Second Life: Testing a new home page this week

I agree

Argent, you are nitpicking on what I said. Application is not what *I* said, the word "application" is part of the acronym used to define RIA, a definition loosely applied to anything that uses rich, interactive interfaces. Let's call it RID if you are not happy with the definition.

And if you really want to nitpick, today most web sites *are* applications, because they include services such as authentication, and more, which require code.



Problem is, the purpose of Google's home page is not to present content, but to *search* content. I suspect that a SL's home page laid out as Google's one would not be too beneficial for the purpose.

Interfaces evolve. Interfaces will be entirely different things in some years. The difference between the web and the desktop, whether it will be a document or an application, will fade away. Technologies such as Silverlight have started that.

Frankly, I find the entire discussion on Flash a moot point. The Lindens clearly said that a HTML alternative will be available. Which is what any professional in the field would do. People will have a choice, so what's all the fuss about?

Here's an idea.

Instead of having Big Spaceship use their 'designer talk' (meaning jargon) to convince you to that this website is an extremely good idea. Why not have a forum whereby users can suggest and vote on what content the Homepage should contain? This means that LL will have had the most input from the people who really use SL (THE RESIDENTS) and thus create a more effective homepage. As for design, plenty of designers in SL who KNOW what SL's rich content and culture is like and so would be able to suggest a more informed design sketch for a homepage.

Yes, opening up suggestions to residents will be hard work, but not as much as you think. Allow the residents to decide what THEY want on the homepage and you have a better homepage. Forget about PR, start thinking about Second Life. Anyone else agree?

I am not a MS partisan and won't even dare to discuss MS's business practices, which is a thorny issue on itself and quite OT. But, honestly, MS is often blamed for past things and not on actual facts. When talking about web standards, there is some serious work in the .NET field to comply. Starting from ver.2 and VS2005 already.




Maybe. Sometimes, not all the time. The good thing about Silverlight is that it is multi-platform, deeply integrated with .NET and sweeps away all the complexities of developing complex interactive interfaces in a simple, elegant way.

It raises the bar for interfaces and it does it by significantly simplifying the development. With the additional advantage that an interface developed with Silverlight will work on the web or the desktop with the same code.

Of course!

Can anyone imagine YouTube without Flash?

I agree!

I don't think the acronym is misleading at all.

What Flash and .NET are all about is pushing a rich application to the desktop. The same thing is true for Java and heavy use of scripting (eg, AJAX). There are plenty of places where this kind of thing makes a lot of sense (for example, Google Maps, or Youtube, or the many flash-based games on the net). The places this kind of thing is really useful and productive, however, are not the majority of sites on the net.

The revolution that HTML brought is the ability to produce a workmanlike document with hypertext using simple tools that can be easily modified and adapted as requirements change. That's why it's become so widely used in businesses despite the fact that they DO have the ability to push applications to the desktop. Because applications are complex, fragile, and hard to modify. Embedding that application in a web page doesn't change that.

Unless you have a real requirement for an interface feature that you can't provide without embedding an application in your web page, you're better off removing that feature and finding a way to do it using standard interfaces. You will end up with a page that is smaller, lighter, faster, and almost always better for the user AND your bottom line.

Actually, it's been over 10 years since Microsoft started trying to erase the distinction between the web and the desktop. They actually branded it, initially, AS "Active Desktop". This technology and its successors has been the best exploit tool *ever*. Every year they have come up with a new twist, claiming that they've got it right this time. Silverlight is just the latest one of these. It's not the start, it's just another paving stone on the downward path.

If the page discourages visitors, then that's what the fuss is about.

I think the main thing here is that the page doesn't need to be ENTIRELY flash. Yes, flash is nice, but it is not an end all. Flash was created to be a support to HTML sites to make some things possible that HTML, XML, JAVA, JAVAscript simply couldn't do. Then some bright spark got the notion of creating entire websites in flash instead.
I would suggest that the website be largely kept as HTML as it is now, but with flash assets where movies and other such media are concerned. This will be more inviting to users as they will have a choice as to whether they wish to view the flash content and not merely represent a bandwidth leech. It is a myth that you can only build a professional website suing solely flash in the 21st Century.

I can, it's now .mp4

i really like the idea. The colors don't really suit Second life more of a blue and green and white landscape would be better. Also is this going to run on silverlight? or Adobe flash?

Also will the images change and will residents be able to submit there artworks for the homepage?

Thanks
Joy

i have already pointed the same thing out. i wish there could be lighter colors for the Design!

