Destroying User Content to Make SL "Like the Web"

Wow here's something to make me sputter -- the Lindens' plan to muck around with the viewer, like Windlight, includes concepts that could utterly destroy very basic activities in business and socializing in SL.

You wouldn't know about this unless you were a very astute student of the SL-DEV list (the elite one, not the grungy one) and also followed what M was saying, and Jacek "Go Around the People" Antonelli's blog, in response to Dusan's blog. Basically, Jacek discounts M's claim that there is a "new viewer to ease new user experience" -- it's not new, he says. It's just some embellishment on the old viewer that might make it easier to use (the notions for this, if they are in the realm of the existing geeky Lindens and Torley Linden, who has lost touch with reality, will not be "easier" for anybody, new or old).

Jacek is just splitting hairs, and it's not interesting to debate. But what he does say in refuting M Linden is that the Lindens' "Landmarks & Navigation" project may be what they *do* insert into the viewer. Alarm bells went off for me, because I remember seeing something about this on the God-awful wiki some time ago, and thinking "I better to something about this" but it was one of many things. I remember seeing that a group of graduate students were being hired by SL to work on tagging and such; but this seems to be an actual firm now hired by LL as an outsourced viewer-fixer.

I was appalled just reading it, and put in some wiki contributions right away -- I hope others will do the same.

While they claim this is "Food for Thought" only, and would "have to be done carefully," this outside firm -- and their Linden fans and FIC boosters -- are mounting these concepts precisely because *that's how they think*. What their vision involves is "How to make Second Life like the Web". And that's where they go wrong. Second Life doesn't *need* to be like the web! It is not a web page. It is a world. It has people in it; not texts and pictures. It is about interacting, not merely "accessing content" that you consume alone.

So what they want to do, God save us, is 1) remove landmarks from inventory and 2) deprecate, i.e. erase and get rid of, User Picks in favour of 3) putting in a browser-type function with saved bookmarks.

Yes. That's right. Remove User Generated Content. That these Web-mimicking monkeys should consider sacred, but don't.

The usual suspects line up to crow about delicious, as if they ever really look at delicious any more (I wish they'd be honest about this). They love the idea of tagging things like "red shoes" instead of being able to keep a landmark with a brand-name store on it, that you could search under the sim name or store name.

Yes, anything to destroy commerce. That's what this is ALWAYS about.

Here's what I've posted:

This concept of removing landmarks as objects in the inventory -- and in fact removing them as objects in the world -- is all wrong.

Would you *please* stop trying to make this interactive 3-D virtual world "like a web page browser"? It's *not a web page*. It's a *world*.

You will really destroy commerce models already thriving inworld if you remove landmarks as an object that can be put in prims. Every single business in SL uses landmark giver objects onsite or in ads or gives people landmarks as part of their advertising. And that's all good.

The idea that you "can't find or use" the landmarks in inventory is false. Of course you can find them. You use "search inventory" with the name of the store or sim and the landmark is found in the search.

People constantly hand each other landmarks to interesting places precisely because there isn't enough space on the Picks. By putting these "bookmarking" functions into a browser, you remove the sharability. How will I share my landmarks if I can't push them as inventory to other people, individually?!

Again, SL is *not a web page*. It's a 3-D interactive social world that has objects in it that people share and move. Landmarks are one of them. They are sharable sortable objects and inventory access them just fine now.

It's noted in the design description that removing landmarks from the data base will be some kind of "save" for the dbase. Is that what this is all about? It doesn't seem warranted if it kills of interactivity and commerce, exchanging that robustness of socialibility and economic life for a static solo-user's experience of his own bookmarks.

My mind absolutely boggles at the thought that you would want to get rid of User Picks.

This is *resident content*. *You do not get to destroy resident content*.

Deprecate picks? In favour of landmarks that will be shareable somehow? (when you're going to remove them out of the inventory? and have them shareable as...what exactly? how? off a browser? all of them at once?)

Why? People go to enormous trouble to make their Picks. It's the heart of their identity. I know as a landlord in SL that people record all kinds of special moments as well as places they like on their picks. The picks are *not just places*. The picks are a *story*. The picks have things like descriptions of your best friends. Or your business policies. Or information about using your product.

Could you people *look at how these things are actually used inworld* before you set about destroying them?!

