Twitterfox

I just learned about Twitterfox today. Twitterfox is a Firefox browser plug-in that allows you to make and send Twitter tweets right from the bottom of your browser instead of going to the Twitter site. When you receive them, you're notified via pop-up immediately. Because it's separate from Twitter, you don't have to choose it on Twitter as the method you want to get tweets, but the plug-in will go check your Twitter account on your behalf.

Of course, Twitter is designed to be easy to update via IM, website or cell phone, but Twitterfox is the easiest of all. Also, the person who created Twitterfox also created TwitterFon for the iPhone...got to give that a try although my iPhone has never properly recovered from the grapefruit juice I spilled on it a few months ago.

I use Twitter to update people when I have Therebucks in stock to sell, and any little thing that can make that process easier and faster is A+ in my book. Those people looking to see if I have ThereBucks in stock should definitely give it a try if they use Firefox.

Tweet, tweet, tweet!

Therebucks: what the heck?

I was just wondering if my Twitter page comes up in a search of Google or not so I checked it out. What I found was this article. At first I didn't even remember it, but after reading the whole thing, which tells people to visit the tbux website to buy discounted ThereBucks I realized that at the top it says "Idea for article by Jinx_tv".

What???

The "article" is from 2004, and I do seem to remember giving some eager young There reporter the idea to write something about where to get Therebucks. Who knew a few years later I'd be off selling tbux on my own and the article would still be up and directing people somewhere using MY NAME? Yeesh!

I did finally find my twitter URL. On page five.

People who steal money in There.com

Y'know, I like a lot of things about IMVU. One of those things is the fact that they work WITH trusted IMVU credits resellers to catch scammers, which makes sense because if they steal from IMVU, they are likely to turn around and steal from members reselling their currency, and if they steal from members, they are likely to use their same credit cards/mommy's credit cards, ex-spouse's credit card or whatever on IMVU directly as well. So everyone works together to prevent fraud, and it usually works pretty well, although there are certainly some people in IMVU trying hard to create that fraud in the first place. I recover probably 70% of all scammed credits.

There.com is better in some ways because it's more of a sense of a close knit community, and scammers are somewhat more rare. I have had a number of occasions where I have had PayPal chargebacks and people have jumped through crazy hoops to fix the credit card problem or whatever it was to make sure everything was alright. One unfortunate young woman found herself in the situation of owing me 2 million ThereBucks and actually spent about two months paying me painstakingly raising the funds and paying me back ThereBuck by ThereBuck. You see someone who belongs to a bunch of clubs, owns a neighborhood, has a bunch of buddies and you think "this person must be alright!" and usually, they are.

This is fortunate because There has a total hands-off policy toward theft. You steal from me, you make a chargeback against me, and There could really give a rat's ass. Oh, they're happy if I want to let them know about someone that I think is trying to sell ME stolen Therebucks...they're happy to come in, take the stolen Therebucks out of my account and say "thanks so much!" But when the table is turned they're like "sorry, it's our policy to sit here with our thumbs up our asses." A policy which seems strange to me simply because it is sooooo different from IMVU's policy, and yet both places have the same roots. How did they turn out so differently?

So, it's usually not much of a problem at There, but lately I've seen a disturbing trend of chargebacks. Like in July, there were $140 worth of chargebacks from Matt_Tobin and Sarah_G. As far as I can tell, Sarah_G isn't even a real person, just an alt avie for Matt_Tobin, and Matt_Tobin doesn't receive WhereMail and uses a dummy address. So who IS this guy who stole $140 from me? Hasn't he been around since 2004? Doesn't he own a neighborhood? Doesn't he have a bunch of buddies and is an active, "respectable" member of the There community? And yet this person joined my club, Jinx_tv_tbux, and then made a series of purchases from me on July 8th at http://jinx.tv and then reversed the transactions only one day later, and EVERY attempt I have made at contact has failed.

Is this what our There community has come to? We can no longer trust even the most involved seeming members?

And...does anyone know how to reach this Matt_Tobin person and why they would do such a thing? (I even heard he did the same thing to tbux.com.)

I'm all a-twitter part two

Last time I posted was about how I signed up for twitter to better keep people abreast of when I have ThereBucks in stock. I also sent emails out to all my tbux club members and past purchasers of ThereBucks that contained specific instructions on how to use twitter for ThereBucks updates, but for those who may not have received the email...for instance for future members/purchasers, as well as for those with over-enthusiastic spam filters or WhereMail problems, here are the instructions again...
-------------------
Tired of spending your time searching for discounted ThereBucks? Just want to know when they are in stock without wasting your time? Sign up for twitter.com (if you don't already have an account) and then add "therebucks" (that's me!) as someone you are "following". http://twitter.com/therebucks

In case you are unfamiliar with how twitter works, I'll explain it a little along with giving you instructions for getting alerts as to when I'm selling via your favorite IM client OR via your cellphone!

Once you are signed up for twitter and you are following "therebucks", you should go into your account settings, click on "devices" and from there you can set up your IM and/or your Cell phone to receive alerts (and you can set a few more options like to not send you alerts in the middle of the night, etc). Once you've done that and confimed it with twitter, you still aren't going to get any mobile alerts until you go to the page of someone you are following (http://twitter.com/therebucks) and click on "device updates off" to turn device updates "on".

Once you've set it to start getting alerts on the IM client or cellular phone of your choice, you can always go to http://twitter.com/therebucks to stop receiving the alerts (like maybe you don't want to know several times a day that ThereBucks are in stock once you've purchased a pile of them) and if you are getting alerts via text message you can just text twitter the message "off" and you will stop getting them. Then, once you've spent all your ThereBucks, you can text "on" and you will get the alerts again. Pretty cool, huh?

I just figured no-one wants to waste a bunch of time trying to find discounted ThereBucks in stock if they don't have to. Why not let twitter do the work for you? Plus sometimes someone visits http://jinx.tv and if I'm not selling seems to get the idea that I just simply don't sell ThereBucks any more when ACTUALLY I tend to get ThereBucks in stock several times a day, and now I can prove it! If you have any questions or problems, please let me know. I'm pretty new to twitter myself, but I will certainly try to help.

