What could Landmarks do, ideally?

In Benjamin Linden's office hours for the past couple of weeks, a company called vectorform (http://www.vectorform.com/secondlife/) has been talking about their sanction to augment the LL viewer's capabilities to handle Landmarks. The basic objective seems to be to make landmarks contain more information, and be more readily organized and manipulated in the UI. It seems they're determined to press on with this, so folks here may want to know what's being talked about, and might want to provide feedback before everything is cast in stone.

A relevant transcript from last week is at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Benjamin_Linden/Office_Hours/2008-04-17 . As I write this, it appears the transcript from yesterday isn't yet posted.

[SOAPBOX] I figure I should get this out in the open: I think this is all gravely misguided. In principle, it's fine for LL to enhance their version of the viewer, but IMHO, exactly the sort of thing they're doing here would be much better handled by user-implemented content--scripts--if LL would just give script access to the relevant data either directly or through a web service. And frankly, I'm surprised a company like Linden Research doesn't immediately appreciate why that's so obviously true.[/SOAPBOX]

In the brief time I was able to attend yesterday, I was flabbergasted to hear one of the vectorform folks say that *traffic* was one of the attributes they'd heard from users would be valuable for sorting landmarks. You'll note that no mention of traffic appears in the transcript of the prior week's hour. This just seemed ironic, having only just come from Everett's office hour, where the whole concept of "traffic" was deconstructed, along with how/if any variant or hyperfine dissection of it could ever be useful to anybody.

In my personal view, the best use of Landmarks would be a web-based mash-up with the grid maps and grid-location-tagged Flickr snapshots (something else discussed at Everett's office hour yesterday), as a kind of grid-geographic context to a "social networking" initiative. But, being a Mainland geek, I'm very partial to maps, so this may be idiosyncratic.

So, I'm wondering what other folks would want to do with Landmarks that they can't do now.

I would like landmarks to be tabulated with the new search, exactly the way picks are. You should get a 'point' or 'link' or whatever the terminology is, for every LM that someone has pointing to your location.

I would also like to be able to 'make a LM' based on someone else's profile pick, or a search result / classified. In other words, I might see a link or pick that I want to visit, but I can't go right this moment, so I'd like to grab an LM out of the profile or search result.

I know neither of those things really relate to the actual LM itself and what it can or can't do... but for me at least, the current LMs do everything I can think of requiring of them.

-Atashi

I like this idea, and have long wanted a way to geotag SL screenshots.

Probably more an inventory function than a landmark function, but it would be very helpful if identical duplicate landmarks would automatically purge themselves from inventory.

I would like to have landmarks specify and sort by search places category. I used to do that using folders back when I actually made a pretense of organizing my inventory.

Shopping - Metaverse Togs, Periwinkle, 185, 42, 321

etc...

What would be extra groovy is a user input box at the bottom for "notes" where I can put in - "really great dresses but don't bother about the shoes"

Originally, LL said that landmarks were used for links to a place, but the concensus now is that they aren't. Personally, I don't think they should be used for that purpose, because it would greatly favour some businesses over others. For instance, I sell hundreds of items every day from my store. If LMs counted as links, I'd sell everything in boxes and the boxes would include LMs - maybe even more than one in each box. I could gain links in 4 figures every day that way. Even if the system counted only one LM per place per person, I could still gain hundreds of links every day by force rather than by people's choice. It could be that only LMs that are in the Landmarks folder count, but even then, auto-givers could be used to force them on people.

The very idea of using links for ranking purposes is because they are seen as being voluntary *votes* for the target page/place. Many LMs would be forced on people, they wouldn't be genuine votes, and they would devalue the search results for users.

I would love this; I was just commenting to someone yesterday that I wish we could do this.

I saw this in the transcript Qie posted:



This sounds like a great idea - since taking a LM already gives you the LM popup it wouldn't change that much about the experience to have some editable fields in there.

Hmm ... I'm just dropping in before my day starts, and this thread is giving me a sense of impending doom, but I don't have time to read the meeting transcripts. If anyone reads them and understands what LL is actually proposing to do, a few more words about that would be nice. I'm not very clear on it at all.Personally, I don't feel any need for landmarks to provide geographic context at all. But then, I'm an island dweller.
Oh, I hope they don't do this. I frequently will leave a landmark in a folder, in addition to having it in my Landmarks folder, just so I can quickly go to the shop where I got the thing.
.

Oy!

What planet are they FROM??

I'd like to third the motion that we can pull landmarks from other people's Profile Picks. That would be awesome. Might also be cool if you could attach objects or notecards to Landmarks, like you can with Group Notices.

Like if Qie sends me an LM to Super Cool Place, and wants to remind me to go check out Super Cool Build, he could write it to me in a notecard and attach it to the LM.

Just an idea.

Mmhmm, so many times I've wanted this! I never understood why there wasn't a "Landmark it" button in the search window page and on the map (the create SLurl is a poor substitute since that only works for a few and not me anymore, although I suppose there should be a create SLurl button on the LM windows?)

Beat me to it, Crystal. Every time I find a place in Search that I like, I find myself looking for the nonexistent Take Landmark button. Often, I'm doing a search to help someone ELSE out. Being able to grab a LM and pass it to them would save the tedious extra steps of opening the map, copying the SLURL, and posting it in chat. Not to mention that the person who's the recipient would not have to then remember to LM the destination once they arrive.

