INTERESTS? In MY Web Profiles Tab? Early questions & answers...

[Torley Linden]

Friendly greetings! You may have noticed that when editing your profile (Me menu > My Profile) there's a new Interests tab. (It's in today's Message of the Day too.) More info is forthcoming from Linden Lab, but upwards of 40,000 Residents have already used it with 7,000+ unique interest tags. I wanted to share some details so you understand what's going on.

How is this Interests thing meant to work?

The general idea is simple: Interests is going to help you find people, places, and things of interest. For now, fill it out at your leisure so you're ready for the future. Adding interests is simple, too:

• Enter interests and click Add after each one.
• You can use multiple words.
• If you start typing and wait awhile, the interest autocompletes with existing matches. (I should note there are some colorfully-stylized ones. ;) )
• Refreshing the list shows them in alphabetical order.
• To remove an interest, hover over it and click the X.
• All of this may already feel comfortable if you've used other keyword/tagging systems.
• If you're been in Second Life for awhile, you may recall the old profiles which also had an Interests tab, but wasn't connected to other people — this will be.
• If you haven't filled out interests yet, your profile gives you a little completion reminder, as with every other major profile area.

For example, see my Torley Linden profile.

Can I see all Residents with a common interest by clicking on a keyword?

Not currently, but that's been suggested and that was my natural instinct when profile-browsing, too. Forthcoming details will be announced as they're ready; there's no date yet (I knew you'd ask).

Related, the extent to which we'll recognize similar words and stemming has yet to be decided. In other words, stuff a real human could easily look at and go "Those are basically the same thing!" Some of you may know how other sites like Flickr recognize plurals and verb variations.

Are only interests going to be used to find other matches?

The tentative plan is to use your entire profile, although the Interests tab helps supply specifics. Remember these are still the VERY EARLY DAYS™ so a lot to come isn't in place yet. Filling in your interests right now helps Linden Lab improve the matching engine.

Is this voluntary?

YES, like every other aspect of your profile, sharing info is opt-in.

In the future for those who explicitly want to be excluded from the "recommendation engine" on the whole, we'll definitely give you a way out.

Right now, you can control your web profile Privacy Settings if you want to hide your profile on the web and/or limit it to friends.

We won't sell your interests to nasty-**bleep** spammers because we care about your privacy. This is covered in our existing Privacy Policy.

How many interests can I have?

Up to 20. (As of 2011-03-28.)

Can I edit my profile when I'm not inworld?

Yup, since it's called a "web profile" that's exactly what you can do: go to https://my.secondlife.com/settings/profile#interests and login.

I have an awesome idea! Where do I share my feedback?

OMG we'd love to know. You can discuss in this thread — please keep it on-topic :) — or contact Wolf Linden (wolf at lindenlab dot com), who's working on this project and who I've learned some of the above details from.

[Luc Starsider]

This is all well and good, but could you fix profiles so they are visible to other logged in residents, in the viewer, when we have changed the privacy setting to not show profiles on the web?

- Luc -

[Torley Linden]

Luc, have you already reported a bug about this? I can remind the right Lindens if they don't already have it on their radar.

[Rhonda Huntress]

---

Torley Linden wrote:

Can I edit my profile when I'm not inworld?

Yup, since it's called a "web profile" that's exactly what you can do: go to 

https://my.secondlife.com/settings/profile#interests

and login.

---

   I guess I will keep trying.

[Rhonda Huntress]

I found the problem.  The text of the link is correct but the link itself tries to open "setting/privacy" instead of "settings/profile#interests"

I copy/paste the URL in the address bar and it worked for me.

[Luc Starsider]

 

Torley Linden wrote:

Luc, have you already

reported a bug

about this? I can remind the right Lindens if they don't already have it on their radar.

---

 

That's a point. i started creating a jira, but could not find the right section to file it in, and then it drifted away from me. :smileysurprised: I'll go do it right away and post it back here.

Jira is created!

- Luc -

[Keli Kyrie]

Is this going to be some kind of new logo?