I'm all a-twitter

I've known about twitter.com for a while but couldn't really think of a good reason to use it until now.

Then, after using twitter to track when Wiis are in stock at various Internet stores I thought "EUREKA! I can use twitter to help people find out when ThereBucks are in stock!"

This isn't something I've been too concerned about for a while, I have had Therebucks in stock since December...haven't sold out once during that time and even carried a tbux balance as high as 12 million. Now that's all changed, the economy has evened out and even though I am buying/selling more Therebucks than ever, the demand is back to its normal state of being greater than the supply.

So, if you're looking for discounted ThereBucks on my site, http://jinx.tv, and I seem to be sold out all the time, try following me on Twitter...get alerts via cellular text, IM or email about when I am in stock and be the first one there to snag 'em!

http://twitter.com/therebucks

Luxury: Scents and sensibility

Yesterday a package arrived in the mail for me. I've gotten caught up and actually ahead with ThereBucks sales (finally) so I have a little bit of discretionary income to spend and I bought myself a bottle of chanel No 5. I had been reading a book called "Deluxe; How Luxury Lost Its Luster", which talks about the history of luxury and designer brands and how they've changed (or in a very few cases, not changed) over the years. Probably the biggest takeaway message of the whole book is that you should be an informed consumer...you can't just buy a certain brand, whether it's jeans, cars or ketchup and just assume that because you have always purchased that brand and it was up to a certain quality standard before that it still will be or that just because some rap star sings about how they've got so much money and that's what they spend it on, it must be great. Not that I'm aware of any rap stars singing about their favorite brands of ketchup. Maybe Shonen Knife should do a rap album. Most brands compromise the their quality and trade off the reputation they've built eventually...even if the company founder is against it, eventually someone new is head of the company or there is a board of shareholders demanding greater quarterly profits or they feel the need to get their foot in the door at Walmart. More and more these days I think companies don't even have to change and grow to "sell out", these days many of them plan it that way right from the start.

So why did I buy a bottle of Chanel No 5 eau de parfum? The book talks about how No 5 was created and how it is now the standard against which all others are judged and how they still use natural ingredients still grown in the same region of France where they have been since the perfumes inception. I guess I just felt the need to own that standard against which all other perfumes are judged. Which is not to say that perfumes aspire to BE LIKE Chanel No. 5. Actually, smelling Chanel No. 5, with its notes of jasmine, rose and aldehydes, I wouldn't say it's a classic so much as really old fashioned...like your 80 yr old grandmother who doesn't think you should go out on a date without a chaperone and calls you "dearie". Some say it's too mature for anyone under the age of 25 to wear, but I'm an ancient old 40 yrs old and I think it's too mature for me.

I usually wear Bond No. 9's "Chinatown". I'm a little obsessed with perfume. It took me quite a few bottles of things I didn't really like to find Chinatown, and I can't help but wonder sometimes if there is another perfume (maybe another Bond No. 9) that is even more "me". While sampling different perfumes, I purchased many decants from eBay. These were little samples that ebay sellers took from full size bottles of perfume and put into a smaller roll-on or spray bottle so that the buyer could try stuff without buying a whole bottle and the seller could offset the cost of their own bottles. This was great...I mean a lot of perfumes are only available if you are in New York or in Paris or you know, they aren't just in every KMart store, you have to go to the actual store that sells that perfume (often in conjunction with a clothing line, a handbag line, a luggage line, etc.) and then spend $250 or more on a bottle. (This is considered "entry level" luxury...you get to buy in to a brand name without spending $25,000 on a couture dress. Hey, you can't afford the Christian Dior dress you saw on style.com but at least you have the Dior perfume! Actually, I have Miss Dior Cherie and it's not bad. I do wear it once in a while.) So, the decants are a great way to see if you like something.

After buying a whole crapload of decants, I thought "hey, *I* should sell decants on eBay!" I mean, I had also purchased a few full size bottles and it's an expensive habit. Not like I thought I could make money selling decants, but I thought I could maybe offset the cost of trying new fragrances. So, I read loads of perfume blogs and perfume websites, I ordered books on perfume and the history of perfume from Amazon, I ordered loads of decanting supplies (spray bottles, roll on bottles, padded envelopes, cute tissue paper, mailing labels, a usb postage scale, photo studio in a box, etc...etc...) and of course I started ordering a lot of full size bottles of perfume (and cologne). What a great excuse to order a bunch of full size bottles of perfume! The only thing is, I found I was too lazy to actually do it. I've sold stuff on eBay before, but I have other things to do with my time and the idea of photographing everything, writing up listing descriptions, pricing everything, researching what decants have sold for in the past, and worst of all...packing up and actually MAILING stuff just seemed totally not worth it. Maybe I'm spoiled by selling virtual goods most of the time, but I could just not get excited about printing out mailing labels and contacting the USPS or UPS or possibly having to actually GO TO the post office...ugh.

So now I have all this perfume STUFF. It's been sitting around for a while now. Not just perfumes I don't care for or colognes I have no use for, but all the packaging and such for decanting and mailing. *sigh* And...I'm looking around the other day to order my bottle of Chanel No. 5, and I get a little interested in some Hermes cologne that I'm wondering if my bf would like so I think "maybe I can find a decant of it on eBay". Not only did I NOT find a decant of it on eBay, but I couldn't find a decant of ANYTHING on eBay. It was actually rather strange. I did a little investigating and I found that apparently, due to some pressure from some large corporations, including some that also have filed lawsuits against eBay for refusing to take responsibility for all the counterfeit goods sold on their auction site, eBay has prohibited the sale of decanted perfumes. People who like to sell and exchange perfume decants have now moved to sites like Perfume of Life where you need to be a paid, premium member to access the private section of their forums where you can connect with others looking to sell or trade decants and/or full and partial bottles of all sorts of perfumes. Perhaps that will be a suitable place to sell my rather expensive box/bottle of limited edition Fleur d'Oranger 2005 Vergers de Nabeul Eau de Parfum from L'Artisan Parfumeur.

