I’ve been a long-time Resident of Second Life- I recently celebrated my 2nd Rezday. Throughout these two years, I’ve experienced almost all Second Life has to offer and bar inventory loss, all of it’s problems. Some of the problems with Second Life really, really bug the crap out of me; the ones I know how to fix even more so.

Logging into SecondLife.com

Linden Lab employs a load-balanced secure HTTP setup for the account areas of the website- these are the URLs you get along the lines of https://secure-web5.secondlife.com/ . The problem is it screws with Firefox’s (and probably other browsers’) password manager.

Solution

Don’t load balance the login form, or at least make the load balancing for the login form transparent to the browser so it doesn’t screw with the password manager.

Separate login processes

Linden Lab uses several pieces of software on the website- MediaWiki, vBulletin, JIRA etc. Unfortunately, since all those pieces of software are developed by different people, they all have separate login processes, which reduces workflow for Residents wanting to go from one area of the website to the other.

Solution

1. Tweak the code on each application to set and expire the cookies for all the others.
2. Tweak the code to use one set of cookies instead of 30+
3. Modify the applications to use a single-sign-on scheme such as OpenID

Lack of an OpenID server

Identity fraud comes up every now and then in the blogosphere- most blogs and other applications that allow user-input don’t authenticate the credentials people put into it. OpenID can be used to authenticate your Second Life identity, based on the argument that you can’t create an OpenID for a Resident account you don’t own (or otherwise have access to) on a server where the OpenID account must be paired with a Second Life account.

Solution

I’ve done it already.

Second Life website is full of invalid HTML

This is just a pet peeve. The site is full of invalid and inaccessible code.

Solution

1. Run through the code currently used to generate the site and fix it.
2. Switch to WordPress.

Things that could be fixed by “eventful-esque”

One of the projects I’ve been working on (with the developers’ blessing) is eventful-esque, a server-side application that is compatible with the existing eventful.com API interface libraries.

Either using a cron job or the eventful-esque API, publishing a directory listing would vastly improve grid exploration. Seriously, how many people out there would love to find it easier to find places to go, things to do, people to meet if there was an online directory listing published by Linden Lab ?

In-world Search tool

In general, the search tool is slow to respond and rarely returns useful results. It’s also impossible to use if you just want to hop around the grid randomly since you can’t just “view all” places in a category. Applied to Second Life, eventful-esque would allow both Linden Lab and Residents to develop improved, customised search tools without using libSecondLife.

Events posting-to-web delays

People have noticed that there are delays between an event being posted in-world and appearing on the web- sometimes as much as 2 days after. I do kinda know a part of the reason why this delay exists, and the fix is “relatively” simple.

As with the problems with in-world search, my eventful-esque is the answer :-)

In-world Groups

The eventful.com API has support for group search, creation and management. I don’t know enough about the back-end architecture of Second Life to know if eventful-esque could help alleviate the bottle-necks that keep the group slots restricted to 25 (previously 15), but being able to administer your In-world groups without having to login to Second Life would be a big bonus for some Residents. The /groups/users/list call alone would make it easier for Residents to setup group-only websites & forums.

Region Management

I’ve covered this before

Contact Management

Currently, there are three types of contacts in Second Life:

1. Contacts (people you have calling cards for, but aren’t on your friends list)
2. Friends
3. Partners

I doubt that newcomers know calling cards are even there.

This isn’t fine-grained enough for my liking. Being able to categorise contacts via XFN-esque values be a vast improvement over a 3-tier system.

Calling Cards

As far as I’m concerned the calling card system isn’t implemented correctly. The assets are non-transferrable, so you can’t:

• Give someone else a calling card if they need to get in touch with someone later.
• Put a calling card in an object- would be nice to be able to distribute your calling card via LSL