[Argus Collingwood]

Added mine right after Rod Tweeted that he had done his. I am adding as I discover more keywords that strike my fancy:smileywink:

[Suspiria1488303077]

When can we add vids to our profiles? :smileysurprised:

[Suspiria1488303077]

 

---

Argus Collingwood wrote:

Added mine right after Rod Tweeted that he had done his. I am adding as I discover more keywords that strike my fancy:smileywink:

---

Your forum badge strikes my fancy :smileytongue:

 

Nice work!

[Torley Linden]

@Rhonda Thank you and I'm sorry! I've corrected that link.

@Keli That's actually the Linden Lab logo, as shown in the upper-left here.

@Suspiria No word on video yet, but just as the Internet has generally grown more multimedia-laden and high-definition as bandwidth around the world has increased, we can expect a general trend of "richer" experiences.

@Qwalyphi As mentioned in my post, what's coming in the future — personalized recommendations — will be new.

[Perrie Juran]

@Torley

Has someone at the Lab forgotten the beauty and simplicity of "tabbed" browsing.  With the old style of profiles it was a quick and simple matter of clicking through tabs to view someone's picks.

 

Now with the Web Based profiles I actually will have to open 10 different web pages to view in detail a person's Picks.  We've made it more work, not less.

 

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussions/Arthur-Miller-s-The-Death-Of-A-Profile/m-p/511327#M252167

[Torley Linden]

Perrie, thanks for pointing that out and with pictures (GREAT) — I soundly agree. Not to mention that the "old way" also loaded faster than waiting for each web page to refresh. I don't surf picks much anymore due to this. You're not alone in observing this awkwardness, and I'll be sure to bring this issue up (again) the next opportunity I have!

I note there are various websites that can smoothly pop up info (or lightbox it) without loading a new page. Even Google has a feature like that when mousing over search results.

[Perrie Juran]

 

---

Torley Linden wrote:

 

I note there are various websites that can smoothly pop up info (or

lightbox

 it) without loading a new page. Even Google

has a feature like that

when mousing over search results.

---

 

Thank you very much for your response.

Light box pop ups have their potential but to be effective they need to be kept to a minimum.  There is nothing as irksome as seeing the info you want to get to and having a dozen pop ups occur almost instantaneously as you try to mouse to the information you want.

The problem I would really see using them in the web based profiles is that the text in these pop ups generally is microscopic.

The SL viewer is already a very resource intensive program.  Personally I find the SL browser very limited in function.  If and when I need to view a URL I always open an external browser but it adds to the resource strain and drain on my computer when I am In World.

I do have a whole soap box of issues I can get on concerning Web Based profiles but will stick here to the topic on hand.

Again, thank you for your response.

[rbaker31a]

y do i not have an inventory

 

[Luc Starsider]

 

---

rbaker31a wrote:

y do i not have an inventory

 

---

 

That's probably because you are in basic mode. The next time you log in, you can choose, on the login screen, what mode you want. Select Advanced before logging in, and you will have an inventory (pluss a lot more...).

- Luc -

[Mircea Lobo]

Thank you Perrie for mentioning this here! I would also like to link a topic I made yesterday, in which I'm suggesting LL again to go back to the old system (viewer profiles and search). My thread is located here.

Basically, the web profiles and search are not only slow, but sometimes don't work at all. It happened several times for someone's profile to not load on my end, although I have no connection problems in-world. I had to give up seeing their profile until later on when it worked. Also, please think of us OpenSim users! How are we going to have search and profiles in places like OSGrid if we need to hack the viewer settings and also code and host web pages for each grid?

I'm not even suggesting destroying the web profiles. Not at all... they can be useful. But keeping them separate from the viewer profiles entirely, and optional / not part of the client. People could keep using them in a similar fashion to how they are now, by accessing them from the embedded SL browser. You'd just have to type the URL in manually of course. Or the normal (old) profiles could have a link leading to the web profile of that user, which people can click optionally (but without the web page containing any feature not in the viewer).

Given I use OpenSim a lot, but also because the web profiles are very slow and feel wrong to me, I really wish to convince LL to consider this. I miss the old profiles that worked so nicely and smoothly. Almost every other user agrees with this as well, and you would make a lot of us happy if you could do this.