Ebay's stance on decants along with the pending (I think they're still pending anyway) lawsuits should be very interesting to anyone freaking out about IMVU and their apathy wrt music rings, those small objects some imvu developers create to enable the owner to play a full song by a music artist without actually having any rights to that song. IMVU's attitude seems to be "well, we'll deal with those when the music companies and artists actually come and file a dmca takedown notice and/or threaten to sue us". Until that time, developers can steal and redistribute all the music they want, it seems. Perhaps some of them don't even feel it's wrong...especially depending on what country they are from. I've had people say to me about piracy "well, it's not illegal in my country". I don't even know if that's true, but I think just because maybe the police won't prosecute you for doing it in your country, it's still illegal under international copyright law. But anyway, I suppose eventually music companies and artists will start filing lawsuits and dmca takedowns...and then IMVU will probably take some drastic measures to eliminate this stuff quickly...something that also ends up removing a bunch of legal content. Now, how they will deal with lawsuits against allowing people to use trademarked stuff on avatar clothing and stickers and such seems a bit trickier...who is going to go through millions of items to find that stuff? Well, maybe that day will coincide with the day that some big company wants to buy IMVU for megabucks to use for their own purposes, and this big company will just pretty much discard the whole dev program or severely restrict the whole thing because it's not what they want the chat program for and THEN IMVU will have nothing to worry about. (OR, perhaps the pending lawsuits will prevent a sale instead...)

Okay...backing up from that tangent and coming back to perfume...

My bf and I had gone to brunch and then wine tasting in Livermore one Sunday. (I know, I know...who names a city Livermore? Great place to go for wine, though.) Afterwards we stopped at a mall...him to buy a new suit jacket and me, I wanted to stop by Sephora for some Frederick Fekkai Glossing Cream. That stuff is so awesome. I hope they don't decide to ever ever change the formula to please some shareholders board. It's the stuff that turns my hair from a rats nest to smooth and manageable. Of course, a little goes a long way and my bf bought me a large tube of it that will probably last about two years, so I could imagine that the shareholders board would be quite tempted to try and make some change that would force me back into Sephora to buy more creme brilliante on a more consistent basis.

While at Sephora, my bf decided he also wanted to buy me some perfume. We tried a bunch and finally picked out Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle. I don't know if après wine tasting is the best time to pick out a new perfume. It's very nice...you don't have to be 105 to be mature enough to wear it. However, it's no Chinatown, with its notes of peony, gardenia, peach blossom, patchouli and cardamom. After a few months of vainly TRYING to wear it, I went back to my beloved Chinatown and am currently plotting to buy their Bon Bon collection...and I'll have to be sure and judge each one against the bottle of Chanel No 5. It's funny how I just read this whole book on the homogenization of luxury brands and how we are first lured into the dream and the promise of these things with gateway items such as perfume, and yet here I am...pickier than ever, but still obsessed.

Circle of (virtual) life

Last week I emailed my club members. My intention was to remind them I'm here and selling ThereBucks in ten minutes or less mostly, but it was also rather chatty and encouraged them to email me about anything at all.

I received some very nice responses. I kept waiting for something nasty (wow, am I cynical or what?) but it was all positive. One person mentioned that they used to buy ThereBucks from me, then they started developing and bought ThereBucks from me less but purchased some of my model licensing rights. Then, they started selling ThereBucks to me sometimes as they became a successful developer. Now, they sell ThereBucks to me all the time!

The truth is, they aren't the only virtual life I've seen go that way. I had just been thinking the other day about the very same thing. I could name a half dozen avies/people like that off the top of my head and I'm sure there are more that did it so gradually I just didn't notice. And it's just...it makes me sooo warm and gooey inside. There are people who bought LARGE quantities of ThereBucks from me for SEVERAL YEARS who eventually started painting and even learned 3D modeling and maybe lost a bunch of money doing it at first, and now they sell me 500k of ThereBucks at a time or are just SO PROUD every time they have enough ThereBucks to get $100 from me.

Hey, if somebody never, ever takes an interest in developing, if the only time they ever sell ThereBucks is when they're unloading a neighborhood or decided to sell their rare one seater buggy to make a real world mortgage payment, or if shopping is their favorite activity and they wouldn't touch Photoshop with a ten foot pole, that's totally cool and I will sell them ThereBucks until the day There shuts its doors (oooooh....knock on wood!) But the ones that have made that journey from first time buyer to profitable seller/developer...those are my babies, my children, my darlings, my fledgling birds that left the nest but still migrate back to the same spot. I just want to give them a biiiiig hug.

Ooops, wait...There doesn't have hugs. '''sad

Hey hey...only 12 hours behind!

Hey, it's either talk about this or try to get a video card working in one of my computers while I wait for my bf to show up. My bf who is off having dinner with his business partners at OUR RESTAURANT. Well, I mean, we don't own the restaurant but it's the one we always go to when my cat has her chemo treatment and now he's going there without me. :(

Why is it that when you don't use a computer for a few months it can't just y'know...start right back up again? It's like a car you left sitting outside in a cold Minnesota winter. How am I supposed to fix a problem with nothing displaying on the monitor when no monitor will work with it and I think the problem is with the video card and the video card is built into the motherboard? Hmmmm?

Anyway...what was I talking about?

Oh yeah. I am not two days behind paying ThereBucks sellers, not one day behind. I am only 12 hours behind! And...I'm abnormally happy about it! Who cares if I've had $1000 worth of ThereBucks transactions come in from sellers in the last 12 hours so that being 12 hours behind actually means being $1000 behind? Heck, that's not so bad!

To all you Therians out there looking to sell off your extra ThereBucks I just have this to say: BRING IT!

Tbux musings

I've had ThereBucks in stock for over five weeks straight now, and no end in sight. Last night I went to bed feeling pretty great that I was only one day behind paying sellers. (Not to be confused with buyers, who get paid in ten minutes or less!) This morning I woke up to $750 more in sales requests. *sigh* Naturally, I've been a bit more focused on There lately because of this, and also on other ThereBucks resellers.

Ye olde tbux site particularly interests me because, besides the fact that I used to be a seller there (and am the only seller ever kicked off the site...a dubious honor bestowed upon me for refusing to stop claiming sales transactions as quickly as possible) and have long used "who is listed as selling and how many sellers and how quickly are they paying" as a barometer for how quickly ThereBucks are moving through the system and how long one might expect to spend trying to sell the ThereBucks one might have in stock.

