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In a recent post on its official blog Linden Lab announced a new way to share suggestions on how to improve Second Life. This is a welcome and much needed improvement and, frankly, Linden Lab should have done this long time ago. I have jumped at the opportunity right away and submitted a suggestion that I made back in July 2011. This is my submission: Improve groups and communication by creating a web interface to groups by implementing the following features:

  • A web page as a front-end with some degree of customization for group presentation.
  • A blog for group notices. Add logic to broadcast group posts to social networks. Add a subscription system for people who wants to receive automatic updates without being group members.
  • People should be able to subscribe to news and events and receives automatic notifications when events are about to start.
  • A small wiki to store information, images, files. The wiki and forum (or info stream) could also relieve group chats by part of the load stress they suffer today.
  • A forum with public and private sections. Having sections would be ideal to cover different needs in the same group, such as a private section for group officers. This could also be organized as an information stream the way Facebook or Google+ work.
  • Group owners should have the ability to make the group visible on the web.

Web-enabled groups could be more effective promotional and social tools, not only inworld but also on the web. There are thousands of groups in Second Life covering all kind of topics which could attract new users and better promote the myriads of activities in Second Life. This could be made as an additional service available to Premium members. This would give real value to Premium accounts and it is likely to increase the number of Premium accounts.

UPDATE: Read about more suggestions for group management in this post.