Rumour - LL to buy SLExchange

There's a rumour here:

http://www.squadvillage.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=36

Personally I wouldn't mind this, although I'm sure there are some implications. I love the search features on SLX and think an official link would be a worthy addition to the Second Life experience.

Anyone have any thoughts whether this would be a good thing, even if it's not true do you think LL should develop their own sort of SLX setup?

to be honest i like that two different companies are running their own..
i just see LL not having time on bad purchases or money not being credited to accounts and things..
i just don't get a good feeling with it..
sorry.

Okay, if LL bought out XStreet.. well, for starters, the customer service would SUCK.

It'd also be down half the time, even if there's nothing wrong with Second Life itself.

They'll eventually say they have scaling issues with it... and close it.

Edit to add: Honestly, LL needs to just stick with the grid. It needs far more TLC than they can give it as it is. Maybe when the grid can run for two years without needing logins restricted, then...

If this does come pass, perhaps LL will simply pay Ms. Chung's employees to keep the machine running, as it were. XStreet is already a well oiled system, so I doubt LL will change anything. If there is truth behind the rumour, I'm sure it's merely a business transaction.

DO NOT WANT

This is unfortunate, if it really happens. I can't see LL wanting to run the Marketplace portion of it; perhaps all they would be after is closing the currency exchange?

The only real justification I could see for it would be if the owners got tired of running it and were going to close it anyway, which I have no reason to believe. In that case it might make sense for LL to step in and rescue it, since it provides a valuable service to the community.

Let's see ... I had an SL Boutique account, maybe it got carried forward to OnRez ...
.

Ms. Chung? As in Anshe? She doesn't have anything to do with xstreetsl.

I don't think I want LL to run their own xstreet like setup.

I thought she had a lot to do with it, I'm sure I read she owns around half of it and is a silent partner.

Wouldn't surprise me much. Anshe Chung has a significant stake in SLExchange, and if you've looked at the amazing shrinkage rate of Dreamland lately, she's got to be hurting for cash.

Plus SLExchange is just the sort of "enhanced web service" that LL has been talking about for the past year. Especially the ability to transfer L$ from one resident to another from the web. As users, we are probably better off with LL buying a service that does that and works, rather than having them build their own.

If this is true, I hope OnRez can step up and become a more viable competitor.

One of the best things I like about xstreet, besides that my stuff sells well there, is how short a time it takes to get my L$ out of SL, into my account on xstreet, and then to my PayPal account. It takes days to do the same thing via LL's system!

Less than 10 minutes compared to LL's days! I'd really hate to lose that ability, since LL doesn't seem to understand the concept of Paypal's mass pay system. I'd also hate to lose the excellent customer service I've gotten from the folks at Xstreet.

Also, if you have payment issues with LL, it's nice to have this alternative to getting some L$ to pay the rent on time. Or at least, being able to advise people that they can do that.

To the best of my knowledge Anshe is a partner in XStreet and owns a sizable chunk of the company.

Personally I am not happy with the prospect of LL buying up XStreet. At the moment it works. In my experience the only times it doesnt work is when SL is being quirky. The 2 best things about SLX is the currency exchange and the customer support. If LL buy it up then I'm sure these will dissapear overnight. Even if they employ the existing crew to run it then we should retain the support, but we would surely loose the currency exchange. The double wammy would be that a good number of additonal poeple would be forced to use Lindex increasing the waiting time even further for payouts.

On the flipside I would like to see Apotheus and his team get some big bucks as they have done a fantastic job with the site and have been an integral part of the growth of SL.

With all the rumours floating around about SL's future at the moment I think I would sell if the money was right.

The currency exchange wasn't something I'd considered, I've seen frustrated noobs being directed there due to LL's limits. I've also seen business owners recommending cashing out there rather than via LL because the process is so much more efficient.

That really would be bad news and possibly the nail in the coffin for me.Maybe 80% of my revenue comes from Xstreet and it functions well.If it gets swallowed how will LL justify the commission fee?
Its also a good place to check out when SL is down which seems to be often now,I do hope this is bad info.

Funny, I rarely check the XSt RSS feed but today noticed:...and...The former made me think something legal might be going on, the later combined with the former, combined with this makes me wonder if there might be some validity to them?

I've never used the Linden system, as XSt's was easier/faster/simpler, so if they switch to that and get rid of their own, I suppose it would be better?

Meanwhile, my sales have been doing well there, here's hoping they don't lose any of the benefits?

Or Xstreet is causing or is a significant factor of the MySQL overload problem and LL told then to fix it.

Funny, now that I think about it some more, it makes sense? XSt. has to be immensely profitable, why wouldn't Linden Research want to capitalize on their success? If they can manage not to break it, and it remains profitable, it may help them survive tighter economic times? Meanwhile XSt.'s plan was to provide similar services to other virtual worlds (diversify), which would have been wonderful to sustain them and not be reliant on another sole private company, which now would be no longer true...

anyone remember gaming open market (gom) and what they did to THAT? seems to me its typical LL behavior

Yes, which is why I say it's a bad thing if LL interferes with XStreet.

XstreetSL generally addresses support requests within 24 hours, and their system even fixes some problems automatically without any customer reports required. This is true for all customers, even for transactions of only a few L$.

Linden Lab, on the other hand, takes up to three weeks to process support tickets of customers who pay the company thousands of dollars a month in land use fees- and some of these support tickets themselves involve transactions in the hundreds or thousands of USD dollars.

I do indeed wonder how an acquisition would affect XstreetSL, support-wise.

Easy, there won't be any problems after the acquisition (wink, wink).

the longest i have ever had to wait for a problem with a transaction with Xstreet was 3 days and this was in the weekend..by Monday all fixed..
the silly tellers in sl is why i even had the problem in the first place..
i hit the teller before there was a blog announcement of transaction problems..

if i was dealing with lindens i would still be on the phone going on two weeks now lol

if they had someone else run it and it was just a purchase to own it i still get a bad feeling..

This doesn't mesh well with LL's hands-off policy toward resident-to-resident transactions.

On the plus side, they could do away with in-world scripted objects as a delivery mechanism. It'd also be nice to be able to deliver folders rather than packages, but xstr could do that, too, and doesn't.

Today we are very happy to share some exciting news with you: Linden Lab has acquired Xstreet SL and OnRez - the two leading Web-based marketplaces for buying and selling creations for Second Life.

Please read the Blog post here:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2009/01/20/xstreet-sl-and-onrez-to-join-linden-lab

Please continue the discussion here:
/352/de/303465/1.html#post2294694

Rumour CONFIRMED. Go look at http://www.xstreet.com and read the top bar on the site