SL Share Extends To Flickr And Twitter But What Next For SL Profiles?

Linden Lab have blogged that the SL Share feature that was initially introduced to allow people to share photos, status and check ins on Facebook has now been extended to include functionality for Flickr and Twitter.

Personally I feel Flickr and Twitter are a much better fit for Second Life as both allow people to have their Second Life user name as their profile name, whereas Facebook is still in the bah humbug arena regarding pseudonyms.

In both cases they are taking advantage of features and requirements of the respective platforms, with Twitter the hashtag of #SecondLife is automatically added and with Flickr, they respect the fact that maturity ratings are sometimes required.

However there are also other funky features, such as post processing of pictures, as explained in the blog post :

This update will also introduce a set of post-processing filters that you can run your pictures through to create cool one-of-a-kind images! The new filters were inspired by the images posted to Flickr by Second Life Residents. With more than a million uploads, most of them enhanced by some post-processing, we thought it would be great to include this feature right in SLShare. These filters will work regardless of which social network you choose to share your Second Life pictures to.

However if you don’t like those filters, you can use the advanced features and create your own filters, the wiki has more details.

Now to take advantage of these features, you will need to download a special project viewer, which you can find here.

If you want even more details then Linden Lab have also provided a video, which I’ll post now.

So all good stuff for those who want to use these features and no real problem for those who don’t. However, what of Second Life users own profiles? They suffered a setback when private messaging was disabled without announcement towards the tail end of last year and they haven’t really been enhanced much recently.

Do Linden Lab have plans to improve them or are they going to slowly try to encourage people to use other forms of social media on platforms which are designed to meet the challenges of people posting images and updates regularly? I fear for the future of SL profiles and there are plenty of people who would far rather use their SL profile feed than have to sign up to another site.

On the other hand, these other sites help to extend the reach of Second Life because they go beyond the Second Life sphere, it’s a good form of generating interest in Second Life with those who are not currently Second Life users.

I do feel Linden Lab are right to go down this route in terms of taking advantage of the features both Twitter and Flickr offer, it’s a very sensible move but I also wonder if Linden Lab are starting to feel their own profile feed system is a resource too far, time will tell.

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