Second Life Viewer Managed Marketplace Update

At this weeks Third Party Developers’ (TPD) UG meeting Brooke Linden provided an update on Viewer Managed Marketplace (VMM).

gentle bride
gentle bride by mmm lisichka, on Flickr

The VMM beta has launched on the main grid. They are limiting access to the beta for now. Also, VMM is currently only in English. In a couple of weeks the localization (multi-language support) will be in place. You can get more information about VMM in the wiki’s VMM FAQ. Additional information is in the Knowledge Base: VMM. And there is technical information on the VMM API here. 

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Second Life Money Exchange

In August of 2009 I wrote an article on the Linden Currency Exchange for Second Life™. See: XStreetSL Currency Exchange Tutorial and Second Life Currency Exchange Extended. Back then things were a bit different. There was competition in the Second Life money market. The US government has ended that. Now, Linden Lab is the keeper of L$ and the only company officially converting L$ to RL currencies. There are black markets in Lindens and there is a reason they are called black markets.

Buy Sell Orders 2014-15
Buy Sell Orders 2014-15

What has not changed is people not understanding currency or currency markets. Someone in the Answers section of the SL Forum was asking why their Sell L$1/US$1 order had  not been completed when other similar orders had been. 

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Market Place 2014-2

Shug Maitland has an article up pointing to Why moving a shop to Marketplace ‘hurts’ the SL economy. She prefers to shop in-world, where she can see what she is buying and demo it. I suspect many of us have similar preferences.

She uses the Market Place as an index and search engine for Second Life. In-world search sucks so badly we have little choice. That says something when we consider how bad the Market Place search is. I often end up using Google via a manual search command like: site:marketplace.secondlife.com gesture vendor 

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Market Place Change

Yesterday a new post appeared on the Second Life™ Blog: New Merchant Requirement. The Lab is making Payment Information a requirement to sell on the Market Place (MP).

MP New Requirement
MP New Requirement

Making this requirement should stop some of the churn of accounts made by griefers and copyboters.

This will be hard on some international users of SL. Getting verified and having a means to move funds in and out of SL is easy for those of us in the USA. It’s more difficult in many countries.

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Second Life Market Place Update 2013-29

The Second Life™Market Place (MP) has been a source of pain and frustration for many. For myself I rate it as an annoyance to my Second Life experience. I continually hope they will get it fixed and working well. But, keeping track of what is going on with the MP is enough of a challenge I tend to ignore it and follow Darrius Gothly’s coverage over at dgp4sl.com.

Fraud by: Peter Blanchard @ Flickr
Fraud by: Peter Blanchard @ Flickr

Today I see he has a new article out: Wanton and Willful Fraud by Linden Lab. Darrius tends to rant. But, his rants are well explained and backed up by his experience.

He does say that the new Direct Delivery (DD) service of the MP is a good thing and generally works better than the Magic Boxes ever did.

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Lab Makes L$ Exchange Announcement

There is a new post on the Second Life™ blog announcing: More Options for Buying Linden Dollars. Quoting: With a credit card, you can purchase L$ on the LindeX using 27 different currencies, including EUR, GBP, JPY, and AUD. If you don’t have a credit card, you can also use PayPal, which can be connected directly … Read more