The Viewmasters: Are the Lindens Going to Get Rid of Landmarks?

I bet they are, based on what M Linden said in this interview, based on the fact that Lindens tried to do this once before with their design work farmed out to consultants, it was beaten back by residents, but now they're up to it again, all in their quest to become, as Khamon cynically put it, "webfortable" -- making people have (ostensibly) a comfort level with SL akin to their comfort level to the web. This contains so many marketing assumptions and Linden tekkie assumptions combined in the  worst possible way that they definitely need a challenge, but first, I want to make two main, hard-rock, unaltering points about the Lindens' changes to the viewer coming up, that should frame this discussion always and everywhere:

a) Changing the viewer to make it more usable is not necessarily progressive; it is not necessarily progress; it is not necessarily forward and not backward; it is not necessarily necessary lol; it is not necessarily the wave of the future. The Lindens have so pre-packed the room on this with their fanboyz telling you are that you are filled with FUD if you object to anything you are doing, and that you are like an out-of-date curmudgeonly old oldbie stuck in your ways if you object to anything, that they are *in advance* discredting most critics as being "unable to change because they are old and stuck in their ways". False. The Lindens are stuck on old 1990s marketing and web and geek concepts; we're living up here in the future in 2010 waiting for them to get over themselves.

b) Changing the viewer to make it  more accessible, even if they are right, will not help them retain the high-paying customers they have, or even retain the newbies, if all they do is make a casual browser-based wordlet/chat room, because many, many other platforms offer that faster and better and cheaper (meebo, Facebook, Twitter, IMVU, etc.)

It's very hard for any Linden to accept these two *truths*. And they are *truths*. They are *truths* that the will learn the hard way, but maybe we can help them now to mitigate this market-driven and geek-driven pig-headedness of theirs and try to get them to see reason. We won't even be able to have the conversation, however, if they discredit any critic at the outset as "unable to make change".

The entire "unable to change" meme is something that no Linden should ever be making about a resident, ever, in their lives. You know why? Because the Lindens inflict change on us every day, in every way, hundreds of ways, without consent, and without mitigation. In their history, they have made the most outrageous unjustified changes. They have made the most insane changes to the viewer that only aggravated people. They have made the most depicable changes in pricing policy. They have made the most outrageous alterations in patches that broke people's stuff, ruining some businesses forever. Yet most people have rolled with these punches. Most people adapt. Most people struggle because of the higher goal of loving Second Life. Anyone *left* around here to criticzie their fancy new viewer is someone whom Mitch Kapor has disparaged as a "masochist" who has lived with change as a constant.

So the only people who have shown themselves *unable to change* are *the Lindens themselves*. They are unable to change the addiction to change; they are unable to change for the good; they are unable to change by listening to their customers. That is the change we need to have; not change put on our backs once more time, with a slap and a kick that we are outdated and unable to change adding insult to the injury.

Now, on the question  of the landmarks, some fanboyz will say, but you don't know they are doing this, so why complain in advance? Answer: because after they do it, it is too late.

Others will say, "more hippie anti-hippie whining" (a new mantra lol) -- but of course this isn't whining for whining's sake but a grave report on a significant breaking of the world.

First, let me tell you what M said to me, and what I said back, as follows:

2009/11/05 20:11]  Prokofy Neva: M, what's this all about? Are you getting rid of landmarks in the new viewer? "One is the browser-like location bar where you enter a region name (e.g., p squared), hit return and voila you are magically teleported there. It is really slick and every time I use it I smile."
[2009/11/05 20:11]  Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
[2009/11/05 20:11]  Prokofy Neva: How are people supposed to trade locations with each other?
[2009/11/05 20:11]  Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
[2009/11/05 20:12]  Prokofy Neva: I wonder why you like the browser bar so much, when we really are not on the Internet, we are *in a world*. That is really your product, whether you chose to acknowledge it or not. There already is a bar called MAP and you type the sim in SEARCH there and go there magically too.
[2009/11/05 20:12]  Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
[2009/11/06 14:18]  M Linden: Hi Prokofy.  The web is all about one click ease and that's what the location bar does.  Yes you will be able to trade locations.  The web metaphor is powerful because it is familiar ... especially to users who do not know Second Life and how the viewer works.  Think "web easy."  Thats our goal. Cheers!
[2009/11/06 16:04]  Prokofy Neva: M, the reason Walter Cronkite seemed so sonorous and authoritative all his life is because he was a radio personality who segued into TV and simply treated it like it was still radio. And that's inevitable with all new media that we will always bring the last stage of media into the new and keep treating it the same way.

