Kitely Adds Teleports And Additional Viewer Support

A couple of weeks back I was in Kitely, when CEO Ilan Tochner arrived to say hello to me inworld and we had an informal off the record chat. However, some of those off the record features that Ilan told me about have already been implemented! Oren Hurvitz blogged at the end of March about the new features, including world to world teleports and making the choice of viewer you use a less scary feature.

Oren blogging is nice to see because Ilan is the person most recognised by people outside of Kitely and nice as Ilan is, it’s also worth pointing out the amount of work that Oren Hurvitz is putting into Kitely, Oren is the VP of R&D as well as being a co-founder of Kitely, meaning he’s a very important person! There’s a team behind Kitely and it’s good that their work as a team is recognised.

The new features have already been covered eloquently by Inara Pey, indeed Kitely added a choice of viewers for Kitely based upon Inara’s excellent viewer reviews and roundups. I’m not eloquent like Inara, but I have taken a  dabble with the new features and they work rather well, although one does need to remember that Kitely is very much in beta still and in many ways the publicity for Kitely arose earlier in the process than they would have liked, having said that, I’m sure Oren and Ilan aren’t complaining!

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It’s Still All About Tier

Ah Thursday, not just any Thursday, but the Thursday before the Easter Holiday weekend, where I can now put on my slippers, sit back, and not worry about my day job until Tuesday. This also means I’ll be blogging … unless Football Manager 2012 hooks me too much again. Hopefully I’ll talk about Kitely later but for now it’s the Second Life shoppers paradise that I’ll write about.

The rumour mill suggests that Linden Lab are looking for ways to get people shopping inworld again, not that people have stopped shopping inworld, but the rise of The Marketplace has caused concern for inworld ventures. I’ve spoken about this before, I am not a huge fan of The Marketplace but it’s here, it’s convenient, it works (usually, there have been glitches lately) but it undermines some key aspects of Second Life, such as store rentals and sales which help fund roleplaying sims, Arts sims, Club sims, social ventures, hangouts yadda yadda yadda. Personally I think the horse has bolted now, the time for some joined up thinking was months ago.

The Marketplace isn’t the only reason for concerns on the viability of social and arts ventures, Styles Of Edo have announced they are closing after five years of trading in Second Life. This is a Mens fashion store for those who aren’t familiar with the fashion scene. When I originally published this post, this paragraph suggested Styles Of Edo was closing due to not making enough sales to make tier, this is not the case and I apologise for any confusion, I have not spoken to anyone from Styles Of Edo and do not know why they have chosen to close, however there is a comment from Chrissy Ambrose in the comments of this post. Stores and Sims in Second Life close for a variety of reasons, new ones arise from the ashes and we carry on, times change, tastes change and culture changes.

Deja Letov posted in the official forums on their views on why getting shopping back inworld is a great idea, however again we’re back to inworld shopping not exactly being dead and my view that the horse has really bottled, we are too far into the bricks and mortar challenge here, the online shopping experience in an online world is now very appealing and yes there is something wrong with that picture because Second Life is a 3D virtual world and The Marketplace is a 2D Shopping site.

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Going Underground

I was reading a post from Hamlet Au over at New World notes regarding Mesh terrain, which you can read here. However what caught my attention most was a comment from Masami Kuramoto:

What mesh brings to the terraforming table is the option to use subtractive modeling. Think caves, tunnels, subway stations, underground cities. It’s all possible now.”

I’m not quite sure what Masami means, but the idea of sims being to have cave tunnels, subway stations and underground cities is something that could really add a new dynamic to Second Life. Think of exploring deep mines or dungeons. People have long wanted  to build underground in Second Life, the problem is, you can’t, you can’t build at a base level and then raise the terrain, that causes chaos, you get error messages or items returned to your lost and found.

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Direct Delivery Migration Dates Pushed Back

I think it’s fair to say that Direct Delivery hasn’t gone smoothly so far, ok I may be underplaying the issues there. Darrius Gothly has a blog post entitled: The Fiasco Called Marketplace which has an in depth look at the issues. I’m not going to take an in depth look at the issues, largely because I’m tired and grumpy, this isn’t an unusual situation!

Linden Lab aren’t hiding the issues, they have a post on the forum detailing Jira entries on issues. Linden Lab have also made changes to the migration schedule, the original schedule was:

  • April 2 through 13, 2012: Inworld Q&A sessions on using and migrating to Direct Delivery.
  • April 18, 2012: All listings priced L$10 and lower must use Direct Delivery.    
  • May 16, 2012: Magic Boxes no longer allowed for any Marketplace listing.

This has now all changed, with the FAQ updated to state that merchants will not need to migrate before June 1st and that a new schedule will be posted closer to this date, this means the Q&A sessions as well as migration are now going to take place further in the future. This is a sensible move, I felt the migration dates were too short in the first place and that was without the problems that have surfaced.

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