{"id":2571,"date":"2013-01-01T15:53:23","date_gmt":"2013-01-01T15:53:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=2571"},"modified":"2013-01-01T15:53:23","modified_gmt":"2013-01-01T15:53:23","slug":"is-it-time-for-a-linden-lab-login-account","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=2571","title":{"rendered":"Is It Time For A Linden Lab Login Account?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in 2009 Argent Stonecutter created a Jira suggestion that I very much agree with. SVC-6212\u00a0Create Master Account Name, Linking to Avatar Names<\/a>. The idea here is that you’d login to Second Life and then select an avatar name to go inworld with, this would mean linking your alts, which could have benefits for issues such as Mesh uploads, which are currently on an avatar basis, so even though the person behind Ciaran Laval meets the requirements to upload Mesh, my alts don’t, this despite the fact that my alts are known by Linden Lab as they linked them for the cases of being adult verified back in the day when the requirements were more stringent.<\/p>\n

I shouldn’t need to have payment info on all my avatars, having payment info on my overall account deals with this. However whereas this has merit for Second Life, it has even more merit now that Linden Lab are releasing new products. Patterns<\/a>, Creatoverse<\/a>, Dio<\/a> and Versu<\/a> are all Linden Lab products. There are different ways these products are delivered with some aimed at the mobile community and some web based but with Linden Lab producing multiple products doesn’t it make some sense for me to have a Linden Lab account, rather than a product specific account?<\/p>\n

Blizzard do this, I have one login for World of Warcraft, the same one works for Diablo III and would also work for Starcraft II. This just makes the process of purchasing products easier, it makes billing easier. I’m already a Linden Lab customer, a bird in the hand and all that.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Linden Lab instead, seem to be turning to Facebook for some of their products. I’ve been through this before with Kitely, Cloud Party and Spotify. Kitely and Cloud Party now both allow me to login without the Facebook requirement, Spotify from what I can see, still requires Facebook for new accounts. I don’t use Spotify because I don’t have a Facebook account.<\/p>\n

I can understand why companies, especially startups, turn to Facebook for assistance with their login process. I can also understand why companies allow a Facebook login option, as some do with Twitter too. However I can’t really understand why companies, once they are established, persist with Facebook being the only login in town.<\/p>\n

In reality, you should want to own your own customers. Linden Lab are not a startup, they’re an established company. I’m a bit bemused as to why they want to send their own customers to Facebook. As I said earlier, I can understand why they’d want to attract Facebook customers by providing a Facebook login option, but they should be offering their own logins too.<\/p>\n

Maybe when these products are officially released and gaining traction we’ll see more logic to this Facebook tie, but even then, it surely makes sense for Linden Lab’s customers to have a single login for further future products. This Linden Lab login should be the basis of the master account Argent Stonecutter requested via the Jira.<\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a>
\n