And frankly, that's how I see your over-fascination with "making things like the Web". You are Walter Cronkite persisting with radio into TV. Virtual worlds are not the web. You don't need to flatten them out to make them usable. If you have one-click placement people will treat sims/worlds like pages and scorn them and not immerse in them, you will see. Younger people already move way too fast in VWs because they are used to FPS games and don't know how to enjoy a world that doesn't have a unidimensional quest crossing it. But ultimately, my question is more simple: are you getting rid of landmarks, or not? Is everything that is based on making landmarks work now obsolete? How can people trade locations without a physical object called 'a landmark' that goes in 'my inventory'? Are you expecting they will just copy-paste to each other? But that's regress, not progress. One-click visiting and back-spacing denigrates the 3-d world back to a 2-D non-involved and engaged world. And why couldn't you have both? You could have the browser effect if you must, but also have the ability to store, categorize, trade an inventory item called 'a landmark'.

[2009/11/06 16:08]  Prokofy Neva: You speak so casually about all the things you will break in the next iteration. Have you discussed them with the public that pays your bottom line? Why break something for the sake of breaking it?! You have a touch portal script that can be put in a prim and pull up a map and people can see a map location and go there. Are all the scripts related to the map that people have developed with landmarks and landmark distribution now going to be broken and obsolete just because you need to intrude in the world with the Internet page, as if 1.0 and 2.0 of the Internet were progress, and not 3.0 which is 3D?!

[2009/11/06 16:09]  Prokofy Neva: For example this item I'm sending you, will this now be broken? I'm quite used to having days and years of work devastated by one patch. We all are. We get that. We get that you can't cling to certain iterations. But certain philosophical breakages aren't progress.

[2009/11/06 18:47]  Prokofy Neva: When they tried to do this before you got here, residents pushed back hard: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Talk:Landmarks_and_Navigation_Project

Ok, so you get the market-speak and the smarm coming from M -- all understood.

He doesn't quite deny landmarks are going, but he peddles the line.

It's funny how bookmarks in a browser are being used by both as an argument for and against landmarks. Some geeks tell you haughtily that they "never" use bookmarks -- but of course everybody does. Maybe not as much as they like, but not everybody likes RSS feeds that fill up with junk, or tabs in Mozilla that take you to places instantly opening up RSS feeds, or various widgets and wadgets. I use bookmarks to find those impossible-to-find Linden forums and blogs, for example.

Others say we can get rid of landmarks because the new viewer will have browser-like bookmarking capacity.

M Linden says we will still be able to share -- like Gwyn talks about the real-time sharing in this wiki discussion.

But sharing by pasting into another's IM box in real time, or one-on-one in a friendship network is NOT what we need and want and must have in landmarks.

Landmarks are inventoriable items that MUST be able to be shared not just among friends, but by strangers. They must be able to be accessed on demand by clicking on kiosks in public places. They must be able to be stored and searched in inventory -- and yes, you can do that, and no, it is not hard and cluttery. Delete some if you find it so.

The map list of your landmarks is not very useful, but that's not reason to get rid of the landmark system in full.

If the reason is saving data base overload, then get rid of the spamming landmarks that cause overuse by enforcing the TOS. But don't get rid of the landmark as an object inworld just to do this.

