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I just found out that SLBoutique, a Web-based shopping site for Second Life objects, has been relaunched with a new look and new functionality. The relaunch comes courtesy of the Electric Sheep Company (a sponsor of this blog), the virtual world services firm that bought SLBoutique some months back. SLB is one of a handful of sites that let SL users browse and purchase in-world items via the Web. Others include SLExchange, and Second Server, plus a few others I’ve no doubt forgotten or haven’t discovered yet. How significant is the SLB relaunch? Well, the site certainly is easier to use and look at, but it’s the new functionality that will make the difference. Or at least, will begin to.

Web-based shopping sites were one of the early add-on apps that residents created for SL, only because the native search functionality of the virtual world is deeply broken. Linden Lab’s initial vision for their world left out the ability to make information available to a large number of people in an organized fashion, or to somehow incorporate the Web (where that’s easy to do) into the task. This is being rectified now, as LL struggles to bring a Mozilla browser into the environment in a meaningful way. But there’s still a long way to go.

The best thing about the SLB relaunch is that it helps push tagging into the mix of Second Life. On the new site, vendors can now tag their objects, and shoppers can search by tag. Of course, this is only as reliable as its users. (One of the most popular of the new tags is apparently “footware.”) But it gives users a new layer of control and a new lens through which to filter what they’re browsing. Those things are important in making sites like SLB more useful and easier to navigate, and keeping them from being what they’ve more or less been thus far: a pile of stuff that was difficult to sort through, like the bargain bins in the basement of a discount department store. You can also now see lists of Hot Tags, Most Popular Tags (how is that different?), Most Populat Items, New Items, Top Sellers and Recent Sales, and there’s even an RSS feed to let you know when new items are posted, which I think is very cool.

No offense is meant here to FlipperPA Peregrine, who originally built the site. SLB — which actually debits your SL account and delivers the object before you’ve even logged into SL — was a great advance when it first hit the Web. The idea of tagging objects and places in Second Life has been a long time coming. When LL began building its world, tagging was not the Web-based darling it’s since become. Nor are LL’s developers big Web-heads, I’m told. Brilliant designers and programmers, yes; deep into Web-based processes, apparently not.

Still, the concept of a metadata layer is almost entirely missing from Second Life, and that’s a big drawback. It’s great to see users bringing it into the world now that the API is slowly becoming a bit more open. There’s still no way to store metadata within SL, though. (Adding a “meta” field to SL objects and locations would be great! LL, are you listening?) But adding tags to SLBoutique is a small step toward some kind of Web-based solution. Generalized SL search is another problem that residents have attempted to tackle on the Web in a number of ways. SLB’s tags should help push all of this gradually forward, only because they finally give residents something search on, and in a context — shopping — that people will actually use.