in doing away with the first name / last name format for avatar names.
The problems are in the fact that – once again – Linden Lab seem to have shot themselves in the foot when it comes to testing and QA: many users are reporting issues with the new sign-up system across all flavours of browsers. These are as minor as the selection bar on the first screen appearing OVER the avatars themselves, right up to the screen failing to load any avatars at all.
This isn’t really very clever, and needs fixing quickly. For my part I rant the process on the latest Chrome and Opera iterations, and found the selector bar issue in Opera, while Chrome displayed everything faultlessly.
The loss of a last name for an avatar is more of an issue inasmuch as it severely limits the choices available to users – hence the massive rise in names like “Jodie1234 Resident”. While it can be argued that the use of Display Names overcomes this limitation, the removal of the last name option – even when using a pre-selected list – has potentially lessened the external view of Second Life as being a digital “reality” and moved it closer to being viewed as just another game.
That said, this is overall a good move in cleaning up the user sign-up process – assuming the idiotic browser compatibility issues are rapidly sorted out (and for which there is simply no excuse). I certainly hope that the rest of the sign-up process is similarly revamped in a positive manner. As it stands, it still suffers from the bland (and misleading) videos and slide shows that do very little to entice new users or offer an actual meaningful explanation as to what SL is and what people can do within it. Hopefully, these will be addressed in the near future, and replaced with something more vibrant an appealing.
SLM: How about some Direct Disclosure?
Yesterday, Brooke Linden blogged requesting SL Merchants volunteer to help with the new SL Marketplace Direct Delivery system. I actually missed the post, as unlike the old Jive system, news such as this doesn’t get pushed to the Featured News announcements on people’s dashboards, so you have to go hunting for the sodding information – which is about as pleasant as dropping a hardback edition of the OED on an exposed toe or two (and I speak from a position of authority on this latter point).
Direct Delivery (as it is now to be called) is a method by which the current Magic Boxes (themselves a hold-over from the days when SLM was still XStreet SL) can be replaced by a method to deliver items direct from a merchant’s inventory. This in itself is not a bad idea – some OS Grids actually already have such a system.
However, as it currently stands, the testing programme for this new system looks like it might not get out of the starting gate because Linden Lab seem hell-bent on keeping the whole thing a Sooper Sekrit to the point of absurdity.
- There is no actual information on what the testing actually involves, beyond the broadest outlines (people will need to spend “several hours a week” involved in “trying to find problems” and “try out typical Marketplace Merchant activities”
- There is no real information on how the system works, what set-up is entailed, how the Beta might impact a Merchant’s store and current delivery mechanisms, what additional overheads will be involved on the part of Merchants in order to actually position themselves in preparation for taking part in the programme
- No information on what support will be available from Linden Lab for Merchants in the event of significant problems occurring that impact a Merchant’s ability to do business or which might adversely impact their reputation
- No information on what this is likely to do to inventory loads and organisation, etc., is provided.
The lack of such up-front information means that it is next to impossible for any Merchant to reasonably evaluate whether or not they should offer to participate – and this despite previous promises from Brooke that such information would be forthcoming.
Instead, Merchants are being asked to blindly sign a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) covering their involvement in the programme. On the one hand, this suggests that there is a high degree of paranoia evident at LL (an NDA is required for testing an enhancement to a product for which there is not credible competition in terms of scale? Is there something broader going on here that users are being kept in the dark about?). On the other hand, LL’s NDAs have in the past helped to create rifts between company and users, so the use of the term “(updated) NDA” in the sign-up form is already going down faster than a lead balloon among many well-established Merchants.
There are a myriad of other questions surrounding SLM as a whole, and precisely where LL are going with it.
While many are reporting that their SLM sales are growing (I’m one of them), in-world sales are equally declining for many (I’ve seen my own in-world sales significantly drop). Significant drops in-world sales calls into question the viability of keeping stores and shops open. After all, why pay $40-$100 a month in tier if you can achieve the same volume of sales for $2-$5 dollars a month in SLM commissions? This in turn opens up the risk of land rentals plummeting as stores are closed down and Merchants re-focus their effort on web sales supported by perhaps a single, low-cost store, and thus further undermine an already fragile in-world economy.
At the same time, there cannot be any doubt that Search in the SLM works somewhat better than the Viewer 2 in-world Search; so why isn’t effort being put into actually sorting the latter out properly and making it possible for people to enjoy shopping in-world once more?
Make no mistake, there is a need for a service such as SLM, and a Direct Delivery mechanism such as appears to be under development would be a welcome addition to managing stocks. However, the manner in which LL are once more approaching what should be a relatively straightforward development and implementation of a worthwhile feature is fast becoming shrouded in frustration and mistrust.
So how about it Brooke – or better yet, Rodvik – can we please have some Direct Disclosure around the topic of Direct Delivery before we’re asked to sign our lives away…again…?
Advertising SL: the machinima effect
It’s been said many times that LL are pretty weak when it comes to promoting Second Life through advertising. Like their attempts at PR promotion for the platform (as opposed to the company), their approach is both lax and sporadic, rather than being proactive and focused.
When you consider that anyone with an interest in virtual worlds can barely flip a web page without hitting yet another ad for IMVU, you have to wonder at how LL can be so reticent to get out there and aggressively promote the platform on a continuous basis. Lets face it; when does SL tend to hit the headlines? Either when the Lab is facing a lawsuit (or when users are hitting each other over the head with legal claims such as the bunnies vs. horses situation) or when some erstwhile pundit is predicting the “imminent” demise / sell-off of the platform.
As readers will know, I’ve found LL’s lack of willingness to actively promote Second Life pretty frustrating over the years, and have commented on this a number of times – including quite recently.
I’m not alone in thinking this. Earlier today, Crap Mariner tweeted:
Linden Lab needs to make some ads like this for Second Life:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC6nkqGEBBw&feature=autofb
It’s super advert. It prompted me to reply:
Or #LL should work with the machinima folk for suitable ads: say a competition; top 3 promoted on YT, SL.com, etc.
Which I think got us both thinking, as Crap followed up with a blog of his own even as I set out to blog here.
Next month is Machinima Month, in which the platform’s burgeoning machinima community is encouraged to participate, and to “encourage the creation of new work, and showcase existing work to the community and beyond”. As monthly rolling event supported by the Linden Endowment of the Arts, this is an excellent move on LL’s part.
But – as I hinted at in my Tweet, why not go further? Why not have a machinima competition: the top prize(s) being the active promotion of the resultant (time-limited) videos by LL (with full credit to the originators) throughout all channels available to LL – including things like an official You Tube channel and the SL Facebook page (both of which should be used to show-off the “winning” submissions from the month Machinima event overseen by the LEA).
The competition could be free-form (limited only by time length – say no longer than 1 minute), or be defined by specific content LL wish to see covered (in-world creativity, in-world entertainment, commerce, etc.) – with these aspects acting as categories for the competition.
Integrated into a broader-based advertising campaign (why not take a leaf from IMVU’s book?), a Machinima-based advertising approach such as this would score in three ways:
- It engages the Lab directly with a talented section of the community who are capable of producing material that promotes the finest attributes of Second Life
- It relieves the Lab of the burden of attempting to produce something themselves, while allowing them to determine what should be used through their own advertising / promotional channels (You Tube, the SL Facebook pages, etc.)
- It provides a clear demonstration that Second Life is a collaborative platform, where user creativity is fully supported and encouraged by the Lab.
Art is an incredibly powerful tool for promotional purposes. Let’s see LL and the community leverage the creative potential with the platform to actively promote the platform.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 