OMG youve got to see this!!!!

My friend just gave me this new attachment call SLbrowser and all i have to say is WOW!!!

you need to get one of these.

i can actually find what i want when i go shopping without nearly as much effort as the built in search.

I don't know, I somehow prefer the classifieds search that way I can browse all shops, not only those who support such attachments.

Is "support(ing) such attachments" a requirement for this? More info please

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Somehow the shops will need to register their wares for this attachment, and pay a fee for the service. Unless it somehow uses data collected with a bot.

Well, I realize that is a logical assumption, but I'd like to know more and see whether that's true. Even if it were done by a bot, I can imagine several ways that could be done as an opt-in system that would not be painful to merchants, and still not raise the "Red flag of privacy".

Relevant search results can be a very powerful tool for merchants, this has been proven conclusively, so as a merchant I'm always wondering about how to best market my business. The in-world classifieds search is absolutely NOT an example of good or even marginally useful search, it's simply the default bare minimum currently provided by the system.

But mostly I'm just curious... Anyone know where to actually find out about this thing?

[EDIT] I found this page, seems to be it: http://slbrowser.com/

From the notecard:

I know Meta Mart has such a HUD that you can browse. You can find it here, http://metaversemart.com/index.php

I had heard of a SL browser and thought it was a part of SLBoutique's thing.

Here's a blog post about it, also: http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.com/search/label/metadata

Ah, our friends the SheepBot people...

I'm still confused. How does it build its database of products? And, I read the blog post, will the browser not work on land where you cannot run scripts or will it not find items for sale on that land?

I wouldn't want to raise that flag. If such a system ads my shop automatically, I'm all for it and don't care how they gather the data. Free advertising is always nice.




Thanks for the link. The article sounds as if the thingy automatically scans for matching content. Would be nice if it did.




As I understood it, it will only not run on script-disabled land, like any other scripted attachment.

OMG! A shill!!

That it is, however interesting it might be to me personally...

Presumably the mods will move the thread to the Shill forum?

Do you mean SLB? The HUD doesn't seem to be related to them directly, at first glance.


Apparently both the SLBrowser and Meta Mart search were announced back in April, according to this blog post at SLNN: http://www.slnn.com/article/article45/

Raudf said SLB, I said SheepBot...really had nothing to do with the HUD, I just wanted to post a cute sheepie image. lol

On a complete tangent, has anyone seen the new Scion ads with the Sheeple and the Little Deviants? They're sort of disturbing...

Saw them right before the previews at the movie theater... They are disturbing. Poor decpitated sheep..

They are very disturbing!

And, kind of funny

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I just tested the free HUD and saw some problems with it. The interface is nicely done, it's easy to use and, most important, it finds my wares but it lists everything that is for sale and teleports the user to the location of the vendor or sales object, without making any difference between private homes and shops. It teleported me into a private living room when I followed a link to something called "Great Dane 5000", where a security orb informed me that my presence was unwanted. Could have been a private bedroom as well.

But what I find worse: it displays other people's textures. Usually it uses the vendor texture, but in case of objects that sell copies of themselves it steals the next best surface texture.
The textures are displayed at a size of 390 x 300, sufficient quality to re-upload them at 256 x 256. Example:



So, there's a product that uses one of my textures, for whatever purpose. This texture is not for sale, and somehow I can't recall giving the product creator permission to use it. It looks like this product circumvents SL's built-in DRM system in order to grab texture UUIDs, a process of questionable legality.

O.o

Bummer I was really hoping for something that wouldn't have raised those kinds of concerns.

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Well crappies. I was anxious to try it thinking it would be a better search engine.

(what is that texture anyway? Reminds me of those commercials that warn you of dust mites..)

Coins Only looks good at 512 x 512, on a prim with added shininess.

I'm not really worried that someone could steal textures. The vendor textures are advertising material only and are put to good use by this tool. And the items that sell copies of themselves are just hodgepodge I created mainly for my own use. But I dislike that someone deliberately uses other people's textures as if copyrights didn't exist. Reminds me a bit of the copybot.

