Dartagan Shepherd

Tried to suggest at one point earlier on that the Marketplace create its own alternatives. Meaning that if products were available via an external API, then people could build their own versions of the Marketplace, or specialized markets (for say fashion, building tools, etc) by tapping into this API. That would enable people to put together their own markets using existing products from the Marketplace, and selling those products on their own websites. 3rd party websites could be making money on commissions/affiliate sales. SLM (and LL) simply do not need a 5% commission to operate as a L$ sink or as revenue. This 5% could easily be earned by those running their own versions of SLM using the same products. The whole LL needing commissions and listing fees to justify itself, or earning its own revenue was always a myth. I think that window too is also passed, because rather than designing the Marketplace as a web service that accesses products (individual or by category, etc.), it was designed on top of a traditional shopping cart.

Got it. Thought this was veering toward a list of fixes/features/expectations that do share a common agreement. Also thought it might be trending toward something resembling an "open letter" that could be published. My mistake.

Couple of questions: Are you going to compile this into a single list that goes in the Jira? I think you said as much, just clarifying. Might this be suited to putting this together in roadmap form? Something that's never actually been done by Residents that I've seen and actually a very proactive step. If yes here, besides a roadmap format, reasonable and realistic timeframes might be a good addition? Potentially an awesome collaborative project, and certainly something thoughtful and professional to present to make about the best case possible for the kind of toolset modern SL Merchants need.

Josh, I get it, I really do. For the record I'm not carrying angst around about it, and I'm not without a sense of humor either, some of your points are actually amusing. I don't think you completely believe the amount of conspiracy you're flinging about yourself. I know this is out of context of this thread, and have to agree with Mad's advice that it probably belongs elsewhere. It's that convincing a company that's generating great numbers for itself, especially in the context of the SLM that it's failing to satisfy customer demand, and not properly supporting its merchants in terms of dedication. Used that graphs example, and pitting that against one of the teams replys in response to the fact we don't have useful features that SLX had. The attitude is that "this is not SLX". Well yes, no kidding ... but how do you convince a too-autonomous, too small team that's performing very well for the company in terms of numbers that customer fulfillment is as important as the earnings? With conspiracy? Not likely, but not ruling that out, even. Why supply good tools very quickly to merchant customers to help sell better, when as someone else pointed out, there's a ceiling on the amount of goods that can be sold, while the amount of product steadily increases? Why would they want a merchant to sell better? It doesn't affect overall sales in the slighest whether merchants A, B and C have better tools, the top numbers remain the same. Someone else made the point that the company is still plagued by culture, and I think this also is true. If it were based on fast innovation and performance it would be an entirely different company. As in clearly defined management dictating the work to be done, not the other way around. A monkey can put together lists of features that merchants and other segments of SL are asking for. So why are these things not as prioritized as internals? My take is because they don't at all affect the bottom line of the company and because real speed in development and innovation costs more money. So, yell and scream, conspiracy or calm negotiations, the end result is the same. LL isn't Pixar, and I think they need to get over that. Even Google is starting to see the light that culture/creativity over performance is a losing proposition. The losers in our particular case in terms of revenue are the merchants. But I see we're back to comments now on blog posts. Drama sells. Commments on the quarterly report are unanimously pointing out the same problems and frustrations that have been with us for years. The last straw for me, was a post by Torley playing both sides of the fence a short while ago saying something like "hey we know parts of LL suck and here I am convicing my co-workers to walk in Residents shoes". Not dumping the problem on Torley, Torley is awesome. How cool is that? Not very when it points to the fact that there's a serious lack of accountability in customer satisfaction, a weakness in fast-paced development, not enough money being spent to get the job done, and overspending in frivolous areas. Great for the company, except that you can't deliver on modern tools that would drive people to innovate enough to draw more people. I wouldn't be so quick to suggest that people get fired if the root cause is lack of spending and lack of manpower. It would seem to indicate that not having a very slick and sophisticated Marketplace after 2 years is a failing of talent, but that may not be the case. My only real point against your methods is that you may be falling right into their hands with this culture issue. Aren't we just so cool for picking up a trivial issue by one of our vocal critics? No, not very. Not when you're still not delivering the type of product that people are asking for. Congratulations on the revenue though, looking great. In the meantime our revenue is somewhat ... less. Liked that our CEO realizes that part of their commitment hopefully later this year will be working on delivering more customers to Merchants. Got to take the show on the road though rather than spend money to do that. It still fails to show a dedication to Merchants as business folk. It also shows a lack of being able to control a market with a ceiling, and in that sense is only a fix as long as membership grows. Barely on topic in this thread as it shows some points why freebies aren't the largest part of the issue when it comes to profitability and Merchants. Sorry, awfully long and boring, but hopefully a bit more clear than sniping at your snipes