The Lindens are likely to do this anyway, listening not only to the geeks who still have their way but to their marketing pukes. Why do I call them "pukes"? Because they puke out what they learned in MBA school like robots, with cynicism, and sometimes even arrogant hate.  Marketing people are a good curb on the excesses of geeks, but it's like saying "let's have the Iranians and Iraqis fight each other" to solve problems.

The geeks, as we know, have a lifelong dream of making SL like a Star Gate that they saw on TV or in a movie or a comic book. They want to walk through with no travel metaphor, no black screen, no whooshing noise. So in order to do this, they don't mind cracking, breaking, bruising and devaluing each world that aquires this instant capacity.

That's because male gamers burn through content like Sherman through Georgia. I always can tell when I have a new male gamer landing in the infohub. He walks with lightning speed through the space, as he wuold on a quest fighting a war, where no one ever looks at scenery or they'd get shot. He clicks on things to get them to yield their loot, and scrapes the space mercilessly before moving on. He wants to get out of their fast because he's already looked at the scene, grabbed its loot, and is now bored and needs stimulus. If the area won't let him rez a penis or a gun, he needs to leave.

Women householder types are different, as are the more intellectual and older males who aren't gamers, they wander slowly, interact, play some of the games (not being gamers lol), and talk to others and learn from them.

Obviously Linden needs to serve both kinds of customers with orientation, but they can't bork the viewe to serve only one kind -- and that's what they may be doing.

The rapid consumers are not the ones who will stick to SL. Churning in more of them in the hopes that they will drive up the overall rate of retention, which is abyssmal, is one way to skin the cat, but it won't accomplish the overall goal of creating more long-term customers.

Making people be able to browse rapidly through SL as if they were on their Disney Viewmasters (a better metaphor than the Internet, where pages in fact often load slowly and in fact have a metaphor of worlds like the black teleport whoosh) helps Disnify the world, but in fact doesn't create a Disney world that in fact would keep more people. I'm not against Disneyfication like others who hate it merely because it is mass or American. I'm all for Disney if the Lindens use it to create places of delight and wonder and stickyness. But that isn't likely to happen unless you get people hooked on the idea of a "walk forward world" rather than a "entertain me by fast moving frames" world.

Just like people rarely stay on websites for more than 4 minutes, you will find that they don't stay on SL parcels for more than 4 minutes, either, once they scoop money, freebies, or whatever if you make it all like the web. And unless you can get them to stick as much as a sit-com on TV for 30 minutes, you will be failing. Webfortableness isn't any good if it doesn't lead to a landing spot like a Facebook or a Youtube where people *will* sit and state, or even interact, for 30 minutes or more. To be crass about it, trying to get them to filter out their ad-clicking in that 4 minute window versus trying to get them to click in a 30 minute window isn't rocket science, one will pay out more than the other, surely, even allowing for a notion of having multiple ads spread across lots of 4 minute windows.

Note that on the landmarks debate, Dale Innis shows up like a bad penny again, as he always does in any crucial world discussion that he wants to intrude the IBM/opensource/corporate/destructive shtick into. No accident, comrade!

And as always, what he is doing is "subtle". Seeming to be a worldnik in good standing, seeming to be advocating that the landmarks be kept, but then weaving and bobbing and in fact speaking against them, when you scrape away the bullshit.

Frans says "landmarks are a powerful metaphor". Well, more than a metaphor, a metaphor that is in fact transformed into a thing that people use and adapt as a thing, without constant meta thumb-sucking about the metaphorness of it all.

I'd like to hear a detailed description about how M Linden is planning to keep the social and exploration AND COMMERCIAL uses of landmarks as they are now in some other gimmick involving browsers.

Because, I don't see that trading a slurl through a copy-paste, or even a button that sends a slurl will be the same as an object that exists *outside* of friendship networks, bilateral interactions and multilateral interactions in groups which are all closed. That object enables strangers to find other strangers through serendipity, accident, or design, in an open commercial space, like a store.

