Second Life: Pfaffenthal

Pfaffenthal 1867 is a historically accurate Second Life build of a section of the city of Luxembourg in 1867±. Several in the blogosphere are writing about it being moved to Sansar. (Closing 11/26/2018) Jo Yardley’s article is here: Pfaffenthal 1867 closes its doors in Second Life and moves to Sansar

Pfaffenthal - 01

Pfaffenthal – Second Life June 2015

The reason for the move given in a letter to Pfaffenthal residents is land-cost, the free 4×4 km land in SL would require about 225 regions in Second Life… at US$300± per region… that is $67,000/mo… Free vs $67k…

But space in a virtual world is not just about cost and the amount of building space. SL has value because of people. People will be a bit tougher to find in and attract to a build in Sansar.

The idea the Lab has is similar to websites and WordPress. Every day billions of people are on the Internet visiting websites and about 75,000,000 of those sites are built on WordPress. I see the attraction for the Lab. However, I see this whole thing hinging on the popularity of VR Headsets… which so far is not going well.

There remains a problem I have yet to see solved. GYB… Google Yahoo Bing… SEARCH… the way people find websites and information. Second Life has created Place Pages. These are meant to be, I think, the gateways into your region that show up in GYB. If that worked, great. But it doesn’t work well.

Find an SL Place Page… go ahead, I’ll wait. Really…. try.

Need some help? Start here: Second Life Place Pages. I suggest you try searching using the term ‘Berlin’. You should find Jo Yardley’s 1920’s Berlin Project listed in Place Page search. Also, so try ‘Eden’.

Now copy/paste the titles of the pages you found into your choice of GYB. Google and Yahoo pop up the Places Page for Jo’s region. Bing manages to find the link in the SL Destinations Guide. But, I didn’t see it list a Place Page.

Try all the ‘Eden’ result titles you want. Of those I tried, none came up. Starting to see the problem?

Now try again with the word ‘project’ left out of Jo’s page title. I used to have software to find a page’s placement in search results when I was doing SEO work. Without it the results for Eden pages are so far down I can’t find them.

So, you MAY find a Place Page if you know the exact title and it is something relatively unique. The chance of stumbling across a Place Page is small. Does anyone look much past the second page of search results?

WordPress puts effort into making their pages… well, all WordPress based website’s pages… friendly to the search engines. The Lab has put some effort toward that end. But they have not achieved the level of SEO friendliness that WP has. So, it is up to the user to make their pages places well. I think that is something that will only happen in rare instances.

Is Sansar going to have something like SL’s Place Pages? Will they work any better? I suspect yes and maybe. Meaning ‘region’ owners in Sansar are going to have a challenge drawing people to their builds. After all, the Lab has not solved the problem for Second Life or its builders.

At this point, Sansar is still too new and undefined. So, if you want people to see your work, SL is likely a better choice.

Pfaffenthal is a first, or at least early, test case.

2 thoughts on “Second Life: Pfaffenthal

  1. My problem with Sansar is the time it takes to load a region, even with a fast internet connexion. Nearly 2 minutes to go from one region to another is too long for me 🙂

    • I agree. This is a problem Blue Mars had too.

      Google has done a load of stats on visitor behavior. Any page that takes more than 7-seconds to load has people clicking away before it loads. At some point, they will have to do something about the problem.

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