Just How Bad is the SL Economy

If the shopping system "moves to XStreet" I'm probably closing my stores and saving the tier. I think LL might have lost track of why people are paying for a lot of the land currently in use.

Not sure if you ever downloaded and used the Onrez Viewer.? When you logged in with it, the Onrez shopping pop-up box was the default, so it was easy to search for items there and make purchases. So this technology exists already and wouldn't be to hard to integrate into the SL viewer and have it as the default pop-up once logged in.

I'm curious how XStreet own search engine will impact the existing SL search engines, its obvious that a given percentage of the SL population will choose XStreet search engine as their default instead....which means the other 3 SL components will lose some market share. It could also mean purchasing XStreet banner advertisement could be more effective in terms of eyes on logo than any classified advert.

I personaly prefer looking at the XStreet results, as you get to see various photos of the product, can read the information card,read comments and discussion points.....versus just looking at someones' company logo in SL's search engines.

Also if XSteet search engine gets more demand it might lead to a reduction in the gaming of SL's other Search components e.g Places search with its camping Bots. Maybe spending money on making your product a "Feature item" in XStreet is more cost effective than spending tons on a Classified? Other than listing tons of non related keywords, its harder to game XStreet Search......except Popular items, where you could buy your own product 100's of times o move up the Popular Items ranking list.

Nope, it wasn't the default viewer, and it had a reputation of being "dumbed down".

Anyway, I realize that this *kind* of thing is easy to implement. My comment isn't about the technology, it's about the social impact of the kind of change implied by Isablan's comment.

The point is that if it becomes "the way to shop" in SL, then there's no point in having an in-world store any more. No malls, no sims paid for by malls, no sim-wide stores...

yes it could bite LL back.....especially as regards land for shops and tiers collected. I still think there will be a large portion of consumers that like the shopping experience of visiting shops and mingling with other customers. XStreet would be too clinical and take away from that.

Well if Malls wern't dead and buried already...XStreet in the SL viewer won't do them any favours.

You and I don't agree on very much, but I'll be behind you, or in front of you, if that happens.

Linden Labs doesn't seem to worry too much about making radical changes in the experience of Second Life... for example, Voice has already fundamentally changed SL (and for me for the worse).

I'm not saying that XStreet in the viewer WOULD have the effect of "moving shopping to XStreet", mind you, but if it did...

Only for those who have embraced it I imagine as it has not changed my SL experience one iota.

On the subject of XStreets, I am not looking forward to integration. I dislike the web type stuff that is already in the viewer (like Nu Search) let alone adding more. My preferences tend to be to use an external browser for links and slurls too - so integration will only mean more switching back and forth from the viewer or avoiding that functionality all together.

I have to agree though that if XStreets becomes the defacto way to shop in SL then people would be crazy not to primarily focus on listing products there.

I can understand it probably makes sense from a conversing resources point of view but to me SL is supposed to be getting more immersive, not less. Makes me wonder how far it will end up going, will we start to manage our land via web next? Our Inventories? Chat/IM?
May sound like a good thing to some and I agree that web access to these would be good as an augmentation - not as the primary way to use them though.
Will there be any need for a 3D interface by that time I wonder or will SL really be just a chat room by then? I could be overreacting but LL needs to consider its direction carefully as they could be unwittingly signing the death warrant of our beloved 3D world.

I think it almost a certainty that a future viewer release will have the OnRez "Shop" button that takes you to XStreet. With LL now collecting the sales commission, they would be stupid not to push people in that direction. I also think it a certainty that as more products get uploaded, XStreet becomes the de facto way people start their shopping journey. Why TP to a store, wait 5 minutes for everything to rez, only to discover there isn't anything there you like? XStreet is going to deliver pictures and prices, with the user controling the search terms and being able to order the search results to their choosing.

I also think those giving up their in-world store will end up losing out. There will be an arms race to still get people to TP to the store -- for creators of hair/skins/clothing they may have to use live models as a lure so people can see the actual product in use. Pictures are great, but there is no substitue for being able to cam all the way around and zoom in.

I don't think XStreet is going to replace in-world shopping by a long shot - but it will replace the badly gamed system of the current Search by allowing people to preview the wares before they TP to a random store on the list. What it will allow a shopper to do is quickly narrow down the list of places that they want an up close and personal look at.

Or for those whose communities have embraced it while they haven't. Voice has been extremely divisive, splitting communities down the middle into those who prefer (or even demand) voice, and those who want nothing to do with it.As I noted in another thread, I got ejected and banned for just typing "/me can't do voice, I don't have a mic." (which happened to be true, I had to buy a USB audio dongle just to get sound back on my Wintendo).

