[Changes to Display Names Based on Your Feedback]

Ralph,

That is actually one fear that is not an issue with Display Names, as proposed. When looking at prims owned or created by someone, you will see both names - the Display Name, followed by their actual User Name. If the creator later changes their Display Name, their creations do eventually reflect that change, but at all times their real User Name remains attached to the prims (and presumably other assets, like textures) that they created.

[Changes to Display Names Based on Your Feedback]

Another question, Jack:

As I understand it, the new registration process would, as proposed now, require a new account to create a one-word username, without unicode characters, and would disallow an exact match to existing user names, with or without the dot between them. So, for example:

"CeeraMurakami" and "Ceera.Murakami" could not be registered for a new account, since "Ceera Murakami" ("username ceera.murakami") is already registered as my unique name. Correct?

But what characters will be allowed in the unique user name field for a new account? Just the letters A-Z, a-z, and the numbers 0-9? What about periods? Hyphens? Spaces? Apostrophies? Diacritical marks?

Can someone register "Ceera Mura Kami", and have that show as "ceera.mura.kami" for their username? ("ceera.mura.kami Resident" in legacy scripts and on non 2.x viewers, but not displayed that way in 2.x for the most part.)

Will someone be able to register "ceera.murakami______________________" (my exact unique name string, followed by a bunch of underscores, or periods, or some other easily ignored character, to the length limit allowed), to push the word "resident" out of display range?

And if we catch someone who is clearly making a *** deliberate *** impersonation attempt, copying not only our name but also our appearance and profile information, will that be an AR-able offense, as a violation of the TOS regarding deceptive or misleading representation? I think that should be a bannable offense.

[Changes to Display Names Based on Your Feedback]

A couple more things:

I'll agree with several others in this thread that a land owner should be able to turn OFF display names on their property, just as we can turn off Voice Chat. If I want to be 100% certain that no one can stand in my "Fox and Ground Construction Company" offices wearing a misleading display name and passing themselves off as me, or as one of my employees, and harming my business, or ripping off my customers, I should have the right to turn that feature off on my parcel of land.

And can you please explain why the new registration process has to ignore the last name field? Why force them to cram everything into a single name field? If I want to register my account as "Fred Murray", and that is unique, why should I have to register as "FredMurray", and be known in-world as fredmurray.resident? Why not have "fred.murray" as my unique user name on the things I create? Yes, with the display name they can force it to display as they want. but it would be SO much simpler, and much more compatable with existing scripted content, if the majority of people continued to use the "first name, last name" convention that all current scripts are based on. Allow them to enter data into both fields, and concatenate it with a dot for the user name, as long as that is unique. So new user Fred Murray shows up in legacy scripts as "Fred Murray", and not as "FredMurray Resident". For example, if I wanted to make a fresh account as "Ceera Saito", which is a unique name, and which would allow my unique name as that account to match the surname of my SL Partner, why shouldn't that be allowed? Why should I have to be "ceerasaito Resident"?

And I agree with Qie. First setting of the Display Name should be free, but after that there should be a small fee to change it.

[Changes to Display Names Based on Your Feedback]

Well, Jack, I must say that I am pleased to see at least some offers of compromise here. But we're still at about the point of 95% what the lab designed, and only 5% addresiing what your paying customers are concerned about.

Please, we really do need both a color and text style differentiation between Display Names and unique names. It should be possible to tell them apart at a glance. Consider some option that is friendly to color-blind Residents, like displaying the changable name in parenthesis.

*** The official Linden Lab 1.2x viewer needs to support seeing display names, the same way that it supports seeing avatar alpha layers and tattoo layers. ***  (I'd emphazize that more, but your borked Blog software won't let me do it.) You need to offer a patch to the 1.23.5 official LL viewer that will enable seeing display names. Many, many Residents still find the 2.x Viewer unusable. It is going to cause incredible confusion once this goes into effect, when maybe 30% of the user base is using Display names, and well over 50% can't even see the name in use. If one user is going by "Fred" as his Display name, and I'm in chat with him on the 1.2x Viewer and all I see is "asdfghjk123", how can I even talk to him? How will I know that the "Fred" that someone else is saying is trying to get my attention is the person I see as "asdfghjk123"? Yes, the TPV's will eventually backport this function to their viewers, but many of us, after the Emerald incident, are gun-shy about using TPV's. Both official LL viewers need to support seeing the display names.

