Tag: SL

Bye bye XstreetSL

I’ve just removed all the products I’ve had for sale at XstreetSL. Since they’re about to change their policy, I’ve decided it’s time to stop using their services. It’s been fun while it lasted but now it’s over. I won’t have any reason to log in there anymore now. No more browsing for products, not more impulse items. I wonder if I’m the only one thinking like that. Only time will tell.

Changing the view

I’ve decided to stop doing everything I hate about SL and go back to doing everything I love. All the things connected to having a business are actually things I hate:

Having to decide what the best way is to advertise. Deciding where to rent a store or if I should own land. Agonizing over how much is cost for me to have land, when I’m having financial difficulties in RL. Deciding what rights the products should have and how the sales posters should look.

What I do love to do in SL is to meet nice people. I love to create things. Take snapshots of nice environments and to explore. I love the live music scene and to go to events. And I also love it when people like what I create. And it’s because of that I’ve decided to give away my products for free. I’ll stop selling them on Xstreetsl too. I’m still not certain of how I’ll do this because I don’t have a store in worlds and the freebies section in Xstreet is quite over crowded.

I have some ideas about how to do it. I thought I would give one thing away once a week. All free, not even for one linden. I could advertise them on the blog and then deliver them in worlds for those who contacts me. And you can “pay” me in pics of you using the product. Wearing the clothes or having the artwork or furniture in your house. That would make me so much happier than a few lindens.

I’ll give this some thought and I’m happy to get input from my readers about how to do this.

Apart from giving my things away, I’ll get back to exploring SL. I used to do that a lot, but I seem to have stopped doing it along the way somewhere. I’ll write about my “trips” here in the blog and post the Slurl so you all can go visit if you want. And I’ll start finding new and interesting artists too to go and listen to. Any suggestions?

Another update!

A while back I posted a help post in the xstreet forum and the response was almost overwhelming. I tried out most of the suggestions and I think I have the result of my efforts now. I posted 2 classifieds with SL and got 3 visits to my store from that. I had them a few weeks and payed 100 lindens for each. So, no more classifieds for me. Then I payed for a start box for an ad system. That didn’t give any visitor at all.

Someone was very generous to let me have a store for free. The result of that. No sales. Another one contacted me telling me about a good place to rent. I tried that and payed the rent for a few week. No sales there either. And no sales at all in my main store.

I rented a small store, very cheap before I asked in the forum and in that I actually sell a some. The profit covers the rent and a little more.

Another thing I tested was to pay extra to have one of my products to show on the first page at xstreet. I think the total views for that was 25 hits and 2 sales. And I didn’t get my money back from that.

I had land in SL that I really couldn’t afford. It’s on the main land so I have to have a premium account to keep it. And since I need to downgrade now it was important to sell the land. No one was interested so I had to lower the price more and more. In the end I managed to sell off half of it, but I almost didn’t get anything for it.

I know that other people can make a profit on the products they make in SL, but I can’t. I was hoping that I could change  that when I asked for help in the xstreet forum but it didn’t. Now the only thing I have left it to lower the cost I have for SL and with that all the fun will go away. It doesn’t help that there are some posters in the xstreet forum that seem to have taken upon themselves to make me sad.

I won’t stop playing in SL, but the fun is gone and I won’t stop reading and posting at the xstreet forum, but the fun is gone from that too. I’ll have a break (yes, again, I know) from both SL and the forum. Trying to charge my batteries and hope I’ll find it fun again to be there, to create things (which was the reason I came there).

I know after all my efforts that my products isn’t what people want, so why bother.

This is SL for you…

Mymble

I was at a beach in SL with my alt. She’s a tough looking girl and usually people don’t approach her. This time though a guy IMd her and at first I thought he needed help, but as it turned out it wasn’t that kind of help he was after ;). For some reason I found the encounter really hilarious.

[5:01] h. guy: hi mymble

[5:02] h. guy: are you in, making love?

[5:02] my alt: hi

[5:02] my alt: what do you mean?

[5:03] h. guy: fuck

[5:03] my alt: if that was an offer, no thanks

[5:03] h. guy: pitty

[5:03] h. guy: bye bye

[5:03] my alt: bye

Cool SL resource

When I checked stats for my blog today I noticed that the visitors had come from a new resource for SL blogs.  At least it’s new to me. They have put together a sort of   top list of  SL blogs and mine was on it. Not very high up,  but still:). Want to see if  your blog is on the list or check out other SL blogs, here’s the link:

http://www.secondeffects.com/2009/04/active-second-life-blogs-2009.html

The future is here

Eddie is only 4 years old and he spends every day in a virtual world. No, I’m not talking about the average computer game player, but the Artificial Intelligence created at Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Lab. Eddie is programmed to reason and to predict other people’s actions and has also passed a few reasoning tests. Eddie or really, Edd Hifeng, isn’t yet walking around in Second Life, but it’s possible to talk to him. When I tried to contact him the other day, he wasn’t online so I couldn’t meet him “face-to-face”. Imagine meeting this new lifeform in a way, a first contact.

The researchers of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute aren’t planning to leave little Eddie in the virtual world. They are working to bring him to us in real life. But first he’ll play in the 3D world of Second Life so he can grow and learn about how to be more like us. Eddie is part of a bigger project that Renselelaer is working on. It’s a holodec project like in the scifi series StarTrek. So our “first contact” might not be in Second Life, but in a holodec and a full size Eddie or someone else. The future awaits us and it looks really promising.

Finally…

… I can go back to SL. My computer crashed a while back and I wasn’t able to do anything really. I could access my email accounts but nothing more. It’s so frustrating when nothing works for you. But now I’m back and can go back to what I was doing before. Work with my store and hang out with my friens.

When worlds collide…

I have loved Second Life for a long time, for the people I met there and for the creative sides of it. Never seen the virtual world as somewhere to make money. On the contrary I’ve always felt that it’s a bit too much money and sex in SL for my taste. For those of you who have read my blog for a while knows I have a store in worlds and products at XstreetSL, but the main reason for that has always been the creative part. I love that people love my creations.

I’ve always been able to use SL as a place for recreation, where I can forget about Real Life for a while. But as RL problems got bigger, the harder it was to relax and forgot. Now I’m facing a big decision. Will I have to downgrade to a free account and sell my land or stay as it is. If I’ll do, I’ll have to find a way to earn enough in SL to keep the land. That means more work with new products, more advertising. Will I have time for that? Will it be enough? Or should I close my eyes and drive off towards the cliff that that will be there at some time.

Why can’t I just move in to SL?