Virtual Worlds – Page 205

March 11, 2013

Is It Time For Seller Registration On The Marketplace?

I’m always wary of discussing issues of malpractice within Second Life commerce, but there are scams out there and it seems the marketplace is one place where they are materialising. Inworld sales can also be an issue of malpractice and most certainly have been in the past.

However it’s the marketplace which seems to see some of the more blatant scams and I’m starting to come round to the idea of a sellers registry for being able to sell on the marketplace. I’m not talking about making it premium members only, there are plenty of leigitimate merchants who have no need to be preimium. There are also alts of premium members or people who have alts of accounts who have a payment history with Linden Lab.

I’m not a fan of restricting merchants inworld, largely because this would require some serious reworking of the systems by Linden Lab to still be able to allow people to transfer items to each other. Passing items around for free has many use cases inworld, from education to simply sharing information.

However the Marketplace is a different beast and it’s probably time for Linden Lab to introduce a system whereby merchants need to be verfied somehow to participate.

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March 9, 2013

Project Viewer Available To Assist Those With Direct Delivery Migration Woes

Since the announcement that magic boxes are to be retired in April for ulimited quantity items, the merchants forum has seen posts from people to migrate. Dakota Linden has been given special dispensation to assist and Jessica Lyon from Firefox has also been offering advice there too.

CommerceTeam Linden (CTL) has also posted a FAQ, with FAQ’s …… I think you could have worked that out for yourselves! This is useful because it links to the direct delivery migration guide, which is a pretty essential source in this case.

However, there’s also a merchant outbox project viewer now available from the alernative viewers page on the wiki. The blurb for this viewer says:

“This viewer resolves remaining issues with the Merchant Outbox as laid out in WEB-4600”

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March 8, 2013

Land Wars Episode IV – No Hope (AKA Five Years On From The Openspace Fiasco)

March 8th 2008, the skies darkened, dark forces were at work, Jack Linden posted a blog entitled: Announcing changes to the Openspace product. This would be a post that would ultimately lead to bloody battles in the forums and blog comments, it would pit resident against resident, Linden against Linden, resident against Linden, it would get ugly, but initially everything looked sunny as Jack (AKA The Land King) made the announcement:

“An Openspace is a type of private island intended for light use countryside or ocean. Unlike normal regions that effectively get a CPU to themselves on the server, there can be up to four Openspaces on a single CPU, sharing the resource (hence them being ‘light use’).

Openspaces will no longer have to be purchased in sets of four at a time, as they have been so far. They can be bought singly, for a setup fee of USD$415 followed by a fee of USD$75 per month.

All other island services are therefore available for single Openspace regions, at the usual region rates, and Openspaces will no longer have to be placed together on the grid, they can be placed apart.”

Somewhere someone sniggered “This will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of Jack, and will soon see the end of the rebellion.”

The Better Announcement

Another post from Jack appeared on April 10th : Details on the Q2 2008 Island Price Change. In this post Jack informed us that the setup fee for an openspace would be reduced from USD$415 to USD$250. Many people cheered, others scratched their beards and wondered what was going on. However how could we raise our concerns when there were so many happy campers, protest would be futile as someone mused: “What are we going to do? We’ll be sent to the spice mines of Kessel and smashed into who knows what.”

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March 8, 2013March 9, 2013

GayWorld-News TV – The InsyX Show

I’m hoping that some time in the near future I’ll be able to get in touch with some of the people behind GayWorldNews-TV The InsyX show, such as Teno Theriac or Rocky Constantine. There are currently six episodes of this inworld chat show available on the YouTube channel.

I’ll be honest, I’d never heard of this and being a straight male I’m not that familiar with the gay scene in Second Life but this is why having a blog is useful, you get to discover more happenings within Second Life and this show came to my attention due to recent discussions about use of machnima for promotion of Second Life.

These shows are longer than The Drax files, running closer to half an hour rather than the five minutes in The Drax Files and they take a different approach with the show shot entirely inworld, it’s more like Paisley Beebe’s Tonight Live, than The Drax Files but both approaches have merit and the fact that both are available outside of Second Life means they have potential to attract people to Second Life who aren’t currently using Second Life.

I haven’t watched all six episodes of the show, I’ve only watched the interview with Eddi Haskell so far, which I’ll embed at the end of this post.

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March 8, 2013

From The Huffington Post – Second Life: How a Virtual World Became a Reality

I saw a post over at SLUniverse from Cristiano (SLU head honcho) linking to an article by Peter Diamandis on The Huffington Post – Second Life: How a Virtual World Became a Reality. The article is based on an interview with Philip Rosedale, AKA Philip Linden, once Second Life’s head honcho. The post makes for an interesting read, although it should be pointed out that Peter Diamandis is a friend of Philip Rosedale, which he states in the article.

This means the article is positive, hurrah! What I like about the article is that you get a glimpse of how excited Philip was about creating a virtual world, Second Life may or may not have turned out how Philip expected, I’m pretty sure he once said he expected it might look like New York. However he envisaged a virtual world and he got one and it will go down in history as being revolutionary.

The key to a virtual world going from being a dream to reality was, it seems, tied to broadband over DSL. This breakthrough left Philip realising that a virtual world was indeed a possibility. However just how expensive these dreams can be is also explained in the article, Philip had USD$1million to invest , largely due to making money when Real Networks, where he worked, went public. However this was not enough to get started, Phlip is quoted as saying: “Unfortunately, even with my $1 million it wasn’t fundable.”

However some people such as Mitch Kapor of Lotus 1-2-3 fame were on hand to provide help and Second Life was born.

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