Transaction black hole at Second Life Marketplace

In the push to migrate everything out of XStreet SL to the Second Life Marketplace, some major problems have cropped up. One of the biggest is the lack of a clear trail between the customer's purchase, the delivery of the item and payment of the merchant.

A pJira has been opened on it. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-2920.

The problem is all transactions go through an intermediary account - Marketplace Linden. It's similar to how the XStreet SL system worked but the reporting is not right. The transaction ID the customer gets is NOT the same as what happens when the merchant is paid. If you look through the Jira issue, Sassy Romano has done a great job of showing where things get lost.

I know the Linden Lab programmers are working long and hard on SL Marketplace but seriously, it looks to me like the migration has been pushed too fast too soon. While I had the occasional delivery glitches with XStreet SL, I could solve them fairly easily because there was a clear trail between the transaction as reported via email and the Magic box delivery. Now it's sort of all muddled together.

Several merchants are reporting not even seeing the money going into their accounts -- which is very disturbing.

LL, you have to fix this before shutting off XStreet.

Early Adopters of Facebook

I just got these from a friend (thanks Ben) and they have to be the funniest things I've read in weeks! I don't know who did these originally but kudos to them!

New release from Inga Wind - Connie

A sort of 1920's can-can look meets gypsy girl! Whatever you call it, c'est très jolie and it shows once again that Inga really has her design-style firmly on the girly-girl side of fashion.

As far as fitting goes, I had to adjust both the prim skirt (make it a big bigger for my butt) and move the ruffles up. Both simple to do and no stress. As always with Inga's outfits, the textures match perfectly and the blend from system to prims is almost seamless.

NOTE: If you join Inga's inworld group, Connie is yours for $300. Otherwise, it's $450. Outfit comes with matching shoes and the belt is built into the prim skirt. Hair orchid and choker are my own accessories.

Emerald Viewer to be blocked from Second Life

As of Wednesday, September 8, 10:00 am, all versions of the Emerald Viewer will be blocked from accessing Second Life. This includes the last release. Read Joe Linden's blog post about it. Anyone logging in to SL or with a valid email contact should have also received direct notice from Linden Lab about the change.

This is truly sad in many respects because Emerald held such promise and was, for a long time, my viewer of choice for building, creating and ♥ playing ♥ in Second Life. However, it does show the limitations of open source projects especially when they are tied to people with shady records in Second Life.

Options

If you must have an Emerald clone going forward, then the Phoenix Viewer (http://phoenixviewer.com/) might be a good option. The development team, composed of some Emerald folks with some new members, has promised complete transparency. This is not a guarantee of a drama-less future however. The team is large and the Emerald project has always been very ambitious. So who knows?

Other options are Imprudence (which I'm using) or Kirstens Viewer (which I like and KirstenLee is awesomeness).  If you want the last version of Emerald itself compiled from "known trusted sources" by LordGregGreg Back, the go here.

If you use an official viewer, I'd lean toward Snowglobe or maybe the old SL version 1.23 viewer. While Viewer 2.1 has greatly improved texture loading speed over the old lines, the UI is just so arcane and difficult, it may well lead to short-term insanity. If you feel like being on the bleeding edge, then you can play with Project Snowstorm AKA the Development Viewer which is also available from the SL main viewer download page.

That is all -- back to your regularly scheduled viewer drama my dahlings!

Second Life viewer drama

I think I'm about to go crazy with viewer madness. Can anything be more strange than all the drama unfolding with Emerald? Seriously, I leave SL for a few weeks and return to a warning from Linden Lab about Emerald being non-compliant. WTH??

Running off to the official Emerald website, I found a new version available for download. WTH again! Then I traipse over to the Modular Systems blog, where I found Arabella Steadham's somewhat overwrought poetic note as an end to Emerald (http://blog.modularsystems.sl/2010/09/01/the-end/). Eek.

Then I came across a notecard from one of the groups I belong to in SL which was a quote from Jessica Lyon's final good-byes with her saga about being locked out of the developer site and so on. Uggghh!

I had actually heard rumblings about problems with the Emerald team a few months back so, being a cautious kitty, I installed Imprudence and started playing with it. I dearly missed some of Emerald's features but when push comes to shove, I really do NOT want to risk my password or other nonsense to an untrusted team. Plus, if even half the stories about one of the Emerald devs logging IP info were true, well, you get the picture. :(

Now the latest just came in from another group notice that Jessica is reforming the development team under the name Phoenix! Woohoo! Added drama! Read here!

At least I know one of the names on the Phoenix developer list -- Kitty Barnett. She seems like a good sort. And Lord Greg Greg has promised (really, really) that his days of griefiing are behind him.

OK, so what should a Snickitty do? Like most of you, I think I'll just wait and see. If things work out, so be it. If not, I sure hope Viewer 2 gets its act together because trust is sadly lacking on many fronts. Right now I'm sticking to Imprudence.

