Which Came First? Meta Card or Global Credit System
Maybe they are the same, maybe not - but if the Global Credit System is not the Metacard written of
The Metacard does seem to work differently than the Global Credit System - it requires merchants to accept the Metacard and they make it a point to say that they are waiving merchant fees for 6 months. Great. I love paying to accept money.
Its no secret that I am not a believer in credit cards much less virtual credit cards - but hey, I'm only one person. Maybe these credit card systems will pay off and we'll see people camping to pay their virtual credit card bills.
I'm tossing around the idea of whether accepting a virtual credit card would be worthwhile for myself and others. In the real world (brick and mortar), I know credit cards can be a real pain for merchants as far as fees. I wonder at systems that make both merchants and consumers pay, but then I'm not a high powered financial demigod. Or a member of the Metacard team, which does seem pretty transparent.
Of course, I probably wouldn't mind if everyone were paying me...
What will you do if your avatar gets a bad credit rating? I know what I would do...
It will certainly be interesting to see what happens with these credit card systems for Linden dollars - they are not real dollar credit cards from what I have read.
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would this not be subject to
would this not be subject to consumer credit lending laws.... oh sorry i forgot its not real money. I just can not believe that linden are doing this big push on the new 'how to do business' in secondlife and arent taking a stance on this. How long before someone from a real retailer in discussion says to them "wake up".
I have a new payment system its called PayME.... i am sketchy of things beyond the name though... any ideas for a product?
To avoid any chance of being credit blacklisted i have allready deleted my self and registered as MrFraud Oh.
Zal.
Linden Lab and Business
I think it is fair to say that Linden Lab is catering to what they believe is the majority of business related to Second Life, whereas the business within Second Life is not something that they are taking too seriously.
Bloomfield wrote in Worlds For Study: Invitation. Virtual Worlds for Studying Real-World Business (and Law, and Politics, and Sociology, and...) something along the lines of business within Second Life being a 'sliver'. That these businesses aren't deemed statistically important. Linden Lab is also on the record for saying that it doesn't want to make rules well defined.
It really is a pity that they do not see potential in SME within SL instead of corporate interest outside of SL.
I agree, the problem is that
I agree, the problem is that in the world of influencing. A very large number of those SME's within SL are actually people proto-typing, path finding and shaping on behalf of the coroporate interest "outside".
If you give these influences a bad experience the influence they will carry into the board room to the question,
"hey should we have a secondlife presence"
is
"hey i tried it as a prototype, and the customer experience was woeful, in game support was woeful for our customers, and how would we get enough leverage with the supplier (linden labs) that they cared enough about our corporate presence and out customers experience"
I actually think the SME market needs to be vibrant and survive, and introduce the cross over into r/l, s/l for it to have any chance of getting real trading commerce through the door. IWOOT.COM is pretty close and cool tho
https://www.iwantoneofthose.com/competition.do?competitionCode=secondlif...
These guys should be applauded for giving it a go
Z.