The difference now is, well, now I can actually share my observations with others (you!) Please don't think I'm bitter towards kittenkat/tbux, it's more like I'm hurt (although at the same time grateful, as I probably wouldn't otherwise have gone off on my own and made all the buying/selling streamlining and automating improvements I have) and of course I can't help but be interested in what's going on there...even if I was tempted to pretend that the site didn't exist, that would be a rather foolish business move. Besides, there are a few tbux members who actually sell ThereBucks TO ME, which naturally makes me curious.

So here are my recent observations...

People who have been selling recently

Mercuria: Of course, you are more likely to see Mercuria selling than anyone else on the site. Who do you think took over most of the ThereBucks sale request claims after I was gone? Plus, although I hear she's not really developing for There any more and has turned her attention almost solely on IMVU, she has a HUGE amount of stuff in auctions. You know, it's really a shame that she stopped designing for There soon after trans mapping arrived...she has soooo much fantastic stuff in the catalog, but most of it is caramel skin specific. Anyway, I have noticed that she is usually listed as selling in 8 hours or 12 hours, so I'm thinking she must have a full time job again, and perhaps a boyfriend. It also seems like she is not actually claiming sales requests any more (as far as I can tell) which would be pretty weird/ironic after all the trouble she went to in order to be able to claim as many as possible in the first place. She also seems to have stopped accepting credit card or unverified PayPal account payments.

Xedos: One of tbux's newer members. It's weird the way kittenkat had asked us what we thought of adding new members the first time she did it, but didn't say anything at all the second time. Well anyway, Xedos always used to sell loads of ThereBucks to the tbux site and now he can sell directly so that's great. But anyway, it LOOKS LIKE he is listing himself as selling for a day or something, then giving up for a bit, then listing again. I mean, I get the impression he isn't selling out, is just tired of waiting for sales. Hmmm...he could always sell them to me...I'm two days behind paying people but that's still quicker than what he's doing now.

Majandi: I notice he is also not accepting credit card or whatever payments. There used to be only one tbux member like that, now there are five!

Banshee_Kate: She was listed as selling but isn't any more. While Xedos may have gotten tired of trying to sell, Banshee_Kate is more likely to have actually sold out. She has always been pretty active in-world and usually sold on her own before she was a tbux member, and she is quite likely to have sold a bunch of ThereBucks to her friends, fans or club members.

Randra_Loqqet: Not listed as selling very often. He hasn't been active on There for a while now but still lists auctions and comes back occasionally to sell what I can only imagine is a large chunk of ThereBucks at a time. On the one hand, he may be in for a rude shock wrt how slowly they sell, otoh I doubt he is counting on the money so won't really care.

Phedre: Well, I don't think Phedre has designed anything for There for quite a while. However, she makes quite a lot of ThereBucks because of her fantastic designs like the dragon hoverboards and, well, like...everything she has ever made. About three years ago someone at There, who doesn't even work there any more, had the brilliant idea that instead of paying her like, $100 an hour to make some cowboy hats and braided hair, they would let her submit them as her own items instead. You know, to save There some money. I'm sure in the last three years she has made and far surpassed how much she would have been paid as a lump sum. That's great for her, but she doesn't list herself as selling very often so when she does...watch out! She's probably trying to sell millions at a time and she's not as laid back as Randra, she'll list herself as selling in an hour or less for extended periods of time. When she lists herself, watch the number of sellers grow as she upsets the balance of things.

People who haven't been around as much

Ashy: Another one who has been gone from There but still lists in auctions. I sold off most of my inventory but you know one thing I kept was a limited edition coffin hoverboard s/he made. Such talent...Ashy, come back! Anyway, when s/he sells credits it is another situation where it doesn't happen very often so it can amount to a large chunk of them when it does.

Kittenkat: She doesn't seem to like to list herself unless no-one else is selling. You know, she has a baby, she does some...I don't know...accounting work or something, she designs websites or something with her husband sometimes and oh how could I forget...she has been pretty involved with IMVU stuff. Like Mercuria, she's making more money with IMVU than with There, I'm sure. Actually, I'm pretty darn sure she's making a lot MORE than Mercuria. So, I'm sure she has a huge ThereBucks balance right now, but you probably won't see her selling until someday when for some crazy reason everyone else is finally sold out, and even then she will have to actually notice everyone is sold out. Or maybe for some reason she will want/need a bunch of cash fast and try to sell.

Alexis_Josephine: Apparently she is back after something like 4 years MIA. It's kind of funny to think that she was a tbux seller all that time even though she wasn't even listing in auctions. Well whatever, it's pretty cool that she's back. Maybe someone should tell her about IMVU....

People who are just totally gone

Wildcat: This dude was one of the first 3d modeling members of There. In fact, he helped me out learning GMax. He had graduated from college and was moping around his parents house for a while working at some boring job. Then one day, he got a boyfriend and I think he may have moved to the big city and no-one ever heard from him again. Dudes...this was a LONG time ago. It's so funny that he's still listed on the site.

Viv: People thought I was the one who ALWAYS claimed the sales requests on tbux but originally it was Viv. Because of her, I was practically glued to my computer 24/7. I set up a laptop on the nightstand by my bed because of her. And...she still got more of the requests than I did! How did she do it? My theory was that she was based (she was in the military) somewhere close to the servers tbux was hosted on, and therefore received alerts slightly sooner than I did. And/or she had some buddies that would claim requests for her if she ever went to sleep or stepped away from the computer. Or maybe she actually WAS a computer. She was the beginning of my quest to find a way to claim sales requests quicker than anyone else could. I didn't complain about her, I just set out to be better than her. Not that it worked...she just disappeared one day. I hope nothing bad happened to her. No-one has heard from her for years now.

Kiana: Not much to say about her except that she hasn't been around for a few years now.

Rejeanne: Also has NO There auctions listed, so we should assume that she's not going to be around selling ThereBucks.

