[19:41] Linden Lab: Hey, Eloh... about the 1,495 "sales" of your freebies on Xstreet over the last 90 or so days...
[19:41] Eloh Eliot: Ja, I know! Awesome, right?
[19:42] Linden Lab: Well, yeah... except that every time one of your freebies sells, it costs us $0.50 in fees and God kills a puppy.
[19:42] Eloh Eliot: T_T
[19:42] Eloh Eliot: I'm sorry! I didn't know. I'll take them down right now!
[19:42] Linden Lab: Cool, thanks for understanding!
[19:43] Eloh Eliot: np! Oh, can I have a bear? ^^
Oh, can I have a bear?
Sunday, November 22, 2009
This is the conversation that should have happened and needs to happen.
Well, maaaybe, but the thing is, they purchased XStreet and set up the business model themselves. They should have taken into account things like lame freebies that take up space, and extremely popular freebies, and freebies that ought to be there as a community service. Just having freebies there got people to use the service and familiarize themselves with it. A lot of companies provide a free service in order to attract users. No reason this model wouldn't work for Xstreet.
My contention is that the usefulness of Xstreet was hampered by the UI itself and weak search parameters, not that they weren't charging enough.
Hm, no, the thing is rather: IF freebies are really that expensive on server resources, then they are expensive on server resources in-world, too! And since Xstreet makes up just about 10% of all transactions in SL, it's not the most logical point to start when you want to save resources.
ALSO, the complaint was, that the cost of freebies would have to be distributed among all users through the fees, so what are we doing now? We RAISE the fees and get rid of freebies, too.
Maybe all this is a clear course of thought for a Linden. To me, it rather sounds like 'we do, because we can, and we want to, because we can't get enough'.
"then they are expensive on server resources in-world, too! " - Embers
Yes but those are one and the same servers providing both streams of content so I do not see what the issue is. They are more than fit when balanced and maintained properly to handle more than what sl currently accommodates. It is a matter of staff organization and project management that would resolve the imbalance :)) Passing the buck on to the average consumer I do not think is the answer to this, its like taxing the poor for being poor, as if it is not a global market where people who earn a wide range of incomes can feel like they are part of the same lifestyle. The way it was before this idea came to be, was that a person from a less developed or poorer country, who earns a pittance had the same chances to live the lifestyle as a high earning person from another part of the world. This is kinda ruining the concept, to allow people to live their dreams, and sadly even sl is becoming pay to play where once it was possible to earn your way without bringing rl money into it. I have managed thus far and might find myself out of business soon because of it. The ingenuity of giving and promoting through the sharing of your hard work by gifting people with it is bein frowned upon as if our time and energy is not comparable to the 50 cents they are losing each time we share with someone. Sad isnt it.
Regards
Fel
I have some thoughts on all this at my blog. http://snickitty.blogspot.com/2009/11/some-new-ideas-for-xstreetsl.html
Everyone knows what LL needs to do in order to truly fix the system: fix their search engine.
There is one problem with this solution: even if they commit to it now, it won't get fixed overnight. Look at what happened with DeviantART: eventually they had to turn searches to subscriber only just to cut down on traffic usage because their current search engine was taking so much away from them. If LL runs in and implements a search engine that is no better than what DA had, the problem will only be magnified. They need to make sure whatever fix they make to the engine actually IS a proper fix, but this takes time and money.
I'm of the opinion that they need to start that NOW. The cost of waiting to fix it, or hope that the situation improves with another solution even temporarily is more costly than NOT doing it. DevART was able to make it work, LL can too I'm sure.
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