There's no objective need to remove a page off the avatar, used to put his best selection of picks/story pages he wants to tell about his Second Life, in favour of some giant grab bug of landmarks, that does not tell that narrative.

Can you grasp that Picks are not just bookmarked spots, but *a story*? Can you please see this narrative on thousands of people and not tamper with it?!

I fail to see why your need to tinker with the viewer involves destroying what is already established *as user-generated content*. Try to remember that's what it is: *user-generated content*. Linden Lab should not be in the business of "deprecating" *user-generated content* under the guise of "new easier-to-use features".

User Picks are a more expert folksonomy than "traffic" (due to the gaming of some aspects of traffic) because people put something in their picks because they tend to really like it. Of course, Picks are gamed, too, as some stores will pay you or give you freebies to put them in your picks, as Picks are now part of search (so aside from everything else, these outsourcerers would destroy the search ranking you achieved by having people genuinely put you in picks -- thanks!).

But clearly they never really studied what Picks *are* to people, as I've complained:

THEY ARE BOOKS, NOT BOOK MARKS!

People write whole stories, sagas, ideas, concepts, descriptions of friends, how-tos, business policies, rules for sims, etc. on these pages. Deprecating all that is just -- unthinkable.

How can we deal with this kind of high-handed monkeying with what we should rightfully feel is *our viewer* that access *our user content*.

Well, you can go the route of sitting in those interminable sycophantic Linden office hours, where you will have to deal with 20-something alternately goofy or insolent Lindens, or worse, Torley's own aggressive idiosyncratic barrage, where he will insist that we must "embrace change" with something like the removal of landmarks in order to have this new viewer which will be "better".

Even if there was a way to share this viewer, something like "Google reader share" with shared RSS feeds, I can't imagine it will work *well*. It's more complicated, buggier, and laggier. Browsers inworld just don't work. I can't get SLURLs to work at all -- they simply lag out and never pull up. Other people can't see Showcase or other content that is in that "browser" box inworld now with search -- it just never displays. Imagine, crippling the world even further than it was crippled with Windlight.

No, I really think it's high time for a business lobbying group to get formed that makes its voice heard over the dulcet tones of the smarmy Linden office hours and exclusive privileged SL Dev list and the Solution Providers' Council and all the other "specials". This should be made of tier-paying managers who pay a lot to keep their businesses on the grid, who serve a lot of people inworld, and who are tired of being the last to find out about every major decision like this yet the first to suffer under them.

I don't have illusions that it will be easy to form such a lobbying group, because people don't like each other or trust each other, and each secretly harbours they will cut their own deal with the Lab, or get on the specials' list themselves, some day. But people really do need to get together to get some basic concepts across to the Lindens -- because they just don't live here.

Again, these basics would include:

1. Interoperability, and now even work on not just teleporting, but creating groups that can push objects across worlds (as groups now do within SL), has to include a robust permissions system -- non negotiable. The Lab's plan for really ensuring and implementing and *engineering* this needs to be heard and it can't be just vague assurances.

2. Non-Destruction of User Generated Content. There should never be such arrogant and casual idea like "let's get rid of the guide rail on the RR" "just because" when there is nothing whatsoever in its place, and when hundreds of people have made content around it. There is no justification for it. Nor should there EVER be ANY notion of destroying the tens of thousands of STORIES OF RESIDENTS on their Picks under some short-sighted and half-assed notion of "making SL like the web" as if Picks are just "not enough room to put bookmarks".

3. An end to theoretical geeky "use cases" and an actual study of what people really do, not by having office hours and the special privileged SL Dev list, but by having more notification of these plans further in advance (there has been no notification of the Landmarks program, for example, except in the exclusive SL Dev group, and you'd have to "just know" to go on the wonky wiki).

4. Ad farms will be judged not by rules, not by discussions, not by promises, but by delivery of junk-free land back to the public. The policy will be judged by the extent to which it can get the edgecasing fisking and manipulative nasties ROBO Marx, Cytherea Eagle, Austin Hallard, Ancient Shriner, Chrischun Fassbinder and many other notorious ad farmers, viewblockers, and parasites *off the grid*. This policy will be judged, again, by *what is removed from the grid*, not by fancy rule sets.

