This is a bit of a rambling post on a varitety of subjects, the lack of official music channels in Second Life, a new messaging feature via web profiles and some strange claims by Linden Lab over premium features, I’m blaming the hottest end of September since 1895 for this rambling!
As some of you may have noticed, I’m a bit miffed about the whole Spotify now requiring new users to have a Facebook account, largely because I think this is absolutely ridiculous. However where I do think Spotify have made a sensible choice is in making their offerings available to Facebook users. This may sound contrary, but it really isn’t, my criticisms of Linden Lab pushing Facebook have been due to Linden Lab seeming to push Facebook our side, pushing Second Life Facebook side makes perfect sense.
However the deal does raise the concept of media, Second Life is a place that is ripe for media, music, videos, live performances, they are all popular within Second Life and for bands looking to make a cheap promotion, Second Life seems a reasonable cost solution and yet, we don’t see much of it. However this brings me to another gripe, which is the lack of a decent API for advertising events, I love the showcase widgets we can create, I’d love to do the same for Events or get a feed of some sort of events strream with a nice level of richness, but it’s not available.
However back to media, it’s not just bands, radio stations, television channels, they can potentially extend their reach by engaging with Second Life, this is tricky of course due to contracts, but even if like the Spotify Facebook deal, channels were only available to people from certain countries, this would extend the reach of those radio stations and channels. There’s no doubt that people in Second Life like their music, so people looking to promote music should be looking here.
Now for a completely different subject, Opensource Obscure has alerted us on Twitter that a new feature is coming to web profiles, the change is one of private messaging, here’s a screenshot of the current settings:
The new setting, which you can view at https://my-demo.secondlife.com/settings/privacy can be seen in this screenshot:
Did you spot the difference? At the bottom is a send you messages option, it currently only has two options, Second Life (which will mean anyone in Second Life), the other is friends, so only friends can send you a message. I would imagine people will ask for a nobody option. Whereas I think this is a nice addition I do think we’re getting to the stage where our inworld and web based profiles need to have the same settings, receiving im’s from profiles should mean I can reply via email, as I can to inworld instant messages, otherwise I can see things getting very messy long term.
Now I’m going to ramble about another issue, there are some very odd adverts on web profiles, and by odd I mean they make odd claims about the benefits of premium membership:
Both of those claims are questionable, unless Linden Lab are about to roll out some new premium benefits I see nothing in the premium plan that gives you more privacy and more space, unless they mean sandboxes, which would be quite a stretch, is something new coming?
Premium does give you more space, 512sq meters more. However premium forces me to give up my privacy because I have to send LL my RL financial info. I’m not sure how that could ever be more private than a completely anonymous free account.
Yet you need to be premium to get that extra 512M, these adverts are odd. Unless they’re talking about Linden homes where you do get extra prims.
I might poke you in the week for an interview, I’m off work, but I’m old now and find late nights hard.