Where’s the action in SL?

I logged into Second Life a couple of times recently with the idea of exploring and engaging in things I don’t usually. So I started with the Search window. It’s so amazingly hard to find a link to anything good, but this Search window makes it almost impossible to even just browse the list.

I may be wrong here, but Search is supposed to present organized lists of links, right? Isn’t that something that we’ve had for over fifteen years on the web? And somehow that’s beyond the capabilities of LL devs? You can’t navigate easily, the search basically doesn’t return expected results, and you can’t bookmark for later exploration without actually going there and making a landmark. It’s just phenomenally poor design and implementation.

I couldn’t find much with the search function, so I wandered through each of the dozen or so featured links and found a handful interesting but empty locations. Nothing truly engaging. I know there are people in SL doing fun things. I’ve been engaged in SL since 2003. But I can’t, despite my best efforts, actually find them. At that point, I ended up wandering through empty sims for an hour or so.

Essentially, there is no way to get to good content beyond word-of-mouth and shared landmarks. That is inexcusable this late in SL‘s life. We need a Google of SL, and then nobody will say there’s nothing to do in SL. They’ll say there’s too much.

My predictions for Second Life in 2011

As the year in Second Life tumbles towards December 31, 2010, like a griefercube spinning and screaming towards the edge of the map, our thoughts naturally look ahead to what the metaverse will bring us in 2011. This year was, without a doubt, turbulent for this particular piccolo pixelated planet (sorry): massive layoffs at the Lab, fewer benefits for educational users, obvious deep flaws in the official viewer, a third-party viewer fooferah (AKA, “Emeraldgate”), and — on a personal note — the sale of my Bay City lands and my exit from that unique community. I think I can speak for other SLers when I say that I’d like 2011 to be the bearer of good tidings for weary avatars.

So for the year 2011, here are my predictions, and don’t hold me to any of this, because I’m full of crap. Continue reading “My predictions for Second Life in 2011”

I killed Cubey

For the better part of a decade, I’ve engaged with the Internet with a more-or-less consistent pseudonym, persona, avatar… handle… or whatever you want to call it. First I was the blogger, “Cubicle Dweller“, then “Cubey”, and finally “Cubey Terra” in Second Life. It worked for me, for the most part. Lately, though, I became concerned that I had taken a back seat to a fictional character. Just like when Leonard Nimoy published “I am not Spock” to reassert his identity as an actor rather than a fictional Vulcan, I wanted to set Cubey aside in the same way. I am not Cubey Terra.

So I killed Cubey. First I killed Twitter Cubey who had only a modest 200 followers. But Cubey wasn’t dead yet. His persona lurked elsewhere. So next, I killed Facebook Cubey, an avatar with a list of several hundred “friends” that he’d never spoken to, let alone actually befriended.

Continue reading “I killed Cubey”