5. Orientation/Newbies Experience -- here, we need to understand what is happening to the sign-up stream, who has gotten a piece of it by the favour bank or outright payments, where it is going, how it can be accessed by groups wishing to help, or who have services to sell *and yes, that's fine*. Time for Linden Lab to come clean on the newbie stream -- one of the reasons they fail on retention is that they refuse to be transparent on how this is apportioned, and what can be done to access it. This means expanding advertising opportunities in welcome areas, infohubs, etc. -- fixing all the broken Linden ad banks and putting in better ones.

6. Assignment of a Linden to full-time duty to interact with inworld businesses. There is every conceivable kind of Linden. Lindens assigned to hand-hold outworld corporations. Lindens for educators. Lindens for scripters. Lindens for those wishing to "interoperate" and make "open architecture". Lindens for Burning Life. Lindens for Solutions Providers. Lindens for Lindens. But there are no Lindens for inworld business that still pays a very big chunk of the tier. That is really disgraceful, and should be ended.

In a way, the concierge, and Jack Linden, is the way in which inworld business attempts to interact on these issues. But...that's not business. Jack Linden is a government official in charge of public works, not the small business administration. They are different functions.

Is anyone willing to work on creating such a lobby, and moving these simple 6 points, or others similar to them, along? Or will they just go on kvetching in Concierge, blogging, and making up stories like "OMG they are going to ban rentomatics along with ad farms".

Comments

[Prokofy Neva]

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Image:Landmarks2.jpg

Take a look at this mock-up from Benjamin Linden to see another nasty aspect of this privileged dev group's notions -- hiding your Picks from all but your friends.

Makes for more of a closed world. Like the cliques on Plurk.

[Cocoanut Koala]

Gwyneth talks about how she passes SLURL's more frequently than landmarks:

"If landmarks are moved out of the inventory altogether (I'm a bit undecided about it; in-world, I tend to pass SLURLs more frequently, since it's far easier to open the map, create a SLURL, and copy & paste it to someone who's waiting for it in IM — to do the same for landmarks would require me to drop everything I'm doing, teleport to the destination, create a landmark, and come back), can we have a simple way of passing them as assets somehow?"

I'm glad she has asked for a way for us to still pass landmarks, cause I'd sure hate to have to do it the way she usually does.

I will tell you how I believe most people pass landmarks: They drag the landmark from their inventory and drop it on the other person.

Which they found easily by name.

If they don't have a landmark, they tell the other person, "I don't have a landmark, but you can look it up in Search."

If there are people actually using the method of not keeping landmarks, but instead, opening the map, locating the general area where the place might be, creating a URL, and then copying and pasting that to someone else - well, I'm impressed.

Because it seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to when there is a much easier way: Simply pass them a landmark, or direct them to Search.

I make landmarks when I find a place I want to return to. I click on them in my inventory when I want to go there, and I share them with other people.

I suppose that's entirely too straightforward though, huh?

And that's not to mention the fact that I include the landmark to my own shop in notecards and in my sales boxes for easy reference. Guess they think that's silly, too!

GOTTA GET THOSE LANDMARKS AND PICKS AWAY FROM US. They're entirely too useful and easy to use; even help businesses. That won't do!

Sometimes I think that every good and right thing they ever designed into SL from the beginning, someone is always now coming along and trying to destroy.

Just because.

coco

[Paisley Beebe]

As far as Landmarks go, what I would really like is to be able to check out picks in someone's profile and grab the landmark from that pick, instead of teleporting to the place to get a landmark, I end up sometimes with people's profiles reduced at the bottom of my screen, until I can get away from where ever I am, to go to the pick if its a place...and take the landmark, It may be a place I want to go to later-on, not right now...

e.g If you inspect someone's clothing/hair whatever and find out the creator and then click on the creators picks (where they often have their shop listed) you cannot grab the landmark to their shop from there, you have to TP to the shop to go make your own, and then come back later if you can't shop then, sigh....what a wasted opportunity to use picks as a great way to sell your gear...If Im at a gig and I see a great dress on an audience member I'm not going to tp right then to make a landmark while Im on stage obviously....and if I save the profile at the bottom of my screen for later, I often forget about it. Sale to that dress maker lost...

Personally I only use slurls in notices that go out and IM's for events, the rest of the time I use Landmarks and I use them a lot!!!!!

yep search for them in inventory, easy...I also collect a lot of them...and I put them all in sorted folders so if Im looking for ...furniture e.g I go to my furniture landmark folder and check those places I've collected first.

