Wow, didn’t see that one coming. I woke up to find an email in my inbox, like many readers I suspect.
I must say I knew that OnRez was probably not long for this world. Strategically, the Electric Sheep Company pulled pretty far back from Second Life through most of 2008 and it was increasingly apparent that the OnRez portal just wasn’t going to get the developer time and attention it required. I figured that ESC was just going to quietly wind operations down and move on to whatever it is that they do now.
But I was genuinely surprised that the Lab showed up to buy both OnRez and Xstreet, putting the former out of its misery and the anointing the latter as the web shopping experience for Second Life. I had to tilt my head here and think, “Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?”
For all the charm of Xstreet’s late 90s layout and design, I always recommended people buy things from my OnRez store, whether they wanted to do it in world from our headquarters location or via the Web. I also had put a number of free (hopefully useful) items in my OnRez store so that I could easily distribute them to others. I guess what’s really disappointing is that a ton of content creators are going to have to spend hours and hours and hours transferring information, objects and graphics from OnRez to Xstreet.
I’m debating what to do myself. All Second Style back issues and magazine kiosks are already on Xstreet – but I’m not really sure I want to go to the trouble to move all of the free items over. Based on the feedback I’ve read at SLUniverse, I don’t think this is an extremely popular acquisition, although I can tell it has the potential to be a great thing.
Given previous track records though, I’m not really expecting much, or on any reasonable timeframe.
What do you think?
[poll=20]
Yeah I can’t quite understand why they ditched OnRez. It was much better organized and laid out than slexchange ever was.
Good blurb.
I’m not hopeful about the merge because it seems the XLStreet site is already less responsive.
OnRez had, I think, a couple of things going for it. One was the wealth of “freebies”. Another, and this I’ll miss for sure, was the really easy and fast search capabilities.
SLExchange search doesn’t deal very well with multiple criteria. When you have thousands of entries, many with the same keywords, being able to easily and quickly narrow that search is critical.
Meh, just one girl’s rant.
See y’all inworld!
– Shraud