Extending Reach – Facebook and Other Options

Hamlet, over at New World Notes, is on a Facebook offensive, as opposed to Ciaran, over here, who is on an offensive Facebook campaign.  I do agree with Hamlet with regard to Facebook having the potential to extend reach, which it clearly does have.  Indeed I have no issue at all with Linden Lab or any other Second Life residents promoting Second Life on Facebook, where I do have a problem is with Linden Lab promoting Facebook on Second Life, as they did again recently on the spring break blog post.

I fully believe LL are doing this all arse about face, they should be offering Facebook exclusive promotions, on Facebook, to Facebook users (as opposed to Second Life users, although some clearly fall in both categories). People may well moan about promotions on Facebook, but the idea is surely to extend Second Life’s reach into Facebook territory, not extend Facebook into Second Life territory, which is more akin to driving the wrong way up a one way street.

However Facebook isn’t the only way to extend reach and Facebook simply does not welcome Second Life users, to use their Second Life names, full stop. Facebook doesn’t like pseudonyms, beyond the rich and famous and those whose cause Robert Scoble takes up. Continue reading “Extending Reach – Facebook and Other Options”

Support extremely busy

I’m biased when it comes to overworked and understaffed support teams, so when I received an email from support today informing me that they are sorry for the delay in my ticket, but the plain fact of the matter was that they were behind with their workload and trying to catch up, I smiled.

This doesn’t mean I find it acceptable to wait this long for a response but it does mean, I have respect for the honest response and a support person who isn’t trying to spin me a line, I’d much rather hear straight forward truthful answers, rather than stories about someone’s dog eating their homework.

Well done support team, now get back to work!

One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Animation Override

The Second Life Marketplace maturity rating bugs are reaching comical levels right now, well comical for me as none of my items have moved rating, probably not comical for the merchants who are scratching their heads wondering what’s going on.

Reports have came in that “an”, “5”, “Six”, “AO” and “X” (uppercase) are considered too hot to handle for general audiences on SLM. There’s clearly a bug and it’s clearly teething problems but this has all got a bit silly very quickly, fortunately so silly that merchants seem to be seeing the funny side but one wonders how long their goodwill will last.

Brooke Linden, has been rather impressively communicating in the blogrums and reminds me somewhat of Pink … and look what happened to poor Pink in the end, I still don’t get why they’d let someone as talented as Pink go, whereas I often didn’t see eye to eye with Pink, the reason I didn’t see eye to eye was because she communicated, Brooke is certainly doing well in that department. Continue reading “One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Animation Override”

Stagnating but by no means dead

I was ready to move on from Facebook, with Inara Pey frowning at me on her blog, and Hamlet Au covering different angles over at New World notes, I was all Facebooked out, but, in a turn of events not related to privacy and more in line with some of the points Hamlet made in his New World Notes post, there’s a very interesting post over at Gamasutra about virtual worlds, social media and why the easiest pathway often wins.

What’s interesting about both the Gamastura post, and Hamlet’s post, is the numbers, the number of people using Facebook compared to Second Life is quite staggering, this is largely down to Facebook being both cheaper and easier to use than Second Life, but that only tells part of the story, World of Warcraft has something like thirteen million registered accounts, so people will engage with a client based system when the appeal is there.

Both posts point out that at one stage Second Life was considered best placed to capture the largest share of the market, with 3D worlds set to replace 2D webpages, and that will happen eventually, whether Second Life is that 3D platform is a different matter because they were ahead of their time with their ambitions and now have issues with trying to scale. However this will happen one day, and it will be easy to participate and will be the path of least resistance. There was a time when people poured scorn on Amazon for having a website and felt that angle had no legs. Continue reading “Stagnating but by no means dead”

Facebook won’t eat your children

As much as I dislike Facebook, the company that is, it needs to be said that Facebook isn’t going to eat your children, run off with your wife or burn you to death whilst you’re questing in the Wetlands, as Deathwing did to me last night!

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the concept of Facebook, it’s the practices of the company that make it an area of debate and some of those practices are not comfortable viewing, this is why when Blizzard wanted everyone to use their real names on the forums, there was a backlash and complaints to privacy bodies, because Facebook goes beyond your circle of real life friends and neighbours and that’s where the issues start, hence why Facebook have been in talks with the German authorities regarding privacy settings on their friend finder feature, as reported by AFP here.

Over at New World Notes, Hamlet Au is talking of how Second Life was once considered the social networking platform of the future and how Facebook has passed it in spectacular fashion. There’s an interesting video there from 2006 featuring Robin Harper, who has been working for Playdom since November, a company who specialise in Facebook games. Continue reading “Facebook won’t eat your children”

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