Second Rant #12 - Big Media, Sheep, and the Death of Classifieds

"CSI is for idiots" !! lol ...

I agree totally with the search issue - if the Sheep limit SL to their understanding of it - let alone attempting to push their own interests via the viewer technology, this will simply backfire on them. Eventually people will realise - dump the OnRez viewer and resent the Sheep for limiting their experience. If I trusted a company to show me the internet - then realised they decieved me and only showed me 1/3rd of it - i'd never use any of their products again. I'd say it would be a monumentally dumb thing to do, in terms of the Sheep's business interests alone.

Second Life is radically dynamic socially, and I believe uncontrollable in this way - Surely they realise that all the more experienced residents in world would just tell people to get a better client ?! Let alone what the blogs would make of it.. Why would anyone deliberately choose to stay with this - especially when, as Jeska Linden outlined many months ago now - Google search in Second Life is imminent ?

http://blog.onrez.com/2007/10/18/viewer-clarifications-big-picture/

Clarification here about the search.. looks like it accesses the standard Linden search.. is this a Sheep U-turn ? However it says they are apparently they are actively "improving" the Linden search...

Dizzy,

Once again, as I keep saying, "accessing" the search -- being able to access the search through a number of clicks behind this browser -- is not the same as making the search VISIBLE and working the way it normally does. You have a search box where you can put in a term and have it search all the tabs of the regular search which could well return a big mess, and then a big SHOPPING button which only leads to ONREZ properties.

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/10/greed-shepherd...

Prokofy

Also, Dizzy -- where were these new members going to even get the news that there is another standard browser? There'd be no way for them to hear about this.

About search: unless I am looking for a specific shop, the SL client search is almost useless; there's so much keyword spam and games analogous to naming your garage "AAAAAA Garage" to force it to the beginning of the Yellow Pages entry for garages that there's barely any point to it. I will celebrate when it is gone. I'd love to see Google for Second Life, complete with safeguards against attempts to game the system. (Even better--Google maps for SL!)

I'll agree with Melissa about the native SL search -

The only time I ever use it is to test if I've disconnected by opening up the search and typing in "sex" (because if I don't get immediate hits with THAT search term, then I'm not in SL anymore heh heh)

Classifieds? I seriously don't know anyone that uses them regularly. I know quite a few people with successful SL businesses -- two who have quit their day jobs in the past year and one of those just purchased his own sim, all supported by in-world sales.

Of **ALL** the people I know with SL businesses, maybe one has a classified ad. Maybe. Most don't, and they seem to be making enough to support their SL habits in the least, and enough to make a nice living at best.

If I want to search for some SL business or location, I use the best search engine I know -- Google. Most of the better places have all been covered in blogs if they haven't built their own website themselves.

The native tools aren't good for finding what you're looking unless you know EXACTLY what you're looking for and then it's still no guarantee it won't take you ten minutes or more to find it.

I'm personally looking forward to more variety of viewers to choose from, as customizing my own interface is the one thing SL is missing. I want a viewer customized for different activities, from building, to dj'ing to combat to whatever.

Variety and customization are two of the things that brought me to SL almost two years ago so why wouldn't I want that in my UI and viewers, too?

The SL Search is NOT useless; it accounts for most sales in a very vibrant and growing economy. Some of those who dis the search are merely hoping to make competitors, or don't grasp that the inworld economy depends on it, in exactly the way it is now, with results showing traffic. Fixing it by breaking that function will kill the inworld economy.

Grey simply doesn't grasp that his very finite keyhole picture of the classifieds is simply skewed. People spend enormous sums on classifieds because they do indeed work and they do indeed increase sales. Try to grasp that if this keyhole perception were true, we'd see no or very few or far less expensive bids on classifieds.

Many, many people use search places, groups, events, and classifieds to navigate the world and buy and sell products and services. These few who can't grasp this are a narrow segment of people who are not really involved in the immersive world, or who have some narrow interest that can't dredge up from the search.

The variety and customization already IS in the search in its traffic returns; it's already on the avatar profile PICKS which is golden as well. Those calling for customized browsers are failing to see that this or that company with this or that narrow interest to grab the whole search sector will obliterate variety and diversity, not ensure it. You don't ensure a robust Yellow Pages for all by enabling a series of full-page ads in your scrapbook without complete listings.

