Will Second Life Be Popular After Popular Places Are Gone?

With little fanfare, the "Popular Places" tab has been removed from the latest version of Second Life, replaced by an editorially-selected Showcase of high quality sites and locations.  (This move was announced by the Lindens last April, a belated response to the gaming of Popular Places with camping chairs, bots, and other controversial means landowners use to artificially boost foot traffic count.)

What happens now? RightasRain Rimbaud, CEO of metaverse development company (and NWN partner) Rezzable, offers some provocative speculations:  "Expect to see a drop of... as much as 10,000-15,000 users at peak times."  That'll be something to look for this weekend, with Sunday around 2pm-3pm SLT usually hitting the maximum concurrency of about 65,000.  Then again, the latest viewer upgrade is still an optional one, so any impact of losing Popular Places may not measurably register until it becomes mandatory.

In any case, Rimbaud thinks the real solution for improving user experience and just as crucial, helping in-world businesses grow, isn't a Showcase.

Instead, he believes what's needed is an improved Classified Ads and directory system.  ("[The Lindens] could sell, er, keywords for classifieds? ... noobs are still the future for any merchant hoping to have a business with positive monthly Linden Dollar flow or even positive monthly real money flow.")

What's your take?  And what will happen when the Popular Places-less version of Second Life becomes required?  One possible downside: Garth Goode will almost surely need to end his hilarous if vaguely creepy hunt for bot farms.

Comments

[Paisley Beebe]

see by entry on my blog about this http://www.tonightlive.blogspot.com I have been checking out the new hotspots and showcase entries but I don't think many other have.....

[Nightbird Glineux]

I never used Popular Places, so I'm not going to miss it.

[Beatrix Noel]

Even when I was a newbie I never used Popular Places as a way to find something. I think I used it one or two times and realized that popular places meant ...something but it wasn't anything I was looking for. Definitely nothing I'd want to go back to .

[Christophe Hugo]

..."Selection of high-quality sites by Linden Lab"?

Let me translate it: Linden will tell you what's good and what's not, in a top-down approach quite opposite to their alleged "we-are-just-an-open-platform" philosophy.

"Fun, clean" sites will be listed. more edgy stuff will remain invisible.

Parents and 12 year-olds will be smiling. Those with the PG part of their life behind them will not.

Welcome to Dis-SL-Land...like it or not!

[Nexii Malthus]

Are you advocating for having all the XXX and money-camping places listed again Christophe? That is what it sounds like.

[Maddison Hax]

Put me in the camp that appreciates the removal of Popular Places. I've enjoyed using Showcase to find new spots. However, I think that the real target audience for Showcase is new users that are looking to explore a bit. Hopefully, it will give them a taste of the creativity and diversity present within Second Life. I know that I would have appreciated something like Showcase when I first tried SL. I remember being baffled by the Popular Places listings, which were filled with odd locations like Welfare Island -- it wasn't very inviting, to say the least!!!

[Nightbird Glineux]

@ Christophe: I don't think the 12-year-olds will be smiling. Parents, yes.

@ Hamlet: I tend to find places through blogs like NWN. I guess Rightasrain doesn't think your work is important. ;)

[Nightbird Glineux]

On further thought, I think Rightasrain is getting the 10,000 number from Tateru Nino's estimate about bots here:

http://www.massively.com/2008/04/28/peering-inside-how-many-bots/

[Rezworthy Chiddles III]

"Parents and 12 year-olds will be smiling."

This parent is. I don't need pixels to get off.

[Laetizia Coronet]

"I don't need pixels to get off."

Oh sure, nudity is all about people jacking off to Second Life. The Lindens removed a naked George Bush caricature lest people get aroused by it. The Lindens destroyed a statue with nipples lest someone soils their undies because of it. That's what this is all about, Rezworthy, you are so right.
/sarcasm

[Barchan]

I have to agree with RightasRain Rimbaud. The showcase is not the solution and for the current size and scale of Second Life, let alone the potential future size of SL, the search tools on offer are barely adequate. One of Second Life's greatest strengths is its diversity and the search/navigation tools just don't present this well, particularly for the newbies that need these tools most.

[eggy lippmann]

Uh, yeah, because people actually give a damn about what's behind them as they cyber or chat with friends.

[Chenin Anabuki]

I am glad to see the Popular Places tab go. It was never really useful to begin with. I think SL needs something more of user-generated metric for recommended places...much like the YouTube and Flickr favorites. At one point, I thought LL was going to harness the information from the My Picks tab of all avatars to generate some type of rating system of in-world locations. That was a good idea. Whatever happened to it, I know not.

[Corcosman Voom]

I logged on just before 2PM Sunday. Looked like there were around 65K in world at the time.

Popular Places? Went to a high number place when new and then used it this way: insanely high traffic numbers indicated places that probably would not interest me.

[Arcadian Vanalten]

Personally, I think Rightasrain is as wrong as Chicken Little on this one. Popular Places was utterly useless. Few residents past 4 wks of age ever used it, mostly b/c the only places on the list were bot & camper farms w/ screaming lag and little value. If the concurrency drops, it likely will reflect the abandonment of camping alts, to which I say good riddance. The measure of the overall worth of a place is not now, nor has ever been, measured accurately by traffic. I run in a lot of circles, and we NEVER discuss a place's PP numbers. WE're more likely to discuss places we've seen personally, or interesting travelogue reviews we've read. This, to me, just falls in the category of one more melodramatic wail that this change or that will Spell The End Of Second Life (cue minor-key music in the background).

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

About Picks as a rating system: it's being gamed now. Vendors are paying people to list their stores as Picks (and requiring that the listing remain for a specified interval before paying, so you can't list a store, get the loot, and drop the store immediately. For that matter, one can instruct bots to list one's store as a Pick as well.

(BTW, when I signed on Sunday, there were 60+K clients signed on. I don't think the drop will be that much.)

[Gahum Riptide]

I'm not sure who can talk about popular places as being useful with a straight face? That was probably the most useless tab in the UI. I'm glad to see it and its top ten of camping alts and lag GO.

At least showcase shows some interesting places. I also don't understand what all the bitching and moaning for "edgy" places in shwocase is about? Edgy doesn't necessarily mean good. Showcase should be for the best builds, not for reputation. Perhaps its this fear we'll be flooded with soccer moms who scream "Think of the children!" Pleaaaaase. Not everyone is in SL for the gritty realities of life, violent RPing, sexual role play and social activism (< /sarcasm >)

Personally, I really wish the search tools were improved. It's difficult weeding out useless places, and annoying to not be able to find people easily (aside from knowing their exact name)