The latest SL viewer (1.20.15.924560) finally kills off Popular Places as LL promised sometime ago. Popular Places ranked parcels according to dwell (or something) so it encouraged some people to use campers and bots to increase their ranking. So this is actually a big step forward to remove the incentive for dead traffic. So, maybe fewer campers, bots, money trees and other such things to collect dwell on a parcel.
Impact almost certainly will be a dip in concurrency. Expect to see a drop of up to 20% even--as much as 10,000-15,000 users at peak times. So, let's see if max concurrency drops to 50,000 level again. But really LL needed to do this to wipe the resource drain off the grid for this dead traffic--which is non-paying, non-buying traffic in the main. But, will this also be a ripple that tears into the weaker merchants who relied on camping/bots to get any traffic--so this could also mean more parcel abandonment and store closures.
Now the only inworld marketing choice is classifieds--which are dominated now by desperate skin makers paying $L400,000 plus per week to smear their ads at the top positions. Rezzable actually pull all classifieds out as we feel it is outrageous price and yet another badly implemented community service by LL. They could sell, er, keywords for classifieds? It still looks like LL is trying to take advantage of exuberant merchants.
OOOO, but wait--there is of course "Showcase". A selection by someone of things worth doing--or like the best of SL according to some mysterious LL person(s). Of course they at least got Greenies on their list (they missed Black Swan though which is by far the most impressive area in SL). But out of more than 20,000 sims--they only pick about 50? And how do they decided this? Not that any person in SL more than 90 days would use this, but what's a noob to do? And the noobs are still the future for any merchant hoping to have a business with PMLF or even positive monthly real money flow. Come on LL--stop playing favorites finally. Give your customers a level playing field. You killed Pop, now kill Showcase and spend like 10 minutes with improving Classifieds and a decent directory.
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Comments
RightasRain, like so many of
Thu, 07/31/2008 - 15:42 — Prokofy Neva (not verified)RightasRain, like so many of the haters of a populist, mass culture in SL, who is promoting your own elitist company-town model for SL business, you have a very skewed notion of traffic, and you will swiftly be proven wrong as concurrency will not be dropping. And you better not see traffic dumped out of the viewer completely, or the destruction of the economy will be complete -- including your own.
Even without popular places, clubs and malls will continue to use bots. Popular places only had 20 slots for "gaming" -- and many people took one look at it, saw it consisted merely of tacky newbie free money joints and sex palaces and gave it a pass. But they did see the sort by traffic in search/all and of course search/places.
Of course, search/places still has the traffic indication and sort by traffic -- and thank God for it. And while some of those top returns will remain gamed, if not by bots then by camping, most of the returns there are useful, most people shop by search/places, especially when they encounter the idiocy and frustration of search/all, and that is the engine of the economy (even the engine of some of your personal economy).
Camping will continue regardless of the excision of popular places and even if traffic is removed completely, due tothe limit -- and cost -- of classified viewable space, camping will remain as the poor man's classified and ad campaign to physically bring in eyeballs to click on and spend on vendors. It's just that simple. Impossible to stop. People want a cheap entree to the economy -- camping gives them that. Businesses are desperate to find attention -- campers give them that. Traffic is ultimately irrelevant to those in that sector of the economy. Fiercely competing clubs will likely even keep bots to keep dance poles filled and giving the place a busy look or to have automatic greeters and group inviters.
Most traffic-infusion bot users aren't on the popular places but spread out beyond it -- but of course, not anywhere near the number that people imagine on the more than 22,000 sims of Second Life (I don't think they exist on more than 1 percent at most due to the cost of getting them and maintaining them).
Linden Lab profoundly doesn't care about the "resource drain," which is merely a users' lament, because it gives them reliable load testing on their eternal beta. They could have charged for bots, which they can and do identify upon log-on, but they decided not to go that route as they are obsessively committed to encouraging artificial intelligence.
I have to chuckle at someone who has been on Showcase for weeks and weeks on the web page version dumping on it as only reflecting 50 sims.
And another big laugh at dumping on skin makers who spend more keeping Rezzable in an ads arms race. I don't see how the Lindens could be "managing" this in the putative "name of the community" unless they ration or play even more favourites than they are playing. Of course, I've always suggested they enable the purchase of ad space on Linden land in welcome areas, infohubs, and along some roads. I raelly don't see what the Lindens can do to "fix" the classifieds (selling of key words in SL will be a disaster I would imagine) other than making it so that clicking to go to the next page really pages down to the next level of paid advertising, not to the middle of the entire set of ads, i.e. currently people are enabled to spend far less because of this glitch in order to show up on page 2, and those spending a little less than the top page 1 buyers are put into invisibility.
The hilarious thing about Showcase is that for all this pimping, the venues still have low traffic -- you just can't drive people to go and sit on boring sims that are meant to be "good for them" educationally or culturally.
As Prokofy mentioned, the
Sat, 08/02/2008 - 01:17 — Clubside Granville (not verified)As Prokofy mentioned, the Second Life metric you're referring to is traffic. Dwell was a reward based on traffic removed two years ago. As for Popular Places, it should not have been removed. It was certainly "gamed" but as someone who reached it and remained on it for months with a public sandbox that had no bots, it served its purpose for newbies well. My only complaint was it only listed 20, With the new showcase allowing 50 entries, it could sit side-by-side with a popular places that also included 50. It would be amusing to see the gamed/populace list in contrast with the brown-nosed showcase.
How to fix searching? Keywords can help, they just need to be implemented properly. My recommendation would be one of two choices: a keyword list on the parcel information page tied to the type of place chosen that allowed up to three keyword choices, or the same with a single keyword where something like "sales - general" implied many product types. The free-text search would still work but a list of parcel types and related keywords for filtering the results. This is no perfect solution but it would help and be easy to implement.
One quick tidbit: while there may be only 20,000 or so regions, search is based on parcels of which there are far more. I made popular places without a whole sim, so have others. Second Life should never be beholden to the mass-land holders.
yeah, there must be 100,000
Sat, 08/02/2008 - 18:11 — RightAsRain Rimbaudyeah, there must be 100,000 or so parcels in SL--even more reason to have a proper Search function and paid listings--or maybe 100,000 just seems big in SL terms. Probably only 10,000 parcels or fewer would even have an interest in people finding them.
Kudos to LL for getting rid
Sat, 08/02/2008 - 20:23 — Dreck Drechsler (not verified)Kudos to LL for getting rid of the tainted Popular Places. I'm sure all the bot-infested land owners are annoyed, but the new Showcase does a great service to people interested in discovering some of the cool places inside Second Life.
It's true that some deserving places are not yet listed there, but I do think that it does a great job introducing people to some new places. Not everyone is "in the know" on all the hot spots -- many people only have a little bit of time to explore SL.
I should also point out that I discovered this blog because of Showcase! I LOVE your Greenies build - and will definitely have to check out the Black Swan area. I "googled" "Greenies" to see who was behind the build..you guys have done an amazing job in creating unique spaces in Second Life!
ty Dreck--cu on the grid...
Wed, 08/06/2008 - 12:40 — RightAsRain Rimbaudty Dreck--cu on the grid...
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