Looking for cool places to visit within Second Life? We are too! We’re pleased to announce that the Second Life Showcase is coming to the 1.21 viewer release, which is planned for Release Candidate in 2-3 weeks and in final form in 6-7 weeks.

For a sneak peek at this new feature, please visit Second Life Showcase on our website. The Showcase is an editorially-managed guide that highlights a variety of inworld venues and intriguing locations to new and existing Residents. For more info, read our Second Life Showcase FAQ; it includes information on how to suggest a venue for feature placement. We are currently developing an easier way to nominate inworld experiences for the Showcase from within the viewer, so keep an eye on this blog for more news!

The Second Life Showcase is all about quality over quantity. Our internal editorial team periodically selects new and/or popular venues to rotate into the various featured spots within the Arts & Culture, Fashion, Hot Spots, and Music categories. This new feature complements, but does not replace the more comprehensive Search tools within Second Life. However, it will be replacing the old Popular Places tab.

Since many of the inworld builds created by our community — small and large alike — are both amazing and overlooked, we’re introducing Second Life Showcase as an additional way for Residents to discover interesting places to visit. We hope this feature will make it easier and more effective to help those hotspots shine (instead of Popular Places). (more…)

Since the launch of the new search, we’ve had lots of Residents ask for more tips and information on how to improve their search relevance and ranking within the Search All results.

Over the last few months, we’ve compiled some of the best practice tips and guidelines to help improve the relevance and search ranking for your classified ads, parcel listings, object descriptions, profiles, etc.

[EDITED 3/31: After comments from several Resident in the below comments, we have researched how the Google Search Appliance uses "stemming" and included it here. If you're really curious about how this works, read more at Google. The top search results most closely match the search term you type.  If you enter "shoes" as your search term, results for "shoes" are listed first, since they match the term entered.  Results for "shoe" are not omitted; they are just listed after the results for "shoes," since "shoe" less exactly matches "shoes" as the user entered.  If you look at several pages of search results, you will be able to see this.  This is a difference between priority, or rank, and relevance.]

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With the 1.19.1 Release Candidate, available today, we’ve made some changes to the overall way that media is played inworld which results in a more general approach to playing media and, more importantly, allows you to display various types of Web content on your parcel! This is a great step toward further interoperability with the Web, which we’ve been discussing for some time, for more history on this, read here and here.

The current parcel media player allows you to stream audio or video (or both!) to visitors on your parcel. The parcel owner controls what is played on the parcel and visitors to the parcel control whether or not they want to listen or see the media. (Visit the Knowledge Base for more information on how media on a parcel works currently).

The new media on a parcel feature allows landowners to select and display a wide range of Web-based media content, including Web pages, movies, images, text documents and audio. This change replaces and expands the existing QuickTime parcel media feature, giving you more flexibility in your media presentations. Currently, the displayed media is entirely non-interactive, meaning you will only be able to view and not be able to click web links, use scroll bars, or press buttons on web pages displayed on parcels, although we hope to add this functionality in the future.

The points below highlight the key things you should know about the new Parcel Media functionality:

• When you arrive on a parcel with media available, you will be presented with a media display, just as you are currently and decide whether you want to “play” the media or not. You will need to click the play button to load the Web page or other media.
• Parcel owners who want to display media-on-a-parcel will generally not need to set the “type” of the media (“QuickTime movie,” “Web page,” etc.) it should automatically detect it.
• While not a shared interactive experience, it does include an in-viewer web browser (which enables viewing of web content inworld, a popular request in our public JIRA, see: VWR-5004)

Keep reading for more tips, links to video tutorials and more…

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You may have noticed we’ve been working on better analyzing and quantifying our Residents views on voice over the past few months. For example, Aleks Linden’s current survey on Voice, which is almost finished, is examining how Residents use Voice in Second Life.

We’re also looking for help on how best to prioritize additional voice features as we move forward. Voice communication has been an official part of Second Life for several months now and we’re interested in finding out what types of additional voice features you might be interested in so we can work to make Second Life better for everyone! (You may have already received notification to take this survey via email a few weeks back, it is the same survey).

Help us Out!
Interested? Please take 5 minutes to respond to this brief multiple choice survey by clicking on this link:
http://secondlife.qualtrics.com/SE?SID=SV_d0AI31Jtyq2FTZW&SVID=Prod

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We launched a survey about voice in early December in order to get your feedback on the service, and to figure out how we could meet your needs in the future. We’ve had an incredible response.

Almost 2000 people have clicked through from the blog post and from the pop-up window that appears to one in 200 Residents at the Second Life log-in screen. Now we’ve only got two weeks left before we tally up the results and report them back. If you’ve not already done so, please take 5 minutes to answer the 15 multiple-choice questions on what you think about Voice, how it’s affected your Second Life experience, and how you think you might use it in the future.

We strive to take this information to work towards releasing new features in a way that meets all our Residents’ needs. So please, we’d love your feedback! You can complete the survey by clicking on this link. It’s on a website hosted by the survey company Qualtrics.

All your responses are kept completely confidential and no third party has access to the data.

We’ll let you know the skinny in a couple of weeks time.

Take the survey here!