UPDATE: OK, please tell me. Why does Jessica Lyon list her name variously as Jessicai Lyon, Jessica Lyon and Jessica Lyons depending on which site you're viewing. On the Phoenix site, she is Jessicai. On the Emerald site she was Jessica Lyons and Lyon. Color her confused? And me too?

New releases from Inga Wind

Inga Wind just released two new color ways for her very stylish "Jackie" and "Kelly" outfits. Jackie in orange is very striking. Ready for business but with a nod to fun! Kelly in navy is what I might call "cocktail caberet". It sort of has a French can-can grrl look but still modern and tres chic. $250L and $300L respectively.

SLURL to: Inga Wind Clothing.

Hope for Second Life Marketplace?

I had a long chat with Brodesky Linden last night which I think was productive and somewhat eye-opening. Brodesky corrected me on a few things I put in my previous blog post while giving me some sense of what Linden Lab plans for Second Life Marketplace. He also took some of my suggestions to heart and indicated that you might see them in the next iteration of the SL Marketplace beta. I'm not going to detail some of the things that were a bit "internal" to the Lab but I will tell you that I thought Brodesky was being as honest and straight with me as he possibly could. One thing he did make clear was that the 30% layoff at the Lab has hit them all really hard. We were chatting up to around 11:00 pm SLT and Brodesky was still working (via laptop at a cafe). Most of the development folks are working 18-hour days. :(

One thing Brodesky mentioned was that, while he might not have wanted to put the beta out so soon, the Lab did convert over 1.2 million listings and perhaps 30K of those didn't come over correctly. But of course, the 30K that got fouled up generated a lot of negative posts and a ton of tickets.

Also, he told me there are 100 merchants of all different sizes participating in the design & beta of the Marketplace -- but the reason you don't know what their feedback is or how things are being incorporated is because they're all under NDAs.

So here we go on some specrfics (I hope I got all these correct):

1. Formatting for listings. The "no BBCode" statement is a final, however that doesn't mean that some form of editor for offering limited formatting might not be included. Bullets (& numbering??) may be added right off. Bolding and italics maybe. However, it's pretty clear that LL is not going to back away from the uniform look and feel they want in the marketplace.
2. Custom fields. My comment was that if you couldn't do a lot of formatting for a listing, you needed to make up for it more fields for information. This seemed like a good idea to Brodesky -- we'll see where it goes.
3. Color / size options. Not sure we really pinned this down but it sounds like there are plans to implement something along this line.
4. Picture formats. I was not aware that 512x512 is now allowed and will not be scaled.
5. Picture limitations. The limit of 8 probably won't change in the short term however they are looking into some way of addressing texture vendors and their unique problems. Coverflow was mentioned as a possible solution (I have no idea what that really is). :)
6. Object ID and updates. Many of concerns voiced by creators like me who have versioned objects seem to have been heard. They are looking at some way of handling these uniquely. The primary concern at the Lab seems to be preventing "gaming" through bait and switch of high rated items with junk. Personally I've never come across this in all my years of shopping OnRez, SLX and XStreet so I'm not sure if it isn't a solution in search of a real problems. Regardless, I was pretty adamant that we needed SOME way of preserving good ratings and reviews for items that simply change via bug fixes or added features. One issue is that LL would really like to get rid of Magic Boxes. However, that's what allows you to sub a product in name only.
7. Search. Haha, we never got around to discussing it.
8. Networked vendors. There seems to be a split internally about what to do about these. No conclusion here. 
9. Storefronts. The new URLs will consolidate all of a merchant's items. And the product listings will be SEO-friendly. We also discussed having something like  /snickerssnook or /snickers.snook also point to all of the merchant's items. However, due to uniqueness requirements, no custom store names for this. :(
10. Video vs. GIF89a. Clearly the Lab-rats don't like GIF89a for product demos. It's a design issue, not technical. However, they are open to embedding video from a trusted site (like YouTube) in listings to give better product information. I thought may they could allow ONE animated GIF and all others must be static formats.
11. More categories -- suggestions wanted! Finally, Brodesky challenged little old me to suggest more categories that could be included in the Marketplace. I'm not sure I'm the best for this. So, if you have any suggestions for categories, post your list up here and I'll pass them along. Or I'm sure Brodesky would take them in a notecard -- or a JIRA could be created.
12. Multiple categories. I hit this point several times. We need a way to have ONE product appear in more than one category. I don't care if the Lab charges a premium for each extra one. It would cut down some clutter AND increase sales. I could see limiting it to a maximum of three. However, category abuse should be a reportable offense.
13. Abusive reviews. We both agreed that some way of flagging abusive or inappropriate reviews needs to be found. I know there are lots of ways to handle this -- from a flagging system to "this review was helpful or not" system. I think a merchant advisory board could handle this.

So there you have it. Very long chat and hopefully things are being nudged in a better direction. That said, the proof is always in the pudding, or prims, or plywood cube. Until things actually happen, you're never 100% convinced. But I'm a shade more optimistic now. :)