[sldev] Re: More plugin / platform harping..

Matthew Dowd matthew.dowd at hotmail.co.uk
Sun Jun 17 02:31:52 PDT 2007


I'm not saying have a means to add extensions to the viewer which do not break every minor update isn't important, just that it isn't a priority.

What you are describing may bring more people into SL, and may make more people see the potential and relevance once they get there, however, it doesn't matter how extensible or powerful or versatile the platform is, whe you are lost yet another days work due to inventory loss, or given up working in SL for the day yet again because it is too laggy, or xyz is broken etc. people aren't going to be motivated to continue using SL regardless how clever or impressive third party extensions are!

Jason was saying that he doesn't want to build extensions around the the current sourcecode since it would break every few weeks until he recompiled the code and his customers would not be impressed as "People don't like software that breaks every two weeks." The same sentiment applies to SL itself, Jason probably doesn't want the same customers coming to him complaining of problems in his extension which are really SL reliability problems.

To repeat that sentiment "People don't like software that breaks every two weeks.", which is a good description of SL at the moment, and I do believe that the bulk of the 90% of signups SL currently loses are due to reliability issues, not the lack of additional plugins and given the choice of having a reliable SL platform or some clever plugins would opt for the former. Also the lack of such tools isn't dampening the high interest rate or initial sign up at the moment, either.

Successful platforms are both extensible and reliable, and at the moment my belief is that the emphasis should be on the reliability to retain the existing users before adding plugin APIs to allow third party extensions to attract and retain new users.

Matthew




________________________________
> Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2007 14:14:05 -0400
> From: giff at electricsheepcompany.com
> To: sldev at lists.secondlife.com
> Subject: Re: [sldev] Re: More plugin / platform harping..
> 
> I disagree.  I think we do need more than a simpler UI - of course -- but I think just making performance improvements -- which are of course very important -- doesn't solve enough of the retention problem.  It removes some frustration, but it doesn't enable a better way to work with a virtual world.  It doesn't solve problems with what to do, who to meet, where to go, etc.  Allowing 3rd party innovation in and on top of the client can do that.
> Maybe it's back to the old debate of immersionists versus platformists, but I'm amazed when people don't understand the power an extendable and programmable UI can bring SL.  If this is supposed to be a metaverse platform, let's make it a great platform rather than just a cool world.
> Not trying to offend anyone here, but just sharing how I look at all of this.

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