Spammers and Lesbians Have Good Builds in Second Life

Spammers and Lesbians

There, that title caught your attention. I wanted to talk a bit about AOL Pointe and Showtime's "The L-Word" builds in Second Life. Both are being sherpa'd in by our friendly competitor, Electric Sheep Company. I think there are a multitude of nice aspects in both builds, and I want to point them out in the interest of promoting good practices in metaverse development.

AOL: A Turn Toward Eco-Friendly

AOL decided to open up AOL Pointe, which I like, because it's much more eco-friendly than sending every man, woman, child, and business dozens of AOL install discs every year. Whichever genius had the brilliant idea to box them in aluminum cases or plastic DVD cases should be forced to pay millions into the EPA Superfund. I once calculated how many tons of landfill these things took up, and it blew my mind. AOL discs are like the Capitol One "No Hassle" spam snail mail credit card invites. It's completely against what it's supposed to be representing. (spam = hassle, spam = annoying people, spam != make people want to join a community)

What's more of a tragedy is that AOL, who pioneered making the web easy for people to access, felt it had to resort to such ugly measures to survive the dot-com bust. So, when I see AOL going with a targeted audience in a new technology like virtual worlds, I have to applaud.

I digress.

There's Stuff To Do

What I really like about AOL Pointe is that between the minds at E-Sheep and AOL, they decided that it was important to give users stuff to do. Sure, you can listen to music at Sony BMG (another Sheep build), but at AOL Pointe you can skateboard, watch video media, and plant yourself on the "sticky wall". I'd show pictures, but I thought Akela Talamasca already did a fine job, so I'll just like to his article at SLInsider. Thanks, Akela.

I point this out because most corporate builds in SL don't cater to the average user looking to kick back and have fun. It's not always easy to convince a client to just have stuff for fun sake. It's also not always easy to make it relevant to the client's project; in that sense, AOL is about providing random stuff for users to do, so, I guess it's a bit more intuitive.

Color!

I was also impressed that Electric Sheep Company was steering away from their traditional gunwhale gray and cerulean blue themes. AOL was colorful and more light-hearted. Actually, so was L-Word, but in a classier way.

Wow, Nice Introduction to the L-Word!

D'oh, I blew it! I had this nice, natural transition introducing The L-Word, and then I had to go and point it out. *chuckles* Actually, there's a method to my madness - I want to point out that The L-Word in SL has a much better introduction in Second Life than I gave it here in this blog. It features an easy-to-understand set of images with icons showing you what keys and mouse movements to use to perform the basic tasks needed in SL. There's no getting lost, you're not overwhelmed, and yet the idea of what alt-clicking and zooming is comes across fairly cleanly.

Sharding, too

Oh, and other than the 1-time Rockefeller Center event, The L-Word seems to be the first majorly sharded corporate build in SL. I have to wonder how Electric Sheep got Showtime to approve something like 10 shards of both the welcome island and the main island, when maybe 1 or 2 of each is occupied at a time. However, I imagine the welcome island is probably a void sim, which comes in packages of 4 for the price of 1, and a lower prim limit. I think sharding is going to become more and more needed, so depite the extra capacity, I think this is a forward-thinking move.

All in all, a nice set of builds. I'd easily say these are Electric Sheep Company's two best so far.