No, the Dashboard Doesn't Rock

I'm not getting Dusan's enthusiasm about the new Linden Dashboard, which is in beta.

Perhaps it's because I have very demanding ideas about what I want in a Dashboard, which I just haven't found yet on any service, and those ideas are about curation, but also about high interactivity and viewability by everyone, not just me or a friends' list.

I looked at the Lindens' Dashboard, after being reassured by Blue Linden that this Dashboard will not be in our faces, inworld, between us and the world-view.

And I have to say that it's yet another institutionalization of the FIC, yet another distraction from the need to fix the world and make the world work, and yet another useless thing I won't really ever look
at because it's merely about Lindens pushing content to me, not having a device to help select and comprehend content coherently myself, much less share it with friends and contacts that I make without the Lindens' looking over my shoulder and steering me.

As is, it is useless, rather like the current "Friends on Line" which I know is "there" but which I never bother to look at, unless I happen to go inworld and then decide while in world I'd like to look at my online friendship list. Perhaps that's because if I wanted to reach, say, Crap Mariner during the day when he might be at work at not inworld, I'd write something @ him on Twitter that he might be likely to peruse while at work -- I'd be more likely to do that then to try to look up his RL email in the thousands of emails in my box. And that's just it -- SL is an experience you are ready to have when you're ready to have it in world, and your burning need to contact SL people outside of that experience isn't as great as you might imagine, and when it is, you know to go on Twitter lol.

Worse than the world-versus-web disconnect, the Dashboard is full of push, and full of one-to-many, and not full of pull and many-to-many which social media is supposed to be about -- all under the guise of being "a social media addition to SL". It is not social media, in truth.

The Dashboard pushes to me the Lindens' recommendations for places I should visit on their Showcase, which they decide -- to be sure, one can submit items to it under a rigorous guide, but in the crush of competition, your chances are slim -- it's basically the Lindens' own highly subjective curated one-to-many old-media push -- the kind of "curation" that Andrew Keen cries out for, faced with the overwhelming scrum of user-generated media, much of it not "rich content", i.e. high-quality or high signal-to-noise.

There is nothing about this "Dashboard" that enables me to set it up so that it pushes to me only, say, sites recommended to me by my friends (the way Facebook friends can send me links I see). Or pushes to me only keyword content interest or past visited sites, the way Amazon pushes "you might like this" books. Or even just shows me "last 5 sites visited" so I can remember them or go back to them. Er, isn't social media supposed to be about *me*?!

The Dashboard, above all, in the main attention space, pushes the Lindens' blogs, not blogs I might RSS in there for it to view of SL bloggers -- and perhaps worse, contains whatever recent additions to whatever Linden blog I was foolish enough not to shut the email notifications off from, so that the last 10 inane comments from my fellow, usually irate and stupid residents, is squarely in my view lol -- not my own irate and stupid comments lol which might be slightly more of interest to me than somebody else's randomly generated in time.

A huge chunk of precious right-looking real-estate is taken up with the video tutorials -- something I hate, never view, don't want, and kill off whenever it comes near me, as it almost entirely comes from Torley and his hysterical Pollyanishly overcomplicated-in-the-name-of-simple smarmyness. Give me the last 5 Linden-curated-and-cleansed "podcasts" of staff members over this, any day.

Yet more precious real estate is taken up with the last five painful announcements about the painful grid not painfully working -- something I don't want in a dashboard, which shouldnt' be filled with pain. If I want pain, I go to that URL to see the pain or I feel the pain while inworld. I don't need pushed pain to me on a dashboard.

More annoying FICy stuff comes in the form of X-street items for sale -- I can't tell how they were picked. Are these the people who bought the most expensive ads? Or what? So now they get a double dip -- once on the Xstreet.com page where they pay for viewability, and now for free inside the dashboards of everybody who opens up a dashboard. How stupid, both for people selling ad space who could be selling THAT dashboard ad space separately, and keyword/semanticize it so that it pushed ads to me like the things I already bought instead of schoolgirl outfits and 4th of July bikinis I'm not interested in.

The Dashboard also contains the events list, something Dusan extols over like a kid as if...he routinely consults the events list "as is" inworld or on the web, which I'm willing to bet he never does because it's a morass.

That is, sure, I can filter it on the Dashboard by clicking and searching a bit more, as I do inworld, and picking out "Discussion". But it doesn't do that intuitively, based on past searches, and serve that up to me on the first interface.