I'm not saying they are broke, I'm just saying that for a large portion of the SL population -- classifieds simply don't even exist. How can you account for successful clubs, designers builders, etc NOT using it?

My perspective, while finite obviously, isn't so much keyhole as you'd think. I'm very involved in SL, I just don't make it my job to be well known, preferring to remain a somewhat quiet observer. I've been in SL almost two years and I log in nearly every night for varied lengths of time. I do a lot of exploring, lead a couple of "tour groups" over the years, spent FAR more money than I ever want to actually track -- all without using classifieds. And either I'm some kind of SL savant (hardly) or I'm not alone.

The fact that people spend enormous sums on classifieds doesn't make the case for them to not go away. In the nineties people spent enormous sums on other silly investments and we saw what happened there. The only area I'll say that classifieds still seem to be important is in land sales, and that might be why it's so important from your perspective. Not being in the land business, nor caring about the fiction of buying virtual land, might be why it's not important from mine.

As SL opens more, and we can get to the point of hosting our own servers attached to the grid, or paying for a hosting service the same as we do for the web today, searching for land will be less and less important too. In a few years we'll just go to "SLgodaddy.com" and register our sim the same as we do domain names.

In any event, I've found the actual communities in and around SL to be a far better search and classifieds feature than the in-world LL ones. When there's neat stuff happening, cool creators working on new ideas -- people talk about it. That's what this very site is about, too. And SL is the topic of scores of blogs and websites, run by people (such as yourself) who all love and care about what they see and do in virtual worlds and can't help but talk about it. Don't discredit yourself and your impact by claiming that you and all the other bloggers are less effective than the LL tools that are questionable at best.

And finally, I think you misunderstand what I mean buy UI and viewer customization though, as using search and picks as an example is an apples and oranges argument.

Grey,

You have absolutely no basis for saying "for a very large portion of SL users they don't exist". But as someone with hundreds of customers every week and 20 classifieds -- and I'm on the small end of inworld businesses -- I'm here to tell you they get heavy use. Search Places for $30 is used even *more*. Each one of these 20 ads gets dozens of TPs, profile searches a day -- and that's just one business. Then the subset of all my customers who themselves take out classifieds and all their use lets me know just on my particular "keyhole" how heavily they are used. Then I merely have to talk to all the high tier payers on Concierge; attend all the meetings that I myself organize or that other event organizers run in SL, and I know that Classifieds get high bids *for a reason*. It's also the only window of advertising generally accessible through the browser -- the *only* place for a paid ad to be seen in principle by anyone logging in, as any inworld billboard or kiosk relies on physical proximity of the avatar on that sim.

Again, your "intelligentsia" use of SL, while important, and possibly influential, does not even begin to touch the mass use of SL by the 50,000 people logged on at any one time.

This isn't about "land sales" -- I don't sell land; I rent it. Read the classifieds. Talk to the people who place them -- everyone from gadget-makers to event organizers to dress-makers. You're not hearing or seeing this because you don't care about these things evidently; they are indeed what make up the inworld economy, however.

Again, people wouldn't buy classifieds at staggering sums week after week for all kinds of things *if they did not work for sales*.

Word of mouth, and the other very, very important form of social advertising and folksonomy -- the avatar PICKS -- is also very important. That alone cannot sustain the economy, however.

I once convinced Philip Linden to make a list of the top PICKS on the avatars, and contrast that with the gamed popular places. It was very, very revealing. The sex palaces waned in importance. PG spots like the Shelter or Svarga or more complex destinations like the Lost Garden of Apollo then suddenly rocketed up the preferred list. That's why the Lindens talk about putting PICKS picks into the mix of the weight for search returns.

Blogs with various followings in fashion are important to generate sales. But people don't always get a SLURL to work, and they often enter the world and do -- what? -- they put a term or a name they read in a blog *into search places*.

lol, now I'm intelligentsia, thanks for the promotion!

You have no idea what my basis is or isn't. Nor who I talk to, associate with or so on.

