Cloud Party Removes Facebook Only Restriction

I’ve blogged about Cloud Party a couple of times and both times I mentioned that to have an account you needed to use Facebook. This is something I simply do not support, although as I said in both posts, I can understand why startups turn to Facebook for logins, it fills a hole in the starting process but the longer a product continues to be Facebook login only, the more it becomes an albatross around the neck of a product. Facebook should simply not be the only login in town, keeping Facebook logins as an option is sensible, but there should be other options.

Kitely was initially Facebook login only, so that’s another example of a startup turning to Facebook, but Kitely moved on and now I’m pleased to say, so has Cloud Party. Hamlet Au over at New World Notes blogged about the change yesterday. They have also added flight, which along with other changes, such as their marketplace and royalties system, shows that Cloud Party is developing rather nicely.

Cloud Party has some interesting people involved in its development, such as ex Linden Cory Ondrejka and Cryptic Studio’s ex-CTO Bruce Rogers, who are I believe investors, I don’t know if they’re hands on. Cloud Party is also developing with previous worlds in mind, for example one of the reasons cited for Facebook logins is to minimise griefing.

So how does this new accout creation work? Well I, as a fearless hero, dipped my toes into the water.

First of all, the Cloud Party website is here. Clicking Get Started will load Cloud Party in your browser, another improvement is that at this stage you can use a display name, even as a guest, previously when I tried Cloud Party you had some generic name that wasn’t pleasing on the eye. Once the world starts to load, you will see in the top right a create account option:

Clicking this provides you with a nice and simple form whereby you can create an account with an email address or a Facebook account:

So I entered my details, clicked create account and away I went. At this stage I clicked on the cellphone that was indicating there was a message for me and my browser crashed. I’m using Firefox, I don’t know if one browser is better suited to Cloud Party than another. However I didn’t let this put me off, I reloaded and away I went.

Now I must say Cloud Party has a nice tutorial to help you to get to know your environment, Linden Lab should take note of this, it is very well done. However, creating an account by email has a disadvantage to creating an account with Facebook, in so much as you still can’t build, so whereas Cloud Party went one nil ahead with their tutorial, Second Life quickly scores an equaliser in terms of allowing people to build.

There is an option if you do want to build and don’t want to use Facebook, that is to link a credit card to your account:

You won’t be charged for doing this but some people will baulk at the idea of having to put a credit card on file, others in the Second Life community will cheer because there have long been calls for Second Life to go back to requiring such verification, as it did prior to June 2006 is my understanding. There are also those who would like building and being able to sell to be under such restrictions. I don’t agree with calls to do this in Second Life because 2006 was a long time ago and many use cases have developed since then, such as education, which would be severely hampered if all students had to provide such information. Cloud Party, being relatively new and therefore having such systems in place from the start, doesn’t face that problem, although it does somewhat limit usage.

The break with needing a Facebook account in Cloud Party is especially welcoming in light of recent privacy changes on Facebook, one of which is that Facebook is removing the ability for people to hide themselves on Facebook search, something that has been a option for quite some time. The New York Times reports that in a phone interview with Facebook’s director of product, Sam Lessin, they were told that the option would be retired as only a single digit percentage of users, utilise the feature. However as Facebook  has a lot of users, a single digit percentage of users could be pretty damn high.

However the bottom line is that Facebook are yet again buggering about with the privacy options people who signed up with were happy to abide by. This is exactly why having all your eggs in the Facebook basket is a bad idea. as things stood, if a Facebook user was unhappy with this change, the likelihood was, they wouldn’t be able to continue to use Cloud Party were they to delete their Facebook account, through no fault of Cloud Party’s.

I know I sometimes give the impression that Facebook is the devil, it’s not, many people happily use it, I even have a couple of pages there (although no personal account). There are good people working for Facebook and my understanding is that the Linden formerly known as Babbage will start working for Facebook in the new year. However it’s the function creep with Facebook that I don’t like, having to use Facebook logins to comment, or use services such as Spotify.

So as I said earlier, I think this is a smart move by Cloud Party, to read the full announcement from Sam Thompson on the Cloud Party forums, go here.

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