TNT: Okay, where the heck did TNT go? Maybe she just decided that IMVU was more worth her time? I have a hunch that she was one of the people complaining about me claiming all the tbux sales requests (hey, the faster they are claimed, the better for the people selling them, right? Actually, the whole claiming process is so inefficient, but I won't get into that right now/again.) When she was first invited to join the tbux site, we were partnering together on IMVU and talking quite a bit and I asked her, jokingly but keenly interested in the answer, if she was going to be trying to claim sales requests. She said of course she wouldn't, she knew I counted on the income from those. Then one day, she claimed one. Well, her bf who stays up all night did, but she said she was probably going to be claiming sales from then on. If Viv was the one who got me obsessed with claiming transaction quickly, it was TNT who lit a fire under my arse about automating the process. Some people have boyfriends who stay up all night claiming requests, some people use technology for even more reliable results. Hmmm...that sounds a bit naughty. Anyway...I'm a bit surprised she isn't listing in auctions...and I wouldn't be surprised if she shows up again eventually.

Starley: This chick has her finger in a lot of pie. Last I knew, she was pretty involved with Second Life. She's also been involved with IMVU stuff. Not surprising she doesn't have time for There, or even listing her stuff in auctions in There.

I know that's not everyone on tbux, but I don't really have anything to say about the others. They sell, they're active, I haven't seen them on the site selling in the last few weeks. This was really more just my musings about what is going on with ThereBucks and ThereBucks resellers. Not even sure it's of interest to anyone but myself.

Some There/Therebucks history

So, the other day...I guess it's been a few weeks now, Kittenkat contacted me because she was very distressed over IMVU's proposed tiers system and she thought, since I live only six miles from IMVU and have been known to sneak attack them and just show up there, that maybe if she could win me over to her cause, she could get me to march into IMVU and get them to listen to reason.

Honestly, IMVU should probably hire Kittenkat to be their in-house economist or something, but my days of IMVU peeps telling me that they owed me a debt of gratitude so great that they are happy to buy me lunch once a month for basically forever are probably over. The best I can do right now is publish what Kittenkat shared with me after being frustrated by one of IMVU's newer employees "Joepez" telling her she didn't understand the There economy as well as There's original founder and some of his cronies and tried to explain to her a few things about the There economy.

Please enjoy this wonderful bit of There history compliments of KittenKat!

As There's founder and ex-employees should be able to tell you, I was there since the beginning, and my resale site (tbux.com) pretty much single-handedly shaped the resale market from the beginning. If anyone knows anything about the resale market at There.com, it's me.

For the record, here is the story of the There resale market:

I became involved in the There developer program pretty shortly after it was released. After time I and the other top developers had accumulated enough therebucks that there began to be talk about selling them for cash. The first person to offer us cash for our therebucks was Baloo, who happened to be There's economist (he operated his resale site on the side). He offered us terrible rates (2700T/$1 as I recall) but we sold to him, because he pressured us and because it was money.

It didn't take me long to decide that we had to be able to sell them for more he was offering. So I got together with There's other top developers, showed them my proposal for tbux.com, formed tbux.com, and began to sell directly to There members at 2000T/$1 (~200T/$ savings over There's official rate). Sure, Baloo could offer consumers a cheaper rate, but he had depended on having the major developers selling to him, so by banding together, we eliminated his supply, so we had no trouble selling for that rate. Shortly thereafter we began to resell other developers' tbux, offering them a rate of 2200T/$1 (our spread is and always has been very low).

We've had a small handful of competitors over the years, but none have ever succeeded at driving the rate of tbux down. Even during the period of economic turmoil and panic which followed There's "Black Friday" (in 2004, when There Inc. announced that it would no longer develop the consumer version of There), tbux.com kept buying and selling at the SAME rates.

And here we are, in 2007, buying and selling at the same rates we always have, and still selling out. 2000T/$1 is now the standard resale cost of Therebucks across all resellers, a whole 200T savings over There's rate of 1800T/$1.

So, to say that There's resale market is where it is because its "mature" is just completely inaccurate. There's resale market has not changed at all since it started with tbux.com back in August 2003."

For the record, *I* never sold to Baloo. My first sale was actually an exchange of ThereBucks for frequent flier miles which allowed me to attend the first There real life gathering in 2003.

Anyway, thanks to KittenKat for allowing me to share that nice writeup of There and ThereBucks history in my blog. Maybe it won't help us stop tiers, since Will Harvey has indicated that they only implement things we suggest that they were already implementing anyway, but it's still a great read. Cha right...like Will knows more about the There economy just because he founded There. According to any IMVU employee who worked on the blox project There is already dead, and yet as far as I can tell they are still growing strong. Wishful thinking, guys?

Not a There Hermit today

This past week, I've been spending some time in There in my clubhouse, which is ALWAYS deserted by anyone but me, and I've visited a few places like THE WATER and the amusement park (also deserted), but today I actually hung out with other avatars!

No kidding.

ZachC IMed me to tell me that he was with Nalora who was doing a video on Icons of There, and he was all like "I saw you signed in and I was like if anyone is a There Icon it's Jinx_tv", and I was like "yeah, haha...you're the icon. Nalora should be filming/interviewing you. Oh wait...that's why you're with her right now." Yeah, I'm a little slow like that.

So I spent some time hanging out with some different peeps like Nalora and ZachC and several others that you can probably see in my screencaps. It felt somewhat surreal to me to spend time with Nalora because it seemed like she held a grudge against me forever for making fun of some spelling mistakes her nephew (who is an amazing developer) made in his There auction descriptions. Sorry, I have a childish sense of humor and his descriptions made me laugh. I need a "doesn't play well with others" shirt. Then one day, she started buying ThereBucks from me and I was like, "that is sooo weird, I thought she wasn't even SPEAKING to me." Now she says she prefers to buy them from me. Maybe that's just her moving on while I'm obviously stuck in the past.

Yeah, so, these great diehard Thereians gave me lots of info/gossip (you can set the environment in pazzes now! The new "real" water can be turned back to cement in preferences! etc) and Nalora showed off her incredible pazzes, which you see here in my screencaps. I was quite flattered to find Jinx_tv stuff here and there, and btw I made those dice you see in the first pic :P

It's soooo cool to look around and be able to name the designers of half the stuff in her bedroom. AND to be included among them.

