Second Life Web Profile Features

You probably know by now that an avatar’s in-world profile and web profile are the same web page. You may not have realized people see different presentations of you profile depending on your profile’s settings and whether they are logged into SL or not. You also may not have noticed that the avatar profile system is getting more features. Opensource Obscure has an interesting post listing features that people are interested in.

Current list of suggestions for web profiles feeds / my.secondlife.com

Web Profile as Seen by Public

There are several feature requests and bug reports that Obscure links to. If you are interested in those, click VOTE and WATCH. Clicking WATCH is the more import click, if you want Linden Lab to place more priority on it.

The list itemized features now implemented. Two of the interesting features are Follow and Privacy Settings Changes.

Follow now allows you to follow anyone that has a public profile. This feature does not require you to FRIEND first.  Hopefully SL will change to get us something more like Google Circles where we can have close friends, booty buddies, business associates, acquaintances, and fans.

Privacy Settings now allow one to have different settings for read and write. This gives one the ability to allow people to read but prevent writing in your Feed.

Profile Feature Poll

Poll

Obscure points out a poll on Virtual Outworlding. (It is in the right-side sidebar.) It ends on September 12 or 13, I’m not clear which. My vote was the 5th. We aren’t exactly tearing it up. Whatever, stop by and caste a vote for the feature you like. I’m curious to see what people want.

Spam

People are figuring out how to spam profiles. Mostly it is INTERESTS spamming. Interests change the Recommendations the system provides for suggested friends. I’m sure we all need more friends that want to spam us. Whatever your spam preference, how to control spam is an ubiquitous problem in your interconnected world.

Integration with Forum

Item 14 in Obscure’s list is about features to integrate our profile Feed with the SL Forum and blogs. I suspect a large number of residents do not use the forum. I am always surprised at people that have an SL Rez-day in 2008 or earlier and are making their first post.

The SL Forum is a great source of information and problem solutions.

The list of suggested integration features is interesting. Many of the features will definitely increase resident interaction. One of the studies made in/on SL showed that player retention increased with person-to-person interactions. So, addition of some of these features could help LL with the player retention problems.

Marketing

One of the features many merchants like is Follow. They would like to see a special Follow Creator feature. The idea being it would allow you to follow your favorite creators. A follow button placed in the object inspector would be handy.

I doubt we will see a special Follow class. I do think we will see Follow buttons appearing in various places within the viewer.

Summing Up

We are consistently getting new features in the viewers. The new web profiles are definitely in the Lab’s plans for more socialization and are quickly upgrading. So, we will probably see more Follow buttons and profile features as we move forward.

It is unfortunate that some user groups are falling apart. When Phillip started the ‘better communication’ age I wondered if it would be a transient thing or a permanent cultural change. It is looking more transient thing under Rod’s direction. This is one of those things that has to be an upper management priority to shift corporate culture.

The most resident irritation and dissatisfaction seems to be in the Lab’s development projects without good user groups. As these social features are implemented we will probably see more irritation because there is currently no user group communication between LL and residents. Sad.

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