Not sure what you were directed to do, or how they've been working with you behind the scenes as you're eluding, unless you're talking about what I'm estimating is about $500 US or so blown on your specific case in time and labor and entertaining your antics about conspiracies, which only serves to make the rest of us look like fools. But since you think I'm insulting you (I'm not, my New York tell-it-like-it is slipped through there for a moment) you, about those fanboi comments you've been making, let me dispel that myth again for you. The company should know enough to handle reporting on a sane level without any sort of input, it's kind of commerce 101. Barring that, reporting isn't going to be completely fixed until after Direct Delivery, at least so says my gut ... reporting will have to be re-done to match the mechanics of DD. As will other Marketplace features. So, they're either missing what everyone else has been saying about reporting in favor of someone with whacky conspiracy theories cluttering up somewhat better feedback (there's a conspiracy theory for you, maybe they WANT to make us look like unprofessional idiots by groomnig this kind of feedback), or they're paying attention to trivial issues when they should be paying attention to larger issues. In either case, mentioned that there is a failing, here it is: Are we going on two years now for the Marketplace? I believe so, one re-write later, nixing features that all merchants liked, development that's dog slow across the board with SL. More examples: Been waiting 5 years for mesh, another year or two to go until everyone can actually see it. In a 3D world, no less. Low poly is well understood as low poly in the rest of the world, it's simple. Not here, not yet. 6 years(?) for a language (something on top of Mono) rather than the 2 million lines of code that makes up LSL. Not understanding this one, built a game engine years ago, took us overnight to drop in (going a bit fuzzy) Rhino for embedded Javascript. That took overnight to plug in, a week for the glue. Regardless, that many years to get the job done speaks for itself. Other companies have done this in a year. Actually made a suggestion in an office hour as a baby step that we need a dialog window for user input rather than something like chatting 69 my command. Finally got that one, although I'm not sure that was due to my input. About two years later it looks like that's finally working after sitting there unbroken and not working for a year and a half. Then it was only working in V2. Major win right? No, what we really need is a full set of GUI controls so that people can develop the kind of slick looking things that draw people into SL, but hey, if you know it's there you don't have to use those odd chat statements any longer. Because they're stingy with everything (one problem with Marketplace reporting at one point seemed to be due to the limitation of characters they were using for some fields), and script limits are a solution for too many resources on too few machines, I won't even bring up certain issues like needing static properties on objects that don't even need to take up memory until they're actually used, saving enormous amounts of script memory. Doesn't even need to be stored in a database. Only uses memory when called. Won't ask for that because I want 256 of them, and I'd probably get 6 which is pretty much useless. Need global objects with reliable access. HTTP is fine, so long as it's reliable and I don't have to deal with limits there and making sure there's actually an always-on connection is fun. HTTP limited to 2k worth of data ... that's really useful for developing killer apps ... not. Could go on and on here, but won't. Combine that with volumes of sincere and thoughtful Jira's, pages and pages of info from the forums. But if that conspiracy style will help my case, and get me and others heard, then you may have proven your point after all. Not sure if I have another 2 years of patience in me to see a fraction of this get done though. Loving those Marketplace charts that not only let me track sales history at a glance on any one item, but also up to an overlay of 5 items and switch between different types of graphs. I can sell much more with info like that. And it's so fun I could spend all day looking at that kind of thing. So could someone just being a merchant for fun. But right, most of your issues were basically due to you not being able to read the wiki, and follow simple advice from other merchants at the outset. So $500 bucks of redundancy later and more conspiracy, here we are. What a cool way to operate a company.

Sparky, you're talking out of both sides of your mouth with the convoluted bits. And ... many people were already aware of discrepencies with reporting for months now.

That's your griefing tool? So out of all your problems, which could have been summed up with a big fat RTFM from the beginning, the need to share this wonderous griefing tool with everyone else instead of actually giving it time to get fixed (not measured in hamster time). Reminds me of the time you said your things were borked when you just didn't wait for the synch, or the time you said support was a failure and didn't even wait 24 hours. Amazing.

Good catch if that turns out to be a real issue. Must deny having any knowledge of accidently receiving an SLM griefing tool. You assume all responsibilities whether implicit or implied.

Dakota has probably been working on releasing a new line of high quality freebies under her alt and snickering over her waffles when she should be working. Wouldn't be surprised if Brooke is in on it. Did you catch her in that vid from SLCC? Shifty eyes.

But if I play it backwards I hear the number nine.

