On July 26th, Linden Labs introduced a new feature to Second Life web-based profiles. When not logged into the Grid, residents could send messages to each other through a social network . Just go to https://my.secondlife.com/ , log in, and it takes you to a space you can make a post for all your SL friends to see, and underneath posts your friends have made.
This looks a lot like Facebook, at least to me, for whom the majority of my Facebook friend list names are also on my Second Life friend list names. One difference, instead of a “like” button, there’s a “love” button. Going to “settings” and clicking on “social identities,” you can connect what social network’s you’re already on to the social web profile, but in the case of Facebook, SL may post status messages on your FaceBook wall and access your info at any time.While worth a look, I can’t see why any Second Life resident with a Facebook account, unless they’re petrified of being banned, would use this for very long. No games, no links to news and other websites, and no friends from outside Second Life. Or as Crap Mariner put it, “Instead of MySpace, it’s WhySpace.” Hamlet Au called it “A social network inside a social network, so you can update while you update.”
Checking the forums, residents were skeptical. At most, they called it a promising first atempt, saying they might keep on using it if had more features, “my.secondlife.com would be great if I could send IMs to friends without having to log onto SL, I could pay people without having to log onto SL, I could send messages and notes to groups without having to log onto SL, . I could put events on a group page with a calendar just like in Facelook, “ etc. Others pointed out that there was no option for posts to be only to friends and not to “everybody” - “It seems to be defaulting to everyoine and everything.” A few outright hated it.
My prediction? A few may continue to use it, most of whom will have it linked to their Facebook or other social networks. But most will forget about it after a couple weeks.
Sources: Linden Blog, New World Notes
Bixyl Shuftan
If I could find it at "chat.secondlife.com" instead of trying to find it in my profile (where I cannot find it without manually typing in the my.secondlife.com address -- yeah, newbs automatically know how to do that) then it might be useful. But putting the walls inside the profiles where nobody goes unless editing their data guarantees this won't get used.
ReplyDeleteHad they created a link on the homepage and used the cookie for identification, then it would probably gain a foothold. Having a Group Chat on the page and having it mirror what's happening in Inworld chat would be revolutionary, allowing group chats while still logged off. But as it actually exists now, I have to shrug and say that it is useless to me.
I preferred SLIM. They should create a cross-over between this new system and that. If I did not need to be in a web browser at all, that would be great.
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