That graph looks pretty impessive huh? It shows the US Dollars spent in Second Life over last 24 hoursat $1,726,930 as of 9:00am PST today (10th Nov 2006).
Well, it turns out that something many people has thought is true – the daily dollar amount which Linden Lab tout as spent is actually (simply) total transactions in world.
This ‘spike/cliff’ was caused by an anonymous resident who wrote a script which passed some Linden dollars back and forth between two avatars. After an hour of running it had generated over one million Linden dollars of transactions, but no money was spent. The avatars which this was running on ended up with the same amount they started with. Zero sum.
I’m sure this is bound to come up at the next Town Hall Meeting with Linden CEO Philip Rosedale/Linden on November 16th. Many companies that arrive in SL are doing so due to all this ‘real’ money being ‘spent’ – hmmm. I wander what they will think. People will want better figures – like the ‘over one million residents’ stat. We want to know how many unique and ACTIVE users there are. Linden record the ‘MAC’ address of your network card, so they have the data.
James Corbett, ‘The Eirepreneur’ hits the nail on the head about customer service in Second Life, while he was at the blogHUD station. So many times when I have been around wanting to buy something, I have found myself in vast emporiums with no one around to help me. I often right-click something I like, then IM the creator, or view their profile to see where there might be help or more info about their skills and products.
I have to say, since re-re-reading James’ post, I’m really touched. Stuff like that hits a nerve. And it’s so encouraging. Thanks for that Truly.
While I sit here alone in a flat in London working on my real life work, I sometimes leave ‘Koz Farina’ sat up in ‘the Lab’ at The RSS Platform (where I live in SL) on my laptop running SL – the place I sit is actually a virtual representation of the actual room I am sat in in the real world! (only ALOT tidier!) I always keep my mini-map open to see it anyone visits the platform or blogHUD area. When I do see someone there, I tend to pop down, say hello, and ask people if they have any questions about the product. Then I say I’ll leave them alone and tell them where I am if they want me. A bit like in a real shop – I hate shop assistants that hovver around around as you make your choices – but they should always be there to help you if you need them.
I usually make a sale or two from this small amount of effort. Just giving them the feeling that someone actually cares about the product and their experience with it.
The great thing about SL is the ‘virtual proximity’ you can feel while in another’s ‘presence’ – it helps you to ‘connect’ in some odd way. It ‘s GOOD and so rewarding.
Another thing about launching a virtual product, marketing it (to a point) and supporting the users and listening to feedback for new features in new releases, is that it is SUCH GREAT EXPERIENCE for the REAL world! From concept to prototype, to alpha testing, to release and actually selling it – then supporting and devloping it. It’s a wonderful experience – and experience that I want to carry over into my real world efforts.
The lifecyles are the same.
By the way – people still tend to ask me ‘what is a CREATEC?’ When I tell them that’s what I am: Here’s a diagram I did last year to help illustrate (part of) what I now do (it needs updating – I have evolved somewhat !:) )
A createc uses both the left and right halves of the brain, often in equal measure. It enables a total overview of a system. Front-end to back-end. From the engine to the bodywork and paintjob. A createc understands the whole system. One can communcate with designers as readily as programmers.
In this day and age – I believe it’s a REQUIREMENT.
Just found this great video of a a presentation (wmv) from Linden Labs’ Cory Ondrejka (Cory Linden) and Jim Purbrick (Babbage Linden) from the Microsoft Lang.NET Conference in August – called ‘Building Reality : User-Creation and Scripting in Second Life’.
It’s mostly the slides and audio, but well worth it for the introduction into SL from Cory and lead in to the world of scripting ‘stuff’ in LSL, the Linden Scripting Language. Then Jim goes on to get very technicial, talking about how LSL will be moving over to use a more robust technology called MONO (which has a coool logo!) and will be 50-150x faster than the current system, using less than 50% of the memory!
Babbage gives a quick demo at the end (from about 70mins) to show (for the first time in public) a Second Life client running LSL AND MONO. He starts by showing script running as MONO spitting out Fibonacci numbers, which it does VERY quickly. Then he unchecks a box in the scripting editor to run it as LSL and it’s veeeery slow. Lag could be a thing of the past.
[AND, at about 38 minutes, Cory shows the blogHUD as an example! Yay to that!!! ]
Funny. At the end, someone in the audience sees that Babbage has a special menu item and asks, “What is ‘God’?” – Babbage answers, “God is me!” LOL.
I can’t promise this will be on all the time, as it was a quick test idea that I have thought about for a few months and got round to doing once I got more memory for the MacMini (running Windows).
Let’s see how this holds up – this blog doesn’t get many readers, so off you go! All ten eleven of ya
I was just looking at a list of virtual worlds and games out there and was looking at Entropia Universe‘s site. It seems like they have a real world debit card available which lets their users withdraw their in world currency as real world cold hard cash from any ATM!
I think that’s a great idea and one which I think Linden Lab should look at doing with their own Linden Dollar in Second Life. How cool would that be!? “yeah.. put in on my PrimCard”
That graph looks pretty impessive huh? It shows the US Dollars spent in Second Life over last 24 hours at $1,726,930 as of 9:00am PST today (10th Nov 2006).
Truly.
While I sit here alone in a flat in London working on 
) in SL too!