SLURL Hurl

Good Lord, is this the best they can do?

Blue Linden has been working behind the scenes on NUE -- New User Experience -- doing AB experiments and whatnot where the compare A to B and trying to figure out ways to get newbies through that rough first hour.

I'm all for that -- who isn't? I've got lots of ideas about that -- who doesn't?

But the last thing I'd do is hurl them on a SLURL. That would be cruel. SLURLS are a hose. They DO NOT WORK.

I've picked my share of SLURLS out of blogs and want ads outside of SL and tried to press on them. SL will open up and it will ask me if I want to teleport to this place. Sure do! I click and click and click...

...and click some more. I refresh the page. Nothing. No SLURL. No teleportation. No nothing.

It used to be that the way the script worked was that a SLURL triggered a pulling up of the map, with a bull-s eye red dot, and you had to the click on the map. That was deemed to clunky, and rightly so, given that for some people, the map stays grey and doesn't rez or is confusing. I liked it better, and still use that script in my rentals, because there's nothing like bringing up a map into people's view with a red bull's eyes that says "Now you're going to go someplace" and oddly enough, they get it!

The other thing that happens now due to map-loading issues and the retiring of that other method is that the system generats you a bookmark with a picture. That bookmark is "supposed" to show up in your lower left-hand corner, and you "just know" to click on it. What happens is...it never comes.

You refresh, you click -- nothing. I have this problem; customers have this problem. I've concluded therefore that...it's a problem, silly me. Oh, I know that literalist fisking geeks will be along any second to say snottily, 'Oh, but it works for mmmeeeeeee nyah nyah nyagh" and you must have an aging Commodore 64 system.

Look, SLURLS are a hose. They were cumbersome before requiring people to look at a map, maybe even additionally sign up for SL, and then press on something and click on something -- you lose people. WoW doesn't work that way; most people get it that you are entering a world not pretending you are dipping down from the Internet for a sec.

The other problem that remains for me to this day is that it's not clear how you get a picture into your SLURl if you want one other than what your land already has, which would be helpful for business -- there probably is some way to do that besides looking at a watermelon tutorial but I don't know.

There's a worse thing cooking I sense here though and that is that the Lindens are very likely --

-- they look to be about a hair's breadth away -- to say "let's have newbies signing up go not to orientation hubs or welcome areas or infohubs which are knee-deep in bots and griefers we can't control, let's have them go to businesses who sign up to catch them (such businesses who ostensibly have use of a REG API (that I don't think is working) already get their cut of the newbie sign up stream on that government giveaway; Intlibber is one of those benefiting from this corporate welfare :)

Once the Lindens decide to in a sense "Showcase" the newbie stream -- carve it up to catchers among their corporate friends, "solution provider devs," newbie helper groups they approve; inworld fashion stores that are in Bub's Underwear Models Club, or whatever, they will simply SLURL away the newbie intake problem. But that's of course going to screw people who developed the infohubs in good faith as the alternative to accepting the telehub buyout (like me!). Oh, I fully expected this, and of course, I will live, because it doesn't benefit my business (the way the corporate gift of the sign-ups does for Intlibber, because the sign-ups get an interface to chose his offering, whereas newbies are merely randomly dumped on me). If anything, it's merely a loss on experimentation of how to help orientation. It's interesting to me. But I do think the Lindens should continue to divide up the newbie stream to these hubs, if not by random dumping, which they now do by randomness and serialization (ensuring the system NEVER has load-balance) they should do by boards that people pick. That will inspire various hubs to make the best offering they can.

I've always believed businesses should be licensed to run this intake; they should bid for it; they should be able to hand it adequately. And it would be great to hear the numbers. I'm going to take a wild-assed guess that the numbers are showing that it makes absolutely no difference where you dump a newbie, the retention rate remains in the toilet. That's sad, but there are also reasons for this:

o bot pile-up -- the Lindens need to license and regulate bots. Get them out of the infohubs. They are hugely annoying and laggy and take up avatar space in these areas

o griefers and infestations -- police the hubs adequately, get them out, newbies land on this shit, it's a bad thing, outsource the problem to a competent third-party and make sure no fake inworld "police" groups get their paws on it

o insufficient advertising capacity -- the way to deal with this with free-market pragmatism is to sell the space under a set of rules, i.e. PG. Give people choices rather than dump them randomly

o Jobs -- yes I know nobody wants to hear this from me anymore, but I can only faithfully report that the single greatest thing that people answer on surveys about how the newbie experience should be improved is "jobs". Job information and opportunities can at least be posted as I do at my modest renditions of these welcome sites like in Moth Temple.

o Windlight -- look, when you're ready to retain people, call me, and I'll explain you need to ditch Windlight and make it optional. If you don't want to retain people, don't do that and don't call me, that's fine, your call.

