Second Life upgrade in progress, business and social update #1

Wednesday is upgrade day at Linden Lab and currently the Second Life servers are down for the newest upgrade. This pause in the action is a good chance to query the group and see how everybody is doing with their business plans. I’ll get this process rolling.

Second Life + Web interaction
Currently I’m about 90% done on the SL side with my business idea but only about 25% done on the website side. I discovered a somewhat significant bug the other day that I need to work on and resolve. I was hoping to launch everything this week but now it looks like it won’t be until next week before I can get an early version of the working program up. I have done some limited testing and I’ve shown a few other people and have a few test machines up in SL. I have done some of the web work as well

Building / storefront / land
I have a generic store built and standing by. Need to add furniture and some other beautification inside, but the outside of the store is complete and placed about where I want it on the land.

Marketing
I’ve shared the idea and shown an early prototype to our group and a few people. I haven’t done any other pre-marketing yet, although I have a short list of people I’d like to personally invite to look at it. Not spammy, I’m going to write personalized emails to people that I believe would be interested in this product/service I’ll (hopefully) soon be providing.

Social planning
The only social events in SL I’ve planned and executed so far have been the weekly Script School radio shows at the Chalet. I’m planning a bachelor party for Weirdharold next Monday night at 7pm PST.

I haven’t spent much time socializing and chatting inside SL, nor met that many people. Most my time has been spent learning about what is there (and a lot of that experience is being chronicled here at VTOR). This SL research is invaluable.

SL and VTOR evangelism
Yesterday during the tech chat I spent time talking up SL to someone new. She fell into the whole “game” trap (thinking SL is just a game) but I think we were able to talk her through that. I have never seen SL as a game, unlike Everquest, WoW and other MMO offerings where there is more emphasis on leveling and experience. My attitude on learning new things is you never stop learning and that blends well with the expanse SL universe.

As for VTOR, I’ve tired to do my best to interest and excite the rest of the group in this blog and sharing their experiences. Jvastine plans to be updating this blog soon I believe with a few items of interest and I’m still working on JP. Yesterdy JohnnyRS joined VTOR and hopefully we’ll see his intro post soon. I’m trying not to be too much of a pest to the group about their need to share, share, share, but somebody has to be the VTOR cheerleader. For now, that’s me, but it would be nice to see other group members work into this role so that I could focus more on completing my SL-to-RL business and thus being able to share the inner workings here.

Ok, I’ve shared where I’m currently at in SL. It doesn’t need to be as detailed as mine, but if you write it down and put in some time commitments than it will help hold you to something. Who’s next?