Dartagan Shepherd

One point this brings up is that some education about social networking might be useful, obviously many SL customers value privacy, so it's good to share to what degree information is being used out there. Some marketing dialog would also be appreciated. I thought the questions where good on how all of this relates to Google, etc. I think between education about privacy and how that relates to your social networking efforts, you could actually get the Merchant community involved in some co-marketing. It's only as invasive as you let it be in general and that's not well understood. Also agree that Merchants shops, feeds, new products should be integrated into the new SL social networking tools. A Share button that promotes the product to the SL profile wall would be nice. Something that Mickey had pointed out to me elsewhere in the forums is that groups are an under-tapped marketing resource. We're so focused on the avatar as identity that we're neglecting the business or group or store as identity (I realize the Marketplace has improved the concept of Store and is considering multiple storefronts/brands). The group and store need their own features like Avatars do. We had strong groups in Avatars United, hopefully some of those tools, and store as group will be re-introduced. This could tie in well with the Marketplace, you can offload a bunch of user/store data to the profile/social networking system. I don't claim to be a social networking guru, as such I'm curious, where does an anonymous click from the Marketplace Facebook Like button display on Facebook? I see products displayed that I've liked show up in auto completion results when searching second life, otherwise, nowhere else, on my wall/feed. Something everyone might not be aware of, the end benefit is mostly to Second Life users ON Facebook. So it might not be for you, or me, but users who are on Facebook who are also Second Life Residents are not evil. There is a reasonably healthy community on Facebook, which you can check out anytime without a Facebook login, at http://www.facebook.com/secondlife Should they come across your items that are Liked, they're taken to your product page, so it's more about a re-direct to your product, than sharing of information about "you". In that sense it's a pretty harmless tool and basically free advertising. Our Avatar identities have always been public to the world in one way or another so that's nothing new. It's only problematic if you put RL information in your Avatar profile, that you didn't intend to go beyond SL, but that too has always been true.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: I think I made my point Dart. And my point on this low hanging fruit wasting ZERO time on Brooke's team is already proving itself now... two Merchants already cannot find this announced button. So who will support the user base now for this 5 minute low hanging fruit? Priorities...... such a wasted effort a company or person that shoots from the hip. Right, so let me make my point. The button can be found on any product detail page, in the bottom right margin of the page. Community help, a simple asking for where that button might be found. There's feedback and then there's something that sounds like it needs a marriage counseler. They would probably tell you the first step in communication is to forget the past and stop playing the blame game in order to be able to have a healthy relationship. For the record, I get the difference between cut and pasting some code onto a static web page and rolling that same bit out on a larger system. I mean really, you had to resort to reading that into a simple statement? That's another point. I can take any two of your posts, compare them and pull some conflicting nonsense from thin air. Heck, I can do that to a single sentence of yours. Much rather have a conversation than play advocate to movie critics, if you follow.

Please tell me you did not just use that frantic verbiage to compare SL Marketplace with enterprise development, and elude to my experience as being sub-par on a commercial product level with no facts whatsoever to make your point. It's called multi-tasking. Yes, I would consider this rather low hanging fruit, but when your team multi-tasks, low hanging fruit would be one way to get the biggest bang for your buck, time-wise. That is true of many products. Personally if I can throw in a feature with little effort during the course of a work day to make a better product, I'm certainly going to do that. Maybe you're unclear about the usefulness of those little extra features to some merchants. And then there are these silly things called priorities, in which some problems should not be solved until a larger problem is solved that those other features tie into. Delivery is one of those situations. [Edit: typo, imperfect human being]

No, I'm just a forum-head. But I can tell you that I can work on a major task and still manage to plug in a Facebook Like button on a website in about 5 minutes. I can also tell you that I've employed small teams capable of doing the same. In fact, I'm doing that right now, fixing a major problem and a few side problems and posting to you here in the forums. I'm not doing that as fast as I could manage with a bigger team. My own backlog is pretty large. But there are some vital bits that I need to attend to first. Call it empathy.

It's a small team, can't help you understand how this works or how you can have a small team doing "mostly" one thing while spending a few cycles on "other stuff". Assuming those social networking bits were pretty much plug and play and took a whopping hour or two to bring you a feature to help spread the word about your products "if" you choose to use that form of marketing. But by all means, continue to turn it into something else.

Sorry, had to go look that up first. +1 for anything that helps promote products in any social networking space, as an option, whether that be product by product, merchant feeds, store pointers, etc.

It would stand to reason that if you're calling these out as lies, that any response you're going to get will also be lies. Funny how that works.

