Viewer Clarifications; Big Picture

There is a fair amount of speculation going on with only a very short period left before the OnRez Viewer 1.0 is launched next week. I will try to clarify some here, and I want to remind everyone that this first launch is a 1.0 release, and we have a lot more work to do to get the OnRez viewer where we want it.

We have designed it with the brand new Second Lifer in mind, but we hope the current community finds it useful as well. Speaking as a longtime resident, I can say that it was a bit strange for me at first because you get used to the quirks of the default LL client, but now I love our new Viewer and wouldn’t go back.

There have been a lot of questions about Search in the new Viewer. Here is the scoop. There are two input boxes at the top of the OnRez Viewer. In one you can enter a location name (complete or partial) OR a url and it will teleport you or open a website inside the viewer. The other search input box queries Linden Lab’s standard mix of services [All, Classifieds, Events, Popular P laces, Land Sales, Places, People, and Groups] and pops up the tabbed window you are all used to seeing (see picture here). As of next week’s launch, that is the only search feature in the Viewer but we are actively working on improving Second Life’s search since it is, to put it rather mildly, flawed. To be explicit, we eagerly await Linden Lab’s improvements and as most people know, we are experimenting with solutions of our own and we will roll them out when they are ready (and ready encompasses many things like data coverage, data accuracy, scalability, accessibility of privacy options, etc).

Most of the changes you will notice are at the top level of the Viewer: the UI and menus. All the core features that current residents use such as building tools, client and debug menus, taking snapshots, etc, are all in there. We felt that it was very important to simplify the button options. As for the next layer into the SL interface, we have not had time yet to work on things like the pie wheels, appearance mode, inventory, etc.

Other than redesign and simplification, the two new features are the back/history button for SL locations, and the ability to navigate the web inside the Viewer (this is basically using the existing capabilities Linden Lab built in, and we do not yet support flash or other plugins). There is also a Shop button that pops open the embedded browser and takes you to Shop OnRez. We have not had time to provide a seamless login experience between the Viewer and Shop for 1.0 but I hope we can add that soon thereafter.

To step back for a second, I’ve often said that there are four things that need to be solved for Second Life to grow now that the initial PR-driven growth is slowing (which is not a bad thing). If we can make the landing and initial experiences better, retention should rise and newcomers will start exploring the broader world in all its glorious diversity.

We need reality to catch up to the vision with:

1. better technical performance and stability
Linden Lab is working on the server side. They, open source coders, and ESC as part of the dev community are all trying to improve the client side. While we have a commercial license, we want to contribute to the open source effort, especially around bug fixes.

2. better usability
ESC is obviously trying to tackle this with the OnRez viewer.

3. better content and experiences
SL residents, ESC’s consulting group, and many other companies are trying to solve number 3 (the CSI experience is a case in point). Number 3 is also reliant on progress on number 1 in a huge way (SL desperately needs better script performance, physics capabilities and general stability).

4. better information services
It is no accident that many of the most important websites out there help solve information inefficiencies: Google, Yahoo, eBay, Facebook for starters. The OnRez team wants to help solve some of the huge information inefficiencies for Second Life (and other virtual worlds as they open up to outside innovation). Right now it is ridiculously hard to find things, places, friends, events, opportunities, etc etc. There are some interesting tools that have been developed over the last couple years, but only a tiny percentage of the population hears about them! As a population gets bigger, word of mouth as the primary means of information flow becomes more and more untenable.

We are working on ecommerce and small business tools, search functionality, group and social communication tools, and even an ad network. As we roll out some of these services, it is possible that we will put them side by side in our OnRez viewer with existing Linden Lab functionality. It is possible we might replace some functionality. That will have to be decided on a case by case basis. When we come out with search efforts, our intention is to provide both services and let the user choose. Long term, I really want to see a skinning and plugin architecture where we can open up our viewer to 3rd party developers and applications. A skinning system will also allow us to support different UIs for different types of users (novice versus power builder, for example).

This might sound wishy-washy, but the OnRez team really cares about providing useful services to residents. You are our customers, not BigBrand XYZ, and we want to provide services that make your virtual world experience run smoother. A proof point is Shop OnRez, where we treat everyone equally whether a huge corporation or a tiny part time business (and we turn down requests from big business all the time that would make Shop OnRez less equal opportunity). We want to create things that help us move from a horrible retention/churn rate to a growing, thriving virtual world of significant size. If we do our job right, you will choose to use OnRez services, and we very much appreciate that it is a choice.

Some of this will become more tangible next week when the first version of the OnRez viewer is available!