Just What On Earth Is Happening With Direct Delivery?

Direct Delivery, the much anticipated new feature from the marketplace, is still in development. Well I say much anticipated, it has been that long since there’s been any real public announcements about it that many people have probably forgotten about it. However that brings us back to Linden Lab and communication.

Direct Delivery, for those whom aren’t familiar with it, is a feature that will remove the need to have a magic box inworld to sell items on the Second Life Marketplace. Instead of having a magic box, merchants will be able to store items in a special system folder in their inventory and customers will receive items in a special system folder in their inventory.

There will be some politics about this, namely that it further undermines the inworld land market, but Linden Lab seem to love the Marketplace, despite the glaring potential for it to undermine their own land product. However that’s a different discussion for a different day.

Now there is some information about Direct Delivery, on the Wiki there’s an FAQ. The FAQ informs us that Direct Delivery will be going beta on Aditi (Beta Grid) for all merchants in December … did this actually happen?

There’s also information about Direct Delivery on the preview grid page, with SLURL’s to locations where Marketplace beta options can be tested and a link to a beta version of the Marketplace itself for testing, alas this beta marketplace is currently closed until further notice.

The merchants forum is bereft of any official discussion about Direct Delivery, even the Wizard Of Oz like CommerceTeam Linden won’t enter a discussion about it, I did much prefer it when Lindens used identifiable names.

There are technical questions about Direct Delivery that will need to be addressed, so I find the lack of discussion quite frankly staggering, this is a big change, although traditional magic boxes will work for a while after direct delivery is introduced, they are earmarked to be phased out.

The FAQ itself recognises that there will be many questions:

When will Linden Lab provide more details on Direct Delivery?

We will be opening up Direct Delivery on Aditi for Beta testing in December to all merchants, which we expect will answer a lot of users’ questions regarding Direct Delivery. We do expect additional questions to come in. We will be using [JIRA] to track bugs and feature requests. Surveys and feedback threads on the [Merchants Forum] will be used for questions and comments. See the [preview grid wiki page] for instructions for filing Beta Marketplace JIRAs.

According to the FAQ Direct Delivery will be launched in early 2012, it has the potential to improve productivity by making it more efficient for merchants to list items on the marketplace and also has some technical advantages such as users not needing to accept delivery of an item inworld, users sometimes don’t see the delivery message or click reject instead of accept, they also claim delivery will be faster and there won’t be the same sort of problems that performance hits and sim restarts currently create for merchants and customers.

However, there has been so little official discussion about this project and it’s a project that really will need discussion, so what is happening here? Does anybody know?