Category: World of Warcraft

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Facebook is not the best place to find out about cool things in Second Life

This Facebook business is getting out of control, not content with a new widget on the homepage we now have the following rather breathtaking claim from Amanda Linden on the blog post about communication improvements, which can be read here:

“Facebook is the best place to find out about cool things going on in Second Life, share ideas, and get the inside scoop on inworld events, contests, machinima releases, PR activities, fun discussions, and more. Come join over 111,000 people who have “Liked” our Second Life Facebook page.”

You know what, it may have PR activities, fun discussions, machinima releases, contests etc. but there is no way in hell that it is the best place to find out about the cool things going on in Second Life, a cursory glance at the page shows one event listed and a few discussions going on. Twitter has far more chatter, Plurk (thanks Daniel Voyager for reminding me) has an active Second Life  community and both of these places allow you to use your Second Life name, but the best place to find out about cool things going on in Second Life, is within Second Life.

Continue reading “Facebook is not the best place to find out about cool things in Second Life”

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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”

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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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Marketplace maturity ratings off to shaky start

The new marketplace maturity ratings system, as announced here in the merchants round table on the official forum has got off to a shaky start, the first shaky start being moving the discussion thread to the merchants roundtable, because unless Linden Lab have changed something, plenty of merchants won’t even have access to that forum…..ah someone has their eye on the ball, since I first posted this and people mentioned it being in the rountable, someone at Linden Lab has sensibly moved the discussion back to the commerce forum where people do have access.  Another part of the shaky start being people wondering why their items have been set to a certain maturity level, general, moderate or adult being the levels.

This is a sensible approach from Linden Lab, maturity ratings on the marketplace should match those inworld, so this is a sensible move. This really should have happened long ago, but one wonders whether Linden Lab departments actually converse with each other, not only because this change has been brought in because of the arrival of teens on the grid, meaning it really should have happened prior to the grid merge, but also because the maturity ratings appear to be different to those inworld in terms of content. Continue reading “Marketplace maturity ratings off to shaky start”

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The Second Life Cataclysm

World of Warcraft is largely expected to experience The Shattering next week, a time when Deathwing wreaks havoc and brings chaos to Azeroth by changing the landscape, another step in the direction of their Cataclysm expansion pack. There have already been a number of pre Cataclysm events in World of Warcraft, including this week’s chaos when Elementals tried to invade the major cities.

Linden Lab are also unleashing events to mark their Cataclysm, when the teens are welcomed with open arms to the grid, this has a scheduled release date of the end of this year, but that may change, although it’s highly unlikely to happen on December 7th. We’ve already experienced a number of pre events too, the search game when you had to figure out why your parcel didn’t show in search when multiple maturity ratings were selected was one event quest, another was when those humourous Lindens decided that a parcel that had PG content but sat on mature/moderate land should be filtered out of PG search, because hey it’s mature land you silly people and even though the content may be completely PG, we don’t want the teens knowing it exists. Continue reading “The Second Life Cataclysm”

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