After ranting to a colleague in Second Life about how poorly Linden Labs have handled the ’search’ experience, said colleague pointed me to the new search box in the top right of the client. Ok, perhaps it’s not so new, but it’s the first time I’ve used it and the associated “all” search. Initial impressions are that it’s a vast improvement on what went before! But are people using it? I really hope so, as it’s much better than the old SL search tools and it has some interesting implications for how people promote their sims and their Second Life businesses.

Turns out search was improved some time ago, (and I didn’t notice). There was an extremely interesting blog post about it over at Linden Labs which I recommend everyone read. The post discusses how the new system works and the fact that search result ranking is fueled by, among other things, resident picks. This page-rank like system is something I’ve hoped that Linden Labs would implement for some time and its great to see it finally happen. The result is that content that is considered cool and genuinely useful and interesting by users should rise in search results above content that is merely popular because people idle there all day (under money trees, perhaps). Linden Labs, colour me impressed! …Except for one small oddity…

If you check the attached thumbnail you’ll see a place search for “roleplaying game”, note the “Mature” tick is left unchecked. The results seem sensible enough, although you’ll note the last result is definitely a mature sim, despite the unchecked box. I’d like to suggest that the SL search tool makes a few of its own calculations as to whether a location is mature or not, and not just rely on the users ticking the “Mature content” box in their land descriptions! I’m picking a dictionary check would be ideal. As in the last result in the picture, the terms “sex”, “bdsm”, “orgy”, “bondage” and “latex fetish” could probably be reliably considered good indicators of adult content, don’t you agree?!

A nice feature is that clicking through to a search result produces lists of items you can buy, groups associated with the site and other assorted details. Interesting stuff and quite well put together! Searching is now useful! Again, excellent work Linden Labs!

But despite these changes it seems many sim owners in Second Life don’t seem to have cottoned on to the implication of the changes. Much of the sim description text out there is still just a jumble of keywords, terms designed to push a sim up in the search rankings. Thing is, that strategy worked well under the old system, but under the new search system the list results read like porn junk mail and do nothing to entire the user to click through to more. Compare the search results in the first image (which are largely readable) with the results you get when you search for “sex” (the image just to the left), that most competitive of search terms! Looks like my Gmail junk folder!

It doesn’t get any better if you clicking through the first result, which produces the the description text: “escort sex furniture dance pole dances poles dance animations sexy dance sexy dances erotic animations escort club sex poseball poseball pose ball pose balls animation sex sex sex poseballs poseball pose ball pose balls animation sauna”. Call me Mr Brainy, but I’m guessing this location has something to do with sex! However, although the overall theme is clear, the land owner has wasted a great opportunity to promote their business through writing a decent description that would make someone want to visit. Tell me about your special deals, your best product and your excellent customer servic(ing)!

Of course, perhaps they tried this and found that the old ways still work best. Perhaps, despite the page-rank like changes,  Second Life’s search engine still favours bulk keywords over player recommendation? I can’t tell, but I do know that very, very few sites include sensible and readable descriptions. I know I’d be much more interested in a sim with DarkLife’s description than one similar to the copy-pasta above. For the record, DarkLife’s description is: “Welcome to DarkLife! A fantasy MMORPG roleplaying game built into Second Life. DarkLife is an RPG with monsters, swords and magic. Come enjoy role playing in Dark Life today and role play, join a guild, and fight!”. Sure, it’s still keyword loaded, but at least it makes sense! So, sim owners, get out there and fix up your property descriptions! People are reading them now, not just machines!

As a final point you might have noticed that there are “paid classified” searches in search results now. These appear to be pulled from the standard classifieds listing that Linden Labs had previously established some time ago, but now re-displayed in this new format. The new way classified are displayed is sure to generate a lot more eyeballs on ads, and making sure those first five to ten words in your classified advertisement are real hooks for your audience is now even more crucial than ever before. Keep that in mind when you submit your classified ad, land owners.

Interesting to note is that currently the classifieds posting function doesn’t have any Google Ad Words-like functionality. That is, you can’t bid on search terms for which you want your ad to appear as you can with Google. Unless this is patented technology I expect Linden Labs will be thinking about rolling out something similar for its advertisers soon.

Ages ago I blogged about how sex dominates in-world search listings in Second Life.  Since I hadn’t been on for a while I thought I would have a look and see if anything has changed. Well, the long and the short of my quick investigation is that it hasn’t. Linden Labs haven’t bothered to chuck a bucket of cold water on the metaverse and Google’s 3.4m hits agree, sex continues to “dominate” Second Life.

An example of this can be found through a search for “RPG” in-world under the places/games category. Lets make it hard and uncheck the “include parcels with mature content” box. There should be 11 results. Of these results:

• 6 reference sexual terms, including ’sex’, ‘bdsm’, ‘gorean’ and ‘bondage’.
• 9 practice key-word padding, that is, they throw in any word into their description to try and boost their chance of being found in searches (because that’s how search in Second Life works). It’s annoying this tactic still works as it makes most plot descriptions meaningless.
• 1 is in Italian, and we all know how dodgy those Europeans are!

So, while searching for games, in a games section, with mature content off, you will still find yourself hitting on mature content. Odd.

If you tick the “mature content” box and run the search again your search results will blossom out to 17 hits and the most popular game in the list is “Kingdom of Sand - Capture Roleplay Game in Arabian City”. In case you didn’t know, “capture roleplay” is a BDSM-like game of “sex tag”, as the wonderful Second Life Herald puts it.

I’m not entirely sure I wanted to learn that.

