Profiles

That's as may be, but building it into a viewer is nasty. LL didn't include llRequestAgentData for the purpose of circumventing a person's chosen visibility, and building the function into a viewer is incredibly irresponsible imo.

I suppose it could be viewed that way - but only if you also view all creators of avatar detection objects as irresponsible and also those that go check groups to find the REAL online status of a person.

Because some people are idiots. The profile is there to be read by others. That's its purpose.
While I would not necessarily call much of it stupid, I would say it is useless for many if not most of the users of the Emerald viewer. A lot of Emerald users do not create content, some of them have never even learned to make a simple gift box and many of the features are only useful for building/content creation. Then there are features such as OTR that are useless for pretty much everyone and whose purpose seems somewhat dubious. Several of the features have little or no utility for even content creators.

I don't use Emerald for the same reason I don't buy devices in RL that have all sorts of low value features added into them. It's just more stuff that can break and make the viewer hard to use whenever the Emerald creators or Linden Lab do an update. It's also more stuff that I might accidentally activate that I don't want activated or might activate on its own by default or by glitch/bug.

It's kind of sad that a huge spike in the Emerald viewer population occurred when they implemented jiggle tech into the viewer. It speaks volumes about the character of a significant portion of the user population. There is also now a deluded mentality among some Emerald viewer users that they are "cool" because they use it even if they only use it for the most banal reasons, and an equally deluded mentality that those who do not use it are noobish and "uncool."

Narcissism?

Given why a large majority of the users are really in SL, this does not surprise me even a little.

'look ma, they bounce'

Phil.. it's not a feature of Emerald. Someone -- not one of the Emerald devs -- found a bug in the previous version of Emerald that enabled him to write something exploiting this bug so people could -- if they wished -- buy a hud from him that told them if someone was looking at their profiles.

When the Emerald devs found out about this exploit, they patched it in the next release, so this hud doesn't work if you're using the new Emerald release. Viktoria explained this at the start of the thread at /327/59/357392/1.html#post2652292

The problem is it is very rare to find someone with a profile that's actually worth reading. 25% of the people I see have empty profiles. 25% have one-liners like "RL is RL and SL is SL" or other crap like that, 25% have stuff that are so overused like "if you want to talk to me, IM me, I'm friendly, I love to chat, I hope to make friends, blablabla", 24% have stuff that reveals how noobish/stupid they are like "please don't IM me unless you're wearing expensive clothing", and the rare 1% have interesting profiles.
I think character limit is also another problem... 500 chars for a profile? Even web forms have a larger limit -.-'; I think my profile has had exactly 500 chars for the last year or so lol~

Agreed. Reading profiles is great. Anyone who doesn't want people reading them is in the wrong place LOL.
I've found laughter and magic in them.

That said, any application that announces who is reading who to the world, whether it be a HUD or a viewer, is so much more spam and total bull and something I'd boycott just on principle.

I don't know either. What else are they for?

Why not leave the profile blank if no one should read it?

It seems there is a wide range about how people feel about profile reading. Some people feel you should only look at profiles after you meet someone. Others routinely look at profiles. Others could care less.

I tend to fall into the 'routinely look' category. Especially in 2 cases:

Someone IMs me and assumes I know them but the name does not ring a bell. Quick! Does their profile give me any clues as to how I might know them?

I am de facto in charge of security and someone approaches who I do not recognize. Are they a new account (so possibly a griefer)? Are they in a group that might be interested in the event?

that's pretty much how I feel about it...

I always find it funny though, when I come accross a profile that says something along the lines of "if you ask me about X...", "IM me without reading this...", etc "...I'll be a rude obnoxious ass" (paraphrasing).

on the up side, that means there are people that actually expect you to read through their entire profile before saying word one to them... which is just as weird to me.

Actually, it's not the viewer itself it is a tool you buy off xstreet and wear. I ran across it a few weeks ago when searching for something else and thought it was pretty stupid. Apparently it can be set to send a private message just to the owner of it or to broadcast it in open chat to everyone. The crazy thing is why the hell would i want to know so and so is looking at so and so's profile. My guess is the people who actually purchase this tool are the "No Drama here" people who have nothing but drama on their hands because they are busybodies.

Sounds right to me. I wonder, though, what the device's creator was thinking...

1. I'll make a mint!

2. Now everyone will appreciate my special genius!

3. The Emerald developers didn't pay my ransom, so *this* will show 'em!

4. My alt who sells tinfoil hats will make a mint!

LOL, no I think they were thinking:

I wonder how many men/women look at my profile and want to have sex with me. Let me count them and while I'm at it, I'll let everyone else know how popular and in demand I am I also want to know why that guy/girl is looking at all these other people's profile and not mine.

That's probably the reason for about half the profile-looks I've done.

The other half is to look for evidence to answer the question 'is this person who's been standing on my land for 45 minutes actually a bot (and therefore likely to have a mostly-empty Profile with an older registration date) or a genuine newbie (and therefore more likely to have the mostly-empty Profile, but a recent registration date)?'

I don't care if people look at my own Profile, and I wouldn't be offended if they did and then didn't strike up a conversation--after all, there's a wide variety of interests in SL and if the looker doesn't share mine, why should he or she take up time chatting?

(But of course I don't have any interest in using a viewer or device to figure out if anyone IS looking at my profile, so it's all academic.)