Absolutely, we've hit a ceiling and that's the main culprit for merchant growth. Wasn't so much promoting separate sites, if it's done right that same data is as easily integrated both in world, patched into social networking features, on individual web properties, etc. How and where it's implemented is a mashup thing. That was mostly referring to LL not providing sophisticated and sexy toolsets that people are looking for. It's not a good idea to develop one set of tools for merchants, and another set of tools for the music sector and throw that into one mixed bag ... that's a bug-fest in the making. Easier to separate out specific tools into sections.

Belated reply ... absolutely no problems with freebies and low cost mixed in with everything else, and I do see plenty of paths to them benefitting sales of other price ranges. Agree there as well. As a shopper, much prefer everything in one place, I don't care whether it's free or L$5000, I just want things that I'm looking for and those surprise finds.

Mickey Vandeverre wrote: I think that perhaps you are trying to make one of the last participation-type draws that they have left even more difficult for the majority of people participating, and particularly more difficult for new people participating. Going beyond very very limited tools...and into territory where people's creations shall be judged and prices to be set (which is impossible, by the way, and that's not the way a market works) Those tools that are absent and have been absent for what is it...a year now? that's your problem. those tools can correct the situations you are having difficulty with. I was willing to pay listing fees a while back. not now. no way. the tools aren't there, and the ones that are there don't work half the time. and I get a wee bit of indication that they do not even have the slightest clue as to what tools will make it work, which is not a great foundation for any of us to build a business on. If people walked away from their shops and they've got stale content....maybe they got bored and tired of waiting for the tools too. Snipped some of that to get to these points, hope you don't mind. Will dispel the fanboi myth, since they seem to prefer a different style of feedback. Also been stewing on that excitement thing and attention to detail point from another post. Agree that freebies aren't an issue. Also long changed stance on the listing fees, that window is long gone as are not putting freebies on the Marketplace in the first place. The problem is indeed the toolset and the speed of providing it. There's a venture that I can't use the Marketplace for unless and until it supports affiliate sales. So, will wait patiently past Direct Delivery, see if that happens, maybe in a year, maybe more. A few other ventures I can think of that I wouldn't touch without the kind of reporting I can dump into Quickbooks. But showing dedication to the toolsets and each sector of Second Life would be a major win. Merchants are here because they sell stuff for a price (who would have thought?), and they've got great tools at their disposal. In fact, it's actually fun to play around in the merchant control panel. And ... look here, there's another dedicated site/space for another sector of SL ... head on over to the Second Life Music Machine where you can upload and share audio clips, check out the dedicated calendar of events for the music scene in SL. And over here we have the Second Life Art Fest site. Upload, rate, share, vote, check showings, browse the artists profiles, check the listing of galleries, blah. Into philanthropy? Check out our dedicated spaces for non profits and education. Maybe? ... Check out the Second Life Thrift Store for great freebies and demos! Not sure on this one, but not possible unless we can get to that kind of momentum with the tools. Shave $5M off that $75M and it's a good possibility. Deadlines are also a requirement. Agree though, the end result eliminates the need for freebies to be an issue for even the highest end merchant.

You would think. And that's a point, but when you're operating marketing on a shoestring and relying on mutant crowdsourcing to carry the load, more is better and devaluing graphics work, programming and other skills are the name of the game. Our founder appears to be bringing that concept to devaluing labor in another venture. Apparently need more legislation on labor laws, but that's another story. So much for creating dependable jobs as one good way of changing the world.

The freebie thing is more of a symptom than an actual issue, I think. I get the value of freebies, their stance, that freebies aren't killing the economy or putting merchants out of business on their own. The single biggest draw to SL that will bring people in, in large numbers will be that they can make "money". The existence of freebies "at all" in a "Marketplace" sends a message of lack of commitment to merchants that are trying to earn, whether freebies are good, bad or a non-issue. They simply never needed to be in the Marketplace, it should have been a dedicated space to ... you guessed it, people trying to earn something other than the feel-good factor. Tolerating silliness and trolling, taking away office hours, huge gap between merchants and commerce savvy Lindens. They're adults in the commerce space while we're just children in the scheme of things. Complete lack of dedication to merchants as professionals and treatment of them as such. Years for a glorified shopping cart with slick features, lack of any sort of commerce related dialog. I get more of a sense of being a professional from an everyday phone call on a trivial issue in RL business than anything here in SL. General answer to "how can we get involved in the economy more deeply" ... "don't worry about it, keep making more content". It adds up. It shows in topics like this.

