Venue attendance HUDlet -- opinions please!

I have a small HUD that I plan to pass out as a freebie. It lets folks find out who's at their favorite haunts. It's intended for smaller clubs, not the most popular and highly attended places.

Here's how it works.

You click the HUD and get a menu showing a list of your favorite hangouts. You select one of them, and a moment later, you get owner-chat telling you who's there, up to 16 names.

The HUD can handle any number of clubs (currently up to 16, but that can be extended). Each venue has its own notecard, and you just drop in the venue's notecard to add its button to your HUD.

Here's how the venue owner sets it up.

The venue owner rezzes the HUD's sensor, and configures the scan distance on a notecard in the sensor. Typically, it'd be buried just below the center of the dance floor.

The venue owner sets up the HUD for the club by editing a notecard. They can mod the HUD to look however they want. They pass out the HUD with their notecard in it, and also pass out their notecard for folks who already have this HUD.

Here are my questions:

1) Interested? Would you want a HUD like this as a user? As a venue owner?

2) Got a good idea for a catchy name for it?

It's currently very simple, and I want to keep it that way, but feel free to make suggestions.


Thanks!

My first reaction is that there may be visitors to clubs who don't really want their presence made widely available that way.

I like the idea for my store....name no clue

how much would it be?
(could it be made to notify when someone is there)

seems like a glorified type of visitor counter thingy

edited to add, after reading ti again... I can see it being used by store owners more than club owners...
a store owner with multiple locations can keep track of them (especially if it would notify when someone is there), also a store owner who has employees could remotely monitor the store (also if it had a paging system built in for customers to page the owner/employees with)

I know you wanted to keep it simple, but I see possibilities

(I am sure there is something like it out there already but... on SL we always seem to reinvent the wheel LOL)

This is a really nice tool to help the SL venue scene.

HOT SPOT HUD
CLUB HUD
CLUB CRAWL HUD

Please put me on the distribution list when you release the HUD. Club Owners would really love this I believe.

wouldnt this violate any privacy issues?

Yep. Nice idea Lear but I can see the gteam shutting this one down.

It would be nice to also have it available as a Mysti-tool/Zhao plug-in much like the one for the Forum Cartel hangout, in addition to a separate hud, as an option for those who value their screen real estate.

Personally, I don't see this as violating anyone's privacy. It's not targeting an individual and tracking them across the grid - it's targeting a specific location and reporting who's there. No more info then you could get yourself by just TP'ing there - just makes it easier.

Of course, Im not an LL employee, so my opinion really doesn't mean much.

The new soulcatcher game is going strong with no opt-out.

I think that as long as it does not spam it may be acceptable.

Or allow folks to click a opt-in prim at the venue they are visiting. Offer some raffle prize if they opt-in at each club they hit.

Opt in would work. First thing that came to mind was all of the flak from the Profile Pic Projectors.

This could be like some in-world Twitter. But hopefully not as annoying.

Could be very useful telling you which places to avoid.. "Let's go to this club... ah.. I see so-and-so is there.. let's go somewhere else."

Please explain.

Free. I may ask a friend to make a Mysti plugin, and I'd allow her to sell it for a modest price.

Nope, no notification -- I want it to be as low-impact as possible, only scanning on request.

That would be another good use.

There are plenty of pager systems, and I want to keep this simple and effective for its main purpose.
If anyone knows, please pipe up!

LOL

That's my first reaction, too.

I realize anyone could be sharing that information anyway, but it seems a bit creepy for a club to be publishing that info. I don't think it's even vaguely against the ToS, but it's definitely outside my comfort zone.

How about: when you get in the club, you can click on a board to let you be listed by name, otherwise you just show up in the count of avatars? "Lear's Club... Lear Cale, Random User, and 7 others"?

As a random aside to this, I came across somewhere recently that actually *asked* if I minded my profile pic being displayed. I was slightly flabberghasted at being asked; normally they just display it regardless.

I'm sure you're right. Odd that they don't mind that someone could just as quickly TP in with their radar HUD.