As previously announced, we are making several changes to the new Search All during tomorrow’s update. These changes fix several known issues and provide slightly more relevant results. Keep reading for more information on the changes:

• Classifieds: We are removing classifieds from the main body of the Search All results. They will still appear in the sidebar on the right. This change also fixes an issue where teleporting to a classified location found in the body of search results did not increase the click-through count reported to the advertiser.

• Bug Fix #1: We fixed the Google pagination error which prevented some search results from navigating beyond the fifth page. (VWR-3159)

• Bug Fix #2: We also fixed the disappearing/reappearing bug which caused certain places, groups and/or people to not appear in search if they were taken out then added back Read more about this bug here.

• Relevance Improved: Holding lots of events at a place no longer increases the relevance of that place in Search All results. (This change was made two weeks ago and should be reflected in the search results now).

Please note that the order for classifieds will not change. They will remain listed in the same order as the Search Classifieds tab (by amount paid). Also, the frequency of updates is still the same (may take 1-3 days for any changes to be reflected in the search all results). Thank you all for your patience while we work to improve finding things in Second Life.Still curious about the new search? (more…)

As previously announced, the new ‘Search All’ feature is currently in beta in two releases; Second Life 1.18.5 and WindLight First Look. We’re planning on making a few changes to how classifieds are displayed in the new Search and wanted to allow enough time for everyone to adjust their listings:

• We are removing classifieds from the main body of the Search All results. They will still appear in the sidebar on the right.
• The order for classifieds will not change. They will remain listed in the same order as the Search Classifieds tab.
• Bug Fix: Holding lots of events at a place no longer increases the relevance of that place in Search All results.
• Known Issue: There is a bug with click-through tracking for classifieds. Ads found in the body of results pages do not have teleport clicks counted. This will be fixed when 1.18.6 is released early next month (1.18.6 is the current Release Candidate)

We’re continuing to make changes to improve Search based upon your feedback. Got a suggestion? Please send it to search-feedback@lindenlab.com.

Thank you all for your patience, feedback and support and have a great holiday weekend!

Eagle-eyed Second Life Residents may have noticed that we’re hosting all kinds of feedback channels via the Second Life log-in screen. We’ve got a couple of surveys running that load up for every 200th Resident who starts the application. The latest one – the Voice Attitude Survey - launched today!

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The Second Life 1.18.5 Viewer is now available. Again, with your help reporting issues in the Issue Tracker and participation in public bug triages, we were able to find and fix bugs in the Release Candidate viewer before making it the latest download. Thanks for your help improving the viewer!

You can download the new Second Life viewer at the Community: Downloads page.

New Features:

• New inworld search via the ‘All’ tab
  • Includes improved search functionality on land parcels, profiles, groups, wiki documents, events, classifieds, and some individual objects
  • Classifieds are returned both within and next to search results
• Search box added to upper-right corner of window; replaces old meters

Changes:

• SLurls with 3 slashes (secondlife:///app….) are now highlighted in the text window
• UI elements placement/sizing updated to accommodate localized versions of Second Life viewer
• Korean text displays correctly on Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)
• Permissions dialogs are now throttled to avoid griefing

Fixes:

• Public source bundle not getting all ares libs
• VWR-2959: Windows (Visual Studio) solution file refers to a non-existing project “build_all”
• VWR-2551: Error in macview.xcodeproj — invalid dependencies
• VWR-2856: libs package missing c-ares
• VWR-3073: Right-clicking someone’s attachments to view profile loads (???) (???) instead
• VWR-592: crash in LLTemplateMessageBuilder::addString
• VWR-2826: Several problems on handling Japanese input (and possiblly Chinese/Korean also)
• VWR-2834: Builds fail on 1.18.4.0 with no mozlib
• VWR-2030: Avatar only turns half-way in Appearance Mode
• VWR-2803: Lag Meter network ping metric doesn’t account for residents outside the USA
• VWR-3311: Web UI elements’ focus rectangle are offset from their displayed position

Complete 1.18.5 Release Notes available on the Second Life wiki. Please continue to report any new issues in the Issue Tracker and be sure to set “Affects Version/s” to 1.18.5.

Keep reading for more information on the New Search.

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We’re getting closer to finalizing this viewer release! Second Life 1.18.5 Viewer Release Candidate (RC2) is now available. Please go to the test software page to download to try out these pre-production viewers.

Bug fixes in Second Life 1.18.5 Viewer Release Candidate (RC2):

• Fixed various XML errors related to the search feature, Windows & Linux only
• Fixed VWR-3064: Land Search does not show Description Text for any parcel selected in Search
• Fixed VWR-3084: Dramatic drop in frame rate after the first use of the new search engine.
• Fixed VWR-3200: Classifieds Statistics in profile are broken

Note, this is not an update to the WindLight First Look viewer. Keep an eye on the First Look download page for updates. Please continue to report any new issues in the Issue Tracker and be sure to set “Affects Version/s” to “1.18.5 Release Candidate“. Also, an updated source code drop is coming soon!

REMINDER: Release Candidates (RC) are intended for evaluation purposes. Please try them out only if you want to participate in the bug reporting process and identify issues before these become the default viewer. You can have both a Release Candidate and a production viewer installed on your computer at the same time, so if issues are encountered when testing an RC you can switch back to the production viewer.

Keep reading for more detailed information on the Search changes in this Release Candidate… (more…)