Krypton Radio Newswire
Linden Lab pushes Second Life into something closer to a Web 2.0 social media platform with its new Facebook-like extension - which unfortunately lets anyone post anything to your profile by default.
San Francisco based Linden Lab (LL), creators of the virtual world Second Life (SL), have taken the next step in what appears to be their overall plans to merge SL with the social media craze that has been sweeping the internet for many years now. The public profiles of SL users have now been changed to work more like the well known Facebook wall, allowing other users to post comments on the profiles of anyone who has it turned on, and it’s turned on by default. Originally a users profile could only be seen by another user while logged-in and in-world, but as Linden Lab pushed its next-gen Viewer project, it moved the profiles to website based.
Called the Feed, SL users will be able to post to a Facebook style wall connected to the public profile of a Second Life customer. This can also be connected to a Twitter account which will allow people outside of SL to follow friends and family in-world. This started an uproar amongst many SL users, who did not want their SL based information being shared with search engines for anyone to find. Second Life rose to fame in its early years as being the place on the net where you could make your wildest fantasies come true in the 3D Landscape, and do so anonymously. Originally this helped draw customers by the thousands, but as the years wore on LL started seeing a decline amongst its user base, mainly having to do with dissatisfaction over LL’s customer service, constant technical issues, and what appeared to be a general lack of interest in listening to its consumer base on the issues that the customers felt mattered most.
After what seemed like many years of feet dragging by LL, a massive lay-off of company staff ensued and general reorganization took place in 2010. The new smaller and focused teams of staff have helped in pushing out updates and upgrades to the Second Life platform on an almost weekly basis, but the overall experience has worsened for some. Linden Lab has for well over a year now been trying to move SL away from the image it portrayed as being an isolated world that only role-players and uber-geeks seemed to be aware of. Taking SL to the Facebook generation and allowing people to connect their SL accounts to services such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
Some have hailed this move as a good step for SL to come out of its shell and join the social media lifestyle that many enjoy, opening the virtual world to people who may have never been aware of it before. Potentially earning many new customers in the process, but an equal amount of users have blasted the move as another way to allow people to stalk and harass other customers of the service; LL has installed the limited ability to turn off the sharing feature, but as many customers worry, not all new users of the service may realize that these features exist and will have trouble turning them off. This is particularly troubling for those SL customers who have to deal with other customers who stalk and harass them constantly, a fear is that a stalker may harass a SL user by vandalizing that person’s SL-Profile/Feed/Wall with obscene comments.
To adjust your privacy settings, log into your profile via https://my.secondlife.com/ Go to Settings, then Privacy, and you can set your Feed setting to Nobody. This will prevent anyone from using your Feed/Wall, and your other settings can only be set to a minimum of friends if you want to hide it from the general public. Also, the web-profiles work independently of your client, no matter what version you use. Using an older client will not disable this, you will still need to log into your web-profile in order to change your settings.
Through various blog posts and individual employees willing to talk, Linden Lab continues to claim that it takes all feedback from its customers seriously and is indeed listening. Is this just standard Public Relations hype, or is LL really listening? Only time will tell!
Stay tuned to Krypton Radio for further updates!
I can’t help but feel this is a mistake, LL I hope you will see the lack of use this will see and choose to do something else
i see this causing dramma
After a quick look the one CON I have about this is I hide my groups inworld for a reason and here they get displayed anyway. Maybe hide here if hidden inworld too?
I suggest that LL would better solve the troubles SL already have before doing such stupid and useless things. Lot on SL don’t like that idea, you could at least put a vote on it.
Seriously, doing such thing and using over 3 months to solve a simple problem … that’s crazy.
This is fine for those that choose it. I did not choose it but must spend time editing the site anyway. Facebook is one of the most intrusive sites that exist. Once you sign up you can’t get out and your setting preferences are not safe. I did not sign up for this LL facebook look-alike. Given the choice, I would have opted out. I resent my private account being plastered on the web without my consent. I resent having to take steps to stop the in-world spam and protect my email from maxing out. LL, if you are listening, this feature should be a choice. Period.
If LL actually did listen they would have invested their time in something other than this garbage.
better than the Avatars United monstrosity that existed a while back. Thankfully this can be turned off, more or less, but new users aren’t going to know how and spamming someones profile feed is going to become a new avenue for abuse. Why LL chose to incorporate more social media like features in an already social platform I frankly do not understand.
Luna, you can actually restrict who can see your groups on this web profile but again, for the new player or those who don’t know how, it’s counter-intuitive at best.
If anything they could have learned from Google+ and started out with privacy in the forefront; make it opt-in, default to NOT sharing (or at least only default to sharing NEW information which would not yet have been filled out by users), and put the privacy-related options in the forefront every time they might apply to something you post.
I truly believe Facebook’s lack of consideration for such things will be its undoing in the end, and I hope LL is wise enough to change its own approach very quickly.
LL want to open up to more social media for one reason – More. Money.
They have already proved they care nothing about the current residents, or those new to SL. They care only for profit. No ‘new team’ is going to change that.
Nothing we say or do on any format will sink in, they will keep the feature, possibly expand on it, and ignore the populace because they’re getting what they want.
Only way to win is to not play. Sad isn’t it
You stated, “Is this just standard Public Relations hype, or is LL really listening? Only time will tell.”
