Google + will be unusable as a social networking site for SL

[Random Mefusula]

I don't use it, but I do have Random on Facebook, even though I had to change "Random" to "Randolph" before it was accepted.  Google + is taking it a step further and insisting only RL names are acceptable.  Any of you that use Google + might want to watch this update.

 

 

[Maryanne Solo]

Not interested in the slightest Google but thanks anyway. How many social networking apps are too many? and how can they be trusted with your personal data? This "all your personal data online in 100 different apps" nonsense is surely a fad.

[Ceka Cianci]

i always thought google was the dumbest name ever..it's such a zoolander sounding word..yagooglelizer..

i just don't take them serious enough to trust them..

[Pussycat Catnap]

I've switched the default search engine of my browser to Bing.

When "the evil empire" are the least evil guys in the room, you know the world's gone wrong somewhere...

But I've just frankly had enough of all of these 'privacy and freedom are so 20th century, get over it' folks. The Anglo-American legal and social system didn't spend the 1000 years, since 1066 A.D., fighting a cause - just to have a couple of stanford and harvard geeks throw the entire thing in the trash because they're too aspergers to understand humanity.

 

[Deej Kasshiki]

I don't think Google's any worse than any other big online outfit when it comes to privacy (and probably way better than Facebook) but, their "real names" policy has already generated a lot of controversy and turned a lot of folks off. I know I won't go anywhere near it.

 

[Canoro Philipp]

we dont need Google+ and Facebook anyway for social network, we already have our own.

[Ishtara Rothschild]

---

Maryanne Solo wrote:

Not interested in the slightest Google but thanks anyway. How many social networking apps are too many? and how can they be trusted with your personal data? This "all your personal data online in 100 different apps" nonsense is surely a fad.

---

That's just it... Google wants you to have all your personal data in one place. Which is, of course, their place. They want your work identity and gaming handles and forum pseudonyms, your circle of friends and your hobbies, your medical records and your browsing history, your sexual orientation and your religious affiliation, your credit card number and a scan of your photo ID, a StreetView shot of your house and a satellite photo of your backyard.

They're going to read your emails, run your photos through facial recognition software (even if you don't provide them to Google, their image search will track them down and analyze them), and rummage through your shopping cart. Then they'll connect all the dots and sell the final picture. To whom? You'll never know. It might be your employer, your airline company, your health insurance provider, your government, or the people who own your government. Or the evil internet overlords. Oh wait... that'll be Google. They'll already have all your data. And if you don't play ball, Google's CEO will insinuate that you have something to hide.

Everybody is screaming for a net-wide online identification system that is supposed to end all online fraud and antisocial behavior. Google strives to provide just that and then some, and so does Facebook. There is an increasing number of websites and online communities that won't let you comment or otherwise participate without providing your Facebook or G+ name. Say goodbye to privacy, anonymity, and security from crazy stalkers (such as the ones that work for your government, or the right-wing groups who keep tabs on gay activists with Google's help).

There will be no such thing as the Egyptian revolution in the Western World. No anonymous political activists, no more whistleblowers, no protests organized on Twitter. Google will know your Twitter identity, and so will any government agency who subpoenas or buys this information. And even if people manage to organize a rally, public surveillance cameras will easily identify them thanks to facial recognition software and the photos which they themselves have willingly provided to Google.

Does that sound paranoid? Probably. But imagine someone were to travel back to the year 1984 (oh the bitter irony) and tell people about full-body scanners, random notebook searches, cell phone tracking software, wiretapping under the patriot act, and waterboarding. It would sound like a dystopian conspiracy theory to them and might be even harder to believe than any of the above. And yet it has long become everyday business for us. What's worse, very few seem to care. People easily accommodate themselves to these privacy violations and even gain a false sense of security from them, which makes it easy for faceless corporations like Google to take over the web under the pretense of making it safer and easier.