Also, this wasn't from Nalora and I'm not going to tell you who I got this info from as it's kind of gossipy, but I was told that WikkeDiva is not buying/selling ThereBucks any more because it got to be too much like work (I can definitely understand that...it's work for me, and not just like, really cool fun work, I like to compare it to being a night watchman, because all you're doing is babysitting stuff.) Also, it sounds like she had a hard time with people sending her money for ThereBucks when she was sold out, and then getting mad they didn't get any ThereBucks in a timely manner. I can totally relate to that, too. That used to happen to me at tbux.com, but it rarely happens to me on my new site...that's why my new site shows you EXACTLY how many ThereBucks I have for sale, it won't let you buy more than I have, and if somebody buys some, the number reflects that. It makes life sooooo much easier that way.

Oh, oh and...lookie! I had some wallpapers approved and not a minute too soon. Actually, this pic doesn't make it look very nice...I hate the compression of the ThereCam. My new approvals totally make me want to get some more stuff in (Like, um, WINDOWS, FLOORS, FURNITURE!) I really need to start making some models. I got really distracted using Adobe Captivate today and of course CHATTING IN THERE. Argh.

Tomorrow I can't make models because we are going to be making Chicago Style Pizza. If the pizza won't come to Jinx, Jinx will MAKE the pizza. :)

A Glut of ThereBucks: Where is WikkeDiva?

I was looking at the books that ended up in the pic in my last post and I thought I would give you a closeup just because I think it's amusing that there is only ONE computer book in the whole pic, "Real World Scanning and Halftones".

You'd think I'd have a lot of computer books, and I DO, they are mostly in a big metal cabinet on the other side of the room and scattered in piles here and there waiting for me to buy another bookcase. Instead we end up with "A Passion for Potatoes", "The Complete Idiots Guide to Improving Your IQ", "Car Smarts" (I don't even own a car) and a book that looks like it says "Intercourse" but it really says "Intercourses" (see, it's actually a play on words) and is a cookbook with a bunch of recipes that contain ingredients said to have aphrodisiac properties. Personally I think the Passion for Potatoes book is enough for me...I effing love potatoes, but Intercourses does have a killer chocolate bundt cake recipe. I love to cook.

ANYWAY, that has nothing to do with a glut of ThereBucks, other than maybe the fact that I'm hungry and even though my ThereBucks sales are MOSTLY automated (that's why they're so fast unless there is a problem, which is why you should email me at jinx.tv@gmail.com if you don't recieve your ThereBucks in 30 minutes) I sometimes (like now) need to stick around to make sure sales are going okay so I can't go grocery shopping.

What is going on? I've had more people than normal selling ThereBucks to me lately. Is it because WikkeDiva closed her tbxbank.com? And why is that anyway? And if that means her sellers are seeking other places to sell ThereBucks, shouldn't her buyers be looking elsewhere as well so it would all even out? Where did WikkeDiva go? Is she coming back?

I love/hate a mystery.

It's great to have so many sellers selling to me, the only thing is it would have been great to have a little advance notice, ya know? It's like I've put all my discretionary income into purchasing them and I would have liked to be more prepared. I guess that's just life.

Please buy my ThereBucks! :) Oh yeah, and if anyone knows what happened to tbxbank.com, please, please, please won't you tell me?

There is expensive!

It's been an embarrassingly long time since I've submitted anything to There. According to my submission page, almost exactly two years. That's not quite right, though, since I did a commission a little bit more recently than that.

Yeah, so imagine my STICKER SHOCK when I started submitting some stuff today!

I'm really excited because I FINALLY got my nice new computer connected to the Internet and up and running. I got it with Windows Vista because I wanted to play with all the shiny new buttons, and I was askeered because I heard there were tons of incompatibility issues and places not supporting drivers for Vista but SO FAR, even though I don't have my second monitor hooked up yet or gotten my second hard drive working in there, the using of Vista hasn't been a problem.

So, I'm submitting some stuff and I'm planning this BIG SET of coordinated items and then I remembered why I've never really submitted more than a few versions of anything...it's so expensive! To submit a little 128x128 wallpaper texture costs basically $3. You could submit oh...let me think...a whole um...crapload of IMVU items for that same price! I know There has a real human being approving stuff, but WALLPAPER? Now I just need about a zillion other items to go with all the wallpaper I submitted...floors, windows, ceilings, paneling...wait, maybe I don't need paneling, I'll have to think about that. I forgot how addicting this is. Too bad I'm not addicted to making sexy cleavage tops...I could make a lot more ThereBucks.

I'm selling! http://jinx.tv/tbux

One of the most difficult things about buying ThereBucks is catching a seller that is in stock. Sometimes anyway. I'm sure most people have better things to do with their time than wonder when ThereBucks sellers are in stock. Sooo...I've given a lot of thought to this problem considering different ways to alert people who are most anxious to find out when I'm selling (sorry, I can't help you find out when other sites are selling). If you want to know if I'm selling, subscribe to the comments in this blog post. When I'm selling, I'll post a comment to let you know. Okay...here we go...

Tbux.com: blah blah rant

After my blog post on May 8th, which was mirrored on the There Voice, I was happy to see KittenKat publish a response there. It really shows how there are two sides to every story, and although the whole thing may come off as airing dirty laundry in public, the alternative of gossip and rumors seems worse to me.

I don't want to make a big deal out of it and publish anything else on the matter in the There Voice, but since this is my blog, and blogs are by nature somewhat self-indulgent, I thought I would make some sort of response here to Kittenkat's response. So if you are actually here reading my blog, indulge me for a minute...

First, kittenkat says I completely stopped responding to emails from her. This is true...she says I glosses over that fact, but I don't think I did. She sent me an email saying "if you're using a bot, stop. If you aren't using a bot, then leave some sales request for others". I wasn't prepared to do that, so I simply didn't answer her emails. It was only a couple of emails! By responding, all I would do is give myself less time to get my own system up and running. KittenKat also implies that it hurt her personally that I didn't respond...and I don't think she is making that up or anything, but at the same time...well, kittenkat and I used to IM sometimes or email, but I've always felt that the only time she would ever contact me was to ask me a question about how to do something in 3ds Max or gmax or to quiz me about how my imvu credits selling site worked and how to use the IMVU payment gateway. Not that she wasn't nice and chatty, and I'm sure she's busy and all, but it doesn't really feel like friendship or a warm, personal relationship when she only contacts me to ask me for information to help her set up her competing business(es). I feel a little bad saying that but...I can't help how I feel.

