OMG youve got to see this!!!!

I agree that you have a point with the Google analogy. But I'm not sure if SL can be compared to the 2D internet in this regard.
SL, unlike the internet, started out with a system to prevent unauthorized copying of digital content. Images in SL are often part of a sales product, not only illustration material. A website owner is fully aware that their images can easily be copied. Right-click, save as... there is no permission system. No one would upload high quality textures if they intend to sell them.

Web designers know how to work around this problem. While they want Google to point to their website, they often don't want to share specific content with every search engine. I use PHP to display the images of my online gallery, to prevent Google from finding hardcoded HTML links. Rather to protect minors from my rendered artwork than to protect the artwork itself. Others use newer technologies like Adobe's Flash for a minimum of protection.



I forgot that I changed it to "sell contents", since copies of locked-down items are automatically locked down when the buyer rezzes them. Some customers complained about being unable to move the objects.



I'm in two minds about this. I think that search engines are a great help for the customer, if they really find all grid content. But you said that only unscripted "Linden vendors" (sell copy / sell content) would be found yet. Personally, I use Linden vendors whenever possible, but a lot of shops use scripted vendors only.
Perhaps it would be possible to search for prims that have their "On left click" property set to "pay"; lots of scripted vendors are configured this way to be newbie-friendly. But that still leaves out many networked vendor systems and might also find tip jars and slot machines.

Another thing: the search ranking. The built-in classifieds and places search is SL's version of Google, and a source of capital for LL. Larger shops usually spend more on their search ranking than on land fees, and clubs do everything to keep their traffic up. For me, an expensive classified ad is, in a way, a sign of quality; it shows that the business owner either sells products that are favored by the SL community and therefore sell well, or is convinced enough of her/his product to invest in advertisements.

The SLBrowser doesn't seem to have a ranking system, other than alphabetical. Ad prices and traffic doesn't matter. Aside from that, the search result is based on the name of prims that are set to sell something, which favors the unimaginative seller. I mean, how many clothing designers call their product "red dress" or "high heels"? With Google, I can easily find a dress called "Fiesta" or shoes with the name "Monique", if the product description contains a description of the article. But in SL, the product desription is usually contained within a texture, rendered onto the vendor.

Sorry for being a critic, but if the SLBrowser becomes the favorite search method in SL, business owners will want to know how they can get a good search rank or have their products listed at all. So far the answer is to use unscripted vendors only, and to rename "Midnight Dream" in "Elegant black dress consisting of black skirt and black halter top with black elbow gloves", which will also be the name of the folder in the customer's inventory.

Aleister, I think you are asking too much from a service which already been exposed as a free service. What you ask, could only be supported by either a RL company seeking a revenue, or 24/7 dedicated enthusiast who do it for a hobby.

Just because a company decides to spend a fortune on their advertising budget, doesn't automatically mean their goods are any good. It's quite refreshing to see an unbiased style search engine, that hasn't been influienced by the size of a cheque (check) book. We get far too much of that in RL, for the time being SL is a relatively free market.

You could place a semi-transparent prim over the viewing window which will slightly cloud the image, or have a alpha with the words 'Protected Image' overlaying the viewing window, much the same way that ebay images apply their stamp.

It looks an excellent product, wish you success with it.

There should be an easier solution for the image problem:

Start with an opt-in and over time vendors opted-in to displaying their textures will sell more than those who don't; resulting in more and more agreeing to have their textures used to the point where they wonder why they have opt-in in the first place.

At that point, scrap the opt-in and you end with the way it currently works.

AWM Mars - yes, that is exactly how the watermark works in our 2.0 version, due out soon.

Kitty, I don't think opt-in would ever work. We tried something like it first, but you can't get critical mass of products that way. The fact that we have 1.2 million products now is a big draw for end users, and that will encourage more usage and more products to be listed. Its the only way to go. In effect, by setting a product "for sale" you are opting in. (Reminder: we only show images from objects that are Sell Contents, and only list Sell Contents and Sell Copy).

