Category: Social Networking

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Virtual Reality Is Within Reality

So I was staring at my bookshelf and wanted to pick up something to read, House Of Cards by Michael Dobbs stared back at me and having just watched the series again on Virgin Media on Demand I reached for it but got sideswiped by Philip K Dick’s “Do Avatars Dream Of Electric Sheep?” … ahhh yes why not, I thought. This also ties in with a blog post from Hamlet Au over at New World Notes and listening to people on the radio pondering whether any of the real world is real or are we in a simulation, sort of like Second Life but with much better graphics and technology would be the answer if that were true, of course it’s an argument you can’t win and probably best saved for a night down the pub because that’s a debate with no end.

Philip K Dick came from an era where Mars and Alpha Centauri were the Kings of Sci Fi. Mars is no longer fashionable, to such a degree that I’m told that the remake of We Can Remember It For you Wholesale Total Recall doesn’t even include the Mars component. Alpha Centauri might be back in fashion in the Sci Fi world though now that they’ve found a planet the size of earth orbiting it. However, a theme in Sci Fi has been inhabiting worlds elsewhere, another one has been replacing human to human emotions with virtual ones or machinery. Even Woody Allen’s Sleeper and the movie Barbarella touch upon this.

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Should We Be Looking To Streamline Messaging?

So I’ve reached that age whereby I listen to BBC Radio 4 when driving to and from work. Tonight I caught a part of Digital Human, where Alexs Krotoski was investigating whether we were all becoming techno-fundamentalists, which makes a change from people being called techo-communists.

The part that most caught my attention was email, or more to the point, how bloody annoying it gets. Email is a curse at times, people hit and run with email, especially when it’s a work email, personal emails often have some substance to them, with work emails, we set out of office replies, which were once frowned upon as being wasteful, now they’re expected. Some people are apparently setting out of office emails that tell people the email will be deleted, which is a step too far in my eyes but I understand the point to a degree, the person isn’t there to handle the email.

Another issue was to do with mobile phones and how people often set them to airport mode when they’re out of work, because if they don’t, the messages keep coming. Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to Second Life and the joys of messaging.

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WordPress Commenting Issue Demonstrates Poor Communication

Here’s an example of how not to do things. WordPress recently updated their commenting system on WordPress.com so that you need to be logged in to comment with a WordPress account. This sounds sensible right, I mean this is how blogger works. However WordPress seem to have missed some important steps in their process, the first being telling their users in a sensible fashion.

The thing is many people comment on WordPress sites, without even realising they’re on WordPress.com and those people use Gravatars. Plenty of people don’t realise that their Gravatar is their WordPress.com account because they’ve never thought of it that way before, with Gravatar having its own site and all that. So what has been happening over the last few days is that people go to a site hosted on WordPress.com and then get told they need to login to post with that account, because the email address is linked to their gravatar, but, there’s no bloody obvious way of logging in and many people don’t get the link between Gravatars and WordPress accounts, they are one and the same in many cases.

I myself ran into this problem whilst trying to post on Inara Pey’s blog. The workaround was to post without using the email address linked to my Gravatar. However, as can been seen from this forum thread on the WordPress forums, a lot of people are confused as to what the bloody hell is going on. Talk about poor design, implementation and communication.

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Facebook Pages Can Be Useful

Via Hamlet Au over at New World Notes, there’s a link to a post from Strawberry Singh on using  Facebook pages to promote your Second Life brand. The good thing about Facebook pages is that you aren’t breaking the Facebook Terms of Service by having a Facebook page for your Second Life avatar, or your Second Life brand.

The thing I found even better about Facebook pages is that you don’t need to have a Facebook profile to create a Facebook page, you will still need to provide an email address and you will need this for logging in but you don’t need to have a Facebook profile, so when Facebook has a burp and sets your privacy settings to something you weren’t expecting, it won’t be an issue. That is unless Facebook have changed that now, but I created pages on Facebook without needing a main Facebook profile.

Google + on the other hand requires you to have a Google + profile to create pages, so it’s a bit different but Google + largely seem more relaxed on the names you use than Facebook are.

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LL Should Consider Group And Event Pages

There has been a bit of a hoo-ha going on about Linden Lab throttling llGiveInventory to 5K per hour per owner, per sim. as explained in Jira-SVC-7631. This sounds like a reasonable limit at first glance, it sounds like an even more reasonable limit on second glance when you consider that a single script couldn’t do this before the throttle anyway. However the ever inventive users of Second Life have got around this limit to allow subscribers to send out announcements quickly. This has unfortunately exposed a security flaw that had to be urgently addressed.

A few things stand out here, one being why the hell do we need to send thousands of notecards and textures to people in the first place. Another, the issue of communications, in this case I’m with Linden Lab, they needed to address a security issue but there remain communication issues. This change will break content.

Reading the Jira, most of the concerns are from people who run mailing lists, there is one major exception in the shape and form of 7Seas Fishing creator Seven Shikami whose game uses llGiveInventory. However it’s mostly about mailing lists, with people concerned that if they use a large mailing list that hits the throttle, all items in a sim owned by them that use llGiveInventory will not work for a while, that includes any scripted vendors that use the function. I don’t know what would happen if the vendors used llGiveInventorylist instead, I’d imagine they’d still be throttled.

However this really highlights a flaw in the group announcement system, delivering inventory to so many users for an announcement, when really we should be just pointing people in the direction of the notice. Google + and Facebook both allow people to create pages for their business or communities, it’s time really to move group notices to the Second Life profiles website and implement this into the viewer. This would mean that instead of people having to have yet another landmark, notecard and texture in their inventory, they’d just follow the link to see the texture, be able to teleport from the link and see detailed information about any new product launch or event.

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