A Website Dedicated To Sims...

Last night while chatting with Aaron Linden and a few others about changes and/or new ideas that could be brought up into the future of SL, an interesting idea was spawned...

How would you feel on a website dedicated to the Simulators and particualar attractions and community details presented in them? This is completely open to discussion and quite a bit of space can be utilized. I would like some feedback, ideas ,suggestions, comments, questions, and concerns... for the more I know, the better off I am at how to go about creating and going to work.

And if there already is a website dedicated to this, please tell me. However, I have yet to find one.

Thank you for time and responses in advance, it is greatly appreciated!

--Water

i think this is a cool idea. it would be a more comprehensive map. maybe throw some advertising in there too.

Let me just say (as Linden CEO) that I think this would be GREAT, and we would be delighted to see it.

Certainly there is lots in the way of features that we will be doing to enhance the view of information in a topographical way (by sims, etc), but I am sure that we will never be deep enough, and that there will be professional 3rd party resources like this that will become essential.

Have at it!

VERY cool idea, Kissling would definatly be up for that.

Imagine any sim with shops or any other buisness getting good publicity.

Also maybe a flash (or something like it), setup where on the website you could navigate the sim. Kinda a virtual "virtaul" tour of the area. Obviously would not convey every update as content of every sim changes within every min. we are all online.

And doing this would be one heck of a grand undertaking.

Sounds like a fantastic idea, Water. The closest thing I've seen to this is http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/muds_vw.html

But it really sounds like you're talking about something more indepth and with a different focus. I think the biggest challenge will be keeping it updated so you might want to keep that in mind when figuring out how much detail to go into.

Good luck on the site and let us know when it's ready for viewing!

The scalability of maintenance on such a site, as Skyllar mentioned, is indeed the biggest challenge. There are currently 30-something sims and that number will only increase. Also the content on those sims will probably significantly change every few months.

You might want to plan on providing some way for other SL residents to contribute to the site.

Also, I suspect there are some tools that only Linden Lab could provide that would make such a site possible to scale as the world grows, such as automated update snapshots (multicolor textures) of a each sim from a birds-eye view.

If many users thought such tools would be useful then they could formally make them "feature requests" in the forums (hint hint).

Thank you all to the wonderful responses that I've recieved over time on this project I've been working on. I've decided to crack down and publish what I Have so far, and Included an area like Andrew suggested so others could contribute to the site (message boards)... Linden's, I would also appreciate your eversocomming and eversopopular feedback there as well! You don't have to register to post any feedback, but I'd appreciate it if you do with your SL Name

Thank you all for the suggestions and input thus far ingame, and I am looking forward to seeing more in the near future... and watch the site evolve!

Second Life Community

--Water Rogers