Aleister - thanks for your thoghtful comments. I do think that the watermark will solve the image problem, and we are working to get it deployed as soon as we can. (But keep in mind that SL's digital content protection system is really not protection at all... it is just a false appearance of protection.. as far as I can tell, the only real protection on SL is copyright, because images can be easily downloaded by alternative versions of the open-source browser.)

Vendors: yes, i have experimented with identifing vendors suggest; that's a great idea. But it is a tricky technical problem gettting it completely right. Again, i'm just doing this in my spare time, at this point for the love of SL. I hope I get it figured out soon.

As for ranking, you are absolutely right! Its essential. You have a good point that SL's ranking system is better than nothing. But I don't think it is the right model, as AWM points out. So far we are focusing on listing all products. We are working on a real Google-like ranking system, but that will take a little more time.

Felix

By the way, if you want to visit us, or get your SLBrowser (free)... we are located at

SLBrowser Headquarters

Felix

Hi. Can you provide a list of the names of your bots?

Mari

Mari,

My business partner runs the bots, and she has never told me their names. I can find out what they are (she's travelling right now, but I asked her to read this forum). But I'm curious why you want to know. Do you want to allow them onto restricted propertly? Or ban them? Or just recognize them? Or something else?

Felix

Hi all. I'm Felix's partner on SLBrowser and yes, I'm on vacation in RL, with periods when I don't even have internet connection First, a word on SLBrowser; then the names of the bots.

We want to provide a Google-like search engine for SL. Classifieds and paid advertisement all have their place and purpose, but there is no question that automatic crawling of content, as well as ranking by means of automatically measuring certain measurable features (rather than ranking by the number of digits on a pay check), has revolutionized the way people think about finding stuff on the web. That's what we're doing here. SL (and virtual worlds in general) are just in the beginning, so a lot of this still feels like the wild west.

One of those sensitive points has to do with permissions/privacy/access control. Our bots go wherever avatars can go, they "see" whatever avatars can see. If I, Diva Canto, can land inside your bedroom, so can our bots. On purpose, we're only listing part of what the bots can actually detect: that part that we think is useful for the public to know and that preserves residents' privacy and property. I think we're doing a good job with that -- but that's up to the residents to tell us! Please let us know if we're listing something that we shouldn't. With 1.3 million things, and only a couple of months of existence, we're bound to make mistakes -- like for example the textures, which, as Felix explained, will be fixed in the next version. (We could try to make the argument that copyright is your only protection, since, technically, all of your precious textures can be easily copied by hackers; but we're not going there. We are placing a watermark on the textures that will render them useless to copy)

About the bots. Below are their names. As a matter of principle, we don't want to list anything whose owners don't want to make public. Feel free to ban our bots from your property if you don't want your products listed. For everyone else, please say 'hi' when they show up (Don't try to strike a conversation, though, they're pretty dumb
Here they are:

Computer Allen
Collaboration Yoshikawa
Cyberr Kidd
Savvy Lisle
Studious Jacobus
Web Debevec
Hack Swindlehurst
Innova Despres
IP Benelli

You do realize that "Hide Selected" works on individual prims and on HUDs? It would be trivial to simply hide the overlay prim.

Unless you watermark the actual texture, there's no point in doing something that only gives the illusion of protection (ignoring the point that anyone could simply snapshot the original texture in the store obviously).

Thanks you. This is the type of concern for privacy I wish all developers in SL expressed. Perhaps one day it will be so.

One thing that might be helpful in the privacy area, would be to make sure your listings do not include the name of the person in any case where the location might possibly be their private (in SL terms) home or other zone. You might choose to give merchants that option if they desire it and it works for you, but it really needs to be strictly opt-in. One of the problems with the Sheepbot website was that one could scan it for recognizable names of individual avatars. Heaven for certain types of griefers - and, far more sinister, for stalkers. Not so good for the griefed - or the stalked. In the latter case, there could conceivably be quite grave RL repercussions.