The difference isn't really the time it takes. The difference is merely one of convenience: I can check to see who's there without interrupting what I'm doing.

BTW, when you check a place, you use the HUD again for 20 seconds.

Since it works on touch, the only way to automatically abuse it (repeatedly poll) would be to use a bot. I don't see why anyone would do that. There's a way the club owner can make it so they can see when it's being used (it changes alpha when polled).

There is a way for the club owners to ban anyone (by name) from polling their club.

I'll give some thought to an opt-in or opt-out system, and hopefully I can find a way that doesn't complicate installation and usage.

But I think you're right -- there will always be someone who's a bit skittish and would pressure the club owner to get rid of it, unless there's at least a way to opt out.

The thing is, I know a number of clubs each with their own HUD for this purpose. I just hate cluttering my screen with each of them, or having to wear one of them each time I want to poll that place.

Thanks

Good ones. I particularly like HotSpot. Unfortunately, searching it pulls up a bunch of hits. Perhaps I could use jHotSpot, since I just the j prefix for lots of my products.

I was focusing too much on the attendance idea.

/me is no marketing genius!

I'm in this camp.

I think it would really -HELP- venues AND venue goers.

Why do people leave a place? because no on else is there.

But if you could see when other people show to a place you like, you'd have a reason to pop in and chat them up.

And for venue owners - that just helps increase legitimate traffic.

Put me on the list to get one of these.

-and yes, if you're in a public place, everyone can easily tell you're there, so I don't see the privacy concern. Put this thing near my sexbed though, and I'd scream like heck.

My concern would be people placing these on the edge of property lines to see who is in the adjacent private home...

OMG, excellent point!

I'll fix it to ignore those who aren't in the same parcel.

REALLY good point.

It really doesn't matter who it's targeting. It may be legal to set up a camera on the street to tape people going into a gay bar, and if you're of legal age, it's legal for you to go into the bar, socialize, and get names. Depending on jurisdiction, it might even be legal for you to then post those pictures, with names, on the internet. But it's still wrong - even though you may claim you're targeting the bar, and even though all that information is information that other people could have gotten the same way.

In this case, our current expectations are that the only way other people should be able to find out that you're at a given location is: a) they're on your friends list and you've enabled mapping (meaning you can control it); b) they're within scanning distance (meaning you have the same ability to detect them); or c) they're a parcel owner (or the owner's agent) and they're collecting it for their own internal business use. For the last point, it may not be written down anywhere that they can't reveal it, but that's the current convention and expectation.

I'll state the same principle here that I believe applies to the friends/groups/balance display on the new SL website: Information that is ostensibly private within SL, given the way the standard viewer, LSL, and perms are designed, needs to be kept private, even if there are ways of getting it that don't violate the letter of the law or ToS.

That only requires counts, not names. You can get the same information from the map, though I accept that being able to get the count information via a hud is a reasonable convenience.


If it's true that everyone can already easily tell that you're there, then there's no value in this hud. The reason why the hud has this value to you is that your statement is incorrect.

There's a second difference. If you TP to see me on your radar, I also get to see you on mine. Your HUD would change that.


First, "I don't see why anyone would do that" are famous last words. A huge amount of abuse on the net occurs because some developer didn't anticipate other uses. Can't you imagine the original designers of email protocols saying "We don't need to worry about verifying that the sender of the email actually exists. Why would anyone want to send anonymous email?"

Second, changing alpha really isn't good enough. You can't expect the owners to keep it on their screen at all times, let alone pay attention to it. A better approach would be to log it. Of course, owners also won't want to get IMs every two minutes telling them that the device has been polled, so it will take some effort to make that usable - perhaps by logging to a web site.

A sort of minor concern might be that this would be a handy tool for SL stalkers; one of their more common tactics is to lie in wait at places that they know their targets frequent. This would make that a bit easier to do, I suppose.

In terms of privacy issues surrounding the publication of names, won't a simple vistor list script produce that now? For the owner, anyway.