Comments

[Ann Otoole]

What is wrong with more word-of-mouth advertising? The entire concept of Secondlife exists without LL advertising. Once the system is scaled to 250,000 concurrency I expect to see SL ads like the IMVU and others who have annoying advertisements infecting web sites all over the place thanks to google ad sense.

Surely you will not complain too loudly about an increase in potential customers? Perhaps you need a ravenglass rentals ad on your blog that slurls in with the not in sl yet button?

[Prokofy Neva]

I continue to be baffled by this. We already had SLURLS. So...what is it that they are doing? You could already put a SLURL on Twitter or forums or your blog and in theory, anyway, when it worked, people could press it and come inworld -- kinda sorta, after first loading up the game or signing up.

I do see one new bit of stuff now, an easier SLURLbuilder than was there before:

http://slurl.com/build.php

This is an easy-to-use template where you will be able in theory to make your own "ad". I will try this in awhile -- but of course I myself won't be able to get it to work as I already know that on the last two viewers, SLURLS don't work. But perhaps someone else will.

[Sean Williams]

The difference with these new ones is that a new account sign up will skip the initial island for orientation and go straight to the SLURL they click on.

[Ann Otoole]

"The difference with these new ones is that a new account sign up will skip the initial island for orientation and go straight to the SLURL they click on."

Exactly. So, for instance, a Ravenglass Rentals website could direct newcomers directly to the Ravenglass Orientation Area thus skipping the Baffling Island phase of the entry process. This also helps to eliminate the reg api aspect that was dumping people onto corporate islands that had nothing but advertisements and no visible means of escape to the real grid. I.e.; corporations hijacking new residents and attempting to make Secondlife appear that it belonged to that company.

This is a large step forward for those interested in recruiting new residents and helping them avoid the idiocracy environments until they have acclimated a bit and will understand that Secondlife has elements they might or might not not care for.

Sadly it also has negative aspects but I won't give those aspects any "air time" at all.

[Sean Williams]

The entire Orientation Island thing was scrapped by LL Ann.

Now they get dumped on Help Islands and forced to wade through a minimal aspect tutorial - the same one they'll be using with this system as well.

[Ciaran Laval]

I'm not sure what is so exciting about this, I've been using SLURL's for ages. I thought this was some sort of new tool they were talking about, but it's just a reworking of the orientation system and the SLURL part seems to be smoke and mirrors.

I agree entirely about jobs, I'm currently recruiting a couple of folks but I'll be looking to recruit more people in the future, jobs will help retention and retention helps the economy.

[Kimberly Rufer-Bach]

There are a lot of great uses for this new Reg API feature. The first that came to mind was how easy it'll be to create entry portals for people who speak various languages. There are a lot of language-learning projects in SL.

[Darien Caldwell]

Yes, but SLURLs did absolutely nothing for people who didn't already have the SL viewer installed. They got an error message. So for attracting new users, they were literally a dead end.

Now, if you had never heard of SL in your life, and you click on an SLURL, it actually does something, leading you to a signup and a place to download the viewer.

That's about it, in a nutshell.

[Prokofy Neva]

This isn't new, though. They had this before. And no, it's not a "new REG API" it's merely a SLURL that brings you inworld. It will hit a default registration page of LL, not anything you customize -- that's separate.

And I got all that -- it can be modified to say "Welcome to Ravenglass Rentals" and take them there -- but that was possible before.

Of course, when SLURLS actually work, it may

Ann, the corporate islands, if they were the "traps" you imagine with ads, which I don't view as the worst thing by any means, were chosen by the user at sign-up. That is, he would have chosen the Ben and Jerry's or the Intlibber's Empire by clicking on the icon on the sign-up page.

Go here, to see the "Select a Community" thing that the privileged few still have:
https://secure-web11.secondlife.com/join/index.php?country=us

This is the official default sign-up age to which any new person, whom I might attract with my own blog, let's say, will go even if they click on my branded link here -- they don't go to my REG API, which I'd have to code and have running separately than this (if in fact it's working -- I heard that was "down" in general and LL needed to fix it).

So they will still face that advertising from the FIC first, then they may opt to skip this, fill out the form and join, but it's not clear how it goes from there. I'd have to make a new alt to find this out.

[Prokofy Neva]

Darien, that's not true. They used to lead to the SLURL teleport page. There, it would say Teleport Now or "sign up".