And I do care about these things, I've been following virtual world development, how we use, abuse, build and recreate places for over a decade now. I'm not saying this to say my point is any more or less valid than yours, just that while I won't make assumptions about what you do or don't know, nor should you about me. My name could be linden, or it could be mud, but in the end, I'm sharing my perspective into SL, based on my experiences living, working, and talking to many people there over the years. And we;re all here for the exchange of ideas, right? The open discussions help us understand more about how other people use these platforms we get so worked up about.

Just as your info about how you use the classifieds is valuable to my understanding of how other people use SL, mine should be valuable in the fact that at least it's how I use SL, and I'm not alone from what I've been able to see.

I'm also not against someone doing a better version of these tools, because in the end the more tools we have at our disposal, to use or neglect as we see fit in our day to day second lives, the better it is for all.

Lets just agree that we come from this from different angles. For me, and my perspective, classifieds work like crap and have never lead to me spending anything in SL over the years. And had I not been able to use word of mouth, websites or blogs I'd have a significantly larger bank account today, so ultimately, I'm all FOR the classified staying in their busted form and keeping my money right where I need it, in my bank :)

Nick, I appreciate your trying to keep this balanced. You were up against it once she got rolling.

Prokofy, you had a chance to get a live demo of this viewer last week at the Virtual Worlds Conference. Hamlet took that opportunity and wrote about what he saw. You didn't bother, but that hasn't stopped you from coming up with all sorts of negative speculation. I've been trying to tell you that Search exposure really isn't going to be that different, but you don't want to listen -- instead you want to scream falsities like we keystroke track (no, we do not) or that we hiding your classifieds (no we're not).

In the current SL Client you click on a search button and get a tabbed interface. In ours you type your search query in directly, and then get a tabbed interface. We haven't changed any plans recently -- we had examined if our own search was ready to also include and decided it was not.

This is a mockery of journalism. If you cared so much about this topic, you should have come by our booth, or pulled me aside, and I would have happily showed you the viewer. There is no NDA or "7 seals" nonsense you keep on going on about. We're just not shipping it until it's done and we don't have time to give you special treatment, nor is your behavior any kind of motivation to do so. It has nothing to do with secrecy because we have nothing to hide. It has everything to do with crazy-tight timelines.

I am not hostile to the public good. I am hostile to Prokofy lies and speculation. You say in this podcast, "They are willing to obliterate it in a day." You don't know what you are talking about, and you spend all your time assigning evil motivations and imagining facts that don't exist.

Second Life's search is used by residents right now, but that doesn't mean that it is not broken. It is useful ONLY because there is no alternative. People make do with what they have but that does not mean it doesn't suck. I challenge you to do a fair poll on SL residents about this topic -- residents have been screaming for an improvement to search for years.

I understand that you feel threatened, but my goal is to help residents and resident businesses in SL, not hurt them. Yes, we are trying to build a business, but you don't do that by offering negative value. I would love to see these new CSI visitors become fully fledged members of Second Life, and get out, explore, and engage with the SL universe.

Of course, I will beg to differ with Nick that Shop OnRez is vaporware. I think if you go to the site today, as opposed to when we launched, you will find Pixel Dolls/Spa, Paper Couture, Shiny Things, Tete a Pied, Shai Delacroix, and many many more of the best brands in SL. We have a lot of work ahead of us though, I agree, and I certainly do not think web shopping will replace inworld shopping.

To be clear about another important point, the only data we pull out of the viewer right now is the viewer version number and the operating system. This data is not tied to an avatar.

This was a far cry more rational than what you've been writing on the Web, Prokofy, but it's still absurd that you had a perfect chance to see this viewer, you refused, and now you're freaking out with lies and speculation.

I have already ranted on search once before, so I will keep it short: for people looking for *common* items in world, it works great (once you mentally subtract all the mature content that somehow appears despite having "include mature content" turned off).

For searching for specific items you don't have exact names for, it is garbage. Maybe I don't represent the majority, but SLExchange or even Google allows me to get useful results about things I want (which are not sex clubs, dance halls, camping chairs or land rentals) faster. The search is just gamed too much and I don't have the patience to use an inferior tool when better ones exist *right now*.

Sex clubs, dance halls, camping chairs, or land rentals are NOT what return when you type in "religion" or "book club" or "science fiction" or "non-profit" or a million other terms not related to those things, all of which produce results. You are raising the sort of bogey man you claim others raise over "IP". It's silly, because tens of thousands of people use it this way, but the world isn't really what you want, so you can't refrain from constantly dumping on it.