Do I dare ask whether the Lindens are going to deprecate Picks too, because someone will whine that they are gamed, sold, or not enough, imposing the geek keyhole on the world again? I bet that's happening too; it has to be.

So this is an urgent plea for a PROCESS, that will involve opening up a discussion of these changes breaking stuff like all my work and all your work in making landmark givers NOW. I won't go to those Linden office hours as I continue to boycott the Lindens, but you can.

And it's a plea for MITIGATION of the damage that they are no doubt concocting now with insufficient feedback.

And it's a plea for ROLLBACK of some of the harshest things they are up to -- and killing landmarks would be one of them.

People who want to shop and explore in SL should NOT be dependent on greeters, mentors, gateway keepers giving them pastes into their webfortable browsers to explore and partake of the economy. If we are to have an open world where people are free to travel and sell and buy without having to submit to social networks that can often be exclusive, we need an open system that makes for non-social-dictated landmark exchange.

Comments

[cube inada]

Its always a matter of INTERFACE.
And for now, Linden will repeat many of the same mistakes that other 3d Interfaces have had as they try to redux what they didnt quite understand they got to in the first place.

BUT they are sold on trying to be a 3d browser now...

loop repeat rinse.

[AnnOtooleInSL]

You do understand that Klingdon doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks of his and his lieutenants plans right? If you were the boss I bet you would have the same attitude because you felt you knew more and were clearly smarter than everyone else. After all who is sitting in the boss seat anyway?

But anyway... We will not know what is going on till it is released. And if people really care about making a difference they need to close their wallets because the only way to change Linden Lab is to change who owns it.

Now if Linden Lab has discovered a way to convert all those landmarks to urls for use in the google appliance then I will benefit because there are literally millions of landmarks to my business out in people's inventories. And you can bet the problem of useless freebies and notices loaded with a dozen landmarks to all their friends locations will suddenly proliferate like raging lymphatic cancer.

And if Linden Lab screws it up then it is just another opportunity for yet another third party marketplace to have a paid listing service for people to migrate off SL search to something done by people that know how to build metadata repositories. And then LL can GOM it for a few million bucks.

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm glad you've thought all that through, Anne.

[katiem]

Prok,

For once, I agree with what you're saying. When you're not talking about the open source movement you make a lot of sense to me.

[Brinda Allen]

Didn't I read somewhere about ppl that create programs just to create programs? Never mind working out the bugs...they just go create something else.

How often as a child did I hear my father say..."Damn it ...if it ain't broke don't fix it".

[Passing Merchant]

ROFL i hope all those educators and enterprise businesses who come to the main grid to market in-world are prepared for spam.

It's one thing getting a folder of LMs as a newbie but to have it all copied and pasted in the chat...omg!! Eeeeek!!

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

By golly, I object to what I'm doing, and don't care how many fanboyz object!

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

...or say I'm filled with FUD.

[Qie Niangao]

Prok, thanks for posting this, especially the wiki link to the old Vectorform stuff; I always wondered whatever happened to the NAV project (ex of the jira). It was a dumb idea then, and it's a dumb idea now.

We should count ourselves lucky, however, if this turns out to be the dumbest of the Viewer 2.0 ideas. Never mind the opportunity cost of rearranging UI widgets while new sign-ups stagnate. Improving the first hour (or six) experience won't much help if nobody new is even signing on.

[melponeme_k]

This system will be better for certain groups to corral traffic.

I mean, imagine an intro screen with just instant tp to those chosen sites of the GSPs and other chosen.

This is a bit off topic, but since SL was based on a dystopic novel, Snowcrash, I think there were others that inspired as well. The over the top novel, "Jennifer Government" swims in the SL DNA too. I wonder if the new separate grids will have their own last names. Will everyone be something, something Nabisco-GAP-IBM etc? Or will they get to keep their own identities....

[twitter.com/Lalo_T]

This "OMG Landmarks are going away!" reminds me an awful lot of Anne's paranoia about RL identity being "outed" in SL because she misread something (in Amanda's blog) -- and didn't go back to re-read to make sure she'd seen it right.