Shortage of threads that talk about business, marketing, successes, tools to make use of. This passes as my New York Times of SL, so I have to skim everything for those tidbits, There are Linden responses buried here and there and real issues mixed in with sensationalized non-issues ... in order to stay on top of SL business, I like to know what other merchants are doing and thinking about things. Maybe I should also ignore the occassional vibes that I get when you try to help someone that there is no end or help in sight and that the resentment is such that if anything someone would rather see SL fail with them, than see it successful. This is why I continue to keep one foot in RL in business, I don't need to deal with those kind of head games, and I can manage to maintain a level of honesty that I don't need to compromise or apologize for. I'd prefer to hear answers to solutions by successful merchants, as those are things that are working for people, in spite of problems, but maybe we should all just ignore all SL problems too, because if you ignore it, it ceases to become a problem, right? Don't get me wrong, plenty of issues to discuss that aren't always about profit and roses, but my personal preference is short and sweet, stick it where it belongs and move on, rather than making "stuff" up. Maybe I don't have the right to that preference in forums or as a business person. Off topic for this thread, I know and I'm actually pretty happy about the detailed response about delivery failures.

Reporting personal problems would be called contacting support. Reporting bugs would be a Jira. But right, bringing up some new angle about delivery as soon as one is reasonably answered (and often ignored, as we jump to the next angle) while the very problem of delivery is being worked on is something else entirely. Got my own word for that, but since that would make me evil to breathe that word, I suppose I'll have to refrain as well, all for the good of the community, eh?

Not quite sure how to respond to all that, I don't bring that kind of extra baggage to business. I'm in New York, and as the song says, "if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere". High costs, high taxes, politics and state contracts, you name the problem, we've got it. What I focus on, is what puts food on the table, what I need to do to make a profit, is this situation one that I want to put time and effort into, etc. Everything else is secondary. New York is my home and we're not evil. I'll continue to do business here, and base my business here simply because it's home. Tempting to move somewhere cheaper, but keeping my nose to the grindstone in spite of these problems keeps me successful and living in a place I love, with people I care for. I'm entirely the wrong person to talk to about having it rough and bad circumstances. Wasn't born with a silver spoon and any successes I've had come from hard work and determination. I can be in New York and make a profit in Second Life, that's what matters to me, most everyone else can do as well or better than I can. At the end of the day, whether I succeed or fail is on my shoulders, not the government, LL, taxes or what anyone else does. But yes, it's a level playing field. If you have problems, keep bugging support until you get it resolved, if you feel it's far beyond the problems that everyone else is experiencing, none of us here can fix that for you, other than give you pointers. Otherwise we work with what we have. Merchants roll on and tackle the problems life and LL throws at them regardless, but ultimately you're your own solution. I think much of this is just beyond the scope of being a Merchant in SL.

Read back to what I'd said. I said that a global market that can't sustain the highest cost of living could "not" support SL. Not to say that LL couldn't survive without merchants, but that's doubtful and it certainly wouldn't be the same SL. SL respects the power of virtual goods as indicated by their willingness to run the Marketplace as a company offering. Commission, paid advertising, items over L$10 ... all of these are up to the individual to use by choice and to find out individually what does and doesn't work for them. As you've seen, they do actually work very well for some people. Agreed with the previous advice that you could benefit from higher valuation, but that's your choice too of course. You're the one that's labelling very ordinary business practice "protectionism". I'm willing to go along with that, all business is protectionism in one form or another. That doesn't make it evil. You're not supporting protectionism, you're participating in a free market, in a level playing field, capable of earning anyone in the world a reasonable profit. What you can do, is make the higher profit margin you enjoy over countries you seem to dislike, work for you more efficiently, by networking with your peers who also have successful tidbits to share. Isn't that why we're here? Besides, with the way the U.S. postal service is going currently, SL will have a better delivery rate than RL, even before Direct Delivery.

It wasn't about pointing fingers at TPV's or LL, or any specific feature, or pro/con Viewer 2. It was about fine tuning the process and determining that a feature released by LL should be considered part of the core experience. An expectation of say 3 months from release of that feature by LL to the point that it's available to everyone doesn't seem unreasonable. and is an improvement on the long times that we've had to wait in the past until everyone can enjoy that particular feature "as" part of the core experience. The code after all is freely available to TPV's, although there is an exception with Mesh that might require more lead time than usual, where code could not be provided.

That's an alternative. Just thinking that a year and a half and counting to gain full adoption of Prim Media, extra clothing/tattoo layers/etc. is a bit of a stretch. Something has to give somewhere. How long for Mesh? People have already blown thousands of dollars and spent thousands of hours in anticipation.

It's a form of protectionism for people in the U.S. and economically similar places.

