Dynamic Login Screens and Basic Mode Needs Inventory

I haven’t spent much time Second Life this weekend, nor in Second Life related sites, since Thursday I’ve been busily trolling Liberal Democrat websites to laugh as they wallow in their own misery, this isn’t strictly true, they just make it too easy not to laugh at them but I have been offering them supportive advice, much as I dislike Toxic Nick Clegg, I do like three party politics in the UK, the Lib Dems need to move away from being Tory Lite and more to being a left of centre social democratic party, which worked a treat for the SNP in Scotland.

However there’s only so much fun one person can have with politics, it gets boring really quickly, so let’s get back to Second Life and the rather delightful sight of blog updates and promotions on the new dynamic login screen:

What’s a dynamic login screen you may be wondering? I know I’m wondering that! However in Linden Lab it seems to be a page that has information, that will change, dynamically I guess, as they explain in this blog post. That in itself is a good blog post and I’ll come to some of the other points later, but this login screen? I like it, first of all it has destination guide links, so you’ll see something like this:

Then when you click the link you’ll be taken to the destination guide section on that category, so in the example above it would be music. This is useful for two purposes, one it promotes music, two it leads people to the destination guide, they may never have been there before. As you can hopefully see from my image, you can scroll through these messages to get different areas of interest:

That one takes you to the communities page. A little bit of work needs to be done as there will eventually be quite a few pages to scroll through, there were three when I took these snapshots but now there are four and new resident places probably deserve pride of place, but it’s a good start.

The other area of the dynamic login screen is the long overdue return of blog links:

There are currently seven pages worth of these links, which lead you not surprisingly to the blogs! However an interesting point to note is that there really haven’t been many blog posts from Linden Lab this year, in previous years there would be many more pages and again this will need some sort of organisation eventually, maybe in line with the current blog channels.

I find it interesting that Linden Lab are finally understanding that the login screen is great real estate, I personally would like to see advertising there too, of course the TPV’s would be able to get around this so anyone advertising would need to understand that, but it’s a good area to advertise on and much better than the message of the day, which plenty of people miss because they’re grabbing a cuppa whilst logging in or something like that!

I’ve been critical of Linden Lab’s lack of promotion of their blog, so I am happy to be positive that they are moving in the right direction, it’s far from perfect and they need to ensure that the latest blog posts gain premium place on the list, but it’s much better than we had before.

The Linden Lab blog post on the dynamic login screen contains updates on other matters too, the return of the resident help network, which really should never have gone away, one wonders why it did. They also mention the new join page, really, take a look, it’s nicely done. They also took about new avatars in basic mode, basic mode is the only thing in this blog post I’m still a bit meh about.

Basic mode itself, I like in many ways and additional avatars will be nice, they are adding robots, animals and soon vehicles…the avatars are easy to change in basic mode, you just click on the avatar bar:

This is nicely done, as are the destinations:

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Indeed I find these features so nice that I’d like to be able to toggle them on and off in advanced mode, or even better be able to populate them myself on my viewer with my own selection of avatars and destinations, so imagine I could drag and drop a land mark to the destination bar and that destination was set there so I could click on it, or drag and drop an outfit from my appearance tab and when I clicked on it, I changed into that outfit.

However the downer for me on basic mode is the lack of Linden dollars and lack of inventory, I know it’s supposed to be basic but it has nice features that people may want to continue to use and one of the first things new residents will pickup, even in an early NCI class, is inventory, being told they need to logout and then losing easy access to those destinations and avatars when they log back in, isn’t the best thing in the world.

However I find most of these steps a very big step in the right direction.