Hamlet pointed to my article: Ebbe Altberg Interview in his article SL 2 to Launch Without Shared First-Time User Experience. He took an idea in my writing much farther than I did. His quote from my article:
For SL2 they are developing toward user created experiences and will thus bypass a uniform path for all new users. So, the concept of a single entry door for SL will vanish. The Lab will provide retention data to experience owners. They will let designers compare their experience retention to other experiences, designs, methods, and retention rates. With solid objective data flowing back to the designers, it may be possible to find the magic combination.
It seems he and others took this to mean there would only be entry to SL2 via community portals. I never it took what Ebbe said to mean that. But, obviously others inferred that was what I implied.
The only entry to SL1 today is via the Linden portal. The new Login Viewer out this week, as the main default viewer, makes that even more clear. Sign up and when you login for the first time the Lindens put you where they want you, unless you know how to over ride that.
The monopoly of user control residing in the hands of the Lindens is apparently going away. There won’t be a single Linden entry door as there is now, but many entry doors. I fully expect the Lindens to have their door and for it to be a rather big door. I just doesn’t seem rational to me to expect anything different.
In Hamlets article today, SL Land Baron on Why User-Created Portals for Second Life 2 are (Probably) a Bad Idea UPDATE: Linden CEO Responds, the drama has apparently built on an idea Ebbe says is just not so. Hamlet quotes from a comment on his blog in response to the Hamlet’s article. Ebbe’s comment is here, give the a minute to load and jump the page. (Emphasis below is mine.)
Hi,
I don’t think I ever suggested we would not have a common first user experiences. I’ve always assumed that we would have one or more of those.I’ve said that it’s too difficult for creators (or for consumers visiting) to bring in their own audience directly in to an experience and that we would like to make this easier and more powerful.
The rest is too much trying to compare apples and oranges to really make sense at this point. Maybe I should not have used the words “Community Portals” when talking about this as that has legacy assumptions attached to it.
And no, I don’t think we should charge for this, if anything we should provide incentives.
Cheers!
Posted by: Ebbe | Monday, October 13, 2014 at 05:45 PM
Thanks for posting this, I had missed Ebbe’s comment.
Please note that both your links to NSW lead to the same post.
The one to the comment does go to the comment in the same post, but it takes some time for NWN page to completely load. Only when fully loaded with the page scroll.
I think that people are misinterpreting what Ebbe means. The way I read Ebbe’s comment, he doesn’t mean to resurrect the past experience of community gateways, rather I believe that what he is saying is that SL2 will have better promotional tools in the form of community portals which could replace the archaic way we promote content within SL today. So, a community portal *is not* a community gateway for new users, though in some cases it could be both. I posted a comment about it.
I think you are right. I took it that way.
Poor Hamlet – that’s almost as good a post by him as the interpretation of statistics that he does :).
I think it has something to do with where he lives…
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