Second Life ... the things we need to fix next

I'm an advocate of Second Life for a number of reasons: it's adaptability to a range of uses, the completeness of it's model and workable DRM, the friendliness and creativity of its population, and the richness of its experience.

Having said that, there are a couple of things about it that are becoming (in my opinion) a serious issue.

The first is the mature content. Now, I know everything has its place, but Second Life doesn't have enforced zoning to manage the spread of locations that include mature content or a content filtering solution implemented in the client viewer to allow you to filter what you see ... much life the safe search filtering you find in the image search tools on Google.

Second Life needs to learn some of the lessons that the internet as a whole, and the search engines especially learned a while back - people will keep on putting sex on the web, but you need to offer some workable tools that allow users to choose what they see before it arrives.

The next thing on my wishlist is some search integration outside the SL client - I'd like to see the content from within SL presented on a search tool that can be accessed directly from the SL website, and more than that, I'd like to see it done in a way that Google can index. My aim with this is that,for example, whenI search for 'IBM Training' on Google, included in the returned results are the locations of IBMs SL training facilities, and not because they took the time to add the SLURLs on their website, but because the small-ads associated with the locations are accurately indexed by the search engines.

My last wish? Proper web-page-on-a-prim. I want to effectively see the output of the browser rendered onto the surface of an object and that includes all the mime types my browser supports (flash, pdf,video etc). The one media / web page limit per parcel is too limiting. There is a huge volume of traditional web content and tools that would work very well if they could be displayed on an in-world object and have the functionality preserved ... scrollbars too.

But what I would like to maintain is that SL is very much a viable platform for us to take VWs forward - we all know it isn't perfect, but taken as a whole it is a viable, robust, well tooled and documented solution that has the buy-in of it's steadily expanding population.