ROAM Regions?make your travels easier!

Posted on: October 27, 2005

I'm all about highlighting greatness in SL. And, to an extent, great things outside of SL which hook into it marvellously. One of these, without question, is Cristiano Midnight's Snapzilla, the picturesnugging resource. Snapzilla punched a hole in some of my frustrations, and it felt very cathartic?and still does?to snapz away my memories. Poor JPEG compression aside, I feel a great deal of energy emanating from all the sharing going on in here, and things continue to get better.

Now, while secondlife:// weblinks that you can click on here and automatically find the location of are currently broken (and have been bug-reported), you may have noticed that in Second Life 1.7, next to Region on the Map, the ol' dropdown list is gone. Which is okeydoke with me, because it was shite. 1223+ sims, scroll down that bastard of a blahblahblah? That's like using a rotary telephone to spell out pi. Complete and utter inefficiency. We've got a better, more colorful map now, so why put up with that crap?

Well, right about now, funk soul sista, Lindens are stompin' out fires and getting ready to release 1.7.1. But let's travel further into the future, or better yet, the present.


Sounds kinda pizzornographic, eh? Click on that and come back here.

I'll unravel.

As the story goes, I was firing IMs at Rathe "haha, yeah i was bored today, so i thought i would write a search engine LOL" Underthorn, asking why we don't have a multicolumn view for regions in the SL client. It makes sense: use that screen space (real estate) instead of letting it go to waste, right?

First, here's a few things ROAM Search?which ROAM Regions is a part of?does for Second Life, better than Second Life's own Find Places:

  1. Snappier. Like a certain search engine, efficiency is the name of the game. Layout is bare-bones but no-frills is what's needed here for you to find the information you're looking for. Fast. While SL gets tied up in bogged database queries (which no doubt will improve someday, it just ain't there yet), ROAM is a cleansheeted website. It's that simple.

  2. Snapzilla. Did I mention after you click on a sim, you can check out all the photos taken there and sent to Snapzilla? For example, try Ahern. See the "Snapshots" linkage? This is community connexions functionality you can't get within SL itself! It's so obvious that one day it'll undoubtedly be implemented in some form. Just not yet. But this is here NOW.

  3. DEVIL IN THE DETAILS! Wanna know parcel size off the bat? Find Places won't show you that. But ROAM Regions will. How about landowner? Same deal! I used to waste time flying to a place to see who owns it. Well, if I wanna see what, say, Rathe Underthorn owns, I just look him up. (You'll also notice I get zero matches for obvious reasons.)

  4. Easy copy-and-paste links. I have a lot of secondlife:// links here. From within SL, there is NO way to take the name of the place and automatically get it into the clipboard. So in the past, I've had to manually type out secondlife://simname/x/y. What a waste of time. Now, I just do a quick parcel lookup in ROAM Search, and it's mine. Right-click, copy the link, and Ctrl-V it back here. Indispensible for bloggers or the SL Forums or anyone who needs to reference SL material on the web.

  5. Color Coded. I'm a big believer in using visual cues to help you sort and organize schtuff. ROAM Regions does this straightforwardly: the ol' SL Region listing showed everything in a monotone black. You couldn't tell for the sake of your secondary life what was on the mainland and what's a private island. Today, this very day, my fellow avatars, it's possible.

  6. More. Rathe Underthorn promises me there's more exciting things to come. I trust him.


HOW'S THAT FOR ASYMMETRICAL GUERILLA WARFARE, BIZNATCHES? :)

Back to what I was saying before, when moments after I sent my query to Rathe, like some lucid lovechild of Willy Wonka and Frank Lloyd Wright, he (perhaps smiled confidently and) gave me the URL for ROAM Regions. I never knew this page existed before on ROAM Search, as it certainly isn't linked from the main page. But here it was… in my hands… http://www.roamsearch.com/regions.php
 
Now, we've still got inworld tools. I tend to be an AND person, not an OR person, so at the very least, you can think of this as a powerful sidekick (even in the meal sense) and compliment to your info lookups in Second Life.

It only took a few more seconds for me to break out in a supernova of praise. This is almost exactly what I envisioned. A big picture.

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