Second Life Link for facebook - What about the Teens? A question to the community

Hi everyone, this is Fire Centaur, creator of Second Life Link for facebook. http://www.facebook.com/p.php?api_key=00b8153d7f12a4c7228b6c927fb2c537

I have an important question to ask everyone, because Id like to get the oppinion of the community.

As you may already know, we released an application for facebook that links your SL avatar to your facebook profile. The idea was, to leverage our social networks existing in SL, using Facebook a proven social networking tool.

Anyhow with our app, you can see your friends Online status, and their home locations, etc.

Ive recently been requested to add a Second Life Link to the teen grid. This is fairly easy for us to do, but the question is,

Do we mix Teens with Adult members on Facebook?

Facebook's members range from 13 and up, yet Second Life has two versions, 13-18, and 19-up

So, if a teen adds our application on facebook, should their avatar be shown in Second Life Link, where adult avatars are?

Or should we display their avatars in a completely separate facebook application?

Please let us know what your thoughts are on this.
We appreciate your oppinions.

Thanks very much

Sincerely

Fire Centaur

Two applications seems a bit complicated, is there no-one way to just add the teen/adult distinction within the application itself?

I think they should be kept separate. But perhaps it could be easier to move from the teen grid to the adult one. at the moment its a bit difficult as far as i am aware.

I don't think exporting SL's policies to other portals is a good idea, there is no point adding restrictions to an external site, on something that will be account based anyways...

presumably a person who is on each site has to abide by that site's TOS, and should be able to use that site within the limits of that TOS. LL has no reason to assume liability for content provided by another service, and neither does a person that ports normal access in, so LL's TOS really doesn't apply to their content.

Link SL to Facebook? Ick!

I think the whole thing's a bad idea, for any age.

(Well, you did ask for my opinion.)

(I kinda agree with Lindal, to be honest, but presumably there's some market for this, so...)

I wouldn't go to a huge amount of work to separate the two, because there's reason to expect that the grids will themselves be merged at some point. And if, end-game, there's no distinction in SL between a teen and a senior citizen who hasn't age-verified, then any distinction in another application would be pretty pointless.

*But*... you mentioned that you are making public the avatar's "home" location. First, is that really in the world.secondlife.com data? (Now I have to try it and see.) And second... hmmm... well, if it is, then I guess it's "public" in some way already, but it's not necessarily information that everyone will expect to be public.

Nope, they should be totally separate, the same as the grids are.

I'd hope not since it's one of the security questions to get a password reset .

Thanks everyone for your responses so far!!! We are watching them keenly to figure out the best approach.



Hmm, interesting idea, actually, it would be very simple us to have an on/off checkmark to display each group, ie: you could select: All residents, or just teens etc.


This was actually my personal oppinion on this matter too Toxic, however others are raising some interesting points..


Thanks Qie, actually, I think we'll have to change the name of "Home location" in our app, because it's actually not the same as the second life home, which you would set in the actual second life client - as we can't actually retreive that info. Instead, its just a location we allow users to set IN facebook - as a way to share their favorite location with their fb friends.


Well, its ok, we know our app isn't for everyone, however it does personally help me with my network of sl friends



Hmm void, this is a very interesting point you made, you are completly right, people on facebook are only required to follow facebook's TOS. Will have to think about this some more...

please if you are reading this, give us your oppinion! Cheers!

Hmph... no PIE option. What sort of survey is this? But seriously. I tried out your Second Life Link app for my FaceBook page. It seems to work just fine but seeing how I hardly have any FaceBook contacts from RL or SL the excercise was a bit moot. Still it might be useful to the social butterflies out there.