If you want the Internet, go out on the Internet.

Um, also, I don't know about you, but if I go on Google "searching for specific items I don't have exact names for" (! lol!!!) then...I can expect to try about 20 searches with different bound phrases or single terms before I'll turn up something past the Wikipedia and other junk that is always in the first few returns on Google. Same problem. You learn to ignore those first few returns.

There aren't any better tools. The Sheep tool is tilted to search and drive people to their properties, and consists of people who failed to opt-out of a scrape -- it has a lot of junk in it. THAT is ok? Why is that ok and "superior"?

Other searches like Cristiano's consist of social landmarked sites that people put in manually and that he clears manually. Or relies on putting a box on your land which means turning over all the search data to a third party. These are NOT superior. They are good as far as they go, but your imagination that there is something truly "Google-like" in or around SL now is not justified.

What the Lindens plan to remake as search is just as socially-engineered and skewed as their old Linden picks and even their gamed popular places -- it will not be Google.

I find that many people who imagine that the search doesn't work don't really use it, and don't spend significant time in SL. They confuse "popular places" that they see when they open up places as somehow "the search" -- it isn't. I challenge you to tell me the terms you are looking for, and I will screenshot the results and indicate that you're notion that it is all sex and camping is silly -- unless, of course you typed in "poseballs" or "money".

You remind me of this guy I debated about the search who finally admitted to me that he had typed in the word "fun" and wondered why it didn't return "pirates" which he found fun. Try typing "fun" into the Google box!

Hmmm, I retried a classic search just now: "coffee pot", something I wanted for a gathering. "Places" search and classifieds return no hits. All search returns a bunch of junk. The places I *know* have coffee pots are not to be found.

The "all" results? Slingo and camping! Flowers! Living Rooms! Furniture shops (may be relevant, a teleport later I know it isn't). Oh, I like this one: "Drug Store", Crack Den..." with keywords to match and the mandatory "sex" thrown in the description. Scroll down far enough and you will hit coffee shops, but no coffee pots for sale. (I will admit to there being *far less* sex with that search than some of my searches for scripting tools or gadgets usually bring.)

Just run the search (quoted "coffee pot") and see for yourself that such a simple search terms just don't get happy results. The same exact search term does quite well in SLexchange though. Yes, I know... I don't spend enough time in world and don't know how search works; I'm OK with that assessment. Have fun and take care... and thank you for one more reason to enjoy the concept of "pirates".

John,

I don't know why you are being deliberately misleading here, as I am inworld now, opening up the search, and searching in CLASSIFIEDS, typing in COFFEE POT and immediately finding COFFEE POT at KITCHEN KORNER as the top return. If you failed to get that information from word of mouth, or asking in groups, use CLASSIFIEDS -- and contrary to what you just posted, there it is, indeed, the genuinely best place for this item, KITCHEN KORNER with plenty of coffee pots.

What I always find humorous about you search complainers is that you use the Linden search in ways that you wouldn't use Google. You aren't accurately reporting how you use Google, or accurately reporting how you use the LL Search. If you were to type "coffee pot" into Google, it would turn up anything for you in Google you needed, either. You might have to put in a different term, or more terms.

So please pay attention to what you actually did, which you didn't record faithfully. What you did isn't go to "CLASSIFIEDS" or "SEARCH PLACES". You went to SEARCH ALL, which nobody does. If you are still going to SEARCH ALL, you can expect the same sort of grab bag as a poor Google search. It is SEARCH ALL that produces "Potheads". The Lindens' SEARCH ALL doesn't bind the phrases as in a Boolean search, and that's why it merely searches on POT and produces that return.

I don't see them at all, but let's say for the sake of argument that if "Slingo and Crack Den" were to appear it would be because camping is the poor man's form of advertising. That's all. Traffic isn't *gamed* -- it is purchased like an ordinary classified is in the "classifieds" section -- the Lindens have merely set the example.

