TriloByte Zanzibar

As a resident, as a merchant, and as a participant in the beta, I'm very excited about the Marketplace. What I'm not excited about is how rushed the last couple months have been, and how many outstanding issues and pieces of essential functionality are still missing (sales reporting, traffic reporting, and search still need a lot of work), despite being told repeatedly that they would all be in place before this point. A partner would have responded to those concerns, or adjust the transition schedule in order to make sure the Marketplace offered the same or better functionality as XStreet. I look forward to a better partnership moving forward.

I'm sorry to hear the news about what appears to be some drastic increases in the cost structure for educational customers. Unless the intention is to drive educators off the SL grid and onto other platforms, the goal should be to encourage educators and students to use as many prims as possible. I understand that developing the land market and land market products has many factors and considerations, but I can not help but feel that opportunities are being missed. The challenge (as it appears to me) is how to innovate and create new and compelling land products that perform the same or better than current offerings, and to provide customers (commercial, institutional, and otherwise) with solutions. Heading into 2011 with 2008 offerings and prices hardly seems like a winning strategy.

Excellent, looking forward to it!

It's funny how things can be taken so far out of context, sometimes. In some cases it's just someone innocently skimming through a transcript and misinterpreting what they read, in others it reveals a certain bias or predisposition on the part of the person blogging/tweeting. That said, I agree with your post. Too many buttons/controls add a lot to the complexity not just for the folks writing the code, but for the residents who are using it. One area where I think the Viewer could benefit greatly is by defaulting to a minimal set of controls, then let residents optionally open up the other groups of controls through something like profiles (builder, machinimist, role-player, etc). As a power user I like having access to all the knobs and buttons and switches, but I also recognize and understand all those controls intimidates and turns away novice users. Some RL friends were recently visiting, and asked us to show them "that Second Life thing" we spend so much time with. Had there been a candy-coated version of the Viewer, chances are they would have signed up.