The Events list is likely to be another frontier for Linden content-curation urges and resident content-creation urges to clash as its excesses and low mass culture become more visible in the public eye and to bloggers like Dusan with the Dashboard. Some can be reliably expected to "hate" or "be dismayed at" the wads of low-quality tacky sex poseball ads and wet bathing suit contests that are put in as "events" and want to "get rid of them".

The Events List was hotly contested a few years ago when FlipperPAY and other FIC content-culling oldbies were furious that newcomers were using this open list essentially as a free ad system that helped get business to their stores and properties, bypassing the oldbie hammerlock that had been enjoyed by people like FlipperPAY who used to have exclusive use of the advertising capacity of this framework by either a) being featured on the website by the Lindens or b) being steered to the RL media by the Lindens or c) relying on an insular word-of-mouth culture.

Events became a democratic forum for people like me who were new at the time and dismayed at the blocked avenues the FIC had grabbed to the website, RL media, and forums -- because we could put on art and events and discussions without them, ourselves, on an open platform, that they couldn't abuse report in spite or savage, the way they often did with forums posts, even of ads of products. The history of Second Life has to note and remember this facet.

Events were a forum in which urban sophisticated tekkies -- or at least tekkies who thought they were sophisticated from the Greater Philadelphia Area -- could sneer and even screech hysterically about people abusing the events list and selling when they should be having some high-toned talk -- but about which they couldn't do anything but fume, as there were no AR functions on the list. Thank God.

A guy who made the Internet's thing I think that's called Eventful, who met Philip at a party, and who I once happened to talk to at a conference, and who was considering putting the Second Life events into his system had this discussion with me. I told him about how some people wanted to control or even kill the free events list in SL. He told me that you can't restrict content by discretionary review as it comes up -- otherwise people won't use it. The only way to make sure people start using it for their Little League games and bakesales is by having it open and free. Yes, that means you will get lots of junk, spam, etc. or, if you are a Metaversal Elite, ads about poseballs you think are beneath you. But the way to deal with that is by filtering and having categories and people being able to first search with tags or tabs, not by telling people they can't put up bakesales.

And of course, that's how I use the Events list, and perhaps Dusan uses it that way, to get only "Discussions" or "Art and Culture" (and that was always my argument to FlipperPAY: use the tabs, filter out the good stuff, or, make your own events that are more high-brow and get your friends to go to them, stop huffing and puffing about other people's tackier culture you don't like).

Of course, the Lindens' new Dashboard does NOT let me *get delivered* only Discussions, say, much less key-word filter. So it's not like Meet-up or Eventful in one sense although easy enough to filter. Watch out, however...

The hysteria and "moral panic" about the Events List being encroached upon by people who were misusing it for OMGODZORZ selling land (that was more horrible than selling sex for the oldbies!) or putting on dubious contests like "contest and live music" (which would be an empty parcel with no people, a sploder, and a URL with an Internet radio station lol) was so enormous that the oldbies wanted mentors empowered to go through and fillet and gut the Events list, cutting out everything they didn't like. That desire did not go away.

The Lindens paused that ambition, for reasons unknown, fortunately, but then put in draconian rules which they then very selectively enforced -- the presence of lots of tacky ads for stuff instead of events today proves that.

My solution for this is to LEAVE IT ALONE and let it go on EXACTLY AS IT IS, which means, yes, it has tacky ads and events that are fake. And simply to add more key words and filtering capacity so that we do not shut off yet another line of communication and advertising in Second Life

After all, my laundry-room bulletin board contains an ad for Herbal Life that is tacky; it contains an ad for some cruise dating thing; it has some kittens for sale; somebody's used folding table for sale; somebody offering French lessons; and also, amidst all this clutter, a very important notice about how to reduce electric bills by listening to a talk from a visitor from Con Ed in the community room. I'm quite able to sift through the Herbal Life and kitties to find the Con-Ed guy. The management solved the awfulness of people's used folding tables, their kitties and their Herbal Life in the view of their high-paying prospective rentals customers by banishing the community bulletin board
from the mailbox area in the foyer, where it more "organically" and "semantically" fit, to the laundry room, where, I suppose, the cleansing nature of Chlorox and big faucets with gushing water in the laundry tubs made it feel "more clean".

Now, you might say, my RL bulletin board has no sex ads as explicit as SL -- but then, Zindra, filtering, the new search tags, etc. are supposed to take care of that.

