GOM down / 03.42 PST

For good? Temporary?

I guess we're about to find out.

Anyone know what the price of a L$ is right now?

Hmmmm......
Bit worrying. They have US$229 of my money.
I was waiting until the new Paypal month so as to be allowed to transfer it out without breaking my $500/month paypal non-commercial inpayment limit.

Perhaps I have been a little foolish - anyone know what those "registration" and "trust" type icons on their site were ?

Too early to panic - all the evidence is that they are two very honest and trustworthy individuals............

Blaze: it was about $3.56 a short time ago.

...who are on their way to Tijuana. With $0.42 of my own money, too. I wonder if they can even get a margarita down there for that much.

I kid, of course. I love the GOM guys, and I trust that everything will be resolved satisfactorily.

A 404 error is a "page not found" that would mean that someone redirected the domain to the wrong page or someone deleted the main page. Frankly that'd be worse than the current problem.

Right now we're getting a connection refused error, which sounds like the computer might be down, or an ISP glitch, or a router burp, or who knows what. I wouldn't panic yet. The time to panic is when you see a website turn into one of those "we're squatting on the domain" search pages.

They have $177 of my money I really need right now with the gas prices being ungodly :/

Looks like its up again.

Why would you try to start a panic. Websites go down all the time. GOM has been around for a while, and would not just "pack up and leave." Even Secondlife has gone down a few times.

With respect, Dnate, this is exactly the sort of response we need to eliminate from the forums. You are attributing an intention to another poster which you cannoy possibly know he holds, and which cannot possibly be deduced by a reasonable man from his posting.
He is merely expressing concern. There is some background to this, in that we know that the operators of GOM are angry, upset with LL, have stated that they are making virtually no money from their labor-intensive operation. Didn't they say they had only made US1200 each from their $2.4m turnover ?
Given all these circumstances, it is not unreasonable for people to begin to feel a little edgy. I am confident that if these two individuals threw in the towel, they would return everyones outstanding funds, but this would not mean we would not bewail their loss.

Personally, I think they have a good future, and should be able to make much, much more money than the truly ludicrous return they report to date.

In fact, when their site went down, I actually got my son (who is a talented professional creator of e-commerce websites), to have a look at what might be involved in plugging the gap myself.

Hopefully it looks like it won't be needed. Anyway, he is too busy making money in RL.

But you can look at what the person has posted in the past, and you can see what they intentions are. I can point to many people and predict what kind of posts they will have. It is not hard to see the true intentions of a post. I am sure by now many of you will know what I am going to post before I post it. It is true, it was early for me and maybe I would have just been better not posting, but I still stand by what i said. (I could be wrong, it has happened once before, but in this case I think someone was just stirring the GOM pot)

Dnate, if you figure out what my true intentions are, I'll give you 10K L$, because trust me, you'd be the first.

You are a stange person blaze. I think sometimes you just like to post for posting sakes. You make a lot of very good posts, but you also like to stir things up. You would be a great case study.

Sorry, I'll try to be more predictable next time.

No blaze, you are great just the way you are, don't change

Isn't that illeagle? or does he work for the government?

The poor guy has a wife and new baby to support. Isn't it amazing what people will do under pressure

I think GOM will still be around at least as a corporation, whether it remains in SL is too be seen and I suspect that decision will be made when the ingame exchange is opened. Jamie did clarify his comments on the GOM Forums, that essentially he would still be working on GOM projects. So I'm expecting GOM to potentially diversify away from SL and into other areas.

Or at least start to implement some of the missing features like Pay Pal Mass Pay and ability to accept credit cards.

And maybe offer mortgages? In conjunction with a land company ? Put that big idle balance judiciously to work ? If they don't do it someone else will, and they have that idle cash balance sitting there begging to be used, they have a fine reputation for honesty and service, they even have some established RL credibility. Why do thye seem to be waiting for all these advantages to erode, if they feel so strongly about protecting their position ?

LL pre-notified everyone of their intentions re the currency market well in advance. Did GOM actually believe they already had such monopoly power that is was they who could dictate collaboration terms, not the other way round ?

Just as LL has pre-notified the land barons that the huge tier discount on which they depend may well go soon. But will they scream "foul" when the predicted happens, and demand compensation from (effectively) all of us? Get your earplugs ready. The GOM shouting is just a little dry run.

Oh dear - I'm getting grumpier by the hour. Must be the heat.

I think it depends on what the position is or whether GOM decides to diversify away from SL in some form or another. In the past Jamie has said that GOM was all about market style trading, they weren't interested in becoming an IGE or a Land Baron. And they still wanted to expand to not only just SL but other virtual currencies or commodities. The GOM system was set up to be quite neutral in that respect.

So maybe mortgages could be a good fit, it depends whether GOM wants to invest more time in specific SL ventures. And in the current circumstances I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't. But well I'm going to wait to see how things pan out.

At the same time other ideas are around which could turn GOM into a much more serious trading exchange tool. Take on board some of the ideas in the Forex or Real Life stock markets. Things like Margin Trading, Shorting, Options, CFD's, maybe even Derivatives or being able to pair currencies so its not just the USD.

Absolutely agree. No entrepreneur can stand still while his advantage erodes. If he is in it for real, he has to contingency plan and innovate. The opportunities are legion. GOM don't seem to have done either for a while, so all the complaining seems to me totally inappropriate, particularly in view of the long advance notification they had. In RL most of us get none.

I noticed that. So what has prevented them getting some other currencies on board all this time I wonder ? Would be good for them, good for us.

They use to trade in just about everything else.

I actually came into GOM via trading currency from another game and from there GOM introduced me to Second Life. So GOM has done its fair share of attracting new users to SL as well

Unfortunately if I recall they were hit by a very large paypal scam and they shut down everything except the SL Exchange. I managed to find some old news about it here:
http://strange2.mcmaster.ca/~mactavis/weblog/research/000423.html

Now that gives me some more context, Hair.
Thanks.