Had to dig for a bit, Indigo appears to be a fiend A good case for integrated groups features as social networking power. Had some of that with Avatars United, but of course it didn't tie in with in-world groups. I understand the time thing, especially if you're already busy with other social networking or other things in general, there are only so many hours in the day, so we have to work with the tools that bubble to the top in usefulness. If you could tweet SLum (had to go with that just because it "is" catchy, no matter the dig ) and vice versa it might save some time. Springboarding off of your comment about whether or not this feature could have been presented and explained in more detail and how new programs are perceived: It might be worth considering newly introduced features under the banner of a "Lab" offering akin to Google Labs. That way people can rest a bit easier knowing that this is experimental or newly released and subject to feedback and change until it reaches a certain adoption/maturity threshold. Err ... panties as use-case? I'll take two, but only to match the pantyhose on the shower curtain rod with panties on the virtual wall. It's all about the decor, after all.

Ugg, sorry about the blanket statements, not trying to demonize us "old" users. With a feature like this, making it as optional as possible harms none of the oldbies, and I think personally is a good attempt at internal social networking, that I've heard many people ask for (for instance why should I use Twitter and Facebook, when SL should "be" a social networking innovator). Commented elsewhere that SL needs to regain that freshness and relevence to hook in new users. We were fresh and relevent once, and I think we're picking up speed on that front again, but the majority of feedback by far from us oldbies seems to be "no more shinies" and a resistance to anything that smells like a shiny I absolutely agree, listen to seasoned and older users, but this is more ongoing maintenance, and that's only half a solution to the bigger picture. We desperately NEED new features and to try things out at a faster pace regardless of some of that resistance (including my own). I was actually more pointing fingers at LL to make more right decisions, based on feedback, as well as keeping that innovation going and then to act in a more mature and confident manner. To some extent LL breeds division by a lack of dedication and follow-through to their commitments and decisions. I think I was mostly knee-jerking to Torley's comment about "fighting for residents". Do it right and you don't need to "fight" for anyone, the entire company is behind its customers. Would just like to see a more unified front and a company confident in its decisions or experimentation. It's a hard sell as it is, don't make it worse. How can I advocate something to my neighbor that LL agrees partly sucks? Not sure if I'll use it or not, will give it a go, and if it's fun or useful I might make use of it. But I do see it as a right step toward "being" a social networking tool, and being complimentary to other social networking tools. Will it work? Not sure, and I don't fault LL if they're not sure either, I just don't want to see them on both sides of the fence about it. We throw it against the wall and see if it sticks.

Kind of the message I get too. Beat "the man", don't pay commission, don't pay for advertising, delivery FUD. A successful market depends on making it work for the highest cost of living down, providing that much more opportunity for the "down". Otherwise there wouldn't be an SL.

Was also very excited at the new features of V2, and still am. While I'm not at all against TPVs and lots of choices, the downside is that not having one official viewer "period" is that it holds up the entire community making use of new features, and slows SL down from moving forward that much faster and adapting to new users and staying fresh and relevent. Not saying that TPVs should be done away with, but at the very least every TPV should be required to support the full 2.x feature set. New features should be merged into any TPV in a timely manner or be disabled until they do. Like you, I was excited that Shared Media would be a major boost to SL, in even small things like making many notecards obsolete. Instead, you could put a prim in with your packaging that points to a web page. Changing documentation at once, for all customers would be as easy as changing the web page. I do know that some people are doing well with 2.x feature related products, and I think we'll get there. But again, not against TPVs at all, but they are seriously holding us up. Probably a bit off topic but there it is.

Torley Linden wrote: Yes, this is absolutely true, precisely because I continue to believe in experiencing SL as Resis do, and many times when I have a complaint about something, I find many independent opinions which support that, which makes it easier for me to advocate to Linden teams and show why it sucks. While they may not be heard publicly, rest assured other Lindens also raise "WTF?" flags at meetings. Just because someone represents LL doesn't mean they blindly agree with everything, there's a lot of healthy debate that happens before a feature ever goes public, and there's even more debate after that. To paraphrase Tron, "I fight for the Residents". Thanks for noticing! Forgive me Torley, not generally all that critical of LL. In fact, I try to evangelize and advocate where I can at all times, in a consistent manner. These kind of statements show that you have bigger problems in not identifying useful features at an internal level (although we know that debate is healthy among smaller teams in a work environment) and a lack of oversight when it comes to implementation and standing behind the Second Life product. Or management that fails to provide proper guidance and consistency in promoting their own products and decisions. It also indicates a lack of strength in research of your users wants and needs, and/or a lack of strength in follow-through in implementation of company driven features/goals. To me it also indicates that your priorities are a bit off in trying to target and appease an older demographic as opposed to finding the appeal to the future of SL, which is a potentially different from the current one which wants everything to stay the same. Those 16k per day signups are looking for certain feature sets and a consistency that you're not always portraying as a company. Critical is fine. That not everyone agrees is fine. But for the sake of those of us who are already sold and happy with SL and who are hopeful for the future, you need to pull it together and present your product with confidence in your decisions and to move forward. I can't "sell" it properly if you don't stand behind your product as a unified whole. Please do pull it together for your own sake as a company. Division doesn't sell anything and "fighting for Residents" is something that doesn't need to happen in the first place.