I'd be very interested to see how they could recreate the simplicity of handing someone a landmark and have it then appear where it needs to be with drag and drop...drag and drop is sooo easy,

I agree Prok, re Pics they really in most cases tell us a story about the person we are looking at....(beware the profile with no profile pic and no picks...they are likely to be either new, disinterested, an alt or a bot)...I love checking out peoples pics and I know its absolutely ok! I never feel like Im prying, they are meant to be looked at! If people want to keep some landmarks private you don't put them in pics :)

I do think having a lobby group for in world business is a great idea but all groups have their problems...factions....and people sometimes have disingenuous reasons for joining such groups...Can't stand committees....

I would also be concerned that any Linden charged with the duty of being an in world Business liaison would only be paying lip-service to it, bottom line seems to be right now, will it make a Linden for a Linden, not what will create a world where people can thrive in In world business...They have a hands off approach to in world business but not fair if they arbitrarily change something that works for something that is going to fail for business...

Paisley

[Daman Tenk]

@Coco: I'm actually a person who uses the map and SLURLs more often than I use landmarks.

HOWEVER - I do agree almost completely with your post, Prok. It doesn't happen very often, but I guess a broken clock is also right twice a day.

I really do hope picks and landmark items are not removed entirely, since picks are pretty much the recorded history of my second life, while landmarks still have a lot of specific uses for me even if I generally prefer to TP using the map and/or search.

[Jane2 McMahon]

I love picks...my faves are stored there and I don't have to open my inventory. Plus I've found a lot of great places from others' profiles...isn't that part of the point? And if people want to use ten slots to talk about being collared by their beloved, well fine by me too.

And as for landmarks, it's very very easy to find them, either by name, as you've noted, or by re-naming ("best zombies in SL", for instance, is very handy at Halloween).

[Dale Innis]

Wow, owch, that "Food for Thought" was pretty clueless. :) Being a Wiki radical, I have substantially rewritten parts of the page (and added comments to the Discussion page about what I did). Hope it's an improvement; we'll see if it gets regressed...

[Lum Lumley]

Most of the time your posts on upcoming SL development I find cheerfully overalarmist but in this case I agree: nuking landmarks from inventory is not only wrongheaded from an architectural standpoint, it actually attacks how I use Second Life.

I don't want to have to do some wacky sort of search every time I want to go to a favorite club or store. That would be, you know, why I have landmarks.

Silly overengineering and bad interface design. Add features, sure, but don't remove existing ones.

[Yumi Murakami]

What's really strange is - there are already scripted items on sale in SL that *DO* this. I make one, and I know there's one available as part of the MystiTool, as well.

So why would devs want to provide a function which, not only conflicts with existing functionality in the world, but where anyone who wants it can already get it??

[Prokofy Neva]

The reason these "Devs" feel they can destroy and deprecate is because they imagine they are building something better: a browser with bookmarking capacity.

But I've handily refuted that concept:

1. Browsers can't share easily -- the route to getting the content shared, other than as a "share only with my friends all my bookmarks" or "share all my bookmarks with everyone" is very vague, and NOT the same thing as publicly posting 10 Picks that are...Picks, not just "all my bookmarks". I go to a lot of trouble to make Picks; many people do (I noticed the devs don't -- they use it for a handful of bookmarks of sites they probably haven't been to in ages).

2. I really need to burn in my point: Picks are a diary/MySpace/blog of their own with all the narratives one can find on them for business, education, socializing. You turn Picks into a mere "share my landmarks" and you don't have the commentary that goes with them, unless you go to each individual parcel, and overlay your commentary to it instead of the parcel's usual description. And how can you do that if it is not your property???? See, this is where, in the name of shared/collaboration/high tech functions they destroy what is in fact an organic homegrown folksonomy that grew up inspite of the tech.

3. Browsers are laggier. There is no way they will function well in SL. We have seen this with the F1 in the client debacle -- since deprecated, speaking of deprecations. We see it with other efforts to force web-into-world -- laggy, stupid, not used. I'm in a world, not the Internet, dummy, if I want the Internet, I tab out of my game.

4. What was the plan for making a store's landmarks deliverable to people who don't want to pick them and put them in browsers, but just might like a handy landmark? After all, inventory *is* searchable. It takes the careful ecology of "Picks on my avatar pages" and "landmarks" and merges them and destroys the functionality of both.