I can just imagine the responces from business clients we are trying to immerse into the platform, when their IT Director is given a choice on the front page of 'Dance, Shop, Flirt, Play, Learn'....
Even if they bypass the Flash gismo, still those focused choices.

Your World, Your Imagination.... so why the spoon feeding?

The diversification within the platform goes way beyond describing, even within a list of 1,000 choices... but lets try something a little less 'Sims On Line'.

I would like a lot to see the emphasis on the creativity that we can deploy in SL over anothers virtual worlds, no one offer this capabilitiy their users, no one encourage the user to be an author as SL does.
I think would be really nice to say that to new potencial users: come here to make your very own version of the universe!

Maybe, in order to express the true nature of Second Life. One needs to look at making the homepage customizable. If you look at the BBC homepage website it has the ability to add a nunber of modules and colours that make the homepage more befitting to what YOU want and thus appealing to each and every individual person who uses it.

Everybody uses Second Life for a different reason. Yes, people come to flirt. Yes, people come to dance. Yes, people come to learn. But I think the only way to convey the TRUE nature of the uniqueness of what Second Life can do is give people the ability to build their own Home page.

Using set modules that people can pick from and move about on the Home Page will allow people to optimize their own home page for the best use to them. Not just for the New Resident but for Current Residents too.
The Benefit of this is that you can have the page that YOU think is best as default. Then, those of us who don't like it can immediately change it to something more suited to our taste and, I believe keep a vast majority of people quite happy indeed. People will be able to get the look and feel of the homepage that they personally like as well as make it a very efficient and functional webpage.

Modules you could have are thus:

*L$ Buy/Sell Module: (default) This will allow people to increase credit and buy SL through
this module.
*Showcase Module: (default) A showcase of places of interest within second life such as Greenie's Home Rezzable. Allowing residents new and old to explor Second Life straight away! Possibly with added functionality to a user in and teleport them to that spot from the homepage (like Slurl does with the map.).

*Status Grid RSS module: Pretty self explanatory.

*Blog RSS Module: Allowing people to keep up to date with the latest happenings in SL!

*Introductory Video Module (one time default) for those wondering what all this is.

*Knowledgebase Module (default): Bringing self-teaching and the knowledge base to an easier level of understading within SL.

*Video Tutorial Module (default): Torleys videos are often the best way for someone new to learn SL's ins and outs!

*Virtual Land Module: Allow people to better find out what virtual land is about and how to buy it!

*Support Module (default): Module to contain links to the ticket submission and live chat pages.

*Linden Lab Module: For those people on a more PR basis, this module will connect the user directly to the Linden Lab website.

*Friends Online module: There is a way of doing this. Allowing you to see whose online on your friends list from the website. No need to log in.

*OpenSource module: For those interested in opensource.

*Land Portal module: Pretty self explanatory.

*Metaverse RSS Module: Allowing people to keep in touch with the wider community of
SL.
*Customize Module (default): Change your modules, layout and colour from here!

*TSL module (default): Not 18+? Click here to be redirected to Teen Second Life! This module will be of particular importance since it will ease the amount of confusion people go through when logging in only be banned for being underage. A boon to residents, the teens and the G-Team.

all modules would be able to be dragged around the main homepage, allowing the user to
place the modules of most relavance to them at the top and the ones of less relavance at the bottom (or get rid of them completely by clicking an [X] in the module.) New modules should be able to be added and taken away and even (possibly) explore the ability to let people develop their own modules, so that they can keep in touch with their friends, monitor their sims directly from the homepage.

A news ticker would also be appropriate. If the grid is down, for any reason. The ticker at the top of the page would be able to communicate this effectively (just in case someone doesn't have the Status RSS module up).

Such a layout of a page would not only show a new level of professionalism from Linden Lab, but also keep in line with what Linden Lab have always done: put the resident and user-created content first.
If we can build our own SL in-world, there's absolutely no reason why we shouldn't be able to build our own website (even if a predefined format) too.

I hope this is just a proof of concept and not the final design. Excuse me as I go all "passionate resident*" here, but I don't like the design. Honestly, it feels old.

The header and footer being smaller than the carousel doesn't look clean.

I haven't seen the actual interactions yet, and I hope it's cooler than a modal window pops up. My experience from what my company has done with flash tiles on adidas.com makes me think that they will shift to accommodate a rollover state. But the fact that the grid is so A"x A" square is just... boring.

Black isn't a great background choice, stick with white or use light grey. Use the second life colors, white, teal and green in a way that is kinda shiny and sexy and bright. You can make the images in the carousel pop out just as well using white.