Kittenkat also says that sellers complained that they wanted to claim sales requests but couldn't because of my bot. They may have had a hard time claiming sales requests, but it was actually easier for them with the bot then against jinx the human being! The thing that made it harder wasn't the bot, but the fact that email was broken so nobody was getting notified that there was a request. Otherwise, anyone sitting right there at their computer would have had a very good chance of getting the request before the bot did. I even turned the bot off at times and watched requests sit there for hours without being claimed. Actually, for a long time there were hundreds of unclaimed requests, because nobody wanted to claim the smaller transactions.

People say a bot is unfair, but just what is and is not unfair? There was no rule against a bot. Before I claimed most of the requests, Viv did. I don't think Viv had a bot, but somehow she was faster than me EVEN IF I was right there at the computer with the proper web page open. How did she do that??? Was that fair? If someone had a boyfriend that was a night owl and claimed requests on their behalf while they were sleeping, would that be fair? Is using your boyfriend to claim requests somehow more "fair" than using a bot?

But ultimately, is it fair to the people trying to sell their ThereBucks TO tbux.com? For years, people asked to join tbux.com as a seller and were denied. Instead, to sell their ThereBucks through tbux.com they would have to go through the "submit a request and wait for someone to claim it and email you" process. There were many more sellers than there were members of tbux.com. Is it fair to THEM to try to make things as fair as possible for the much smaller number of people who are actually allowed to be members, when it inconveniences them to have to wait to be contacted, sometimes for hours? (Or never, as was the case with the smaller transactions for so long.) And who wants a version of "fair" that involves everyone wasting more of their time?

Kittenkat says people were forced, because of me, to sit up until all hours of the night trying to claim sales requests and they couldn't because of my bot. First of all, this is simply not true. My bot would check for sales an average of every ten minutes. Anyone sitting at their computer and checking for requests say...every five minutes...would have had a better chance of getting a request than the bot. And anyway...for TWO YEARS I was sitting at my computer trying to do exactly what she says these people were "forced" to do. Tbux.com has something like 20 sellers now...are they all "forced" to sit up late at night trying to claim requests against each other now???? I think their odds with the bot were better! "Fair" is just completely stupid when it involves everyone wasting their time equally, and then the people selling to the site wasting their time as well.

Kittenkat says she wanted to claim some requests and couldn't,but she just let it go until others complained. BUT...for almost the entire time I was using a bot, there were smaller requests just sitting there. Hundreds of them that no-one claimed! Let's be honest here...people were complaining that they couldn't get the "good" requests, because there were loads and loads of the smaller ones that aren't worth as much, just waiting to be claimed. (Note: kittenkat also recently made a rule that sales requests must be claimed in order, so you aren't allowed to skip over a smaller request, so this doesn't happen any more. That rule should have been made long before, although you can always just ignore the smaller request hoping someone else will claim it until you are "forced" to claim it by an arrival of a larger request.)

To say that what I did was unfair is to discount the much greater number of people who benefited from what I did. My bot allowed faster service for hundreds of people, while maybe two tbuxers lost out on a few larger transactions because they weren't willing to dedicate as much time to it as I had.

There wasn't any rule against using a bot. I've had one person say to me "there was a rule and you just disregarded it", but actually there was no such rule until my last few days on the site.

Oh and finally...Kittenkat says that adding more members to the tbux.com site doesn't add more competition as I "suggest" in my original posting/article, because everyone is able to sell all of their ThereBucks. That's true...the economy of There is strong and so resellers are always able to sell out...however adding more sellers makes the flow of ThereBucks less even, and so sometimes you could end up with 10 sellers selling at once, which makes things harder for the sellers. If you are competing against 9 other people to sell your ThereBucks, it is going to take you that much longer to sell out, and so you are going to have to worry about whether you have any transactions to fill or not for that much longer of a time period. If all the ThereBucks flow through a smaller number of people, it really smooths things out. Trust me, I sold more ThereBucks than anyone through tbux.com for years. It can make the difference between selling out in a couple of hours, or a couple of days.

Thank you to http://jinx.tv/tbux buyers

Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick! I just wrote this whole post up and then IE decided to crash just as I was publishing it.

After posting "tbux.com: my story", and having it mirrored on the There Voice, plus emailing people who have bought/sold from me in the past, I was very pleased and all warm and fuzzy inside from the overwhelmingly positive responses I received. So, thank you to all you wonderful crazy shop-aholic and developer-type Thereians who have been soooo sweet!

I did receive a few emails that disturbed me. One member said they understood what it was like to be obsessive compulsive. What? Who?? Me??? What, just because I obsessively spent a couple of years compulsively checking sales on tbux.com? haha...okay, they have a point, but it's not all bad to be obsessive-compulsive as long as you channel those tendencies into something productive...like, not washing your hands 100x a day but maybe building up your business. I would never have been the first There developer to reach 1000 submissions if I hadn't been so obsessed with the There developer program. I wouldn't have made a living buying and selling virtual currency if I weren't obsessive.

What really did disturb me were the half dozen or so emails I received pledging to buy ThereBucks only from me, as if I were right and tbux.com were wrong. What??? I didn't know there was a right or wrong here, and I'm sorry if I gave that impression. While I think the sentiment was sweet and the intentions were good, I don't really see it as me against them and I think you'd be foolish to try and choose between me and tbux.com. Discount ThereBucks are a sellers market...because there are ultimately always more people wanting to buy them than there are discounted ThereBucks available for sale. So rather than pledge fidelity to ONE reseller, I think it's far more sensible to cover all your bases.

