SL11B Contest Poster – 2014
Most of the blogs are writing about Linden Lab’s photo contest with a L$10,000 (US40±) prize. You can find the official announcement here: Second Life’s 11th Birthday: Celebrating Your Second Life L$10,000 Contest.
There is, however, a gotcha. You enter the contest by posting on Facebook in Linden Lab’s SL page. Ciaran and Inara are pointing out how this blocks many SL users from participating. You can at least get the SL11B commemorative robot for free (Market Place).
You can view the entries here: SL11B Contest Entries. So, far it appears there are 19 entries… I am not impressed. I think as Ciaran and Inara think, using Facebook was a mistake. A quick look at the Second Life images on Flickr shows the level of talent possessed by SL users and their prolific nature. I am not seeing that show up on Facebook.
Ciaran tells us (see Exclusive to Facebook) Peter Gray (Linden) did respond to the blogosphere’s complaints and stated:
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.
In a combination of easy-to-run-a-contest and the legal requirements for a contest that offers prize money (government rules) Facebook is a rational choice. After all this is only a US$40 prize from a multi-million dollar corporation. There obviously isn’t a ton of man-hours being poured into running the contest. From what Peter says, I suspect they will develop other venues for future contests as they have people and time available.
One of the awesome photos on Flickr
The SL11B Celebration starts this weekend, June 22. It runs a week to June 29. You can keep up the events planned for SL11B here.