Talked briefly to Felix Wakmann, one of the two people involved. They appear to have nothing to do with Electric Sheep Company. They do use a searchbot - possibly as many as nine of them - and the service is free to both customer and vendor. Didn't press him on his business model.

It does provide an elegantly simple solution to one problem with the sheepbot: Wakmann says his service will not list an item that is marked "sell original," but only "sell copy," which makes the whole sheepbot theft problem go away (something ESC could have done with the sheepbot but did not and VERY obstinately would not add the line or two of code it would take). He says they are working on another difficulty: listing multiple products sold from a single vendor; theirs is one product per "box" (selling object) so far.

OTOH, I did not have a chance to deal much with some of the other problems the sheepbot raises; larger privacy concerns among them. Technologically, he admitted, it is difficult for a bot to distinguish a showroom from a bedroom.

EDIT: Seeing the other posts just listed, yes, he brought up the texture problem himself. Says he is trying to figure out a solution for this problem, perhaps involving "watermarking." FWIW texture theft seems a quite general problem in SL. School's out on this part of that problem so far.

One encouraging sign I did note before he had to log off: A refreshing absence of the sort of high-handed arrogance we have seen elsewhere coupled with an acknowledgment that things in SL have an ethical aspect as well as a technological one.

I'm cautiously hopeful that this case might turn into something useful, and that maybe, just maybe, problems with it might be fixable without having to go on the warpath.

Dang, there I go being optimistic again. http://forums.secondlife.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

lol, there's a whole interactive site where you can beat up on the Sheeple yourself...their blood is bright green.

http://www.littledeviant.com/

Big time.

Then the "Great Dane 5000" that sat in a private living room protected by a security orb must have been set to "sell copy". I checked it because of the similiraty of names with one of my products and expected to find a shop.



Not difficult but impossible.



There is no texture problem: he created a tool that grabs texture UUIDs without caring for the copyright. That's a legal aspect of SL, not only an ethical one. Of course that is a general problem in SL, just as shoplifting is a general issue of RL stores. If he is aware of the legal / ethical aspects - why create it it this way and only bother to fix it if someone complains? It would work fine without a visual preview.

I am one of the creators of SLBrowser. My development partner is Diva Canto.

I'm trying to read all the messages here.. but here is a lot. First of all, i want to point out that RocketMan Rainmaker is not on my friend list, and I have never met him. So I don't think this posting counts as a shill. I met Har Fairwether at my headquarters today, and we had a nice discussion.

We have nothing to do with Electric Sheep. Our entire system is implemented by two people in their spare time.

We have over 1.2 million products and places listed from over 10,000 sims. We do not require any fee by sellers, and we don't require anyone to register their store. We work like Google does, searching for objects that have been marked for sale.

We only include objects that are marked Sell Copy or Sell Contents. We don't provide listings for Sell Original products, because that is an easy way to steal something that was intended as a personal transfer. We do not index Vendors right now, although we are working on various ways to do that. The images are always linked directly to your product.

We have been aware of the texture problem since a user told us about it, and we immediately started working on a fix. I am curious how Google Image deals with copyright, since they take images from all over and display them. Does anybody know? Our next version of the browser, due out very soon, will include a watermark on every image we display. Thus you cannot use our system to take a quick snapshot of somebody else's texture. I didn't show this feature in action to Har, so it is not surprising that he thought it was something we were just thinking about... but we have already implemented watermarking, it is not released yet.

EDIT: We only show images from products that are marked Sell Contents. This is normally used to create a mini-vendor with promotional information on the side. I checked the "Dragon Hoard" and it is marked Sell Contents, not Sell Copy as suggested by the owner. But this particular product uses a copy of the product itself as the "box"; that's why we show the texture.

I hope that people will work with us to help improve search in SL. We view SL as a amazing opportuntity to experiment and explore new possibilities. We look forward to hearing from you.

Felix Wakmann