Ciaran Laval wrote: Dartagan Shepherd wrote: Tend to agree that it wouldn't be all that much of a boost to sales for the shopper, having a broad mix of products. Not that showcasing new products is a bad idea, but in forum format it would be messy and subject to gaming. (release 7 new colors, and get 7 forum posts for basically the same product, thereby increasing reports and moderation for instance). Restrict it to Piof and ban those who abuse it, third party forums manage such forum areas by having rules about them. These forums should never have been done away with in the first place. Fair enough. I have to ask the big question ... did anyone see noticeable sales benefits from that forum?

Someone else once thought we all needed to do it their way and sell all our goods for L$10 or less. Needless to say that didn't go over so well. Sorry, had to say it, heheh. A strength of SL business, thankfully like business at least here in the U.S. is diversity. Someone will find a way to make something work for them, that doesn't work for others. It's a magical goop of creativity, circumstance, factors, expertise and sacrifices. How boring it be if we all used the same methods, the same way, for the same profit.

Between the need for PIOF, a tutorial, and documents like the FAQ and those the FAQ points to, there isn't really a shortage of information about IP rights. Some more example cases could certainly be covered, although people will or won't read, will or won't understand IP issues without some homework of their own. Not disagreeing that education and pointers to a few more answers isn't useful, though. Just that at some point IP is IP and people will or will not understand and respect it. At that point the same reporting processes apply. From the Mesh FAQ on the wiki (which needs tweaking after Mesh is rolled out to the full grid): Intellectual Property and Mesh Do I retain intellectual property rights of the meshes that I create? Yes, under the Second Life Terms of Service, you retain any intellectual property rights you have in the meshes and other content that you import into Second Life. It's important to remember that you're responsible for knowing your intellectual property rights, and if you're importing meshes or other content to Second Life, you must have all the necessary rights and permissions. How can I protect my intellectual property in my meshes? As we announced in our Content Management Roadmap blog post, we are committed to empowering content creators to better manage and control their content. Mesh intellectual property rights must be respected during the Mesh First Look program. If we believe that any participant in the program is abusing intellectual property, then we may suspend the Resident from the program and, in egregious cases, from Second Life altogether. Although meshes will be limited to our test grid during the First Look program, the protections of the Second Life Terms of Service, our Intellectual Property Policy, and Policy on Third-Party Viewers will apply to meshes. If content creators believe their meshes are being infringed, they may submit intellectual property complaints to Linden Lab requesting removal of the content at issue as provided in our Intellectual Property Policy. We are currently testing some early improvements to our intellectual property complaint process. Stay tuned for more content management announcements as we have them. What if I download or purchase meshes from a service such as Google 3D Warehouse or Turbosquid? Can I use those in Second Life? Every mesh you acquire from these and other sites is subject to its creator/vendor's particular license terms, and must be adhered to as such. Every individual Turbosquid model contains a license link on its main page, and Turbosquid's general Licensing Terms and FAQ can be found here. Google's 3D Warehouse Terms of Service can be found here. If any meshes violate either the original creator/vendor's license terms, or Second Life's Terms of Service and Policies, then we will handle the matter as previously mentioned. 

Mesh is 3D models created in a 3D application outside of SL, instead of normal prims and sculpties. These 3D models are then uploaded to SL, in a 3D format.

The changing prim count kinda-sorta came up on the Mesh forum and is a potential issue. It would be much easier if you could indicate the prim count on the product "as sold". Meaning if the product were 10 meters out of the box, then it's a bit clearer to the customer. With a combined link for more detailed information on PE, it may help. It was also brought up that this could be gamed somewhat by selling items smaller than they "should" be. For instance selling a tiny tree with a low prim count that would be expected to be at least 10 meters tall. Is this worth a "size" field in a mesh listing?

Toysoldier Thor wrote: Will you be there to say... I thought it was a good idea and I supported Brooke's decision that Mesh Models should have been allowed to be sold so early in the main grid beta of mesh? Because we're keeping score? Put me down for a +1, because we've been through this before with sculpties with some glitches and changes over time, and many people did very well regardless.