AvaLine Should Be FREE for PREMIUM ACCOUNT HOLDERS

Linden Lab keeps threatening to make a premium account worth more than a free account. The only difference between a premium account and a free account now is that if I do not pay my premium account for 60 days LL will delete my entire inventory while the free account can store 40,000 items on the server until the end of time.

Premium accounts and Island holders should receive AvaLine as part of their monthly fees. Come on Linden Lab, put your money where your mouth is.

This refers to this Blog post:
https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2009/08/19/bye-bye-beta-avaline-dial-an-avatar-is-now-available-to-all-avatars

Therein lies one of the problems with benefits of Premium - what is a benefit to one is not worth an L$ to another. I have no desire for AvaLine -- free or not.

What is Avaline?

Yeah, WTF is Avaline?

The URL implies some kind of phone service? I can't think of a single reason why I might want that.

Have to agree, this would go a long way towards encouraging people to become premium.

I'm already premium, not sure why really anymore, I don't own mainland now, the stipend I don't even notice, etc, etc.

Avaline, RL phone -> SL Voice if I understand right. (ie people outside SL can ring you IN SL.)

Uhmm...yeah. No thanks.

Are people really *that* lazy?

I agree they should give you something more for paying them monthly though..

I agree whole heartedly that the premium account should be value enhanced.
Not entirely sure how many people need to get calls as their AV, but in general it is definitely a step in the right direction if they did.

What I would personally like to see is a offline building tools kit provided free for premium members.

The technology is out there now to save stuff to your HD. Those seem specially designed for getting them to other grids. I think a way for LL to get out in front of that
kind of thing would be to have available its own offline builder. There could even be a free version for people who have never even joined SL yet. They could start learning to build stuff but would not be able to upload it untill they joined SL as a premium member.

Apologies if it is too far off the subject.

ETA- I would be willing to bet that for those who just dont want or need to go premium
that quite a few of them would be willing to pay a nominal price for the priveledge.

Interesting idea but if LL did this then some people who are premium members would demand the ability to opt out and pay less.

The perk for Premium accounts will be a free virtual answering machine so you can screen your SL phone calls, too.

imagine getting a call from a telemarketer.

feeling evil, you string the guy along as long as possible until you tell him that he just wasted about an hour on a person that doesnt even exist in RL...

OH, lots of things should be improved for premiums:
-Inventory of a premium should definitely NOT get deleted after downgrading
-Premiums could be allowed more groups
-Premiums could be offered uploads at a discount, like 5L$ instead of 10L$
-Premiums could be offered new features a month or two before the rest of the world
-Premiums could be sent a random Linden bear once a year

I'm sure we could make this list several pages long, full of feature ideas that would be useful gimmicks, without reducing the value of normal residents.

more marketing tools for the corps.

we did that already.
ll even asked us to.
they are 'looking into it'.

They do? They've asked for suggestiojns, but M Linden has said he doesn't give a damn about Premium accounts, so don't expect them to do anything about it.

If I had Avaline, I'd almost pay to get it turned off. I can't think of a feature of SL I'd find less valuable... NOT excluding lag or griefers.

i am pretty sure that i'm not getting avaline at any point in the foreseeable future.

simple reason:
i have voice disabled, since it lags down SL even more than normal, and works unreliable at its best moments.

when i really want to voice with someone... skype. that's as bad a memory hog as SL with voice on, but at least it doesnt break out of the blue, and it doesnt break when you TP or cross a sim border, and it doesnt take 5-10 minutes to reconnect either.

Another user here that does not use voice and could care less about hooking up voip to sl, I already have voip as my regular phone service, people that need to talk to me can find my phone number, if you don't know my RL identity I don't want you calling me, it's that simple
and unlike avaline my voip is free for incomming calls, I only pay for outgoing calls.

my LAND LINE is free for all incoming calls from anywhere, and for all outgoing calls to landlines in all of europe and the american continent.
well, not "free" as in "free beer"... more like, "all charges for calls to those destinations are already included in the base fee".

I'd call that flat fee, a good service non the less but I don't make enough phonecalls to warrent it, I actualy mean that I don't pay a base fee at all only the outgoing calls at a rate cheaper then land line.

These are really such basic stuff that could be included, which would make many more ppl consider getting premium. wonder why LL don't do it.

well, over here in germany you can't really get a landline w/o base fee, and you can'T get DSL w/o getting the landline, so the best option is the "all in one fatpack", including flat fee landline calls... the "flat fee to america" is an addon option that i got for my wife

I doubt LL would get much uptake from Premium members, but I don't think that's why they'd be reluctant to make it part of the Premium package. Rather, I suspect they have a completely unrealistic view of AVAline's marketability, so they'd not want to lose that (imaginary) revenue.

What fuels their fantasies about this service is their horrid overestimate of voice usage. In response to T's recent blog post (https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2009/08/12/the-second-life-economy--second-quarter-2009-in-detail), I commented (https://blogs.secondlife.com/message/7954#7954):And so that leads to scary-bad technical decisions, too, as witness T's SLCC presentation (http://dusanwriter.com/index.php/2009/08/17/tom-hales-presentation-at-slcc) in which the new Viewer 2009 / SL 2.0 is described as taking us from a chat interface that has voice functionality added, to a voice interface that has really good chat functionality. I have no idea what that actually means because the thing is still under wraps, and the demo was accompanied by a disclaimer that it now looks nothing like what was shown. Nonetheless, that emphasis on voice shows that they've been binge-drinking their own statistical Kool-Aid again.

What's most distressing about this whole AVAline thing is that LL thinks there's a market for it--and on top of their false reading of the voice-usage market, no doubt it's also targeting the imaginary business market to which all recent development has been directed.

It's one thing for them to squander all our tier money on this ridiculous vanity pursuit, but what's really a shame is the opportunity cost in lost calendar while the platform gets no updates relevant to its actual market.

Marketing students, take note: This is how you can destroy a company while moving steadily up its management ranks. Just engineer some "research" that confirms the board members' wildly delusional wet dreams.

The mistake is thinking that LL understands who their actual market is................. Time and again they have screwed over the normal SL user in pursuit of Corporations and Education. Never understanding that those two revenue streams will never amount to even 1% of what they make from Harry or Harriet Homeowner.

Holy Hairy Hanna's Horrible Hat, the blog comments are the most negative I've seen since... I don't know when. You think Linden Lab will notice?