Episode 44 of The Drax Files Radio Hour With Jo Yardley features an interview with a Belgian chef by the inworld name of Jaimy Hancroft. Jaimy is the owner of the Second Life brand Death Row Designs and also a creator for the fantastical Dwarfins team.
However what makes this interview interesting is just how much enthusiasm Jaimy has for Second Life. Jaimy talks about how she creates, how she enjoys Second Life herself and has great fun with games within Second Life such as The Cornfield and how she also finds the time to make appearances at events and help noobs out when they land in areas of Second Life that advertise themselves to noobs but probably aren’t noob friendly.
In short Jaimy is some sort of RPG wonder woman who seems to be able to bend time and space. However Jaimy also makes some extremely interesting observations, one of which is with regards to the inworld shopping experience and how it’s getting a lift from the number of events that are on the grid these days.
Jaimy points out that although she’s not a fan of the deadlines that events create, events themselves are a great way for creators to get exposure. This is interesting because the Second Life Marketplace has damaged the concept of inworld shopping but obviously not to such an extent as some of us may feel. Jaimy feels that over the last couple of years inworld shopping has improved for her store.
Jaimy also points out that as well as inworld events it’s good to have a social networking presence for your brand too and this means Flickr, Twitter, Plurk etc. This is again time consuming and then one other piece of advice from Jaimy is an old fashioned one, be polite to your customers.
However Jaimy also points out that there are problems with the new user experience and Jo, Drax and Jaimy come up with some ideas about how the experience can be improved. There’s not a lot of new ground here, indeed Drax points out that some of the ideas such as trying to get people to declare their interests before they login and then trying to filter them to sims that may interest has been tried before and didn’t exactly have great success.
Jaimy is a fan of trying to guide new people to the Second Life Destination Guide, especially the Editor’s Picks section. However Jaimy is a lot less enthusiastic about places such as Social Island, which she feels are not a good experience for new residents and she’s also not impressed with the safe hubs that people land at in times of crisis, which Jaimy describes as “Safe Hubs are not safe“.
The interview is fascinating, fresh. lively and largely positive. There’s a lot more in it than I’ve covered here, it’s well worth a listen.
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