Tracking Treasure Down

There now exsits a new way for people who want to make money in Second Life to keep track of visitors. It will help residents in SL to easily navagate and rate places they visit. A new tool develped by Slicr Holdings (Second Life Community Ratings Service), founded in December by Vitis Obviate and Hiro Market, recently released the beta version of the Slicr HUD for testing to the general public for a nominal fee of L$1.

The HUD allows many different functions to play with: a search and rating system for locations (ie, businesses that are hard to find or entertainment islands). It also includes a tracking feature which allows the residents to easily recently or frequently visited islands/locations. This will help land owners gain returning traffic along while receiving feedback from visitors.

The goal of the tool is to provide residents a better exploring experience and make the virtual world more intuitive and enjoyable. It will also keep not-so-saavy second life residents more in touch with virtual life entertainment and benefits to exploring the user-generated virtual world.

“We are selling as much a lifestyle of exploration as we are a product,” Obviate said in an interview at the Slicr Sim at Tipsico.

In an article writen by Diago Quaranta from SLNN, reports that
Slicr is not the only group working on rating tracker tools in virtual worlds “Ratepoint, launched on March 12, allows users to rate other avatars on a scale of 1-5 based on their behavior and currently has several thousand users and over a dozen employees, both in RL and SL, despite being less then a month old, according to Chris Bailey, Ratepoint’s CEO.”

Ratepoint is a good attention getter, considering the favorable rating systems that people utilize on social netowkring sites such as “The user-generated virtual world’s 2D platform,” Myspace.com. This isn’t so beneificial to businesses in Second Life presently, but it is still a work-in-progress for future tools for ROI ratings and statistics.

According to Diago Quaranta reporting, “Slicr uses a multi-layered system to search for locations based not only on sim owner’s descriptions and keywords, but also the comments and ratings of other Slicr users. For example, searching “news” in the Slicr system returns a list of locations with the highest ratings with “news” as part of the description or key words input by the other users.”

This systems allows for more in-world buzz marketing rather than relying on real life publicity of businesses in SL; people can now find out were to go once they get in-world. It is similar to youtube in a sense were people view and visit locations based on other member ratings.

When visiting a location, users can give their own ratings in three different ways: a three-star scale of how useful the area is
categorize the location (general/no category, shopping, roleplaying, clubs, themed areas)
enter up to three keywords about the area.

By creating categories and allowing users to enter their own keywords, Obviate says he hopes Slicr will be able to serve the wide range of people who log into SL – from entrepreneurs interested in the businesses of SL to dedicated role-players.