Late last year, Robbie Kiama, who heads up a four man team of developers working on the Metaverse Mart HUD released the first version of their shopping tool. He admits it sucked. It was slow, cranky and under populated with products. This week sees the third generation of the tool released, unveiled at the GSG tech expo, and despite its humble beginnings, it rocks! Its slick, useful and really fun to use once you get it set up and working right. I've even found a couple of things I've wanted to buy using it, and had them delivered painlessly without having to leave the comfort of my mountainside home in the Bel Highlands or even open a web browser The interface is slick, and despite obscuring the entire view when maximized, can easily be tucked into the corner of your viewer where it sits quietly awaiting instruction -- Meta Mart is shopping even men can love.
It does admittedly have a way to go in terms of products. Robbie tells me there are over 100 vendors using the tool now, and the active user count is over 2000. The more people use it, the useful it beomes. The Meta Mart HUD, which you can find here [SLUrl], is really made interesting by the fact that it lists items by popularity as well as your own favorited items. You can even search for items from the database using the chat interface -- Search results rely upon the network effect to increase relevancy by letting searchers rate items in the results. The system adds extra relevancy weight to those items in future searches.
There's also a very neat rating and commentary system on individual items. Much like web based shopping apps Second Life Exchange and Second Life Boutique, shoppers can rate and comment on individual products, which helps other users make buying decisions.
Sellers are provided with a "kiosk" within which to place items they wish to see appear in the HUD's search results, and MM take 3% of the total sale value as their cut of the transaction, forwarding the remaining 97% when an item is purchased and delivered -- Listing items is free, sellers just pay on transactions.
If you're like me, and you prefer to do your shopping sitting down, Meta Mart is a cool, fun way to shop. If also like me, you need the comfort of user comments, ratings and other crowd sourced relevancy to help you make shopping decisions, then you're going to love playing with the MM HUD -- Happy shopping!
Wow,
that is a great review 57 - You have a gift of writing :)
Thanks hope and promise to keep you surprised with new cool stuff & features coming from Meta Mart :)
Robbie