As I browsed the Apple apps store today, looking for new iPhone toys, I stumbled across a great looking flight combat game by a studio who shall remain nameless.

The title was catchy, and although the description was too long, a skim of it seemed promising. But do you know what there wasn’t?

A picture of the game.

The developers, instead of choosing the most exciting screenshot they could, had instead chosen to use their title splash screen as the image for their product.

And in that one silly decision they lost my interest and the interest of who knows how many other people.

You see, if I can’t tell at a glance what your game is about and then chances are I will keep looking. I am unlikely to try and go to your website to learn more (although in this case I did and there were no images there either!).

Screenshots tell me so much about a game at a glance. Is it a first-person sort of game? Third-person actioner? Some sort of puzzle game or a platformer? Don’t make me read your wall of text and risk $5 of my cash based on how amazing your splash screen is!

And if you go to the iTunes store yourself you’ll note that almost all of the Top 100 games have a screenshot instead of a splash screen for the picture. I guess I’m not the only one who likes to see what a game is about before I buy it!

Check out this thread on Quarter to three about Armed Assault and the Zombie mod! Here’s an excerpt to wet your lips.. eyes? Whatever.

We rolled in and started laying waste to the zombies but of course, we started to run out of ammo. I told everyone to get into the APC we had brought along and was firing hundreds of .50 cal rounds into the crowds of undead. Then things started deteriorating. They surrounded the APC when, after we had knocked over some walls and trees trying to get out of there, we smashed into a house and had trouble backing out. They started clibing up over the sides and dragged the gunner out of his mount.

It goes on…

Suddenly I was attack from behind and fell to the ground.

As the “Mission Failed” screen came up, the camera zoomed to an above view where I got to see my attacker eatingg my guts. In a final insult, I reanimated and started staggering around! Oh the humanity!

…now doesn’t that sound fun? Sounds like the mod is still a work in process, but with enough content to make it all work right now. It’s almost tempting enough to make me go out and buy Armed Assault, but I’ll hold off for now and instead live vicariously through El Guapo on the Quarter To Three forums!

While Microsoft’s Internet Explorer bloats its way to oblivion (recent studies are showing the latest version can hit 300mb+ of RAM used after opening a dozen tabs, Mozilla is quitely revolutionising how people think about content. Check out this presentation on Ubiquity, a beautiful way to mash up your mail, web content, calendars and contacts. Neat!

WordPress have released a handy mobile portal which can be reached at http://m.wordpress.com

The portal allows you easy access to your blog from anywhere, meaning you can now blog on the bus, on the loo or in bed, like I am now!

And people say geeks don’t get any action!

It’s 2am, so clearly time to blog. I bought an iPhone 3G! …the irony of doing this after my previous post is not lost on me. However, in my defense, I’ve managed to jiggle the plans around until I got one I was happy with. The change from my previous hatred and bile is that I’ve realised that the $50 standard Vodafone plan gets me almost the same deal as the $80 a month plan. Of course, the $80 plan has lots of minutes and texts, but I don’t make that many calls, and the $50 plan has 20 minutes of calls (yes, I know Rest of World, WTF), which will do for me.

The $50 plan has a data cap that’s almost the same as the $80 plan, and if I go over my limit it remains pretty cheap. I also threw on 2000 text messages for $10 bucks. So all up I got a good deal, got a discount on the phone for signing up with those plans, and I’ve got me an iPhone. I’m also quite happy that a combination of selling Second Life currency and other gaming stuff netted me the cash I needed to buy the phone itself.

Yay! iPhone! Yay New Zealand for being first in the world to get it! Boo Vodafone and Telecom NZ for their crappy plans!

Good night!

Vodafone have announced their iPhone plans. We’re now in the elite club of being among the most expensive places in the world to own an iPhone. We’ve even made the US tech press

Check this lovely table made by a chap over on Geekzone. It shows the total cost of owning an iPhone in NZ over the 24 month contract period.

There’s already at least one petition out there. I signed, but willingly accept it was probably a complete waste of time. There’s also a great grilling of some Vodafone wank on Campbell live for you guys to watch.

I don’t understand the reasons behind their expensive plans. Vodafone have a unique opportunity to draw a very large number of people to contract, and an equally large number of people away from Telecom. What was surely a slam-dunk businesses opportunity, one that comes along maybe once in a decade, has been casually thrown away.

I used to be a fairly big fan of Vodafone. They’ve offered a good service and I’ve loved seeing them put the screws on Telecom. But after today’s price announcement I’m rapidly losing any appreciation I had for the company. For the first time ever I’m thinking I’ll keep an eye on Telecom offers in the future.

Well done Vodafone, you’ve annoyed the hell out of a long, long term customer and you’ve missed a great business opportunity.

New Zealand will be the first country in the world to get the new iPhone! Around 9am Friday Vodafone stores will open and us eager tech geeks will rush in to buy. Only problem, we’ll have to line up in the freezing cold is my guess. No pre-orders, no idea how many are going to be in the shops, we won’t even know contract plan details until Friday morning. Sounds like a recipe for chaos and annoyance. But.. I’ll be there I bet!

I’ve been away a while but now I’m back and back with a decent internet connection I thought I would check out how Second Life is these days. For starters, not a lot seems to have happened to the website. There’s a Showcase section section which has a number of interesting section, but not a single section for games! I was quite surprised about that, considering that gamers have to be considered a bit part of the SL audience.

In other news, DarkLife continues on Navora sim, and the art and code teams have clearly been working away. It’s looking great and people are still playing. I can’t even remember when we started DarkLife now, but the game has been running longer than World of Warcraft, which is a funny fact to remember.