thesixtyone, a great social network/content sharing site for indie musicians, has a new website with a beautiful user interface that makes it even greater. As noted by Vint Falken a couple years ago, Second Life musicians and fans were among the first to jump onto thesixtyone, so now, the site's an even better way of exploring all the metaverse musicians already there. Searching for "second life" as keywords brought up this fun techno dance track of the same name, from sometime Second Life musician Delicious Demar; unsurprisingly the top-rated SL artist on the system seems to be immersive folk musician Grace McDunnough.
That aside, it's a wonderful site in its own right: It's almost like the iPhone UI experience translated to the web, changing the main interaction metaphor from clickthrough-to-content to something that feels more akin to the iPhone's slide-to-content experience. I also love how all the UI is arranged in a frame around the screen, so your central experience doesn't feel cluttered.
Anyway, if you check it out, please post thesixtyone links to your favorite SL performers so everyone else reading this can explore them too. I so hope the new Second Life viewer is half as elegant.
Hat tip: Susan Wu.
I don't think we're looking at the same redesign. They took many of their most annoying things (windows popping up in the middle of the window) and made them worse (windows popping up over each other with no clear way to close them).
They removed functionality (removed, not just moved).
They removed all context from each song. No other songs shown in a queue. No longer any way to see how many times I hearted a song.
And clearly they didn't prepare all their artists. Do you know what a standard image looks like when it's blown all the way up to fill a wide screen? Not a favor to the artist.
They also trotted this out with hardly a word of warning to their users. And still no actual information *on the site* about how to use the new site.
This is no model for Linden Lab.
Posted by: Otenth Paderborn | Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 02:41 PM
Nice to see Delicious Demar featured here. I'd go to her wall and leave her a message... but I can't anymore, because they removed that functionality.
Posted by: DeliciousDemarFriend | Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 08:33 PM
After a quick look-see while at work, I gave the site an hour of my time at home yesterday.
I found the experience excruciating and confusing.
If this is the model of elegance you hope that SL's next viewer will achieve, quest/achievements and all, I wish you good luck with your new book "Screwing The Pooch: The End Of Linden Lab."
-ls/cm
Posted by: Crap Mariner | Friday, January 22, 2010 at 08:05 AM
Yikes ... I'm sorry, but thesixtyone is a tremendously confusing site (admittedly, I've never seen it before) and searching for "Second Life" produced two songs but no artist hits. What am I missing and how the hell does this site work? *Confused*
Posted by: Jayde | Friday, January 22, 2010 at 09:22 PM
Cool - I am honored to be featured in the pic :D.
The sixtyone has been a great way for SL musicians to showcase their music, and meet people that are listening to it. The new site design, although slick and nice to look at, has alas removed many of the social networking features that made "T61" so attractive, and has essentially killed this direct artist/listener interaction. There has been a great deal of unhappiness with the existing user base of T61 over the changes - although I suppose with any major redesign, this is to be expected.
As several have commented here - the new site is somewhat confusing - but let's remember that what it is really about is finding new, independent music to listen to and enjoy - and T61 is certainly chock full of that.
Second Life is certainly well represented, with dozens of regular SL musical acts, and hundreds of listeners. With the new interface, they will be somewhat difficult to find, but if you can manage to negotiate the site - there is a TON of amazing SL music there.
Del <3
Posted by: Delicious Demar | Friday, January 22, 2010 at 10:02 PM
http://old.thesixtyone.com/ is -t3h- shit. If any mob in a near future, are going to lynch the ppl behind the new design, sign me up! I`m bringing pitchfork! =o/
Posted by: kennethb | Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 09:01 AM