SLENTRE.COM

By Sigmund Leominster

Robbie Kiama wants your Second Life to be a sharing, caring experience. But he’s not a New Age guru promoting the “wholeness of Being” and some vague “Oneness with the Metaverse.”  He’s a savvy entrepreneur with a simple idea. When he first contacted me at the end of February 2008, he offered a two-sentence overview of his new MetaLIFE system. “We have been creating a social networking platform for more than a year now, step by step of course, and finally we have released a complete package – a social networking platform for Second Life.”

The system’s cornerstone is the MetaHUD software–a wearable attachment that can perform a number of functions. Robbie’s central idea involves making connections between three elements: People, Places, and Items. These connections are achieved by allowing a user to:

* Search for Places and Items
* Travel to places you find
* Share your favorite places with the community
* Manage your favorite landmarks
* Shop and have items delivered to you no matter where you are in Second Life
* Rate, comment, and tag places and items

In its default configuration, the HUD is attached to the top right of your display and appears as a transparent box that covers no more than one-quarter of a typical screen. However, there is a single-click button that collapses the HUD to a narrow column and it sits there until you want to re-open the full view.

There are four major tabs available: Timeline, Store, Travel, and Friends.  Beneath each of these are context-specific sub-tabs.

Timeline Tab

Using this tab creates a list that shows you what people using the MetaHUD have been doing recently. You can specify whether you want to see what everyone has been doing, limit it to just your friends, or simply–monitor yourself.

Store

For someone who prefers NOT to spend lots of time shopping around Second Life for a specific item, the Store tab will be a tremendous help. You can type in the name of an item and the Meta HUD sends a signal to a server and algorithms begin searching for it. The HUD will present a listing of items that have been purchased or rated by other MetaLIFE customers.

To make shopping even easier, one can sign up for a Meta Mart account. Put simply, you deposit your linden dollars into an account, and when you want to make a purchase, you choose “Withdraw” and your cash is debited.

Travel

I found myself using the Travel tab most frequently. What makes this tab so interesting is that when a HUD users visits a specific location, she can tag and share it with everyone else.  When another person visits that place, they can give it a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” based on their own experience. This creates a totally user-driven list of the best places in Second Life. This contrasts with the “popularity” counts found by using your standard SL client software and hitting the “Search” button.  This type of search is often limited because the counting process defined by Linden Labs is prone to the influence of campers, bots, and hyped traffic. Although Linden Labs are constantly trying to refine their search algorithms to counter such abuse, they are simply not there yet. In contrast, the MetaHUD system only counts a place as “popular” if someone actually votes for it. So if 300 people visit a site and only 30 people give it a vote, that’s all that is measured, not the total number of visits.

Friends

This section of the software enables you to see where your friends are going, what they are recommending, and even what they are buying. Although the idea of being followed around by your friends may seem a little scary, you can set privacy levels and choose just exactly what you want friends to share in. If all you want your friends to know are your favorite landmarks and what you are buying, you can change your account settings to reflect this.

Marketing Through MetaHUD

As well as being a social tool, the MetaHUD is also a marketing device. Users of the HUD can type in a request for an item and the MetaLIFE server is tapped into and its database scoured. Found items are displayed on the user’s screen and they can then make a purchase.

For this to work, the MetaLIFE staff has been developing a network of sellers based on a partnership model. Briefly, people wanting to sell via the MetaHUD need to pick up a free Partner kit from one of a number of locations. The kit contains a three prim MetaWarehouse (MW) that can be erected on a piece of land. The seller then loads an inventory of items into the MW and those items are shared with the entire MetaLIFE network.

A small percentage of sales go to MetaLIFE, but the seller benefits from getting exposure to a growing market of MetaHUD users. And with an upper limit of 200 items for an MW inventory, the entrepreneur can, with little effort, market many products.

Next steps

The value of the MetaLIFE system will increase as more people use it. As the number of users grows, so does the accuracy of such features as “popularity.” Further, as more vendors take to using it, the selection of items will increase accordingly. For sellers, the Meta Mart concept doesn’t take the place of a store; it offers another channel for sales. Robbie is open to suggestions on how to improve the “Meta Experience,” and he sees the whole projetc as a work in progress. As he said to me, “Votes alone do not show entire pictures about popularity, but they are very significant. In the future, we plan to upgrade our algorithm to show even more relevant and more accurate info about popularity.”

For more information about the project you can check the MetaLIFE website at http://meta-life.net and the blog at http://metamart.blogspot.com. You’ll also find a list of locations where you can find the MetaHUD software.