So rather than trying to get "coffee pot" in SEARCH PLACES ALL (which you're doing now) as if you were on amazon.com and not sorting when you arrived there into "books" or "electronics" or 'housewares" you have to use simple common sense, as you would if trying to use Google or more similarly, amazon.com

Go to SEARCH PLACES. In the ALL of SEARCH PLACES if you put in "coffee pot" you get no returns at all. None. If you check off MATURE PLACES in that SEARCH ALL, yes, expect to get whoever has put in adult porn ads in Second Life, just as you might if you went to Google and put the slider up for adult instead of regular or safe. Why are you using Second Life *differently* than you use Google, John?! If you want to compare to Google, at least *use it like you really use Google*.

Without "mature" checked off, If you put in "coffee" you get some coffee shops (not any pothead places). With "mature" checked off, there is also a regular coffee shop, then a gay coffee shop. Don't see any Slingo tho.

Now, if I go to GOOGLE on the Internet and type in "coffee pot" I get 1) an AOL ad for shopping for a coffee pot -- um...now you're SURE that isn't paid for in some way, gamed, or something? please! 2) a Wikipedia entry on the history of the coffee pot that does absolutely no good for me if I am *shopping to find a coffee pot at the really most diverse, best, forms of places to find coffee pots*.

I could go to amazon.com and pull down the right tab to get housewares. I could put in "coffee pot New York".

Again, since this is a world in which people buy the classifieds, go to the classifieds, as you would to Craig's List, type in "coffee pot" in the CLASSIFIEDS and get "Kitchen Korner" which is the best, most popular place to find a coffee pot in Second Life. It will turn up as the first item. In real life, expecting to fish "coffee pot" out of the maw of Google would be stretching it -- you'd go to Craig's list, amazon.com or type in "Sears" or something like that.

In using the Linden search, just like you REALLY use Google, trying different terms when you don't get a return you need, you'd go up a level, and type in KITCHEN. Without mature typed off, to be sure, in in the SEARCH inworld, you get "Neva Naughty" even if mature isn't checked off -- Lord knows what kind of camped kitchen they have. But if you look at the SECOND return -- which everyone does in using the LL search, just as they look past the first two things in Google that are camped and gamed as surely as any LL search -- they get Kitchen Korner, Ramos, Oasis, etc. and Depoz. A dozen normal kitchenware stores all of which have a variety of coffee pots.

Stop using LL's search *differently* than you use Google, John. AND use the LL search *the same* as you use Google *to get what you want out of Google*. I trust a man of refined tastes like yourself will skip over the camped AOL shopping and the irrelevant Wikipedia, and move on to either the Amazon or Totalvac coffee pots on Google. Do the same thing in Second Life, please.

ok .. I understand your concern Prokofy. But I think perhaps if Giff feels that the viewer hasn't been properly examined prior to this discussion we should just ask the question, and let Giff explain what the search does exactly and why :

The Onrez blog post http://blog.onrez.com/2007/10/18/viewer-clarifications-big-picture/ ) slightly ambiguously says :

"The other search input box queries Linden Lab’s standard mix of services [All, Classifieds, Events, Popular Places, Land Sales, Places, People, and Groups] and pops up the tabbed window you are all used to seeing."

Is Prokofy correct in her assertion that there is no way to choose which category you are searching in whilst typng into that second search box ? Is there a front interface category pull down ? or is that only possible after that standard box pops up ? If so why ?

I understand the commercial strategy of attempting to control or hinder information access within search systems, however personally I find it hard to beleive that Sheep would do this. Surely as one of the leading and initial exponents of in world development, they would understand that attempting to control information within SL just backfires. I have great in how the community would respond to this, I don't think it would just be the "intelligencia" which would drop a viewer which limited their options - I think everyone would. I think people would find out too easily from other residents.

Saying that - I am looking forward to the OnRez viewer, and many other viewers, in terms of easing the introduction of new users to Second Life, as well as potential for specialist browsers etc.

Dizzy,

Could you explain to me again why a viewer made from *open sourced code* that the Lindens provide openly, and is especially even licensed to this company the Sheep, has to remain a proprietary secret? Why? The proprietary bits presumably include the functions that drive people to their own properties, and scrape data for their own third-party servers. Maybe that's understandable, but please don't invoke "the Internet" as an example of how open-source is grabbed and turned into proprietary stuff all the time. When that happens, it's in 2-D. This is interactive in 3-D, it's in *a world* and it *affects us*.

