Temp Agency

As we all know, SL and LSL are defficient in many ways.

However, we'd like to be able to do a certain number of things in SL in order to run our businesses.

For example, we'd like to buy land automatically, clean up prims, invite someone into a group, set land to edit, set land to no edit, add people to a ban list, etc etc.

I am thinking of starting up a temp agency that will basically be a ticketing system. You can submit a ticket (clear up these prims, buy this land, etc).

Anyone who would be perform these tickets would be 'bonded', and as the Temp Agency we would be willing to assume a certain amount of liability assuming various safety precautions are properly taken.

Obviously, if we didn't, word would get around and people would not trust the service.

A particularly industrious and well organized user could possibly blow through a significant amount of tickets in a very short time. At one every 2 minutes(let's say all in a super mall), for example, that would be 30 in an hour. If you were paying them 100-200 L$ per item, that could be up to 6000 or 24$ USD / hour. Not a great wage, but for some people it would make sense.

Note that it's not like you're going to need to be clearing off that many prims per Customer. Probably 1 in 10. So if you're making 100 L$ profit per customer, the overhead in wages would be 10%.

Oh yes, and course, there would be a secure LSL API (via llEmail, your own personal send to address and hashing for extra security) which would add tickets to the System

Question - would you use a service like this? How would you use it?

I think that's a creative idea, and yes I would use that. I think, as you say, there are rights issues. Most of the things I would need done would require rights that I couldn't give a temp. Even a bonded one. But there ARE things I can think of.

If you broaden your thoughts a little and include things like shopping service (go buy me a tophat), inspections, go take a picture of X, security check, etc.

I suggest you go for it!

Buster

hehe, personal shoppers, love it

sounds like a great idea, and something that might even merit a Herald story once it gets going (let me know), but I'd just point out one thing:

you might want to call it something other than a "temp agency" even if it acts that way. Calling it a Bonded Valet Service or something will give people more confidence in your agents. Temp smacks too much of Noob to me.

Good luck!

I wouldn't use it and I run malls and rentals.

It sounds too complicated and sounds like I have to take too many risks.

I guess I wish the people who think up brilliant electronic/mathematical/scripting/etc solutions to "game problems" would come out of geekworld a little bit and try to do these things in "real life" themselves through trial and error, struggles with the poorly-functioning game space, etc.

Those services don't take as long as you suggest and doing them provides personal interactivity with customers and helps build the personal network of a customer base, finding out what customers need and want, helping them make decisions, etc.

The new patch interestingly allows you to individual count prims on your land of all your tenants. I can now pull up about-land and objects menus and see the name of every individual and their prim count instantly, such as to bill them the extra for the prims, notify them right away of overage, or boot them. And these matters can be arenas of conflict and can lose customers, so I personally wouldn't want to automate them.

OMG, we can agree on some things, Pro........ and this is no APril Fools joke

I find that personal interaction doesn't scale very well, unfortunately. It might work if you're volume is small, but as your volume gets pretty high you need to delegate.

You need to learn LSL, Prok It would help you quite a bit.

Things that don't scale well when they leave out the individual might have a run for awhile, oh, like the Soviet Union ran for 75 years, and have lots of big science projects and go to the moon and stuff, but then they die, because they wear out people, and people are important to pay attention to.

I think you have never had to deal with irate customers furious that you blew their prims or booted them from the group. I know I hate when mall owners do this to me, and they do it with their groovay automated systems which suck anyway because they don't have enough flexibilty.

No, blaze, I don't "need" to learn LSL. What I do with your precious LSL is that I use it to fill any empty spaces my inventory seems to need : ) But seriously, I just cut and paste it it into stuff, and keep cutting and pasting until it works. This system has worked for me. You don't have to understand a thing that is written there. Just cut and paste and see if it works LOL.

Seriously, I don't have to learn the theory of internal combustion to drive my car. I don't need to understand the chemical formulas for the exchange of blood gases to take an aspirin for my headache. I don't need to know wave theory in physics or understand electrical engineering to watch TV or turn on a light. When you can understand that I don't "need" to learn LSL because I can pay someone $500 or $1500 to do it for me, we will have a world. Your failure to understand that and your insistence that I "need" to learn LSL is what keeps this world crippled.

This is the mindset that cripples most of the business world with bloat and doubles (often triples) cost of doing business.

You see, there is a lie in play here. The lie being 'You don't have to understand X to do Y.'

While it appears to be true on the face and you might even get some mileage out of doing it that way, the reality is that you take two to three times longer to accomplish the same result as someone who does know X would take. And your result is more likely to require constant recurrent work to keep it working for you... especially if there are external factors that will effect how well your solution operates.

The software and technology markets in particular have made multibillions by way of this fallacy, and it is so common today that even here it rears its ugly head.

No, Prof -- you don't 'need' to learn anything. But if you did, you'd be doing it faster, more effectively, with less trouble and less upkeep.

Of course, if spending a little time now to save all the time you waste over the life of your efforts doesn't matter to you, then you likely don't care about spending two to three times as long to get a result that is guaranteed to be half or less as good. So whatever, eh?