No need to wait for time, I can tell you that right now…it’s worse than the standar PR hype, it’s marketing bullshit. If SL was really interested in “Listening” to their users, they’d fix the system so it’s fast and stable, not load it down with useless features that place additional burdens on already overloaded servers. The incompetence of management, or I should say, the single-minded focus of management to maximize income potential, d— the users, is visible in many of the large sites today. The most egregious of these being Facebook itself. I was hoping SL’s shakeup last year would lead out of that mindset, but it just seems to have entrenched it further.
Already some individuals have started to post things to other’s profiles that are not wanted. This is a drama maker from the beginning.
This also brings up another side of things, what sections of ToS apply to Feeds? Without an update to the governing documents we’re in wild west territory here.
So I turned mine off too.
So I’m hoping that that the Lindens actually read Krypton Radio in some cases – maybe if they see that the automatic response is to just turn it off and not use it again, ever, they’ll get the idea that they’re messing this up.
I am not paranoid ( good words to start a rant with for sure )
But I like my privacy. Just because I choose to play this “GAME” does not mean I want to expose myself to the whole world.
I am not on Facebook, I am not interested in learning what the heck a “TWEET” is, I don’t care about your space on MY space. I am just in this game to have a bit of fun and be as anonymous as possible. Nobody needs to know anything about my Real Life unless I choose to tell them in person. and No, I don’t even have any of those lousy grocery discount cards… People are just so eager to give up their privacy, once out there in the net, it is there for ever.
The feed is set to share with other SL users by default, and you can share with the whole world as an option. But I agree with the majority, LL really should have done more research on this first.
I turned all my options to nobody and friends only, it does disturb me that LL seems to have forgotten its roots here. I think SL has a huge amount of potential if they’ll just listen to the customers for a change.
They always say they listen, but I don’t know. I’ve seen them react at times over major public outrage over some things, like RedZone. However on the social media features it seems like they’re just going full steam ahead on this no matter what people say.
Like I always hear people say, LL will listen when their decisions end up hurting the company financially.
What I wish we could come up with is some practical answers for Linden Lab on why social networking and Second Life just don’t mix. People come to Second Life to be timelords, or starship crewman, elves and dwarves, fashion models, and be all sorts of things and do all sorts of things they can’t do in real life. Are there really that many people breaking down the doors at Linden Lab saying “we want Second Life to be fully integrated with the rest of our social networking experience”?
I’d like to be able to say yes. But the reality is that there are a lot of people on Second Life who literally have nothing better to do with their time than make other people’s lives miserable, and Linden Lab has historically not really been up to the challenge of dealing with this problem, so I have to reluctantly say “no”. People want their “second lives” to be secret. Walter Middy didn’t exactly go around broadcasting his inner life. I think it’s the emotional foundation of it that Linden Lab isn’t seeing, so about once a year or so they decide to expose its own customer base to yet another privacy issue. Last year it was Avatars United. Thank goodness that thing died, that was a disaster.
LL is an engineering company, not a service company. This is why they suck at customer support and why they refuse to listen to their customers. There is no sense of creation maintaining something after you create it. So they simply keep making more stuff to add to it rather then perfect and maintain what they built. SL is a dead end to them. They are short sighted and can’t see the big picture because the culture they aspire to only knows one thing, growth through new products. They have always seen themselves as a video game company, the problem is, they have only 1 game. They needed more or make that one game do everything all the others do combined. But it doesn’t work and it’s not was made SL a success.
So finally they realize SL is a social environment not a video game and because they are idiot savants who wouldn’t know how to wipe their ass if there wasn’t a manual in pdf format to show them, they ask themselves who does social media right and how do they use that model. Guess what, facebook is king of social media so that is what they do. Even My Space tried to emulate fb, and their customers complained vigorously, but to no avail. And in reaction fb changed themselves to again differentiate themselves growing herd also angering current customers. Here is a lesson that all these companies should have heeded. In the mid 80′s Pepsi was on top of the cola wars. So what did the brainiacs at Coke do, they changed their formula to be more like Pepsi in hopes of getting more customers. The people who drank Coke because they thought it was better got pissed and stopped buying it. If you missed this era, the “New Coke” as it was advertised sucked. After 3 years and almost the end of the Coca Cola product, they reintroduced the original re-branding it Coke Classic as they had already given the crappy New Coke the title of Coke. Lesson here? Focus on the product and market you already have and enjoy the tremendous success it generates on its own.
SL was a huge success before they started trying to be a video game. Somehow it was still somewhat successful in that new people would come for a year or two and there is a lot of people in the world. But now that they have changed course yet again and are trying to be the FB of 3D online environments, we will see a further whittling down of this product. I surmised SL would be gone by next summer. This new path may slow that end, but it will come. It would have been better had they sold SL the minute they finished making it fairly stable in 2007.
I have been with SL for years and have watched as it changed for the better and like others say it got stable. But as others have said and I agree with they weren’t satisfied. They had to change it to try and be more video game type. I liked it better when all it was, was fantasy and fun. Now too many people get too personal and want to know everything about your RL. I have gotten bored with it myself and am only grateful for meeting the person that I am with in game and will be with in my RL. What ever happened to the TOS and why is it not being followed. Then Community Standards have gone out the window. The world has gotten rude, nasty and inconsiderate and the people that are like that in RL have come to SL with no punishments or being thrown out of game. There is no reason to bother to report anyone here in SL anymore cause LL does nothing to them and they continue to grief and cause trouble for the decent people here in world. OPEN UP YOUR EYES LINDEN LABS. SORRY TO SAY THIS BUT YOU HAVE F****D UP!