[Deej Kasshiki]

---

Canoro Philipp wrote:

we dont need Google+ and Facebook anyway for social network, we already have our own.

---

Agreed 100%.

It's funny how so many average residents who questioned the Lab's push to promote a tie-in with FB  understood this but, the powers that be didn't.

On a practical level, not even touching on the major issues Ishtara raised, it was a dumb move to throw their lot in with an outside entity they had no control over and no relationship with. The whole episode showed just how little some of the execs at LL  really understood their own product, or what their customers wanted.



[Canoro Philipp]

youre right.

things are better handled now, i hope we continue in this direction, having second life fixed the way it should have been.

i hope we get many fixes too, and handled right, like that.

[RudolphUkka]

Just

*******

lie.

*******

Like you

*******

do in

*******

SL.

*******

[Ceka Cianci]

 

right wing left wing..tomato tomatoe potato potatoe.

/me wonders when people will stop with the political dividing crap and start showing that both left and right wings are after the same thing..

full control over our every move and every thought..

i flip both wings the bird..



[Pussycat Catnap]

---

Ishtara Rothschild wrote:

Does that sound paranoid? Probably. But imagine someone were to travel back to the year 1984 (oh the bitter irony) and tell people about full-body scanners, random notebook searches, cell phone tracking software, wiretapping under the patriot act, and waterboarding. It would sound like a dystopian conspiracy theory to them and might be even harder to believe than any of the above. And yet it has long become everyday business for us. What's worse, very few seem to care. People easily accommodate themselves to these privacy violations and even gain a false sense of security from them, which makes it easy for faceless corporations like Google to take over the web under the pretense of making it safer and easier.

---

The Reds over in China achieve totaltarianism through the brute force of a gun and a labor camp.

The Corps here in the west achieve it by the duplicity of smooth propaganda and media manipulation. They've learned that you can let the people say and do just about anything the moment you gain control of the memes flowing through them. People will just no longer have the ability to think of or act on thoughts that could be dangerous to you. No force needed, destroy freedom through slight of hand. And I'd be a fool to think that didn't apply to manage to limit myself as well. After all, I'm sitting on my couch posting this rather than in the streets engaged in a blood battle to topple these folks like most of us should be...

/sigh.

Even my vitriol for Republicans and Libertarians is something of an illusion cast over me - after all if we aren't wealthy most of us when it comes down to it have the same concerns: we want liberty, equality, and opportunity to enrich ourselves and our descendants. All of our differences end up in the details cast over us by media in a divide and conquer scheme. Similar to how, during Jim Crow - 'white trash' were manipulated into hating the equally poor and equally disenfranchised blacks as a way to prevent both underclasses from uniting and going after their true enemies; the landed gentry.

Look at racism today and who are the folks that still hate each other most: the bottoms that are kept divided to keep them distracted: project blacks, trailer park whites, inner city latinos and asians.

As Ceka points out above me: its all a sham game. And our political parties are no different: a trick to keep common folk from paying attention to what's going on in the sleeves of the magician.

 And I'll be back to being duped by that game likely as early as my next post...

 

[Deltango Vale]

"The whole episode showed just how little some of the execs at LL really understood their own product, or what their customers wanted."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was lucky to arrive in SL (October 2006) when Linden Lab understood its product. For six months, Second Life was the hottest thing on the planet - and then, for some unknown reason, Linden Lab went insane. I compare it to having a lover who is amazing on the dancefloor, but a complete idiot in the bedroom.

The two KEY points about SL are:

1. SL is not a game any more than Paris or Germany are games. One does not 'play' Mexico or India or Brazil. One lives there.
2. SL is not RL. It is a virtual country separate from RL. The grand, overriding virtue of SL is anonymity and freedom from RL.

One day, someone bright is going to buy Linden Lab and once again make SL the hottest thing on the planet.