*** We need a way for individuals who are concerned about impersonation to be able to protect their unique names. *** My SL Name, "Ceera Murakami", is a legally registered business name, or DBA, that I own in the real world. I have a bank account in that name, and can cash checks written to that name, just like any Hollywood actor or actress can do for their assumed stage name. I should have the same right to protect my legally registered business name that any celeberty or corporation has today. The common names like "John Brown", that might be people's real-life names, won't be likely to apply for that protection. But those of us who have invested time and money establishing our very unique names as a brand and identity for our products and services will want to protect our unique names. Let us do that, PLEASE.

Please allow any existing Resident to add their unique username to an "exclude list", by paying a reasonable one-time fee, or even as a perk of being a Premium member. If a name is on this list, and someone else tries to use it as a display name, that name choice should be denied, with a response that the name is protected and already in use. Or at the very least, the person trying to change their name to that should get a warning, and a notification should be sent as an IM to the owner of that protected name that "asdfghjk123.resident" has set their display name to the original user's unique name.

Approaching this as a role-player, people who role-play should be able to flip between several Display names at will. Most roleplayers that I know in SL do not live 24x7 in their roleplay sim, and never leave it to roleplay in any other venue. Most of them enjoy several different venues. In the morning they may be a steampunk avaitor in Caledon, at lunch time they may be a castle guard in an Edo Period Japanese sim, and that evening they may be an officer in a Star Trek sim. Changing their name only once a week is useless for that.

As a compromise, I would suggest that perhaps you can only accumulate new names once per week, and perhaps there is a fee for changing names, as there is for Partnering, but the last 10 display names that you have selected remain visible as a list in your profile, and can be switched between at will, or turned off, in favor of displaying your real unique name. That would allow a roleplayer to use one account in several different venues, switch between them at will, and would still make it possible for those worried about impersonation, or confused when a Friend vanishes and a stranger appears on their Friends list, to check the profile and see that the stranger who just IM'ed them as "Trixie Trollop <sally123.resident>" is the same girl that they met last week and hired as a dancer in their club, when she was calling herself "Kathy Cameron".

Being able to flip between a list of names that is visible in your profile would also allow a resident to display their name in Japanese when they are interacting primarily with Japanese speaking residents, but to change to a name that is readable and pronounceable by English speakers when they are not in exclusively Japanese areas. I really dread visiting some venue and having to say "Hey, you! You, with the Chinese name. What the heck do I call you?", when I can see that they are conversing fluently in English with others. If I could look at their profile and see that the girl wityh the unpronouncable Chinese symbols over her head and an equally unpronouncable random character string as her user name also goes by "Sally Wong", it would enable me to politely address her and interact with her.

Again, thank you for at least trying to listen to our concerns. It is very refreshing to see that change in behavior from the Lab employees and management.

[Introducing Kim Salzer, Our New VP Marketing]

Hello Kim, and welcome to Second Life.

It would certainly be refreshing for Linden Lab to have a Marketing Manager that actually "gets it", and understands what the product is that they are promoting, and how the customers who use that product actually use it. The marketing people that they have had in the past have been too willing to focus on some single, internally-generated 'magic bullet', like "If only we could get all those FaceBook users to join SL...", or "Lets really support a select group of clothing creators", or "Let's pitch SL as a great tool for Business communications!", while utterly ignoring the realities of the environment as it stands today, or the impact on your current customers. In all honesty, this was not likely to have been their fault, so much as the fault of the clueless management they worked for, who do not really understand their own product, or how it is used by their customers. Your predecessors merely did what they were told to do. Will you have the courage of your own convictions, and the high personal ethical standards, to at least occasionally tell the boss "Sir? That is a bad idea, and this is why..."? I hope that you will.