And Jane2 has brought up something I forget that is really very handy -- the ability of anybody to make a landmark and RENAME IT. You can take a landmark of your mall stall rented from someone who keeps their description intact on the search, but you can rename the landmark MY STORE. Whereas this sharing of bookmarks can't achieve that.

I never pass SLURLs unless I am making a rentals ad for the forums -- they are a chore to make, requiring several steps, and they don't work for me.

Gwyn is a geek. She's trying to adapt to another geek's wonky tech crap by amplifying a practice she *can* do but in fact probably doesn't do as much as she imagines.

I don't mind that you have to TP to a place to get its landmark. I think that's the whole point, to get people to view other's content. Removing that barrier is like removing telehubs, in the name of some sort of collectors' lack of friction, it reduces commerce. I'm not for doing it.

[Maggie Darwin]

Um....not exactly hard to share URLs, be they SLURLS or otherwise.

http://del.icio.us

Not that landmarks and picks need to be deprecated, of course.

Ordinal's SLURLBlogger is a fine little device, too.

[Prokofy Neva]

Typical of the tool Dale Innis that instead of leaving this Wiki page by apparently Stephany Linden with the really bad "Food for Thought" to stand, so that we can see their thinking and keep letting them know how bad it is and how they need to get their paws off our content, he goes and edits away the bad text and replaces it with his own so that their tracks are covered (unless you are a total geek reading the history of changes) and no one needs to be exposed to their bad thinking processes indicated here.

What I did was add a comment, not try to rewrite someone else's text. I hate wikis.

[Prokofy Neva]

Maggie, be honest. When was the last time *you went back and looked* at all the dumb delicious bookmarks you made? I mean, all 8 or 20 or 100 pages back? Or really looked at anybody else's?

Delicious is dumb. It's a packrat inanity posting as a social service.

[Prokofy Neva]

BTW, I fail to see how you can create a SLURL from the map if you are not at that location. Gwyn has done a neat trick there.

[Sean Williams]

You know, there are some people whose Pics NEED to be viewable only by those in their friends list.

I've run into several people who have had images and text in their Pics tab that have no business being viewed by the general public. Case in point: One person that came to a club I used to work at had her own little sexual kinks listed with some rather racy and raunchy text and pics to go with them. Sorry but the average profile viewer isn't interested in how turned on someone gets by things like rape or being violated in general.

If THAT part is implemented with a toggle that allows such a thing to be opt in - fine.

Otherwise the whole damn thing is a bad idea.

[Hands Mensing]

Sigh.

Do they know that most of SL users are not geeky...?

Loss of a core function and for what?

[Cocoanut Koala]

This is not to mention that every time they try to make LL into the Internet, they break it and cut out that many more people from being able to use it at all.

First, it was "Search All." I cannot search all. It is a static screen, unscrollable, unmovable - limited to only the first six or so items that show up on the screen for that search.

I can't find my own shop on it, to compare its standing to others. If I search for a texture, or anything else not greatly specific ("capybara" maybe) I will get only whatever the first six or seven returns are.

Then they put in "Showcase." Again, I can't scroll it, can't see anything beyond the first few entries.

When I took this issue to them (several times), they were perfectly pleasant about it, but the answer was, "This doesn't work for a certain percentage of people, and we don't know why." They suggested running in a window, but that didn't fix it.

No urgency whatsoever. Just shrugging of shoulders.

(And now Groups doesn't work for me, either.)

This sort of thing leaves me totally slack-jawed. Never in my life have I considered a job finished or successful (nor has anyone else I ever worked with) when it simply didn't work for a proportion of the people.

Being able to search these things is important, and the kicker is, it USED to work.

So they change it so that now some people can't use it at all, and that's supposed to be okay? Or even "better"?

Imagine if it were a car-maker, but the new car simply wouldn't work for x percentage of the customers, and you never knew who that would be. When the old car did! And they would just say, oh well?

This idea of taking more things and making them that way simply means more people will not be able to use those things, either.

I am terrified of the day when they decide to do the same thing with "People." When the day comes that I can't even find PEOPLE, I suppose I will have to just quit.

I simply cannot grasp how anyone in their right mind can take out a working system and put in one that doesn't work for a percentage of people and think that's just fine.

It seems to me OBVIOUS that that is WORSE than what went before.

Why would you take something that works for everybody and put in something that doesn't work for many, and actually consider that an improvement?

