Showcase

The forthcoming demise of showcase was blogged about yesterday by LL when they asked for people to signup for livework reporting in this blog post. Basically if you have the time you can become a destination guide writer and you'll be paid in real money for it. As for Showcase, the blog post states:

"As the successor to the Showcase guide (featured on the website and inside SL), the Destination Guide will feature regular updates and expanded categories that highlight interesting and active spaces that we hope Residents will want to visit."

So Showcase is going, however the winding down has already started because on the showcase website or inworld on the showcase tab, you will no longer find the fashion category. This is something I support because I didn't feel fashion should have ever been in showcase, but one has to wonder what Linden Lab have up their sleeve for fashion, will they be extending the lookbook feature that recently caused a hoo-ha to highlight fashion or are they finally accepting that a competitive category like fashion shouldn't be getting Linden Lab endorsement?

Currently fashion links lead people to information about shopping or to Xstreet, both of which make sense. What happens next remains a mystery, there's no word on the street about the next step so we'll all have to keep our eyes peeled.

A couple of blog posts yesterday exemplified a side of Linden Lab that I'm not comfortable with. The first related to private messaging on Xstreet, as blogged here. The second related to fashion, more to the point a microsite and spread about Modavia fashion week and the designers involved, as blogged here.

On first glance the changes to private messaging on Xstreet appear to be well intentioned. After all the forums are moving to the new flog (it's not a forum, it's not a blog). So moving the messaging system makes sense, right kids? Unfortunately there was this nifty little feature on Xstreet whereby whilst browsing a merchants goods you would see a "Contact Merchant" link. This allowed customers to easily contact the seller of the item. However this was tied to the old Xstreet messaging system so yesterday it stopped working. Now, fair enough, they may not have considered this use case, however once it was pointed out to them the sensible solution was surely to roll back the changes and delay them until such time as "Contact Seller" could be linked to the new messaging system. Instead Linden Lab appeared to spit their dummies and remove the "Contact Seller" functionality completely. There's still no mention of this change in the blog post. Pretending it didn't exist doesn't make this a good decision.
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