Magic Boxes Set To Shut Down In August Along With The Mysterious Shut Down Of XStreet

More information for Second Life Marketplace merchants, Linden Lab have blogged Magic Box and Xstreet Shut Down Dates. No, you haven’t read that incorrectly.

The launch of the Viewer Managed Marketplace has erased the last remaining reasons for Magic Boxes to exist inworld. No copy items are no longer a problem. Once everyone has been migrated, they will serve no purpose, other than taking up a prim of land. Therefore the blog post informs us :

Merchants who are still using Magic Boxes to sell their items will need to manually migrate their listings by August 17, 2015, when Magic Boxes will no longer appear on Marketplace.

Hopefully this won’t be an issue for too many merchants. August 17th is not that far away. The news about XStreet is odd. The blog post informs us :

We will leave Xstreet up until August 27, 2015, so that interested Merchants can pull their data before the site is shut down for good.

This news is odd for a few reasons. New merchants might be wondering what XStreet is. Older merchants might be surprised to learn that XStreet is still running. First let’s go back in time, to January 2009 when Linden Lab announced :

Linden Lab®, creator of the virtual worldSecond Life®, today announced a key milestone in its expansion of the Second Life platform: acquiring two Web-based marketplaces for virtual goods, Xstreet SL and OnRez. These acquisitions join several other recent strategic initiatives, including enhancements to the experience for new users, which will enable Linden Lab to reach a broader global audience for Second Life in 2009. Linden Lab is consolidating the two marketplaces on the Xstreet SL platform, offering one online shopping experience for customers and merchants. This will make it easier for Second Life Residents to find virtual goods to purchase and will provide merchants broader channels to sell their products.

XStreet and OnRez were created by Second Life residents, not Linden Lab. However in 2009 Linden Lab made both online marketplaces an offer they couldn’t refuse (No horse’s heads were involved) and they were eventually merged under the Second Life Marketplace banner.

In May 2010 Pink Linden blogged Announcing the Second Life Marketplace Beta :

If you’re a merchant on XstreetSL, you won’t need to do anything differently; all of your content will be automatically transfered to the new marketplace. The SL Marketplace will be in beta for several weeks and run simultaneously with XstreetSL until all of the content has been migrated to the new website. After the beta period, SL Marketplace will replace XstreetSL.

I read an article about Pink Linden recently and I can’t for the life of me remember where. The long and short of it is that Pink seems to be doing very well and is running her own business.

Back on topic, in October 2010 Grant Linden blogged SL Marketplace is Open and Ready for Business :

We are thrilled to announce that the SL Marketplace is the new destination for online shopping for all things Second Life. We invite Second Life Residents to visit the redesigned site, check out all the new features and start loading your shopping carts with the amazing things only our creative community can deliver. The purchasing functionality on XStreetSL is being disabled as of today. So, if you’re shopping for avatar skins and fashion, home and furnishing needs, scripts and objects for getting your groove on, or almost anything else you can think of….you’ll find it on the SL Marketplace.

As far as many were concerned, that was the end of XStreet, this is why some people are scratching their heads regarding the news that almost five years later, Linden Lab are announcing that XStreet is going to shut down!

However I think the clue is in the comment I quoted near the start of this article regarding merchants being able to pull data from XStreet. Historical data was probably available from XStreet and some merchants would have still been using that.

Then there’s the fact that the XStreet forums are still alive, well alive isn’t the right word, they are more dormant. However you can still browse them. Ah 2009, those were the days!