And then sit there and say, "Well, gee, it works for most people, and the ones it doesn't work for, well, we don't know why."

What the heck sort of product are you making when you purposely screw up sections so that they DON'T work for people when they did before?

Who is UP there in Linden Lab, allowing broken things to take the place of things that once worked? Don't they know that's BAD? Isn't there anyone at the helm at all?

Or are they so wedded to some dopey philosophy that they don't CARE if it doesn't actually work?

But . . . I'm ranting.

coco

[Cocoanut Koala]

(*like* Capybara, maybe)

[Ann Otoole]

An example odf the problem of why control of requirements needs to be removed from the existing LL staff follows. (What? The little tiny sldev mailing list gets to make all decisions> good god the CEO needs to be cleaning house rofl):

[sldev] RX Office hours - "What would you remove from the Second Life viewer UI?"
Grant Linden
AddTo:
sldev@lists.secondlife.com
----
Topic of discussion for this weeks Rx Team Office Hours - General Discussion topic: "What would you remove from the Second Life viewer UI?"

Thursday October 2nd from 3:00-4:00 PM SLT
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Beaumont/148/155/46/?title=Linden%20Village

For more news about the RX team and to suggest topics for future RX Office Hours please visit our wiki page: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Resident_Experience

The SL-UX Email Discussion List is the ongoing conversation about the Second Life UI and Resident Experience. Residents and Lindens join together to discuss, brain storm and refine the Second Life UI. Join here:
https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sl-ux

Steven Grant (Grant Linden)
User Experience Designer
Linden Lab | Second Life

[Dale Innis]

"BTW, I fail to see how you can create a SLURL from the map if you are not at that location."

I believe if you single-click on a point on the map, and then "copy SLURL to clipboard", you get the SLURL of the place you clicked on (not the SLURL of where you are).

[Dale Innis]

"BTW, I fail to see how you can create a SLURL from the map if you are not at that location."

I believe if you single-click on a point on the map, and then "copy SLURL to clipboard", you get the SLURL of the place you clicked on (not the SLURL of where you are).

[Dale Innis]

"BTW, I fail to see how you can create a SLURL from the map if you are not at that location."

I believe if you single-click on a point on the map, and then "copy SLURL to clipboard", you get the SLURL of the place you clicked on (not the SLURL of where you are).

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, gosh, that's a neat trick, Dale, as I said, being able to pick a place exactly off the map, based on that very-slowly-updating map and the view of the builds on it. But...whatever.

[Ciaran Laval]

Well it is ridiculous that inworld business has no real voice. This is another example of too many geeks spoiling the broth.

Landmarks are an address, that's why business owners include them in their products. It's a basic concept, obviously it's not a geeky enough concept.

It's all very well thinking of ways to improve the UI, but this is being done without consideration of the world as a whole.

There's a need for people at Linden Lab to think systemically instead of just their own little pet project.

[Aimee Trescothick]

That wiki page is woefully out of date, it still basically reflects Vectorform's thinking when they started the project before talking to residents back in April. The idea of removing landmarks from inventory and deprecating user picks were rapidly dropped once they'd started speaking to people, who were unanimously against it. Among the most vocal in opposing this were some of the people you are blaming. In fact a lot of good ideas were raised to expand on how user picks work in light of how people actually use them.

Unfortunately just the act of them asking the question opened Pandora's box, and even after they backed away from it the idea took on a life of its own, and keeps getting revived as something that's actually happening, it's not.

There's a summary of Vectorform's actual findings at http://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2008-June/010287.html

Their navigation design is attached to the JIRA issue http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7900 as LLSL-LandmarksEnhancements-FinalIA-08-0626.pdf

[Prokofy Neva]

Aimee,

There is nothing to suggest that whatsoever on the wiki -- it stood (until Dale monkeyed with it), and was never edited. There is no report of any feedback from any residents. Indeed, these people's claim to fame is that they *are* residents, and therefore "know best".

It reveals bad thinking, of the type that won't go away just because this or that element is battled at this juncture.

If these "people I am blaming" were so vocal, where are there wiki edits?! Where is the transcript of their inworld talks? Where is their PUBLIC discussion that is inclusive of THE REST OF US???

What's very very clear from the JIRA is that this is *already a fait accompli* by the time it reached the JIRA, merely being tweaked.

This design provides silly things like automatic "different folders for the landmarks to go into" when few people would use that -- because duh, they can just make their own folder and drag the landmarks into it already with existing tools.

