M (LL's CEO) interview yesterday in SL

or Idiots R Us

This is the same old short-sighted approach to the Live Music 'scene' in Second Life as the fans see it - excluding the venues that started the scene and are the sole supporters of it to this day. Too bad he couldn't say a kind word for these hard-working, tier-paying content providers.

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Not really, it doesn't encourage people to be open about who they are. Instead it encourages roleplay and escapism. Going onto a social networking site and saying "I'm a furry and I like to keep my life private." would be considered odd.

No more nor less than any other social networking tool. Blogs, Forums, LiveJournal and Twitter and the rest, are all full of role-players. You don't see them, perhaps, simply because you don't actually SEE anyone on the Internet... there's no sense of place, no avatars, no "presence" as there is in Second Life.

Heck, the only reason I'm on Twitter at all is because I started following someone who was publishing a series of fictitious Tweets from an imaginary character.

Going to a social networking site and asking someone who they are "in real life", asking someone if they were "really" who they were presenting as, that would be considered odd.

This cartoon isn't about Second Life, it's about the Internet as a whole:



Second Life wasn't even a twinkle in Philip Rosedale's eye when this was first printed.

I suppose our definition of social networking is a little different. My idea of social networking is sites like Myspace, Facebook. These sites are for people that want to connect and get to know eachother.

and please, nobody reply to this with crap like "you get to know the real me in Second Life" ...or I'll fart on your head.

You really have no idea how many completely fictitious people there are on these services?

Yes, there is 232.5

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

Oh yes... must be 2-4%.

--
Aes

/me barks and wags his tail (as it'll soon be time for walkies).

Absolutely with you on that, Argent - sure, for a lot of people (probably a majority) traditional social networking sites provide a useful platform to broadcast their true ('true-er'?) RL identity, but there's definitely people (I would guess, on the whole, writers, artists and other creatives) utilising those tools in what I'd call a positive 'psuedo' way - creatively tinkering and playing with the concept of identity, character, fact/fiction, information/disinformation (some malicious, of course, but a lot, not).

Certainly nothing wrong with them being used in either way, IMO - as long as one aproaches it all with an open mind. I just hope that the freeedom to be imaginative in all these 'worlds' isn't compromised too much (or any more than it already is).

In regards to integration into SL - I guess the only problem would be if the external-to-SL tools start heading more towards the 'true you' model of information. Kinda kills it for fantasy/roleplay, obscurity and creative immersion, IMHO.

Personally I think every Internet user should be shown that cartoon upon entering, but that's just my opinion.

*Woof Woof*


p.s. Maybe the new update to "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog" should be: "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog - but we will implement tools to verify your identity if we need to know"

Whether we call it "social networking" or not, this area is make-or-break for SL; getting this right is much more important than the next generation of eye-candy or (god knows) a dumbed-down viewer for n00bs.

But other than the CEO's platitudes, I've seen no evidence that they're investing in innovating here, so I suspect this will be just another botched third-party "strap-on" integration, if they even go that far. Their history here has been dismal: note how limited are Groups, how borked is Group messaging, how impoverished the Friend semantics, and the embarrassingly featureless SLim.

It's a damned shame, a conspicuously lacking core competency.

Can you still say "strap-on"?

Plug-ins?

I bet they're "robust". "Killer apps", probably.

This would be an example of things I would pay *not* to have.

I must be the only person who'd love to have these features? I have quite a few online and RL friends who are currently not in SL, but who would love it if they knew more about it and would give it a chance. I'd love to have a way to easily connect my SL profile with my Facebook and LiveJournal, and share content across them.

I also think it would help SL to be taken more seriously as a platform and as a place to do business. In-world organizations could set up their own discussion groups and feeds, helping to solve the group limit issues and allowing for better out-of-SL communication. Right now SL is so cut off from the web, and this would be a huge step towards integration. If they added HTML/browser on a prim, organizations and businesses could post their pages in world and people could comment on forums, etc. It would really be revolutionary!

I'm against it.

First off, I don't use any of those other things, don't need to, don't want to. For me, it would be useless functionality.

More importantly, it gives the Facebookers, the people who like using SL to touch base with their RL friends, too much justification to be here.

Not that I object to the Facebooker crowd per se...I've always said that there is room in SL for roleplayers, immersionists, and Facebookers. But it seems to me that it is the Facebookers who tend to be the least tolerant of people whose approach to SL is different from their own.

To too many of them, if you don't give out A/S/L on first meeting, you're "wrong". To them, people with "don't ask" in the First Life section of their Profile are secretive, paranoid, and altogether "unpredictable".

So I say, let 'em have Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn. Let me have my SL.

Put me in the Nay group. I don't use any of those things, nor am I interested in ever using them. I'm not particularly against their integration into SL per se, it is, unfortunately a natural step in SL becoming 3D AOL, but like Lindal said, many of the MyFaceSpaceBookers don't seem to be very tolerant of SLers who prefer the "Unreal" fantasy approach.

Well, it's the old "augmentation" (use SL just to augment your RL identity) vs. "immersion" debate, in a way. Certainly a person who comes to SL to immerse themselves in a different identity must shudder at the onrush of social networking integration; and those who view their SL as simply an enhanced version of themselves must rejoice.

I hope LL does this in such a way that immersionists can ignore the presence of RL social networking tools. I'm not a good immersionist myself, but I find their presence in SL completely charming.
This is true. Facilitating residents' efforts to connect to each other, and to identities outside of SL (whether those identities are real or not!), is something LL has consistently blown and needs to get right. It is just slightly promising that Kingdon repeatedly noted that LL needed to improve residents' ability to "find and discover" groups of people who are likely to have shared interests. (However, he spoke mostly of new residents). He also made indirect mention of the difficulty inworld businesses have in reaching their customers. Better resident-resident-group communication methods would definitely help. However, it strikes me that the heavyhanded search filtering being implemented now is a step backwards, not forwards.
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That really seems to be the mantra out there lately. from the Big Spaceship scheme on down, everything seems to be targeted at the "new resident" or the potential maybe imaginary new resident. It is understandable to want to expand your customer base, but LL always seems to be doing it in way that not only alienates their current users, but kicks them to the curb and shows them nothing but contempt.