Linden Lab's Showcase Versus SecondLife User Choices

A while back, I remembered hearing something about Linden Lab's Showcase, and I recall being less than impressed. Initially, I thought that this would be something that would skew inworld businesses to anyone who, for all intents and purposes, is a favorite of a someone at a company which has always been found to be just a little more favorable to those it... likes. Be it a book on the front page of SecondLife.com, or ear-muffs that allow music to be played, or what have you. This, of course, is a travesty to all those many people out there who have never had the good fortune to be on the cover of a magazine, or gain some level of respect and/or notoriety by having a way to put letters together to form words to form sentences on a website.

But I forgot all of that. I logged in with an alternate avatar, and was poking around out of sheer.... boredom. The events list is, as always, clogged with lackluster events. Everyone wants our avatars to join their groups, reminiscent of Facebook. Everyone wants to give away freebies, or even in some cases sell them. The selling of freebies is something no one seems to care about anymore, perhaps because Linden Lab just doesn't... do anything about the DRM of Second Life to assure once something is free, it is always free.

So I looked in search and found the other tab. The one called, "Showcase". Without even thinking about all the stuff I wrote in the first paragraph here, I took a look.

The 'All' link is the default, and had some interesting things there... the other tabs also have some interesting things, and are almost decidedly not inworld business related. Whew. I was wrong. Maybe.

I found it odd that there was fashion listed there. I look up to the right, see the link to fashion and roll my eyes. It's what I thought. Linden Lab is playing fashion police and skewing fashion to the folks it would like to skew fashion toward.

Wait. That's unfair. Linden Lab is deciding who gets listed based on criteria:

Criteria favoring selection include:

• Is the venue a high-quality implementation of the Second Life experience?
• Does the venue appeal broadly to the Second Life community?
• Is the venue exceptional or unique?
• Is the venue being promoted outside Second Life and participating in the inSL logo program?
• Does the image accompanying the submission meet the guidelines outlined below in question 6?

Criteria weighing against selection include:

• Has the venue or one like it been included before?
• Has the venue ever been warned for failure to comply with any aspect of the Terms of Service?

This, I suppose, falls under some definition of objectivity that I am unaware of.

Personally, I don't care right now - I don't have any inworld business and am unlikely to at this time because of a variety of things that range from my real life activities taking precedence to competing with anyone who gains the favor of Linden Lab. I'm sure that they don't mean anything but boosting the image of Second Life, but that comes at a cost to the majority of residents who, hopefully, have forgotten BusinessWeek magazine covers and everyone saying that Second Life is the new Internet. Hopefully we've passed the 'Second Life is a social network' phase as well, but one never knows. I certainly don't, and won't pretend to.

But all of this is all very negative. Let me slide down off the soapbox used by so many others, if even for a moment, and assume that Linden Lab means well. They have finite resources, their PR firm (Lewis PR, still?) says that they should showcase resident's stuff, and they can't reasonably show everyone's stuff. What to do? You pick people out of a hat? That doesn't work, you might end up anywhere. You have to select some residents to gain the limelight: sure, you're showing off what they do, and you're trying to be reasonable. But then you do something like skew inworld businesses in an attempt to gain PR. And that seems like a mistake to me.

Why aren't residents voting for the places? That seems reasonable, if all things were perfect - but they are not. We all should know the 'alt' game - the 3D sockpuppets and meatpuppets of Second Life. This seems especially odd considering I'm cruising in an alternate avatar right now, I admit, but I'm not using my alt to vote for anything or even influence anyone. In fact, the whole reason I have this alt is so that I can avoid people trying to influence Nobody Fugazi. People leave me alone when I show up. And maybe a few hours or days - or even weeks later - Nobody Fugazi might show up and poke around some more in spots that he finds interesting (be kind to the newbies, one of them may be me). But this isn't about me. This is about users selecting what they believe should be in a showcase.

And how does one do that? I'm sorry, I thought we were already doing that without Second Life's branding. Many people out there write about the good and bad stuff in Second Life. And when it comes down to it, despite some really cool things listed in the Showcase, I think I'll stick with the non-Linden Lab recommendations.

And fashion? I have no idea why Linden Lab decided to skew the fashion industry their own way, but hey... life's too short to take Linden Lab's Showcase seriously.

/me considers dusting off the Wandering Penguin