Facebook – Page 4 – Ciaran Laval

June 17, 2014

LL Take Their Eyes Off The Prize With Facebook Competition

Linden Lab have been doing a lot right lately in terms of community engagement and they deserve much credit for that. However it is inevitable that at some point they’re going to miss the mark at some point and so it turns out with Second Life’s 11th Birthday: Celebrating Your Second Life L$10,000 Contest.

A 10,000 Linden Dollar prize is not bad for a snapshot contest, but there’s a hitch and the hitch comes with the method of entry :

Participation is easy – submit your celebratory snapshots from inworld to the contest page on our Official Second Life Facebook Page. Click the contest tab, review the contest information and rules and start sharing. This year you will be able to submit up to one snapshot a day for the duration of the contest. Full rules, submission and voting dates, and details are all on the Facebook page.

Facebook, really? I’ve made no secret in the past that I’m not a big fan of Facebook. This is largely due to their absurd policies regarding pseudonyms and that really gets emphasised here because people who know others by their Second Life username may not know them by their real name, and why should they? They are different circles.

Facebook has a history of deleting accounts that use their Second Life user name, as Hamlet Au over at New World Notes reported back in May 2011. This is Facebook’s call as using your Second Life account name as a Facebook account (rather than Facebook page) is a breach of the Facebook TOS. No real argument from me about that, Facebook’s rules. Personally I think it’s a silly rule that dilutes social networking opportunities, but it’s Facebook’s call to do this.

Facebook can play a part in promoting a platform and I don’t blame Linden Lab for embracing Facebook, promoting Second Life on non Second Life properties is a very sensible idea but it’s really not the place to be running a community wide 11th birthday competition.

Linden Lab could allow entries on my Second Life or their Flickr page (you have to be signed in to Flickr to view that for some reason), or their own forums, Tumblr, Google + too. Hey they may even want to allow entries on Facebook, but it should not be the only place to enter the contest.

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April 2, 2014April 2, 2014

SL Share Extends To Flickr And Twitter But What Next For SL Profiles?

Linden Lab have blogged that the SL Share feature that was initially introduced to allow people to share photos, status and check ins on Facebook has now been extended to include functionality for Flickr and Twitter.

Personally I feel Flickr and Twitter are a much better fit for Second Life as both allow people to have their Second Life user name as their profile name, whereas Facebook is still in the bah humbug arena regarding pseudonyms.

In both cases they are taking advantage of features and requirements of the respective platforms, with Twitter the hashtag of #SecondLife is automatically added and with Flickr, they respect the fact that maturity ratings are sometimes required.

However there are also other funky features, such as post processing of pictures, as explained in the blog post :

This update will also introduce a set of post-processing filters that you can run your pictures through to create cool one-of-a-kind images! The new filters were inspired by the images posted to Flickr by Second Life Residents. With more than a million uploads, most of them enhanced by some post-processing, we thought it would be great to include this feature right in SLShare. These filters will work regardless of which social network you choose to share your Second Life pictures to.

However if you don’t like those filters, you can use the advanced features and create your own filters, the wiki has more details.

Now to take advantage of these features, you will need to download a special project viewer, which you can find here.

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March 29, 2014

Facebook Should Not Buy Second Life For The Sake Of Both Companies

Bopete Yossarian has started a thread over at SLUniverse to discuss an article that appeared this week on Gamasutra : Why Facebook should buy Linden Lab. The article is posted by a community member called Nick Harris, rather than a regular member of the Gamasutra staff, the opinions in the article are therefore not the opinions of Gamasutra or its parent company.

The article doesn’t really delve into the reasons why Nick Harris thinks this is a good idea, which sort of undermines the article. However the idea is an interesting one, so is the idea that Microsoft or Yahoo! should buy Linden Lab. The ideas are interesting in terms of discussion but generally lack any real meat on the bones.

The article also falls into the trap of saying :

Facebook have tried to retain its dominance through simple critical mass, if that is where everyone is, if you have to join Facebook to not miss out on invites to your friend’s impromptu parties then their hope is that you will and you won’t mind the data mining they do on you for market research and the targeted advertising. You aren’t in a position to complain, really, as it is a service they are providing to you for free.

This is a pet peeve of mine. Facebook is not free, it’s an exchange of resources. They provide the service, users provide the content, Facebook then realise value from said content. Although there’s no money exchanging hands in terms of basic usage of Facebook, there is a trade of content for service. However that aside, the author really doesn’t make much of a case for Facebook to buy Second Life :

Not only is this primarily a social nexus like Facebook (a place where you can project whatever version of yourself you choose others to see, either using a younger image of yourself, or making an effort to dress up for the photo when you are actually a slob in real life, or use someone else’s image entirely out of low esteem, or some catfish scam), but you are encouraged to create an escapist alter ego through which to indulge your fantasies, to travel without time, cost, or hassle to “see the sights”, to meet new people who share your interests unrestricted by enormous geographical separation.

Whereas I can see to a degree what he’s trying to get at, he seems to be missing a gaping point about the differences between Second Life and Facebook.

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