Metaplace

Metaplace will be closing January 1, 2010 after a fair attempt at producing a 2.5D platform.  They didn’t seem to put much effort into community building; a few tools were there, but no incentive to participate.  I created an account around the time its release hit SLU forums and tried my hand at building a garden “world.”  The look and feel didn’t particularly appeal to me.  The idea of selling assets for game coins didn’t either.  If I’m going to work as a virtual world hobbiest, it has to at least pay for itself with real currency.  Otherwise, these environments only serve as 3D Facebooks and aren’t really worth replacing melted video cards annually.  Below are a couple of pictures for the sake of recording:

Painting the Ground: wish we had this feature in Second Life

Three copies of the Acer each displaying one of the textures

Akismet

Comments are enabled for the last four (five including this one) posts. The Akismet Wordpress plugin is supposed to clear them through a SPAM database. A name and email address are also required though I haven’t tested to see if the addresses have to be legitimate. I really really hope this works because discussion is the true heart of a blog, especially one geared around a business determined to provide items that help people construct their ideal virtual landscapes. Drop us a line!

Site Updates

I’m finally off my duff and updating this site with product descriptions and a full explanation of the FGM menu.  The History page also needs some work but will suffice for now.  Comments would be stellar; but I can’t figure out how to allow them without having to moderate hundreds of SPAM advertisements per legitimate entry.  If anyone has ideas for that, or for the site in general, feel free to drop me a line via inworld IM or a PM at SLUniverse.

Another project I’m thinking to tackle is a renovation of the gardens.  As much fun as exploration can be, people have a hard time finding the specific plants they’re looking for.  So my current idea is to cresent some land around the outer edge of the sim on the three water sides and leave the “lagoon” open to Fairchang Village so people can boat through easily.  I might even be able to bridge the land to the museum on the west side of the sim as there’s no way to boat through that corner anyway.

XStreetSL

I listed the new fruit dropping trees on XStreetSL during the month of October and the first two weeks in November to test the marketing aspect of the service.  Only two (2) sales were processed from the vendor during the six week period.  The FGM Apple Tree was featured during the second and fourth weeks of October as well as, to be fair, the first week in November.  The description contained links to the other fruit dropping trees that were also listed on the site.

Homepage views during the featured weeks totaled 26,050.  Actual item views during the entire six week period totaled 93.  If each of the item views had generated the sale of one single tree, they would’ve generated the equivalent of a little better than half my total sales.  In fact, fifty-eight percent of my total sales were made during weeks that no items were featured and only 18 views were registered.  This leads me to believe that having items listed on XStreetSL, and available in the associated vendor, is not going to be a successful marketing point for me.  I had planned, however, to list and cross link the rest of my products, perhaps even build a few discounted packs of trees.  The one time effort might attract a few customers yeah?

Then Linden Lab decided to complicate the relationship by imposing various types of fees on top of the raw commission already in place.  I don’t mind giving up a bit of commission on actual sales; but I’m simply not going to work to maintain a balance in my own account to cover listing charges.  The test proved it not worth that much trouble to implement and maintain.  So when the fees are imposed, I’ll likely just take the listings down and delete the inworld vendor.

Figments of Our Imagination

Pathfinder canceled his regularly scheduled inworld office hour today due to “RL meetings all day today.”  This word came to us via a Twitter posting half-way through the hour.  While it’s frustrating enough that we’re relegated to fantasy-world residential status instead of being perceived, and served, as genuine customers of the Lab; it’s a sad realization that the employees don’t consider us real people giving up real time to attend what we view as real meetings with them.  There must be a reason behind the years of concentrated effort toward convincing the real world to view Second Life accounts as figments of our imagination rather than as real people.  Or is it possible that the perception results from the clumsy lack of business like professionalism pervasive in the ranks?  We can’t give up though; Second Life is still the only game in town.  We can only hope that consistency between what’s said and what’s true will one day be normal in the Lab.