The role of Infohubs

Places such as...

Ahern
Nova Albion (Miramare)
Hyles
Braunworth
Iris
Bear
Isabel
Ambat
...etc.

Yep, for the most part. I kind of lost track of what goes on with them, too.

Thanks for the continued information. I hope to distill it down to a series of articles to accompany the reports on the individual Infohubs I've begun posting.

I'm also hosting an overview page on the topic that is just getting started:

http://slmainland.com/infohubs_page/

I'm looking for the earliest references to the term. I'm also looking for confirmation to the wiki page which says not everyone completing Orientation and Help Islands lands at an Infohub. Where else are they sent? Any new users here not get sent to an Infohub as their starting place?

Mari, I don't think you need infohubs or welcome areas. As a Mentor, I get better results by talking to resdients on Help Island. It's much less noisy and confusing. When I send them on, I always advise them to use Search to find other places to visit, because the arrival areas tend to be crowded and noisy. Help Island, by the way, could be seen as your "Third Life get-acquainted sim". It could sure use some redesign and improvement, but that IS its basic function.

Instead of the current Welcome Areas and infohubs, I think LL should pick a couple of hundred sims...and send new residents to them by a random process. (Except I would send anyone who TP'd from Help Island using the same exit portal within a short interval...three minutes or so...to the same place, to keep groups together.)

I'd also like to see some scheme to prevent new residents from setting their Home location to the arrival sim. That might do something to cut down on the homesteading gangs.

In 2006 - when the Lindens got rid of all telehubs they asked residents that were paying tier in these telehub sims if they would like infohubs. At that time the Linden blog described infohubs as ""These spaces, called Infohubs in Second Life, are distributed throughout the mainland grid. Because these spaces vary in size from very small plots of land to larger ones, we are considering two types of builds. The smaller of these would function as an information center for centralized distribution of Linden Lab news and announcements as well as resident content. The larger type of space would be used as a public gathering space for meetings, events, or general socializing."

The smaller of these would function as an information center for centralized distribution of Linden Lab news and announcements as well as resident content.

FOUR SIM INFOHUBS: The larger type of space would be used as a public gathering space for meetings, events, or general socializing."
***************************
In March of 2007 Linden Lab adjusted the definition of a infohub in the wiki to include mass gathering in one sim infohubs. Then in August of 2008 Linden Lab further adjusted the definition of the infohub to be "A Linden Lab-owned information and social area. Infohubs are located at some of the former Telehub locations and are built and managed by residents or resident groups. Some new players first spawn at Infohubs after leaving Orientation Island or Help Island."

The history of the ever-changing definition of the infohub seems to have been removed from the wiki.

The part about resident groups running them used to be true. The tier payers in the sim were to run them but I am not sure that is true these days. Blue Linden told me last week that Linden Lab scrapped the megahub idea. I guess rezzing a huge parking lot for new players to loiter on was not deemed a good idea after all.

.

Okay, I'm confused. What's the difference between an InfoHub and a Welcome Area? I thought it was just historical nomenclature. But I don't see mention in this thread of the vast Welcome Area on Jeogeot, at Hanja / Gukyeol / Hangeul / Idu. Or does that one go by a different name?

Thank you!

Infohub and Welcome Area are, I believe, the same thing. The Hanja one is a "copy" of Ahern.

They are NOW Mari. But in the beginning in 2006 until march 2007 the one-sim infohubs were for information giving prims only. The 4 sim hubs were especially designed for mass gathering (although 60 avatars loitering on the corner of four mainland sims is a tragic waste of sim resources).

T Linden is going to have a hard time convincing peopel to buy premium accounts if he feels he can ignore the negative impact of the mainland Linden Lab parking lots. http://inside-slbb.blogspot.com/

Oh.

I have not been to Ahern in years.

That's not quite true. Some InfoHubs have no information at all. Not the fault of the Hub builders, either. When they were first built, it was understood, that LL would come in and add the informational content.

That's wrong now. LL killed the Orientation Islands a few months back. Their internal metrics showed them that the OIs ran off more people than they help. Now new residents first spawn at the Help Islands. When they leave HI, then first appear in world at either one of the Welcome Areas or at one of the InfoHubs. Where they go is determined by a script at the "Go to Mainland" kiosk at the Help Islands. It (sort of) randomly hands them a LM to the locations in it.