No, I had never heard of hide selected and didn't know that it works on individual prims. Kitty, thanks for letting me know. I guess Linden labs has made it pretty much impossible for us to even put a band-aid on this problem. This is frustrating. We'll use the watermark anyway, to emphasize that copying images is not legal.

On the other hand, it would probably take a developer a day to release an open-source version of the browser that included a "save selected texture" menu. I bet that somebody has done it already. My take on this is that most of the security feature provides by SL don't do much... other than give people a false sense of security. This is because the underlying system is fairly open. Technology has done this before: its very easy to stick a book into the right kind of copy machine and make a thousand copies. But that doesn't mean you can do it legally.

Felix

This is one of those things that we really weren't sure what to do. If you look at the bright side, it's great to be able to find people's (public) places; if you look at the dark side, then you end up with the scenarios you're describing. We'll take the note of caution, based on people's dislike of Sheepbot.

Note, though, that all the info we deal with is provided by the SL servers to anyone who cares to interface with them. Since we think we understand the complex social networking situations that make SL different from the web, we are trying to carve the "right" cut on all that information. But griefers and stalkers with sufficient programming skills can *easily* get to the info provided by the SL servers.

Felix and I are very much looking forward for a version of SL that handles security and privacy at the infrastructure level. As is right now, it's just way too easy for developers to intrude.

This forum isn't for general discussion; there are many Resident Sites where this discussion is appropriate — Resident Answers is for Resident-to-Resident help.

Source: AR

wait they reopened this after it was locked?....ohhhhhhhhhhhh

I wrote to the moderator about shutting this down. I orginally thought i was being a little extreme, but then I found out we aren't welcome here. I was stunned.

It was nice of him to unlock it so that i can post a forwarding message. I've created a new topic at RCEUniverse:
http://rceuniverse.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6100

See you there.

-Felix

What is a shill?

A "S" on a Hill no?

Its not fun being called a shill, is it.

Shill: One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.

They think you are working for me. People make lots of assumptions here.

Felix

Oh, thanks for the reply.

well they were wrong, i didnt even know who you are until you posted and considering i havent bought anything from you im not even really a customer.

I was just impressed that i could search for a blue suit and find it very quickly rather than ending up in casinos, clubs and malls where what i want is near impossible to find.

I thought it was a good way to search for things so im sorry if i pissed anyone off by starting this thread, perhaps i should have included a question in my post (please dont ban me).

well anyway, thanks for the great search tool.

im loving my new blue suit by the way

Yes we know the sort of attachments you like!!!!

Ok I did not know this.......Thank you for explaining

Usagi

I might be the user Felix is talking about. I must say that I was deeply concerned when I saw my textures displayed in SLBrowser a few months ago. That's why I immediately contacted the creators. I was surprised they all came to my shop almost instantly. Felix and his partners were very understanding and serious about the texture problem and promised a fix back then. They have held their word and will include a watermark, like they said they would. With the watermark SLBrowser will be a great tool to search and (especially) tp exactly where you want. In the meantime the creators try to protect the texture interests of other content creators. It's refreshing.

Personally I like the MetaMart Hud better. The only people who are selling items are people who want the objects there, it uses no bots, you upload what you want there within SL and post UIID number of the image.
Of course you have to transfer lindens to create account and be near the warehouse to use the HUD to shop but I think its convient.
Also you can rate and put comments about items you've bought.

Thanks for the comment. I know that Metamart has a new beta version out, which looks interesting. Rating and comments are important features. We are also getting ready to release our 2.0 product, but... more about that some other time.

We tried the the approach you suggest, requiring sellers to put their products into our system. It is a lot of work for sellers because you have to build your store twice (and mess around with UUIDs) and set up a merchant account, as you mention.

We decided that bots work better. With our current system, the products just show up automatically and are updated automatically. Crawlers and bots are a proven, successful technology (Google uses them .

We also think that sending customers to the actual SL store is a good thing. You might find something else you are interested in, or meet somebody. That's what SL is about, after all. So we offer a teleport directly to the product. That way, we support the SL store itself and generate traffic for the seller.

Felix