Real Life connections in Second Life? | Digado

Source: http://digado.nl/real-life-connections-in-second-life.html

Filed under: Digital Adoption by Rick van der Wal

Just now I stumbled upon ‘Linden Lab thinks about RL/SL friends matching‘ over on the mrtopf.de blog, discussing an interesting proposal by Linden Labs (Second Life) VP Marketing & Community Developer Robin Linden:

“Yesterday at Robin Linden’s office hour she asked at some point if we are ok with the following idea: On signup to Second Life you will get asked if you want to find your friends from Real Life who might already have a Second Life account without you knowing. The idea how to do that was by matching email addresses from your contacts with those of Second Life accounts. These people would then get notified about one of their friends being in SL now, too.”

I’ve been talking about this idea as well some months ago, and according to mrtopf.de, it is a matter of ‘opt-in or opt-out’ (meaning whether you should have to enable the function to be found, or disable the function not to be found) and the issue of allowing these applications access to your Google account. The 4 commenters on the blog are largely opposed to this idea, fearing for their privacy (and quite rightfully so if executed poorly).

How it should work

First of all, I am a big supporter of SL getting the option to ask for permission to read your email address book, then check them with sign up addresses they have already registered. Of course you’d be able to check or uncheck the specific addresses you’d be interested in meeting in SL.

Now SL should send messages to the accounts it has found matching your lists without notifying the newly registered user. All accounts checked receive a message with the new registrants email and avatar name as a friendship offer and are free to accept or decline. On a decline, the person declining the friendship offer remains completely anonymous (no X has declined your friendship offer), and on accept the new user receives a message with X (SL name + email address) has accepted your friendship offer.

This way, SL CAN function as a real life social network the way some will want it to work, and those who don’t want their RL involved in SL can easily choose not to. There is tremendous value in finding someone you know to guide you trough Second Life as the software facilitates this very very poorly, and many people I know use SL as a RL network and really miss this functionality. On the other hand the privacy of those who want to live their Second Life completely separate from their real lives should be respected and handled with care, and never have to compromise in this matter.

So Opt-in or Opt-out?

The problem of ‘opt-in’ with the system as suggested is with the newly registered user. When he logs on, his identity is immediately compromised if he chooses to send out the friendship requests. However, he is able to control who would potentially receive such a message within Second Life and thus free to make his own decision on whether to comprise privacy in return for finding real life connections in Second Life.

People on the invited list who are not registered in the SL system (with that email address) don’t receive any message at all, unlike the Facebook invites who send actual emails or ’sign up requests’ to anyone not in their system. It should be handled in Instant Messages within Second Life itself so whoever is invited and not in Second Life is completely unaware of the invitation. This way the ‘privacy damage’ is controlled entirely by the user. Simply not importing your email list is an obvious ‘opt-out’, not notifying anyone of your presence.

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