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.<\/p>\n
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 <\/a>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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. 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\u00a0and we carry on, times change, tastes change and culture changes.<\/p>\n Deja Letov posted in the official forums <\/a>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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Shopping is a key factor of Second Life, well sales of goods are, because that’s what makes the wheels turn, what’s needed is not a return to inworld shopping, but more options on tier, lower tier and some dynamic thinking …. my dynamo is running lower, it may be fuelled later by beer. However, let’s get back to shopping … did I really just type that … anyway, shopping inworld can be a social experience, Second Life itself is a social experience, moving social experiences away from the inworld experience isn’t ideal. However some people find shopping malls inworld ugly, they’d rather see them replaced by more fun things to do and shop on The Marketplace, this sounds good in theory but then we get back to shops supporting communities by renting inworld spaces to allow those communities to have space for community projects.<\/p>\n