Seven Okelli

There is a way to control your personal data in Facebook, and that is to use a fictitious name. That way, you connect only to the people you really want to connect with, and not to random, barely remembered people from your past. No one needs to remember that "Dale Evans McGillicuddy" is your alias if you're in their friend list... especially if you put a real picture of yourself. Above all, your personal data is perfectly safe, and you have all the facebooky connectedness with the people you really care about.

Welcome, and best wishes. Unfortunately, you have an easy act to follow, and you're taking hold of what appears to be a ship without direction or pilot, and most of all with no connection with its users.

I think LL is genuinely trying to make us happy with the new features they add to Viewer 2, and probably hope that at least one of those features will be such a killer that a majority of us will feel compelled to use Viewer 2. What gets in the way of that is that LL seems to have a vision of SL that's different from ours, and they don't have a way of communicating that to us. Or maybe they're not aware of the disparity in viewpoints. I wonder what it's like on their side of the fence. I think Jack is sincere when he says he's "delighted" with display names... I doubt that he's delighted with our reactions. Do the Lindens have the same sense of futility and struggle that some of us residents have? Imagine working hard on the display names project, and finally feeling satisfied that it works as advertised, and then seeing... well, not the blog of course! but tweets about how people hate it. I mean, they didn't make it to irritate or alienate us. It's just that there is a fundamental incomprehension. Talk about "getting back to basics" -- I hope that's one basic element that could some day go away.

A text-only search would really be great. Faster, simpler, more efficient.

I don't change many settings, so I have whatever the cloud default is... but I was thinking, since you asked (once upon a time) what tutorials we'd like to see... When I saw this post of yours, I thought of a pair of tutorials: (1) For high-end users and people who want to maximize their visual experience, what are the settings to push up, (2) For those of us who want to save bandwidth and have better performance (at the expense of bells and whistles), what are the settings to turn down or off?

Good move. I'm glad those kids (and those programs!) aren't being dropped.

This itself wouldn't be a big issue if LL would have done their homework and created a viewer architecture that allows simple replacement of the UI. But in contrast they... managed it to hardwire UI with underlying core functions thus making it impossible to easily exchange UI. I'm no fan of Viewer 2, but I don't think this is correct. As far as I've heard, this was an error in Viewer 1 that was corrected in Viewer 2.

What about these new profiles SL is working on? Is this a place to give feedback on what we would like to see in them, or is there another forum topic for that? Or do the Lindens have it already mapped out like they did with Viewer 2 and not want our input? Traditionally, LL asks for our "input" once the work is complete.

One has to wonder how display names and the new profiles will work. And how people search and display names will work. If I could just make one suggestion: don't base this new profile stuff on Jive. Use something that works.

I thought that acquiring AU was one of M's few good moves... Now, honestly, I don't think chucking out all the non-SL users of AU is a good step on the road to "social networking". That's a move that might come back to bite you.

Weren't viewer-usage stats supposed to be published with this statement?

You can customize it using Greasemonkey. It isn't hard to write a script to move the elements around or take some off.

For Firefox users, someone suggested making a Greasemonkey script.