Still, here's what I bet will happen with events: having already gotten rid of Popular Places list, which was the epitome of tacky mass culture (I never opposed it, because I thought the Lindens could just make a Recommended Places, which they USED to have on top of that, and if your eye was scalded by Popular Places, you just didn't have to look at it) -- and having nearly finished with cleaning up ad farms (which I think are unlawful because they destroy property values and freedom for other people), the adult continent on the grid (with Zindra and new search) -- they are now likely to turn their zealous sites on to Events.

They will say that now that they have this spiffy new Dashboard thing, Events have to be cleaned up. Or submitted first to be cleared. Or policed with far great draconian glee. Or removed completely, and sent to XStreet (FlippersPAY's long-ago solution) where editors will "manage it" or where it will have abuse report functions tied to each and every event, so you can knock out competition in the never-failing fun game of abusive use of the AR tools for fun and profit in SL.

Then there's groups. Why irritate and annoy me further, Lindens, by showing me a list of the groups that I can't:

o talk in
o send notices in with assurance they will arrive
o pull up and search by name
o pull up and see the land in
o vote in (you removed that)
o even reliably send invitations with

None of those functions "work". Because they are "down".

If the dashboard can't be used to relieve the supposed inworld load of databases that mean groups are jammed now, what's the point? Online management of groups, even just with adding powers or members or sending invites, would be a huge boon. That isn't part of this "social media" construct.

In fact, I'm failing to see any of the "Social Media" functions on this thing except...it has a API capacity at least for...Twitter.

But if I wanted to be on Twitter, I'd just go on Twitter. Why would I load up the SL dashboard to go on Twitter?

Because I can see...events that the Lindens are pushing to me? Because I can see an unfiltered events list? Because I can see...sites the Lindens are pushing to me as one-to-many? I can't even use this device to send a message outside the world to another resident, as I used to be able to do on the forums ages ago before the software there got borked.

In fact, scraping through much of Dusan's adulation of this definitely uncooked and definitely unsocial media, I see it's really about what he "thinks" might be put in it some day. Like group management capacity -- which isn't there, and doesn't seem to be contemplated.

Or like the ability to send photos from BlogHud (BlogDud, which I don't like, which is small, clunky, and overly filled with itself). I can do this from Posterous or use Koinup. If these services are merged with this dashboard, whoop-de-do -- but the Dashboard is primarily all about the Lindens opening up yet another window on the Internet to push THEIR choices to us in THEIR way.

No thanks.

Comments

[Ann Otoole]

Actually the correct and only way to deal with people violating the rules of the event system is to unceremoniously and without any warning delete them, their business, and all their content from Second Life. After the first few worthless shit bags are deleted the rest will discontinue this practice of breaking the rules. However Linden Lab needs to run a query against the historical archives and delete all accounts that ever abused the system because it was against the rules all along. The best thing that can happen to Second Life is the consistent removal of each and every person that abuses any part of the system.

If Linden Lab fails to cleans Second Life of the mass of floating turds they have nurtured then you can bet people will, legally and lawfully, begin exporting their content out of Second Life and taking it somewhere more suitable for business purposes. Sort of like how IBM is doing exactly that. Using Open Sim instead of the unethical resident controlled not even remotely governed by LL Second Life environment.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ann, you're such a caricature of yourself and such a caricature of a fascist that most of the time you don't even need a comment.

But I could hardly endorse anything of the sort you recommend and urge quite the opposite -- leaving the events list ALONE.

Good content will be made and will be find when people make it and stop whining that they can't have their dicks held while they piss on everything.

You also mount a completely fake thesis, to the effect that OpenSim represents some "better" and more "lawful" environment.

OpenSim doesn't even HAVE an events list. If someone put one in, it would have the same rules -- I'm not aware that any event list exists in the wacky opensource nerd environment that somehow is different than this -- if it hasn't emerged yet, it's because fashionistas, blingtards, and mall rats haven't found OS usable enough.

IBM? Huh? What have they got to do with this. Just because they get to have cheaper sims there to noodle around there where they test scripts doesn't mean that it is a governed environment.

In fact, if Dale Innis is any indication, it's quite the opposite, it is technocommunist at its most unrestrained, oppressive, and arbitrary. No business but my business.

What is "ethical" about these open platforms that in fact constantly generate stories -- I just got another one in my box this week! -- of people ripped off with their sims seized after they've paid tier because of some diva's quarrel.

What ARE you smoking? And if Open Sim is so fabulous, why are you not there?!