In my previous blog post I bemoaned the fact that Linden Lab’s SL11B competition was exclusive to Facebook. Pete Linden (AKA Gray Of The Lab from San Francisco) has very kindly explained some of the reasoning behind the decision, and he didn’t even use the telegram system to send the message :
We realize that a number of Second Life users have reservations about using Facebook and other platforms. In this case, we chose to run the contest through our Facebook page simply because we have a tool on our page that facilitates running a contest with all of the legal stuff (technical term) we need in place to run something like this, and we thought it would be of interest to the more than 366,000 followers of the official Second Life page. Our aim certainly isn’t to discourage participation, and we’ll certainly explore alternative ways to run similar contests in the future.
I’ve commented elsewhere that I don’t actually object to Linden Lab running competitions exclusively on Facebook, I just don’t think that a birthday competition should be exclusive to Facebook. However I went through all that in my previous post, so it’s probably best not to go over that ground again.
Now to be fair to The Lab here, there are legal issues surrounding competitions and submissions. This is why there are a few Second Life group pools on Flickr. An official one was setup because the other main one, didn’t quite give Linden Lab the terms and conditions that they wanted for their promotional aims. This was the right thing to do for all parties involved in the Flickr pools.
Facebook offers the facilities for LL to run a competition easily, we can agree or disagree with their decision to use Facebook but there is some logic in this decision.
The important issue now regarding the competition is who wins it, there’s a prize of 10,000 Linden Dollars available so it’s not something to be sneezed at.
Even more important is looking forward to the SL11B celebrations. The event runs from June 22nd – 29th and the best place to keep up to date with happenings is at : http://slcommunitycelebration.com
In the meantime I think I’ll have to send Gray Of The Lab in San Francisco a manual on how to use the telegram system, the immersion is ruined by use of new fangled computerised systems!