Rhotis Paine

I can see you are a master of the red herring. Well played.

Actually they did a very very large thing to market the marketplace. When you go to your dashboard on the SL site you have a menu for shopping that takes you directly to the Linden Lab branded marketplace. That is massive in and of itself. On land while I agree with you on the broad idea of Linden Labs not devaluing land with the marketplace I disagree that estate owners offer no value. If your estate owner offered you no value perhaps you were with the wrong estate owner. Not all of them simply offer you a blank parcel in exchange for some lindens and "I will see you when the rent is due again" mentality. Several estate owners have various levels of co-branding and advertising sharing resources that can benefit merchants. If you are not utilizing an entire sim (If you are if you can afford it it is obviously financially more advisable to buy direct from Linden Labs) then you are renting a parcel of a various size which means you will have neighbors. This is where estate owners and the quality of the estate adds or subtracts value from your enterprise. Does the estate have policies on how many stores, how much resources each store can take based on the land they have and so on. If you and your competitor are selling similar products of similar quality and prices but your competitor's store is on mainland and your customers cannot walk while your store is with an estate that does frequent performance testing and trapping of sources of lag with a 24/7 management staff there to assist you with any issue about your land, then your customers will see the difference and they will tell their friends. So the basic idea here is if you want (or need, I will never buy a building I cannot walk through first) land for your store then rushing to the absolute lowest price per square meter is not really the best choice, specifically for a business. Find out what the estate you will be renting from can do for your business. I big hint, if you cannot reach management when you have a question about their land as a prospective renter, then you will have similar issues reaching them when you are already a customer of theirs. Find out if they do performance testing. Find out what they consider tolerable Time Dilation and Sim and Physical FPS levels. Find out how often they check their sims manually for lag (meaning someone actually teleports to that sim and tests it). Find out what avenues they have that you can use to leverage your business in the greater Second Life community. Land is not just land with the only difference being the price.

Hi everyone. I am developing a web page for a large market place merchant and they want a section on their site to be able to show their store on the market place. The biggest problem is in doing this with their site design the marketplace shown in the content area has a horizontal scroll too it making the page look really odd. This is because LL puts the side bars on the page (the green fading to white). If anyone knows a way to fit this page to a screen (about 980 px wide) without the horizontal scroll using iFrame or any other method I would greatly appreciate it. If the method does not exist, LL perhaps you can setup a system for people to swip their stores viewable on their page more easily. Thanks

Phoebe Avro - Thanks for the info. I hope the next firestorm does have a mode to look darn near exactly like phoenix. I appreciate the info and appreciate the people at firestorm and other alternative viewers for not just giving people choices but literally picking the ball up where linden labs has continually dropped it over the years. That said linden labs is still acting like a darn 4 year old. When the public has continually showed they do not like this viewer a company interested in growing will typically et the message after a copule years. Linden Labs seems oblivious to this message and it is beyond me how they can be. 

While not a ton out there yet when I looked what little profesional looking mesh I saw was absolutely fantastic. It actually makes older geo prim and sculpt builds look like 1980s PC games that is how much better some of the stuff is. That said, it will be the death of Second Life if they do not fix the V2 style interface (meaning get rid of it completely, entirely, not keep a single thing from it). I have been in SL since 07 and I am telling you when I try a V2 (or v3 for the mesh) viewer including firestorm I feel like an absolute newb. It is unusable. Yeah the stability needs fixed but that will obviously come, its the UI itself that is the problem. I cannot describe how much I despise the v2 style UI. yes, actually I can. Whoever came up with it should be fired, and never ever design another UI in their life. That is how bad it is. How utterly unfunctional it is. LL is like a 4 year old when it comes for this stupid viewer. Since its inception people have been telling them its crap and here we are a couple years later and it is still the same basic UI that V2 started with. My wishlist? Is for the phoenix / firestorm people to find a way to include all the functionality of V2/3 that LOOKS in the style of V1. Foreget what changes have been made to firestomr, I have watched the youtube of how to make it function more like phoenix. It is not enough. It is still way too unintuitive to see when you have a group or private IM. The top section of the interface needs to be removed completely. I do not want that stupid search bar up there. Nor do I want pictures for my buttons. Just put the darn text on them like V1, why is that so difficult to have? Ok rant over, V2 just frustrates me that much.

While I am sure the new CEO is a very smart fellow I am equally as sure his hiring will mark 2011 as the end of Linden Labs and Second Life. The user base is shrinking. It is not shrinking because there are no goblins to shoot or there is no super new armor to loot from an NPC that takes 120 people to defeat. it is not shrinking because of VARs or anything of that nature. It is shrinking because Linden Labs refuses to understand the thing that attracts people is that SL is an open ended virtual world and because they refuse to fix actual problems and instead focus time effort and money on making new viewers and trying to add new tricks. Fix the lag, fix region to region traveling, update builder tools to be more intuitive. Those are the three things that will save SL, everything else you do will simply cause more people to leave.