3pointD.com

SLBoutique is a Web site where residents of the virtual world of Second Life can sell the things they’ve created in the world. It accounts for a large portion of many SL vendors’ sales, and is quite popular (along with sites like SLExchange) among SL shoppers — mostly because it’s difficult to impossible to advertise products in an organized manner through the in-world interface. But even SLBoutique (which is owned by the Electric Sheep Company, sponsors of this blog) has its limitations. That seems about to change slightly, however, with the news that vendors can now add tags to their products on SLBoutique, much as you’d tag a photo on Flickr. I don’t think shoppers can search on those tags yet, but that’s apparently forthcoming in a future version of the site. It’s nice to see services like this get more and more Web-friendly, and it seems Linden Lab is also getting the idea that SL will have to move toward a closer integration with the Web, something that’s happening already with the back-end move to a Web services architecture and indications that more such capabilties will be added in future.