ok. The end is nigh

one of my old ex-premium accounts just received an invitation to another LL survey.

The primary focus was on asking questions about what kind of dating services I'd like to see in SL and what kind of details I'd like to see in profiles.. i.e. search by interests, rl age, marital status and other rl info and it asked what dating sites I'd used. it did ask a few non romantic interest questions like asking what kind of reasons I went inworld to meet people and the kind of non-romantic things I might like to do i.e. live music etc

pity they managed to find her to send out this drivel but couldn't manage to remember she existed when it came to sending out the adult email.. you know, the one that was supposed to go to everyone but didn't?

I've got to say though for the first time ever I'm prepared to claim the sky is falling! This survey was an omg!!!!! moment.

/grumble

M Linden, pimp extraordinaire!

the beautiful thing about this is they'll cock it up like everything else so when someone goes looking for a mid 30's female academic with her own income they'll get a 64 yo truck driver called steve whose avatar is a 16yo bimbette cheerleader lookalike interested in bukkake.

Oh hell. You ARE joking, aren't you?????

Isn't this the sort of thing that IMVU is supposed to be about?

/me exits, doubled over, to the accompaniment of gagging noises . . .

here's the email. if the link works for you then have fun with the survey

You all need to lighten up and realize that socializing in SL is a big part of what makes SL. Anything to help in making the profiles better for such purposes is a step in the right direction. I have been in SL off and on for a few years now. I've met many women via SL and even had one RL relationship. Maybe in your miserable luck you keep meeting female avatars operated by men in RL...perhaps it is just the places you choose to frequent!

Talk about creating confusion. First off, they banish adult stuff to a continent, and now they're looking into starting a dating site inside SL? Wait, doesn't that LEAD to adult stuff? And am I going to spammed with this crap, even though I am happily married RL side and SL side?

LL really needs to look into the whole removing the cranium from the rectum operation. It'd do SL a whole lot of good and be a lot less expensive.

I don't think that anyone is questioning the importance of socializing in SL. Nor the possibility of forming real life attachments based on people met here. At issue is the implication that the app might actually be redesigned or at least reoriented with this end in mind.

The most immediate danger I see is in this new focus on RL details in the profile. I have problems with this for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is the danger it opens up to harassment and stalking.

But, on a more general and philosophical level, it represents a reorientation of SL away from the notion of it being a SECOND life, somewhere you can experiment with identity and behaviour. The focus for any dating service, or conventional social networking medium, is (understandably) upon RL identity: this is why, as I understand it, Facebook keeps an ongoing guerrilla war going against "fake" accounts. Turning SL into something like this, a medium into which one merely projects one's real life identity, will almost certainly destroy what makes this app different and exciting.

By all means, it is your right to treat SL as an online dating service with toons. But let's not destroy what makes this place special and different merely so as to expedite this one facet of the application.

You're a guy, right?

You don't get it.

That won't be any different than finding a 40 year old, 175 pound hottie who is ripped, with luscious hair.....and ending up at lunch with a 60 year old, 400 pound bald guy, who snorts and drools.....same as misMatch or eHarm.

At least you can take them out for a spin here, without having to waste time dressing up and fixing your hair.

What else are you gonna do to get new members? Obviously, they have not heard that internet dating sites have already saturated the web or that those sites let you see real photos of real people.

Na they need to keep these blunders up its GREAT comady watching the Lab hand over its user base to other 3d worlds lol
LL couldnt find its way now no matter what
Now the other 3d worlds will start to grow lol

a linden alt more like (it was their first post after all)

notice that the linden commitment to quality is still there in the email? they couldn't even be bothered to spell check it.

REAL photos? are you kidding? lol

No, it's spelled correctly. They sold the vowel to cover the rent this month.

I tried to open the survey via the link, but all I get is a page telling me my survey answers have been recorded.

There is already a First Life tab in Profile. Is this not adequate? Especially when such a tiny amount of residents even use the First Life tab for actual First Life information. (Most of the time when someone bothers to fill out that tab, it is to say that they don't give out real life information.)

If the aim is to make First Life details more searchable for online match-making purposes, I wonder if prospective dates get ranked in search by their Traffic numbers?

If you meet someone on SL and go out on a real date, then tell one of your SL friends about the date, then do you get ARed and banned for giving out real life information about another SL resident? Talk about a don't ask, don't tell dating policy.

I'm suprised at the subject of that survey. It's really not like LL to consider something other than their tao, business plan, and corporate pimpage strategies.


OP's right.. it IS the end.

this is actually part of their business plan. In January M stated they wanted to move towards attracting the facebook/myspace crowd. Hence (i assume) the reason for a lot of the moves towards putting stuff on the web rather than developing inworld functionality. So I assume the dating service will be part of the 2d functionality more than the inworld.

