Category: Social Networking

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LL Should Be Leading The Conversation

I was having a chat at some ungodly hour of Sunday night with Delicia Whipsnaps Inara Pey about Linden Lab’s lack of shouting from the rooftops about what they’re doing. Examples that sprang to mind were the new privacy controls on parcels that allow you to make yourself invisible to outsiders and outsiders invisible to yourself, numerous bug fixes, Mesh allowing you to halve the number of prims you’re using in terms of prim equivalency (or land impact as it will soon be known) when you link them, 64 x 64 meter prims and how Vanderbilt University School of Nursing have been using Second Life as a training faciltity  which is a really good use case for Second Life and one Linden Lab should be highlighting.

Linden Lab are getting on with a lot of things behind the scenes, a cursory glance at the Server deployment forum shows this week’s release includes:

  • Adding additional metric collection information
  • LSL enhancements to catch and prevent shape changes that would cause a return
  • Support for calculating Resource Weights and Land Impact for all objects
  • Several crash fixes
  • Region/parcel crossing fixes
  • Miscellaneous fixes
  • llCastRay() enabled.

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Twitter Emphasise They Are Nym Friendly

Twitter CEO Dick Costollo has firmly planted his feet in the nym friendly camp according to a post at Wired’s Epicenter, which you can read here. Mr Costollo is quoted as saying:

“Other services may be declaring that you have to use your real name because they think they will be able to monetize that better and think they will be able to get more information about you that will help them monetize better.”

“We are more interested in serving our users first, and we think by serving that by serving our users first, we will have a better platform for marketers and advertisers.”

Hooray for that but not only is Mr Costollo absolutely right in his thinking, he shows Google + how wrong they are with their real name policy because in terms of advertisers, whom people follow and what their interests are, will likely produce better targetted marketing than what their name is and Google should know this because so much of their advertising service is based not on your real name, but what you’re looking for or at.

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Real Name Policy Function Creep Needs To Be Halted

Cory Doctorow had an interesting piece in The Guardian this week about Google + and more to the point Eric Scmidt’s comments that nobody is forcing people to use Google +. This came on the back of Eric Schmidt’s comments to NPR’s Andy Carvin in Edinburgh. This was the same piece that led to claims that Google + is primarily an identity service, although Tateru Nino commenting on Hamlet Au’s blog post on social networks suggested it’s Google profiles that will be the identity service.

Cory’s post is largely about discussing the real name policy of Google + and why Eric Schmidt’s comment is off, I don’t entirely agree there, I’m someone who won’t use Google + because of their policy but there is an underlying function creep with these real name policies that could very well spread, I remain opposed to such policies for many reasons, one certainly being that in some ways they are anti social, you don’t need to know your friend’s real name on a social network because if that friend wants to interact with you, they will tell you their name, that’s often how friendships are forged, you meet, you say hello, you get to know each other, you get to know more about each other, this is normal human interaction. I’ve mentioned this before but in the days before Real_ID on World Of Warcraft the guys I play WoW with would share avatar and server names and then we’d all get into a guild together, that’s how friends work.

The arguments in favour of real name only social networking are flimsy to say the least, yet they come up all the time in these sort of threads. Why wouldn’t you want your name associated with a comment? What are you hiding? If you don’t want to be known don’t go on The Internet. All people who don’t use real names are just anonymous trolls, it’s tiresome reading the same flimsy reasons over and over.

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You Are The Social Network

This week The Guardian weighed into the Google plus online anonymity stakes with two articles, one from Jemima Kiss on nym wars , where Marx Dudek seems to have found her way into the murky world of The Guardian’s comment is free section. The other post, from Krishnan Guru Murthy is about anonymity and online social networks. Both posts have some interesting opinions.

I’m not a fan of the real names policies of Facebook or Google, there are a myriad of reasons why telling people it’s sensible to post with their real name is bad advice, there seems to be some sort of attempt to say that it’s only people living under extremist regimes who should fear using their real name, but there are day to day events that make it a bad idea. One example is in the comments of Krishnan Guru Murthy’s post where someone talks of the BBC’s decision to close the Ouch! disability forum they had there, the boards are now closed for posting. The person commenting on The Guardian pointed out how there are some sensitive subjects raised there, that people would not want to post about using their real names, and yet they had a community there that helped people share information and support each other. This is however an example of why you don’t need to be a part of Facebook, Google + or Twitter to social network, although the BBC’s decision to close the board remains a disappointment to its former users.

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Why Aren’t Linden Lab Talking To Us?

So, after a break from blogging of Avril Korman like proportions, I’m back! However unlike Avril, I’m not back with a challenging and epic blog post to create a great deal of discussion and my break has largely been a result of just wanting a break. There are many interesting issues I could blog on, Shava Nerad (Shava Suntzu in Second Life) has an interesting campaign about Google + and their profiles rules. However it’s Friday night here in blighty and I’ll end up singing Safety Dance if I blog about that.

So let’s look at what’s been happening on the official Linden Lab blog, on July 21st they blogged about Mesh and on July 28th, they blogged about Mesh! Now don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to Mesh, indeed during my break I’ve been playing with Blender and volunteered one of my regions to be put into the Mesh RC Channel. However, there are a couple of other things that seem to have happened in the last week, new profiles have gone live and the hidden avatars feature, that I blogged about back on July 5th appears to have gone live, I haven’t checked it but the settings are in the latest viewer.

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