Iggy Strangeland Visits InWorldz

Location: Desert Island Welcome Area

Ruth again! Unlike Second Life, however, mentors were awaiting my sad Ruthy arrival at this up-and-coming grid.

I got directed to a newbies store, and a well-stocked one, by an avatar named Doctor Gascoigne. Uploads of textures are free, so I equipped Iggy with my usual T and Jeans, then found some hair and shades. He's a bit of Andy Partridge from XTC, so I'm playing that band--one of my favorites--on iTunes now.

The result of this ramble will be a piece for the January 2011 issue of Prim Perfect, where I do features on non-SL grids. So far, InWorldz is indeed promising. It seems a major stop for those leaving SL or simply branching out. InWorldz residents are in the midst of their Winter Festival, so if you don't think snowballs are painful enough to toss at the Lindens who so badly screwed up this annus horribilis in SL, go over to InWorldz for some actual wintertime fun.

More on this grid soon here, but here's a note: a grid passes my Tophat Test when I can adjust a worn prim-based item. I found a topper and made it fit right away!

Data Back-Up and a Good UI: Secret Sauce for Educators

Location: Climbing Out of Gartner's Trough of Disillusionment

image credit: Inworldz, from Daniel Voyager's Flickr photostream

Reading this story about InWorldz at Hypergrid Business got me to thinking about how OpenSim worlds should not replicate two of Linden Lab's biggest failures.

UI Fail:

No virtual world will bring in mainstream educators and students without a client as intuitive and simple as Unity (or the Jibe client based on Unity from Reaction Grid). I don't know why more grid owners fail to grasp this. Is it a tyranny of thinking like an engineer? Admit it, coders: you often have the same sort of disdain for users that my Physics colleagues have for we bumbling, windy Humanists.

I know this disdain is correct, but could you make it a little more private?

At least the Physicists don't depend on us for a living. Coders working for a grid do, if the grid is a money-making enterprise.

Builder Fail:

I'll say it until I keel over: Educators must be able to import AND export content they create. Backup of entire sims would be even better--something one cannot do in SL.

InWorldz fails here worse than SL, where I can export my own IP, bit by bit, to do with as I please. In InWorldz, "users cannot export their regions or inventories as OAR and IAR archives — a function offered by most OpenSim hosting providers."

I'll know more about InWorldz, which is not truly an OpenSim grid but one following its own path, when I visit to review it for Prim Perfect. But they've already lost my recommendation to other educators. That said, I don't think that is the customer they are chasing, and if so, that's not a problem. What irked me about Linden Lab's recent move is how they courted us for a while, then effectively scorned us.

Hell hath no fury like a bald-headed freak scorned :)

For now, however, InWorldz seems a great choice for social users wanting a friendlier and more responsive provider of virtual-world services. That's a different secret sauce altogether.

Coda: Bring on That Tasty Sauce! Somebody...

Not all of us can host our own servers. My idea to do that (for next year, anyhow) got a thumbs down.

So we need a grid that permits backups. As for the UI, that's up to developers in OpenSim and walled gardens such as InWorldz, SL, and Blue Mars.

Virtual-word providers who can get this secret sauce right: for educational builders data backups and for educational newcomers an easily mastered UI, you'll get a lot of business from us that Linden Lab is now losing.

Update: See Lalo's comment. I'm hoping for OAR backups as well as IAR. Thanks to Lalo for the clarification that individual export/import works fine. It's slow and it's how I'm pulling content I made out of SL right now.