This is why I think it's the end of the world as we know it. Despite LL's best efforts to drive everyone away, some of those who will hang around the web interface will occasionally come inworld and suddenly a/s/l as a topic of conversation is going to take off again... ugh.

a/s/l ????

a/s/l = age sex location, a term used in chat rooms

I've always found that new users ask that sort of question. They want to make friends, and those are normal sorts of questions for people to ask. They aren't yet thinking about having an avatar identity distinct from their normal real world identity.

Asymmetric Subscriber Line

Ah, ok, thanks. I think I asked that one before, and was told. Memory like a sieve, that's me!

I certainly get asked location a fair amount; not so much sex or age, except by guys who are clearly "interested." But you may be right: this may be more normal (and understandable) from noobs.

Even if the whole "dating service" thing is kept off-world, in the web component of the app, it's likely to have a nasty impact, because it's going to change expectations about what SL is "about."

There is already a fair amount of friction between what we have elsewhere been calling "augmentationists" and "immersionists"; that is likely to grow. I myself am pretty upfront about a lot of details of my RL: I do give out a/s/l, for instance. But I really hate people -- and I've known a number of them -- who are actually offended by immersionists, or people who simply withhold RL info, in part because insisting on this kind of approach really works towards cheapening the whole SL experience. They can use SL any way they want, but getting annoyed that others don't conform to THEIR expectations really pisses me off. If I wanted an online dating service, I'd use one; if my primary interest were in social networking, I'd be focussing my attention on MySpace or Facebook.

If this goes through, watch for a serious loss of creativity in SL.

You said it. Don't go plunging about hunting for lovers on these daing sites Scylla. It's very dangerous.

Anyone who is stupid enough to think that people on the web tell the truth in those chatrooms when they're asked for a/s/l is too dim to ever make it in here.

Bit by bit the old guard are being marginalised and tribalised. no longer is sl our playground as we're being forced to make way for the missing millions.

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing but I do think that LL is handling it in its usual style where it will alienate those core revenue generators even more but it still believes it can get away with it because there's nowhere else to go. They're pretty right in that - a lot of the people I saw screaming at LL during the adult content fiasco are still around, despite threatening to spit the dummy and leave... some of them are still threatening to spit but the problem with threats is if you don't carry through with them there goes your credibility.

In theory for me this should be a godsend because people will want to bump pixels if they're doing the 'romance' thing and I don't ever go out into public areas to socialise so I never need to meet this new wave of one dimensional beings.

It is sad that the creative environment is being slowly abandoned or dismantled in favour of this new breed but the bright side of course is that they'll only do the bare minimum needed to make the press release look good and the rest of us will just carry on as normal.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Second Life is going the way of many innovated businesses that fall on tough times.

You start with an idea, that's just a great idea, and even if it isn't going to make you rich, it's such a great idea that you're going to commit to it and just earn enough to support yourself so you can live the "if you do what you love you'll never work a day in your life" dream.

Maybe your dream is a gourmet pizza parlor- sure there are plenty of pizza parlors, but your passion is the unique gourmet pizzas. The other guys make plenty of money with the common pizzas, but you're going to do something different: chicken barbeque pizzas, bacon and egg pizzas, mashed potato pizzas. You are going to focus on making the best damn gourmet pizzas anywhere.

You start out with lots of enthusiasm, but somewhere along the line, something goes wrong. Maybe you couldn't figure out how to market your gourmet pizzas. Maybe people think your product is too weird to try. Maybe you over-estimated how good mashed potato pizzas are in the first place. Maybe you just get hit with an economic downturn that kills new businesses.

You may want to stay dedicated to your gourmet pizza dreams, but the money reality sets in. The cable gets disconnected, your kids get tired of ramen for dinner every night, and the only thing that prevents your spouse from filing for divorce outright is because the court would be splitting marital debt and not marital assets.

You look at your competitors- Papa Hut and Pizza Johns- and they seem to be doing well, so you finally have to get in. You need to pull in some money now to save your dream for the future. Now it's time to start compromising from your focus and emulate what the other guys do to pull in the money.

After researching the current money-making opportunities, your gourmet pizza parlor starts to also selling swine flu vaccinations, because you read there was lots of money to be made in the pharmaceutical industry when epidemic panics come around. Even though that should have worked, based on your economic research, it turns out that your line cooks have trouble getting out their pizzas in 30 minutes when they have to divide time between cooking and giving shots, and your parlor gets a reputation of being bad as a place for both pizza and swin flu shots (since line cooks typically aren't also trained nurses.)

Then you go back to the drawing board, figure our what the other growth industries are, and eventually your gourmet pizza/swine flu vaccination/amateur nude photography/life coach/office temp agency all-in-one business just falls apart because it's just all too much to do at once, that you can't succeed at any part.

That's what SL looks like now. The 3-D community ran into problems, so now it's desperately pursuing any opportunity that has buzz as the next big money-maker, regardless of whether it's germaine to the original vision or something they are equipped to handle in the first place.