Linden Lab To Replace "Popular Places" Listings With Selected Showcase In Two Months

In recent months, the company behind Second Life has gone through several epochal changes-- the defenestration of their CTO, the managerial retirement of its founding CEO, the selection of his replacement.  But none of those moves, in my opinion, are as immediately crucial to the world's development as the news being announced today: within the next two months, the Lindens will supplant its increasingly ill-named "Popular Places" tab with a "Showcase" listing of SL sites recommended by Residents and editorially approved by Linden staff.  (See above for an early version.)  The official announcement should be up on the official blog this afternoon; earlier, Jeska Linden (the company's Community and Product Development lead, and a pal) gave me an advance look at what they planned, and the thinking behind it.  This comes after years of camping chairs, bots, and other dubious means of artificially boosting the avatar foot traffic by which Popular Places are listed.

Longtime Residents will remember a time in 2004 when the Lindens did offer editorial recommendations in their SL search listings; they were quickly ended amid accusations of favoritism and concerns over scalability.  ("You could say we're moving backwards," says Jeska, "but not really.") 

Integrating a Popular Places listing based on a new metric of Traffic was supposed to replace those, but instead, largely became a magnet for free money sites that were anything but popular, since the Residents who frequented them were usually away from keyboard as their avatars collected cash.

The new Showcase, by contrast, will feature only sites that have been suggested by Residents and approved by Lindens.  Finally providing an answer, says Jeska, to the "What do I do now?" question that plagues newcomers.  (Thereby contributing to the world's poor retention rates.)

Comments

[Lillie Guildenstern]

Fabulous! With the world growing by leaps and bounds, it's really hard to keep up with what's out there, and Popular Places was anything but helpful!

[Oxytone]

Fantastic! I'm pretty tired of seeing that stupid Hippie Camping and Welfare Island showing up in that currently useless tab. I think this is one of the best moves they could make recently.

[Ann Otoole]

Approved by LL eh? guess we better make our sims into watermelon wonderlands if we want to be seen rofl.

j/k... we luvs ya torely

i think its safe to say the pattern of the fashion page favoritism will continue and just spread to other areas. LL should consider outsourcing this. Sadly in a bad economy a lot of people seem to be willing to take bribes so I guess money will ultimately decide who "gets on the A list" ... just like the real world.

[Moriz Gupte]

I think this is a good idea. I am sure a user rating system embedded in the client could do a better job rather than having Lindens do it on our behalf. In any case, they will have to automate...the rating and have some kind of 'digg' like algo that obviously will need to be tweaked from time to time. Babbage Linden might have had something like that in the past in SL.

[Ken March]

Right Move, Cheers!

[Laetizia Coronet]

Good move. It remains to be seen if nay-sayers like Ann Otoole will be proven right. Any automated system, Moriz, is open to trickery like we've seen with the Popular Places. Automated systems don't think and have loopholes.

By the way, is it just me or does the new Search - All sport a sex ad on the first page, even when unchecking Include Mature? That 'problem' has been around longer, which is odd for a company which bans people for saying the F-word in a mature sim to noone in particular.