Just out of curiosity, what personas did Big Spaceship come up with?
Who are you guys trying to attract to the site/game?
This page doesn't really convey the complexity of Second life to me. All of the keywords you have on there I could see on EntropiaUniverse or IMVU. You want to get away from the herd and say basically "This is why our products is unique."

And just in general about flash, you could honestly build that screen capture in javascript, but I haven't seen the interactions yet. My whole carreer is based on making flash interactions and animations using javascript (I love flash too, but JS is my baby.)
I'm not saying flash is bad, but if you want to go cheap and maintainable you should opt out of flash. Unless they are making you a content management system, getting a resource to edit the homepage will cost you more than if you just needed a js/css/html front end developer.



*passionate resident is just a euphamism for opinionated jerk isn't it? >_>

I prefer opensource where the community is active and it's being maintained. But I avoid stuff that is no longer being worked on in favor of the proprietary stuff that IS being maintained. For this and other reasons, I love writing code in C# under .NET. It is a fast and clean way to do a lot without the step-above-assembly C coding all the structures I am so accustomed to. And DirectX has been updated and made current whereas OpenGL seems to be stuck in 1998. I think lots of viewer improvements could be made by using DirectX instead of OpenGL. I liked OpenGL when it came out, but life has moved on and tech has marched forward, yet OpenGL has not kept up to date.

Opensource can whip the proprietary guys stuff, but not if it isn't kept modern and state of the art.

It seems that several virtual worlds are using Flash on their homepages
(thinking to IMVU, vSide, etc...)

So I think it could be interesting your move on there....maybe it will improve conversione and % of registration......

just I hope you guys have paid carefully attention to Search Engine Visibility and Google Crawlers visibility....

cause I think that secondlife.com is getting a lot of traffic from important keywords (as avatar, second life, virtual worlds, etc) and I hope that your website will continue to generate traffic from search engines.....

so I suggest you to guys to give SEO (search engine optimization) attention and resources

good luck!

SL isn't using half the capacity of OpenGL.

And even without increasing the number of OpenGL features, there's lots of things LL could do to improve the graphics in SL... like fixing the avatar mesh and bringing back Runitai's lovely depth-sensitive waves.

I was still able to log on using my iMac using 19_0_4 but now it won't work any more - wah

What is this, the late 1990s?

My company tried this awhile back, it was a disaster.

But since you're going to do it anyway, just like all the other changes that no one wants or even asks for, I will add my invaluable and infinitely constructive feedback:

HA HA HA!

All the images like this ... don't know. really hate it. If this was the web page displayed while logging in with a client (rather then drab sceenery of land) then it would be perfect. Even more so if it was hooked into the latest pictures from snapzilla.

As the web page to the main site - no way! I can not immediately compute the pictures with the images. And what is with the black? I thought this was going in the direction of professionalism/business friendly. Now suddenly everything has gone to black elite gamer oriented cool wannabe factor. Giving demonstrations of virtual worlds at work, I often bring up the second life home page. The dark is going to be a bad thing. And the number of pictures is just too busy. Stick with only 1 or 2 pictures. You are taking to much away from the content otherwise. The pictures are hard to identify with anything. I had to read the text first before I understood what the image was for. Humans are visual. The picture takes too much attention away from the understanding of the links.

-- DM

Okay, so i ranted on redesigning the page to have modules and to be customized. So, not being one to hide my light under a bushel, I put my money where my mouth is and came up with a ROUGH idea of what a moduled homepage would look like. I did two sketches, a default homepage:

http://flickr.com/photos/28058818@N08/3119446972/sizes/l/

and a customized version (after modules have been subtracted and added)

http://flickr.com/photos/28058818@N08/3119446828/sizes/l/in/photostream/


What do you guys think?

I think that's about 7000% better. I assume the only flash part would be the section in the middle with the possibly animated scenes?

Yes, it would combine HTML, Javascript and flash, depending on what applications/modules you wanted. The top bar with the pics in it would be flash, allowing you to scroll along and click on something to find out more about it (possibly). So that would need to be flash.
I think the most effective way of dealing with it is to make flash where it is only necessary, rather than 'because we can'. The centrepiece is a one time 'welcome movie' which you could then get rid of. [x] appears on mouseover, etc.

The red text at the top is a 'ticker tape' This information would change depending on what VITAL information the user needed to know whether or not they had the RSS Grid Status module on their page. The rest of the time it could display other information such as news about events (IE: SL birthdat/burning life) etc.