And of course you hit the nail square on the head there.

I don't plan on giving up in store shopping anytime soon. I've never shopped any other way in SL, the going from shop to shop is part of exploring for me.

Wow I am sorry to hear that happened to you but as I understand it only a small proportion of SL residents are actually using voice most of the time - is this not true? Certainly I have yet to meet anyone who speaks only in voice - it is rare (except at infohubs) for me to even meet a person using voice at that time. Could be my timezone though I suppose.

I guess it depends on whether the commission beats the teir they'll lose.
You could be right. Personally, I spend more time than that screwing around in XStreet to find a product, but of course they may well fix the many ludicrous idiocies in the Sextreat site, and make it actually good.
No, yo misunderstand. I wouldn't be moving to XStreet to shut down my store, I would be shutting down my store because I was forced to move to XStreet... because I wasn't getting sales in-world.
They'd have to change the policy on XStreet first. Last I checked you'd get banned on XStreet if you used your XS listing to direct people to your store.

Some groups have embraced it, some reject it, some are mixed. None of the people are "only speaking in voice", but of course they're not transcribing what they say in voice and many people pretty much ignore chat when they're in voice so the effect is the same.

That may be policy but I see many items that have been listed for a long time with slurls and other ways of writing the location of their inworld store listed.

Not true. I've had links to my stores up for years. At least half of the listings there provide a SLURL to the in-world store.

Also, plenty of people raise their price on XStreet by 5% to cover the additional transaction fee.

Missed this quote!
I used the Onrez viewer about 90% of the time, theres nothing dumbed about it...it has almost all the same functionality as the current SL viewer. The only difference is the layout of the "buttons" and 1 or 2 of the main menu options are named slightly different.

ORLY? So I've been unnecessarily paranoid?

I don't do it for my products but then I tend to stick to the rules of the services I use. I consider it to morally reprehensible to use a service and not play by their rules. If I were not to like their rules enough then I would simply not use the service.

Non-scientific quickie survey:


6 paid ads on the front page - 5 of them have a SLURL to an in-world store.

Links to in-world stores are within the guidelines. Links to other commerce services are not.
http://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=22

Hmmm well there you go, I had only been told by others that it was disallowed and so followed suit. That'll teach me not to check lol. I believed it because it made a lot of sense I suppose.

Anyway - Woot! I get to change my listings.

Thanks Isablan

There are some drawbacks with XStreet, which will need ironing out before they decide to intergrate XStreet into SL viewer.....particualrly the comments and discussion sections, which have been known to be used to slate off rival products through comments & rankings for that product. It has been used that way at times and it would be tenfold worst if it's accesssible inside SL viewer.

Assuming a 32-bit color depth, I believe the correct formula would be 256^2 x 2^32, or just over 1,125 trillion combinations.

If you roll off about 75% of that figure to account for pixel/color combinations that would either be indistinguishable from one another to the human eye or would make the eye bleed, and you still end up with a rather large number of unique combinations from which a designer can choose, at least from a purely mathematical standpoint.

But, let's go back to my theory that, as a system matures, the number of significant technological improvements to it become fewer. It can be stated that the number and frequency of radical changes to a system is exponentially inversely proportional to the system's age. With that in mind, and with no changes to the system on the horizon that will have much of an effect on clothing designs, consider this: If a nice outfit I bought last year is still technologically current even if not fashionably current, and if that outfit was sold mod/trans, then what is to stop me from applying a new texture to it, tweaking it a bit, and reselling it?

Nothing, and you have just replaced all the parts that make an outfit unique anyway so in essence it would be your own creation.

EDIT: Though why anyone would do this is beyond me when they could generate their own clothing layers and do the same thing without any real work involved - then they would be listed as creator too.

I agree; this would be a really, really dumb idea.

Forcing everyone to sell their creations as mod/trans as Briana and her "I've-been-in-SL-since-alpha-so-I-know-everything-and-you-don't" ilk so desperately want, will harm the market. The degree to which the market would be harmed is obviously debatable, but harm will occur.

Moving XLStreet (or any other web-commerce business model) directly into SL's search engine will not just harm the market; it will destroy it, and take SL with it. It would make no sense whatsoever to maintain a "brick-and-mortar" presence in-world; no sense maintaining the sims, paying tier on them, and so on. The land market would implode, in-world businesses would be wiped out, and and SL, if it survives, would just be a gigantic bedroom community.

But, hey, that's just worst-case scenario.