I don't see why we don't get to comment in advance, with very grave concerns, about something that will affect our world -- our world that is a shared world, where the effects of one big company licensed by the Lindens can be *enormous*. It's not just a case of somebody taking out a full-page ad in the Times, or somebody putting a bigger ad in the Mobil space. It's a question of taking over the whole access to the Times. It's not a Yellow Pages; it's a big ad, with a keyhole to the rest of the world underneath.

Look at the screenshots, Dizzy. They show one box. One box. Whatever is accessible underneath that isn't what would be accessible in the normal browser at that first level.

The idea that driving people to one third-party shopping site "eases the entry of the newbie to Second Life* is just plain silly. That concept wouldn't work in first life; it doesn't even work on Google.

FYI, John:

Go to shop.onrez.com and type in COFFEE POT there and get:

o a picture of a cardboard box with a question mark over it saying COFFEE POT by someone no one has ever heard of
o a pot plant -- i.e. marijuana
o somebody's magic pot from some witch RP
o potted plants

Type KITCHEN and get -- only one company that makes kitchens.

Type APPLIANCES and get -- lots of appliances but not coffee pots.

Now go to www.slexchange.com

Go to MARKETPLACE where you search stuff. Type COFFEE POT into Search.

Here's what you get, immediately, with no "pot" stuff and no need to type "kitchen":

o Mr. Oom's Coffee Maker -- Featured Item!
o Mirandaware Blue Bow's Coffee Pot -- perhaps that has your name on it!

It's very good that there is competition among the shopping sites; Slexchange.com has a search that just seems to produce better returns.

Prokofy, are you going to respond to Giff's comment?

Beyond that, trying to convince people that searching the classifieds is a valid alternative to a more general search that is smart enough to figure out what you want is a fool's errand. LL doesn't provide a way to search objects unless a user takes time to take out a classified that includes a relevant name and description. While it's perfectly valid for users to be able to pay for ranking (hopefully with some relevance thrown in) under a "classified" search category, SL has no decent general search capability. What makes a general search good is its ability to determine relevance. Price paid for a classified does not indicate relevance in the slightest. And the fact that someone paid for a classified may, in fact, be completely irrelevant. Google attempts to get you the most relevant search result with the help of page rank, not dollars spent. While this is certainly imperfect, it does far more to return accurate results than some guy taking out a classified and filling it with terms.

The fact is, there is no good way right now to determine relevance in searches for objects or land in SL. There is almost no metadata. Unlike a webpage, you can't parse an object for its content. There is no way, save user Picks perhaps, to determine the popularity and relevance to actual users of an object or place; this would help prevent gaming as well. If these things were the case, we might have a shot at getting a good in-world search tool.

Right now, we're stuck with the easiest and most relevant searches being by word of mouth, paid classifieds, and the web. These are what we have, but that doesn't make them very good.

And this whole issue is really tangential to the issue of the onRez viewer.

Go read my blog, I've had assiduous responses to his comments -- and BTW, he has censored my response to his claims on his own blog, so you'll have to go to:

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/10/whats-wrong-wi...
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/10/dont-buy-class...
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/10/greed-shepherd...

and go back to where I first raised concerns about Sheepbot Search here:
http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/04/the_greed_sheph.html

and continued the debate here on the Sheep's blog:
http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/giff/?p=337

and my other thoughts on why SL search is NOT broken here:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/04/search_works_t...

The search is NOT repeat NOT BROKEN. It works to generate most sales inworld. It works fine. No, the Noosphere doesn't greet your geeky request for a coffee pot with a bot that arrives on your lawn instantly when you think "cofee pot" and say "Hi, John, you must mean this beautifully enameled coffee pot by Mirandaware in Caledon".

But...it works pretty close to that : )

Tell me again, please that AOL Shopping is the most relevant place to buy a real-lfie coffee pot. Um, I'm all ears on that one. That's what Google turns up for me.

Search Places in fact gives you what you want, you just have to look. And you have to look not in SEARCH ALL, and not with "matured" checked off, and try a few times. But...it works. Good enough. Good enough NOT to break it and socially engineer it with utopian hippie dreck and kill it.

Thanks everyone.