Oh, got you. Agree, not much of a bang. I'm with you in that tech sometimes needs to meet the rest of the world. My main thing is hands on, move a mountain, move goods from point A to point B, build it faster. The tech industry is sometimes too self important for that nonsense

The video is pretty bad. Ustream itself is a mess, picking for videos at one point only to realize that I'm only looking at one channel, there are 3 channels, slcc, slcc2 and slcc3 with no clear consolidation. @Mickey, thanks for that other link. Regarding the noob thing, some of that is err ... Being Humble. Seriously though, I think most of that noob reference is in regard to the mixed bag that Second Life is. He gets the business, the platform, resources, technology and I'm sure he knows his way around a general ledger. Like Madeliefste pointed out, he gets the gaming industry, which is the most similar thing to SL that exists in many areas. When you're up against people who are (how old are our oldest residents, 8, 9 years old?) experienced with Second Life and certainly not dummies, it's best to consider yourself a noob until you've gotten a handle on it firsthand as a consumer of the product. I think I was a noob my entire first year and I got the gist of what SL was before I ever logged in for the first time. Noob beyond experiencing it firsthand, is not just the overall nuance, but that we're made up of a crazy amount of sectors, each with their own nuances. Merchants, art, education, non profits, music, romance, adult, socializing, etc. Here's a for instance, knew this one employee of someones who was hired as a project manager. His first day, the CEO comes up to him asking him why the hell he's sweeping the floor? He said this was his way of learning the company from the bottom up. So, rolling my eyes at this story when I heard it. It starts getting silly after a couple of weeks, but as it turned out, he's watching everything, asking questions, chatting it up with everyone and his performance ended up being pure gold in the end. He was qualified before he got in the door, he was deadly afterwards.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/16643492

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/16621402

I've been using http://schedule.slconvention.org/ as a jumping point for the streams and schedule. Main URL is http://www.ustream.tv/slcc Looks like they get archived at http://www.ustream.tv/slcc/videos

Agreed on nearly all of that except for the methods. No one has an absolute handle on what the secret sauce is for SL, and I love that our CEO prefers the ambiguity of it all. You know, most of my points and sticking up for LL comes from the fact that I've been an employer all of my adult life, some of it involving similar ventures, so all my life I've dealt with this "us and them" thing and I'm extremely sympathetic to LL's position. So many things that you could, but just don't share with your customer base because it's not needed, often misinterpreted, often not engraved in stone in order to be flexible, some things are no ones business but the companies, etc. Also ok with the unknowns. What I do see is $75M in profit and a growing Marketplace, some growing pains, some issues that take significantly longer to implement than to suggest. So it's not just blind trust, I'm basing it on past performance, which from a company and profit standpoint is actually very, VERY good. I would even agree that some 3 years back we had this big dry spell of communication where antics would have been justifiable. Thankfully we've now gotten much better communication and need to make the most of that. Here's something to chew on, and this is not at all directed at you, willing to concede that you're a fine developer and in touch with many issues on a professional level. When you take all of the conjecture and then actually do get explanations of things that went wrong, have you noticed that the conjecture almost NEVER matches the actual explanation? Simple answer is not because we're uneducated, it's because there's a sheer amount of data that we don't see and don't need to. Great to have a conversation with you for a change Don't miss the future of Second Life talk going on now if you can manage. One of my favorite Lindens, Esbee is talking. Wouldn't be a proper presentation without Esbee.

Agreed, this conversation will continue to be cyclic until they do something about it. Hoping they will wake up and provide us with a more mature space in which to network. In the meantime, the rest of us might like to be respected as serious and thoughtful. As you've stated clearly in your other posts, you're not concerned with the short term negative effects that your tactics might have on other Merchants. Thanks for attempting to prove everything a lie for the greater good. Not buying that particular hair tonic that cures warts though, I want a refund.

Josh Susanto wrote: I'll withdraw my own interpretation when it's been conclusively demonstrated that it's any more shamelessly spun that LL's. They're the ones producing the data, so the burden is on them to show that the data say what they say they say. Absent that, I'm just applying Occam's Razor. The Lindens have been either incorrect or dishonest about almost everything they've said so far this month, so it's a huge leap of faith to think they wouldn't be incorrect or dishonest about this, too. You're already calling official statements and facts lies, despite that you're continually proven wrong. If everything is a lie, there's isn't a conversation to be had, when there are no facts at all. More facts aren't going to help you, in this case. Surely you can see how silly that is. It doesn't resemble business or science.

If you caught the end of that, about those stats. Seems like they will be considering very detailed stats in the future for added value to Merchants, but not for the near future. I'm ok with that, personally. I'm not here to bet on a losing horse, and so far even with specific areas being flat by the numbers, is proving to be the right bet. YMMV.

Sorry, that was badly worded, I'm not there. Watching the stream that's going on now. Meant that my own research has been verified by the Linden statement. It's also not hard research to do. Very easy on the otherhand to dispute it with no research to indicate otherwise. A good stat to ask for though, perhaps we may get that if we ask nicely.