From the SL Blog:

"Formerly Known as Telehubs"
Sunday, November 27th, 2005 by Robin Linden
http://blog.secondlife.com/2005/11/27/formerly-known-as-telehubs/

This 'random' distribution is one way it happens I guess. I surveyed a bunch of new players spawning ina mainland infohub. I asked them how they got there. They said they were on Help Island and they clicked 'teleport home' on their tool bar and ended up in a speciific mainland welcome area or infohub. So these new players seem to have a home point programmed into their account as soon as they create the avatar.

This brings back an old memory. When I first started, there were these events called "Town Halls" at which several Lindens would text, including the Big P himself. But by this time the population had already grown too large to fit all the attendees into Pooley, so they sorta simulcasted them into the Welcome Areas so people could gather to receive the text from on high.

Apparently they've decided that the Town Hall "doesn't scale" or something. (I suspect it had to do with Project Open Letter, which was the last Town Hall I remember occurring, which presumably made some Lindens supersad.)

Maybe I'm just irrationally nostalgic, but it seems to me we lost something important when we lost Town Halls. I think it makes the grid seem emptier and the residents less engaged.

I'm thinking InfoHubs are underutilized for a purpose that shouldn't be so casually written-off.

The first time i went to one of those hub things there was a bunch of people arguing about world war 2.

The second time i went to a hub it was built right on the border of 4 sims (i think it was ahern) and i spent most of my time having sim crossing errors...and listening to more people argueing and grefing.

The third time I went to an info hub (waterhead this time) there was a little group of people haveing a voice chat under this big tree, i walked up and said hello in voice and i was told to shut up as they were having a "private conversation".

The fourth time i went to one of the big NCI places, a large group of people who chatted withing their own group and didnt let new folks join in on the conversations, big clique feeling.

All that happened within the space of a week as i was trying to find my way around SL.

ALL INFOHUBS....ALL of them...should be scrapped. They are either filled with loudmouthed racists, loudmouthed cliques, text chat group cliques or builder cliques who think they are better than everyone.

Since that first week on SL i have been to most of the others...rinse and repeat the above paragraph.

This is NOT my alt. And I agree with every word.

After this post Jack took over talking about infohubs. As I posted his blog definition from 2006 (as I posted in this thread earlier). Funny that Jack Linden is no longer searchable in the Linden Blog. Could be a glitch.

Right. I was referring to now.

My only few experiences with infohubs were similar to Victor's.
I think one other one with pretty cushioned chairs and all but it was mainly
filled with advertisements that I found no use for, forgot what it was called
because it was so insignificant to me.
The other times had to do with being forced there or accidentally sent
there versus being sent home on my own land, it was basically a Avatar
parking lot.
I have heard sometimes the system accidentally sends people there naked or
stuck in animations in middle of poseball sex. LOL

I'm sorry you had a bad experience at an NCI location. Please feel free to contact me in world about it. If we have a potential problem at a location, I would like to check into it.

One point, though--NCI locations are not Linden Lab InfoHubs or Welcome Areas. I'm sure you know that, but it was not clear in your initial post.

Carl if you directly associate your business with Linden Lab infohubs you are bound to get some of the disgust rubbed off on you also.

It makes no sense for NCI to partner with Linden Lab on these failed infohubs and "welcome' areas. Your a fanboi with blinders on if you cannot see the real issues these unsupervised parking lots cause. You and I have been around long enough to know what these areas were supposed to be. Common sense dictates that a sim that can only support 40 avatars at once cannot function well - or at all- with the Linden loitering hub populated 15 hours a day and the tier paying Premium customers attempting to use the same server.

Last year about this time Travis Lambert posted about his mainland infohub woes. None of his issues have even been acknowledged by Linden Lab so he has just accepted his fate and deals with the resource abuses.

I don't think that's quite fair to Carl and the rest of the NCI people. Yes, the infohubs aren't what they ought to be, but it's people like him who are trying to make a better experience for newbies. How can that happen without partnering with Linden Labs? When I first landed in SL, finding out about the good new person hangouts like NCI and the Shelter only happened through word of mouth.

I was fortunate, I met some people who pointed me in their direction. But how much better things would have been if that had been the *first* experience I had, rather than a fortunate happenstance of the third or fourth "Fine, I'll give Second Life one more go". The ONLY way that is going to happen for new people is through collaboration with the people who own and operate SecondLife--love them or hate them, that will always be Linden Lab.

It is not a smart move to endorse a project by the service provider you know to be broken just to get your name besides theirs on the letterhead. Advertising your company next to parking lots with the blessings of the service provider is not effective educating. Put aside the cronyisms and provide real education solutions for this population.

I think the retention rate could be increased by building something other than an information portal near where new users gather. A certain type of club should do it.