I don't have time to wrestle with annoying zip and PDF files now to see what other things there will be that will be sure to be annoying about this system that will affect us all, in which we had no part. It's just appalling.

I am fucking *tired* of rule by SL Dev. It needs to be seriously challenged by a business council that emerges autonomously free of Linden interference, that challenges some of this sort of bad, privileged decision-making in a box.

BTW, yet another example of the major Big Lie of Open Source, that it is "open" and "everyone can see and contribute" but of course...not really...because you have to be an invited member of this special SL Dev list, which you can only become if you are a merchant of "Solution Provider" consulting for clients outworld, or if you have the kind of inworld business that is of interest to the Lindens' own projects, or if you are simply FIC and once made a swimming animation (that's how Siggy Romulus got on it).

I love how this SECRET process is described like this:

"The project began with a massive research phase that encompassed Office Hours discussions, interviews with Residents (both new and veteran),scouring Second Life blogs, researching resident-created tools, reviewing other Viewers and a host of web apps."

There is nothing open about a Linden office hour. If you can stomach the horrid process that goes on in these tiny meetings with usually 20 people max in them, and brave the deeply-entrenched sycophants arranged around the Linden like Scylla and Charybdis, you might get a point in, but the Linden may even shush you.

Interview? With your friends...

Scouring of blogs? But...how can anybody blog about something we never heard about, that required expert digging through about 4 references tucked away in blogs until finally coming upon this wiki, well hidden away, never the subject of a Linden announcement until M Linden announces it as a fait accompli.

BTW, I loathe and hate and despise the word "affordance".

Note that in this link, when they talk about backing down from deprecating Picks, it is only as a temporary maneuver until "better social tools" come along. There is no understanding that *you cannot destroy user generated content*. Instead, there is the belief that some brighter future exists when some better mousetrap will be built, with an eye to technology, *not content*.

There was no existing social demand to have landmarks or picks "improved". This was a geek-induced fetish that came from a worldview that is all about "making SL like the web" -- for which there is no public call, but only a notion in LL that they have to compete with things like FriendFeed by "making SL more like the web".

Note also this plan as stated then in that SL post is to fit the plan into Dazzle -- which of course has been roundly discredited everywhere.

All that this big whooping and hollering produced is the ability to...rename landmarks and...put them in new folders. Something that...we could already do -- renaming was a snap, and putting them in other folders was a snap. What did Linden Lab pay for this pouring of the empty into the void?!

Management of landmarks has never been a chore, or did it require "weeding through" the rest of inventory, because you just...went to that folder and opened it.

Here's another piece of collectivism, for which there is a claim that there is a "resident demand" for this, and for which the very fuzzy and unsupported concept of "tagging," which is a fad that really doesn't have the use these geeks imagine on the web at large, is conceived a global project for SL:

" *Shared Landmarks & Tagging
*One of our original ideas (and a common suggestion from Residents) has been to include tagging of Landmarks and other Inventory assets. We investigated
a couple of ways to create a folksonomy use with Landmarks in Second Life during the first phase of our project. However, it became clear that tagging
functionality would be useful for many other areas and could touch many other areas including search, the web, User Picks, and most Inventory items.
Rather than build a small one-off tagging system just for Landmarks, it was decided that creating a true folksonomy that could be used throughout Second
Life (For searching, sharing landmarks, creating more a social network, etc.) was a much bigger project than our timeline or project goals would allow for. So tagging functionality was deemed out of scope for this project"

Sigh. Who can manage to derail this idiocy? If you have the ability to edit landmarks, and put them in a folder, i.e. "My Rentals" or "Places That Have Red Hooker Shoes," why do you also need to "tag" them. Talk about drags on the database!

Why do I oppose tagging? Tagging is the spimes of the virtual world. It imposes classification and taxonomy, which they cutely call "folksonomy," which in fact is about coders, and power users of the taggint system, to rate, classified, store features of the world *outside of their owners' control*. It's like the InfoNet ratings of TV makers, where they could slam one person wrongfully, and keep spewing that in the infohubs for ages. It's like hotel and professor ratings that bear no resemblance to the facts.

Tagging enables people to organize their world, and you would thing that would be fine, but...it's also about *collectivizing* that world. Making it "shareable" also means inducing classifications and evaluations on the public from a few power users.