The Killer App for SL

Here it is! Just in time to declare Pixeleen Mistral the reporter of the year for being the first to understood and cover it, and Kage Seraph the avatar of the year for inventing it.

The Elemental, a vehicle, like 100 other geeky vehicles in SL you might not have noticed or even wished to have on SL's bumpy sim-seams, is the vehicle for something much more important: the ability to do amazing killer viral marketing in virtual worlds -- which are going to be much more important to RL in about five minutes.

I'm kinda pinching myself, watching history be made.

Elemental Viral Marketing in the Metaverse

It's like Hellen Keller learning to spell "water" -- suddenly she is no longer stuck in a black well of silence and can communicate with others because her teacher, Annie, has broken through the wall.

Being able to eye-hand point-click and buy and/or receive -- that frees people from being dependent on land, groups, IMs, etc. The kind of freedom everyone has sought with frustration for years in a world that is open-ended and creative, but like a sea of black wells.

So now people can click and get. They don't have to see something, ask the avatar where they got it, depend on their memory, or fuss with picks and find a store that might have relocated, or whatever. They don't have to fight lag in a store or club, but essentially be at the longest, largest Tupperware Party in the world. Of course, third-party sites were supposed to do this for us -- then they didn't, quite, because people like to see things in the round, and look at stuff 3-D and try on stuff.

Free of land -- which will have tremendous repercussions and will be greeted, of course, with great glee by those who hate land.

That is, groups are one important way to fight free of the 40-avatar limit (or 160 limit) on
sims -- you can have thousands at once in groups. The URL on the media tab is another way, if you have big enough shoutcast servers. And land will still remain as important living and gathering places to have people and things even to do the viral clicking on.

But what people are looking for is a way to make the click from avatar to avatar spread in significant ways with less friction across the silent expaness of SL where there is no mass media. And here it is!

As you can see from this article in the SLH, Kage Seraph, a noted scripter in SL, has figured out how to make viral marketing work differently -- you see a vehicle you like at a friend's house, you click on the vehicle to buy it with a HUD -- not by having permissions set on it and buying it through the SL object-buy mode in the client, not by going to a store, but just by clicking on the object itself and getting a HUD to buy it and have it delivered right there to you. That enables updates, tracking of customer data, etc.

I'm also jumping ahead of myself here, too, because I think that if you can make a HUD click up from an object, you can make one click up from an avatar, too, that she might pre-load with information about where she got her clothes or home.

I've posted more at the Herald about the problems I see with the greed that might surround this, if it is not open-sourced as a script -- I view it as a public utlity that should be open sourced, and not sold for ridiculous sums, or put as a commission type of thing like the old monopolist rental scripts of Moonshine Herbst and Hank Ramos.

I hope the Lindens don't GOM this.

Comments

[Yumi Murakami]

I can't see this being too effective. There are major difficulties involved in getting paid for things distributed this way.

[Khamon]

The Second Life Herald site isn't working for me.

[Prokofy Neva]

well it worked ok for Pixeleen? I mean? What are the major difficulties? lag between servers? if it can work from a third-party site, why not from a HUD?

I'm also still not getting the permissions-debited thing as

Anyway, I could be just drinking the Kool-Aid, but sometimes, somebody has to believe in what is possible or it will never be possible. I guess the ultimate to me is to be able to click on someone and get their clothes to buy. I find it a nuisance that even clothes I did buy, I can't identify who they were made by.

[Prokofy Neva]

Khamon, people complain constantly about that. It's a mystery as it has no bandwidth used up or anything anyone can tell about, Walker has been asked about it a million times. IE seems to deal less better than Firefox.

[Frans Charming]

Distribution like this isn't very new, but not done that much. The added update support does make it much more powerfull though.

The problem that i see with this setup for sales is that the owner have to give debit permissions to the machine every time they rez it. Otherwise the creator won't be paid. Now you can make it so, that if you don't give debit permission it can't be sold.

In a nutshell it won't be as easily transferable and viral as it is now.

But you can device other business models around a free item though. He could put a small advert signs on the sides of the vehicles. And sell/rent the advert space.

Or have this model as free, like it is. And make it possible to buy a more advanced version through the HUD. This also would need the debit permission, but you are more likely to give them when you need to do it if you want to buy something.

But don't get me wrong, it is a cool thing! =)

[Frans Charming]

Oh i see on SLHerald you already discussed to points. Just disregard them. ;)

[Prokofy Neva]

I thought the debit permissions was a function of having a money-taking object that provided refunds. Like a rento is paid, and then if the person refunds, it will draw back from my account.

Why can't you just take the blue screen generated by the debit permissions command, and have it say "Pay Creator $100" instead of "grant debit permissions" which scares people. This is a matter of merely changing the text of what is on there.

Please explain.

I think even without decals on the side, you can distribute some sort of item that becomes the loss leader.

I do think that more could be done to work out the purchasing.

[Ace Albion]

I'd have to see this inworld but I can't see a problem.

You click the thing, it gives you a widget (a HUD in this case). You attach/rez/whatever the widget, and that's scripted to say "let me pay Scripter Creator Guy X from your money?" and you agree, and click a buy button or something and some other inworld cube sends you a shiny bike like slex/slb does. Then you delete/forget the widget except to check for updates maybe.

It's like clicking on something and being given a notecard and landmark, but cutting out the "legwork" of going to the SLURL.

[Ace Albion]

Oh yes, Prokofy- that scary "this object wants permission to steal all your money" blue box is pretty unnerving even with things like vendors that you trust when you rez them.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, it always unnerves people, but I wonder if it really is about the copy itself -- if it had a more reassuring and normal message than "allow this object to take money" -- and if it say "pay creator $ from you account?" it would create a different psychology of use.

[Yumi Murakami]

You can't change what's written in the blue box because it's hard-wired into Second Life. Scripts can put up their own blue boxes, it's true, but if you want to be able to manipulate money from a script then there's one exact command you must use to ask for permission, and it always produces exactly the same blue box.

[Timeless Prototype]

Viral distribution like this is not new, check my comment about the Sound Cloud I made back in 24 Jan 2005.
http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2006/12/elemental_viral.html#comment-26709548

[Prokofy Neva]

We didn't say viral distribution is new, duh, and that has been made clear; it's viral distribution THIS WAY. You are just like FIC oldbies Cristiano, Timeless, in being unable to accept someone else coming along and doing it better. It's one of the nastiest things about SL, the creator-fascism and conservativism.

[Timeless Prototype]

Not at all, I like Kage and think the product rules. It's all about the ideas.

[Joshua Nightshade]

No Prok, you're one of the nastiest things about SL.

[Ace Albion]

Did anyone raise a suggestion with LL for a "Pay Avatar X L$YYY One time Yes/No?" kind of permissions function? That would open up all kinds of further uses for this stuff. Or maybe they'd rather everyone does it through slex/slb these days.

[Prokofy Neva]

>Or maybe they'd rather everyone does it through slex/slb these days.

Yeah, that could well be it.

Why not ask Cory Linden at the Town Hall tomorrow?

[Khamon]

I'm afeared to allow a script to pay money out of my account unless it's an alt account with a controlled amount of cash. Considering the hackability of LSL and the platform in general, it seems foolish to grant such a permission on my main.

Prokofy do your automated rental boxes operate on an alt that retains a limited amount of money? Or might a hacker one day walk away with a months worth of unconverted cash? The Lindens will not prosecute the offender or retrieve your funds. As far as they're concerned, such transactions are perfectly valid.