And while we are at it, include the ability to change the picture displayed by a LM.

For the LMs in inventory, maybe two functions could be added....a "Last visited on" parameter. That would help you decide whether older LMs should be revisited ("gee, I haven't been there in ages", or deleted. And add an automatic update feature. If the store in the LM has moved, couldn't the LM in your inventory "know" that somehow, and update itself? For those LMs you want tied to a specific geographic location, there could be an override setting, maybe.

I like the idea of adding notes to LM's. Being able to tag a LM with something relevant for sorting purposes would be great. I don't give two hoots (or one for that matter) about traffic. If I could set them, tag them and organize them similar to how I use del.icio.us, that would be great.

Most of all, when I click on a LM, I'd like the teleport to work. No more of this "Teleport failed. Try again in a few minutes" business.

That's my free opinion and worth every penny.

I just recently read something to the effect of that LL management allows it staff to pick the projects on which they want to work (in one of the threads on the new CEO).

So I'd agree that landmarks are just fine now, allow resident content creators to make scripts for landmarks, and reserve the technical talent of LL for more pressing issues.

But the management philosophy of LL is not to develop improvements that would most benefit the SL user base. So if landmarks has become someone's pet project, it may be pointless to say we'd rather see the technical expertise devoted to something else, and leave landmark improvement to resident-created scripts. It now becomes an issue of pleading with them not to break the features we like.

I'd like to be able to UPDATE landmarks. I'd like to be able to say, move my store, and have the landmarks people already have, point to my new location.

I've pretty much stopped keeping and using LMs altogether these days.

If I want to revisit a store, then it's highly likely I've already bought something there (otherwise I wouldn't think it's good enough to go back), and so I just look at the creator's profile via the object I've already bought and then check their picks.

If I want to find a new place I use Search.

My favourite places end up in my picks so I TP from those, or I remember the name so well I just use Search.

It seems to me that most LMs are out-of-date within about 2 months anyway.

So, just from my perspective, any work on LMs is a waste of time.

*bump*

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/NAV-28

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I don't like the HUD that much although it might be good in actual use, but the Landmark menu seems a step in the right direction since you could detach the menu and have it open as a floater (would need a button or shortcut for it though, and be able to collapse).

The hud-style landmark controls look stupid and clunky. Just use menus that look like menus.

I just added a suggestion to simply add an inventory tab called "Landmarks". It would be more useful than yet another menu in my opinion ) and wouldn't really require any kind of significant work. All the code is already there.

The proposed menu in the pdf looks quite kludgy to me and adding new windows just to be able to move landmarks between folders, rename them and search them seems a bit pointless, the inventory floater can do all those things already.

I don't know I think Landmarks should only be used to find locations, nothing more, nothing less.
I don't want LL fixing something that isn't broken and making it even worse mess to teleport to certain locations that you want personally.
There ought to be more important things for them to do to help maintain stable grid first one would think?

Kitty's idea seems alright to me. I can read the text in the inventory fairly well, except for when you use search and the search term is highlighted in a garish color scheme.

I didn't see one that used normal menus, just a thing that looked like a hud with some oddball icons on it.

I hardly ever use landmarks anyway.

I'd like to see a land function that would put in a default name for the landmark. The new search has made it so that people are encouraged to name the land with search keywords instead of the name of their business. It would be nice if LMs defaulted to the actual name of the business. Of course, a better solution would be to stop placing so much importance on the parcel name in search and stick to the description.

LL just posted a Vectorform Client source on their SVN server and i'm compiling it as i type. Let's see how it turned out.
http://svn.secondlife.com/trac/linden/changeset/959

-Asri

P.S.:
Oh, and in case you didn't see this yet, heres a PDF with the changes Vectorform have in mind.
https://jira.secondlife.com/secure/attachment/17105/Landmarks_Mgmt_Separated_004.pdf

Complete overkill.

Landmarks do not deserve their own complete menu.

Some of the new UI elements presented in the PDF are useful though.
What vectorform BASICALLY introduces is the automatic splitting of new inventory windows with a dedicated filter on a specific item type. And a filtered inventory->tear of menu construction.
These should be implemented on a more versatile level though. (notecards, landmarks, snapshots, textures, clothes, sounds etc. etc.)
My personal preference would also be to incorporate this within the existing inventory window as tearable tabs. (Like the communication / IM window)

To limit this new UI concept to just landmarks is ludicrous.
But i'm no UI design company...

This is what happens when you overhype a platform. Every vulture firm/company tries to come in and be experts at making the place even better even before they understand how the place works.

People have no reverence these days. Everyone thinks they know so much about everything. It is infuriating./..... ugh the arrogance... LOL

He who knows nothing and knows that he knows nothing, knows more than he who knows nothing and doesn't know that he knows nothing.

Some people simply don't know that they know nothing...

This is a common issue, with one department not knowing what the other is doing. Everett and Benjamin are from two compeltely different teams, no?



I do wish "show on map" was bubbled up a bit. It's something I use often with LMs, and takes a bit of work nowadays to get to. I really have no need to "sort" them differently, and even less need to sort them by traffic.

Mari