Now, if more than one place is listed as selling at the same time, by all means buy from me! ;) I do deliver in less than ten minutes if you already belong to my club, and while we're talking about speed, you'll probably get your PayPal payments the fastest if you're selling to me, and I'm grateful for your loyalty. I just don't think anyone should limit themselves...just go for what works best for you at the time. That's what I did! :)

tbux.com: my story

Recently, I was removed as a member/seller from the site tbux.com. I had been selling ThereBucks there for 3 1/2 years. I was also removed from all the related clubs on There.com. I get tired of secrets and gossip and I thought I'd just talk honestly here about why this happened, at least from my point of view.

Tbux.com has maybe a dozen members...I don't know, recently the numbers changed after being the same for years...and those members have the privledge of listing themselves as selling ThereBucks on the site. Anyone else with ThereBucks to sell can put in a sell request, which generates an email that goes out to all the tbux members (although the email part was broken for quite a while) letting them know someone was selling and they can all race to "claim" the transaction. Whoever claims it first then has the right to email the potential seller and ask them to send the ThereBucks.

In my opinion, this system is very inefficient. Also, smaller sales requests require a lot of work for a very small amount of profit, and it wastes the time of anyone who is trying to claim the request but doesn't get there first. It also wastes the time of the person looking to sell, as they have to wait to see who claims their request to be able to send their ThereBucks somewhere and then receive a PayPal payment.

Honestly, if I were setting up the site I would have just claimed all the sale requests myself, instead of having all the sellers squabble over them or selectively only claim the larger transactions or whatever. Of course, I never would have said that while I was a member of the site, because if that suggestion was actually taken seriously I'd never have been able to claim any requests myself.

Another inefficiency is simply the number of sellers on the site. Recently even more sellers were added, so if you are a member-seller you have to compete with other member-sellers for sales. The more sellers they add, the more they have to compete with each other and the more uneven the sales and the longer it takes each of them to sell out the ThereBucks they have. Also, the site doesn't really tell you how much they are selling or take note when a larger transaction comes in, so they need to build a lot of padding into the amount they are selling or risk not being able to fill the orders received, which is always a hassle.

I don't mean to bash tbux.com. I sold there for over 3 1/2 years and it's been the best thing out there for that whole time and has helped me make a living. I'm only pointing out the flaws that bothered me more and more over time but certainly not enough to leave the site or even really complain about it. Kittenkat runs the site and asks almost nothing from the other members, and it's been great selling there and I think she was really visionary to build it in the first place back in 2003.

Rather than complain about the limitations of the site, I simply tried to adapt. I wanted to claim as many sales requests as possible, so I set up primitive systems to help me claim them before any other tbuxer. I kept a laptop right next to my bed, I set an audible alert for sales emails, and I really never went anywhere or had a life because I didn't want to miss a single sale. Seriously, I was afraid to go to the store and run errands because I didn't want to miss a big sale that might make the difference in whether I could pay rent or bills that month. I bought a treadmill so I could exercise without leaving my apartment. I was obsessed, and I was really good at claiming the sales. My day would be ruined if someone else managed to claim one. And of course, they probably wouldn't bother if it was a smaller transaction, those they would sometimes just leave for me. I never thought that was right and never did it myself until finally I saw Kittenkat herself blatantly do it, so then I decided I was justified in doing it without guilt.

I was pretty miserable having no life, my biggest thrill being claiming sales requests on tbux.com before anyone else, so I decided I needed to automate the process. It took me about a year to find someone to do this for me, but I ended up with a really great system that even might occassionally pass a turing test. I was soooo happy! It wasn't foolproof, this system of mine, because it was still possible for someone else to be there at the right time and claim a request before me, but it did a better job than I did and I could sleep soundly at night or go get my hair done in San Francisco, go on dates, find a boyfriend, work out at a real gym, go away somewhere overnight etc. My quality of life improved about 1000%, and I believe it was better for those selling to me as well, since they didn't have to wait for their transactions to be claimed, or only had to wait maybe 15 minutes no matter what time of night or day.

Okay, so far so good, but obviously things didn't remain that way or I wouldn't be writing this right now. After more than a year of automated bliss, at least one member of the tbux.com site complained that they suspected I was using a bot and it wasn't fair and was in fact immoral. I was contacted and asked that, if I was in fact automating the process, I stop immediately and if I wasn't that I leave some transactions for other members, and eventually an email was sent out to members of the site informing us that using a 'bot was now against the rules. Well, I don't want to break the rules, but I also have gotten quite used to actually having a life, so following this new rule meant to me that...

1. I would either have no life once again, or I would keep my life but lose at least half the money I was making or more from ThereBucks reselling, plus if I go back to the "no life" option I'll probably just look like a 'bot anyway...I'd probably get told to stop claiming so many of them even if it's manually, because other members have decided it's not fair. Too me this is really silly, and it means that each time a sale request came in, I'd have to go to the sale request page and evaluate whether it was appropriate for me to claim that particular request or not. Maybe wait 15 minutes to see if someone else would like to claim it instead so I don't get chastised again. What a big waste of my time! Plus, it's just not...well...who is going to voluntarily take a cut in income like that, especially without a cut in time spent on the activity, at least without a fight? Or...who is going to take a cut in quality of life like that, especially after spending a year trying to automate the process in the first place?

2. I still felt the whole claiming of requests by some random person manually was inefficient, and it seemed like a step back in quality of service for the people that "we" bought from.

So I sent an indignant email back to Kittenkat, not admitting to using a 'bot, but protesting that I hadn't done anything wrong. She still wanted me to stop using the 'bot, so I simply stopped responding to her emails. I didn't know what else to do, and it seemed like the best way to buy time while I set up a new system. Eventually, she kicked me off the tbux.com site, and so I started up my own site...it wasn't really what I wanted to do, the whole thing made me really sad, but it seemed like far and away the best option.

The silver lining is that now I can run a ThereBucks selling site the way *I* want, and fix the little things that have bugged me over the years. I can claim sales requests instantly, I can pay buyers within ten minutes, people can see how much is for sale and I don't sell more than I have. I'm actually starting to get excited about it, because I think it's a good system and people have actually been using it! So thanks, and if you haven't tried it yet, it's at http://jinx.tv/tbux

Well, glad we have that all sorted! Be sure to read the above with the thought that this is just *my* side of the story, and each person involved is sure to have their own version.

See you in There! (or IMVU, or somewhere.)