Landmarks *are* bookmarks, ferchrisesake. They just have a cutesy name. The "RL" in URL stands for Resource Locator, and "SLurl" is more than a corporate spinoff of a Web-word. The only difference is the system's capability of handling landmarks as if they were objects.

I suspect that the new feature you've convinced yourself (on no evidence at all) is going to *replace* the landmark system will actually be *added* to it, instead. The Lab may be collectively bull-headed, but they are not uniformly stupid.

[Inara Pey]

Mel, while I suspect we're looking at it from different angles, it's interesting you've picked up on the "corralling" of users as well. It's been very much on my mind since the Adult changes. Kingdon's comments carry undertones that this is precisely what some in LL are aiming for: nicely corralled (or "siloed" to give it the buzzy business term) groups of users.

This might be good from a sign-up perspective to some degree, but IF carried beyond that (admittedly a big "if" at the moment) I'm not entirely sure it'll do SL any favours. With users so corralled / siloed, how hard would it be to start demarking areas of the grid as "no go" based on avatar type (e.g. your avatar is recorded as "role-play", therefore "business only" regions are off limits to you)?

The above is pure speculation, and somewhat pessimistic at that. But when looking at recent trends - Amanda's "Work Avatars" ethic, her commentary that LL will be "improving" the grid "for business", one cannot help but have a sinking feeling on where all this is going.

Lalo, the "only" difference between LMs and URLs you point to (that they are both a URL _and_ a physical object) is _precisely_ what makes LMs so vaulable.

LMs may indeed remain. They may well be "integrated" with the new "browsability" (ugh!) of SL. But then again, they may not. While LL may "not be uniformly stupid", they _do_ have a panchant for breaking things for the sake of new ideas rather than thinking the implications through - as Prok points out.

Given this latter fact, pushing for clarification is entirely merited.

[Prokofy Neva]

Oh, no, Lalo, you are DEAD wrong.

The Nav project most decidedly removed landmarks.

They removed them and even picks, which was even more of an outrage, in the belief that they needed to have the Internet of Things swung a certain way.

SLURL pasting is NOT the same thing as landmarks as I've copiously explained -- it can only be done in one-on-one or group contacts, and those are closed circuits; an open society needs to have open mechanisms for exhanges by random people, strangers, those that just happen to come to your lot from search, people who are new clicking on a kiosk, etc.

Once Desmond and Carl focus on this, after all their hard work on Oxbridge which relies on landmarks; once Chilbo and many other communities not to mention the thousands of stores who rely on landmarks for advertising focus on this, we will set M Linden's hair on fire.

And it needs to be set on fire *even if* there is some other mitigation, workaround, fall-back, doubling of old and new that *might* be put in.

The time to protest loudly and fiercely is NOW while they are setting it up to make sure it takes that fork in the road of mitigation or legacy preservation.

Of course the Lindens want to corral. They want pre-approved Gateways, Partners, etc. that they can manage and filter new people to.

It would be one thing if they allowed freedom in general for people to make their way, and tacked on to it these managed care facilities for those that need either daycare or nursing care as newbies -- and lots do. That's all fine.

But you don't make the entire society a managed care facility as a result.

[Prokofy Neva]

Every time I see Amanda wrestling with critics and arm-twisting them and pinning them down with deletions managed by Blue Linden on her Work page, I have to wonder: why? You have your silos of SLE, Amanda. Can't you stay the fuck in those and leave the main grid alone?!

But...of course there's more to this than meets the eye, and more than Gwyn has let on.

See, one of the Gateway communities is Beta Technologies. It will be a main grid gateway that flushes into her arms all the newbies that come on who didn't "fit" yet in SLE, but who need some further de-lousing or grooming to fit.

There they will be taught how not to take their clothes off in public and be made fit for the workplace. I wonder if Gwyn gets a finder's fee if she hustles an SLE account for the Lab. She should get one, given the hefty fee she had to pay to become a GSP.