[Ishtara Rothschild]

---

Pussycat Catnap wrote:

Even my vitriol for Republicans and Libertarians is something of an illusion cast over me - after all if we aren't wealthy most of us when it comes down to it have the same concerns: we want liberty, equality, and opportunity to enrich ourselves and our descendants. All of our differences end up in the details cast over us by media in a divide and conquer scheme. Similar to how, during Jim Crow - 'white trash' were manipulated into hating the equally poor and equally disenfranchised blacks as a way to prevent both underclasses from uniting and going after their true enemies; the landed gentry.

---

I know what you mean. The powers that be don't want politically aware citizens, but citizens that buy into rigid and mutually exclusive political ideologies which are no longer suitable to solve the problems that humanity is facing in the 21st century.

It would be easy enough to get rid of or loosen up these ideologies ("big government" versus bareknuckle capitalism, the holy personal responsibility versus the oppressed proletariat etc.) and just talk about working solutions for apparent problems in a reasonable way, without labeling and demonizing everything.

But this ideological war works amazingly well for the filthy rich who divide and rule both the population and the government, and pay decision makers to either legislate or block legislation in their favor while chanting these hollow political catch phrases that keep everyone at each other's throats.

[Ishtara Rothschild]

---

Deltango Vale wrote:

"The whole episode showed just how little some of the execs at LL really understood their own product, or what their customers wanted."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was lucky to arrive in SL (October 2006) when Linden Lab understood its product. For six months, Second Life was the hottest thing on the planet - and then, for some unknown reason, Linden Lab went insane. I compare it to having a lover who is amazing on the dancefloor, but a complete idiot in the bedroom.

 

---

Same here. But I don't think that LL ever really understood its product. Back in 2006 when SL worked perfectly for us, LL gazed in utter horror at the unspeakable den of inquitity that their despicable customer base had created. That wasn't what Philip had been trying to sell (to the corporate world, that is, not to us. We geeks and freaks were only tolerated here to generate corporate interest).

So they grabbed the big broom and started to sweep in a desperate attempt to clean up SL. Disneyfy it. Americanize it. Cover its buttocks and hide its nipples. Make it politically correct and family-friendly, disgustingly bland and sickeningly sweet at the same time. Which was, like you said, an insane thing to do, seeing that nobody but geeks and freaks had any use for a virtual "anything goes" role-play stage. An RP stage that was only made less attractive by changing "anything goes" to "anything within the limits of a predictable user experience goes".

 

---

The two KEY points about SL are:

1. SL is not a game any more than Paris or Germany are games. One does not 'play' Mexico or India or Brazil. One lives there.
2. SL is not RL. It is a virtual country separate from RL. The grand, overriding virtue of SL is anonymity and freedom from RL.

One day, someone bright is going to buy Linden Lab and once again make SL the hottest thing on the planet.

---

That's where we disagree. For me, life is a game, and SL even more so. I suck at life, so I've decided to play MMOs instead Before SL, I was playing / living Sociolotron. 90% of what I do in SL I also did in Socio. SL just did everything better, thanks to the complete creative freedom for deviants and role-players like me.

 But LL didn't like the fact that we were playing SL, that we had turned their glorified 3D internet / corporate advertising platform into one big kinky darkroom game, which led to abovementioned craziness. LL are also in denial about SL being a game, which is exactly why they fail to understand the needs of their customers.

[PeterCanessa Oh]

1. On Topic: who gives a toss about social media.  I have snail mail, email, mobile & land phones, SL, instant messengers.  When I want to communicate with someone, or they with me, the ways are open as long as we know each other.  If we don't know each other then I don't want to communicate with them; it's spam.
2. Off Topic: we're still here and the sky isn't falling.  We all know LL hates its customer-base because we won't all act like mainstream-America but if they were doing so very badly then we'd be in OpenSim grids or another competitor.  Come on, recognition where it's due - LL management aren't always wrong (And once when I was in Wales it didn't rain for nearly half an hour!)