I've been an active participant in SL for more than 5 years now. I spend an average of 20+ hours a week in-world, logged in and doing things in Second Life. Some of my time is spent socializing, but much of it is spent creating the in-world content that others purchase and enjoy, and that makes this virtual world unique. Within 4 months of joining SL, I was a content creator, making and selling clothes, and earning sufficient income in-world to completely cover all my in-world expenses, and also cash out real money every month, to spend on niceties for my family in real life. Within six months of joining SL, I was doing multi-sim content creation projects, making entire sims for my clients, from scratch. I currently design and create whole-sim and multi-sim projects for major clients like Rutgers University, and even in the current depressed economy, on average I cash out at least some small profit every single month. Less than 1% of the millions of customers that are registered for Second Life manage to cash out anything at all, let alone doing so every month, so I think I can say that I "get it" for how this virtual world works, and what the customers here want. I'm not one of the "big merchants" who cash out enough to live on as a full time job. But I think I am pretty representative of a typical 'successful' content creator and Resident in Second Life. In the real world, I have a full-time job as a systems administrator for a worldwide Corporation, with responsibilities for projects that have multi-million dollar profits, and in many cases, have multi-million dollar penalties for failing to meet customer requirements. No project I have ever worked on has ever had to pay those penalty fees for failing to meet customer expectations. So I think I can safely say that I know a bit about providing customer satisfaction, in a software services and solutions business where lots of real money is on the line.

To me, the "x-factor" of Second Life is that it is a virtual world that allows individuals to create (or to purchase and assemble) their own content and virtual experience, and not merely be limited to what the service provider makes for them. And most importantly, it is a world that has an actual micro-currency economy, where what you sell in-world can be cashed out for real money. Very few virtual worlds offer that at all.

The original slogan "Your World - Your imagination" was most appropriate. What you can do here is limited only to your imagination. Think of the song that Gene Wilder sings in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", titled "Pure Imagination", and apply that to Second Life.

Come with me
And you'll be
In a world of
Pure imagination
Take a look
And you'll see
Into your imagination

We'll begin
With a spin
Traveling in
The world of my creation
What we'll see
Will defy
Explanation

If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it
Wanta change the world?
There's nothing
To it

There is no
Life I know
To compare with
Pure imagination
Living there
You'll be free
If you truly wish to be

I can think of few things that sum up the Second Life experience better than that.

You have quite a task ahead of you

• First and foremost, please, do not think of Second Life as "Just a game". It is a virtual world, with all the possibilities that a real world has, and more. Thinking that Second Life is no different than "World or Warcraft" or "Ultima Online" is as limited and incomplete a view as thinking that the city of Monte Carlo, in France, is only a Grand Prix racing venue, while ignoring the casinos, the resorts, the social life, and most particularly the local population and business economy that thrives there, even and especially when the big race is not in session. Learn how your current customers use the product. Experience it yourself, deeply. Then you will know how to market the many aspects of the product to new customers, without killing the experience for your current customers.
  
• Understand there is no "one true way" that your customers use this product. Trying to focus on any one aspect is like herding cats. We are a diverse and contrary group of individuals, each with our own goals and aspirations. Focus too much on any one cat, and the rest scatter in a thousand different directions, and you lose many of them. We are a very difficult audience to please, and no one decision you make will ever please all of us. But if you keep the diverse needs and uses of this virtual world in mind, and don't focus on any one faction, either among your current customers, or among hoped for "millions who have not yet tried Second Life", you will stand a better chance of long-term success.
  
• Unfortunately, your fellow employees, especially the upper managers that make the big decisions, seem intent on throwing rabid dogs into the herd of cats that you're trying to manage. Watching the policy decisions of the Lab for the last several years has been like watching Mel Brooks' movie "The Producers". They seem intent on making the worst possible business decisions. Why, I cannot begin to guess.  The recent misguided decision to admit 16 and 17 year old children into a virtual world that contains large amounts of XXX content, with woefully inadequate access controls, is only one of many bad policy decisions that are going to make your job much harder. Unless they ban all XXX content from Mature sims, (and in the process infuriate and drive off a large percentage of their current paying customers who own Mature land in SL and have XXX content on their land), those children will be exposed to XXX content, and both LL and the land owners will face severe legal liabilities for providing XXX content to minors.
  

[Check here if you want more options]

Personally, I don't care if there's ten thousand checkboxes in Preferences, as long as the UI allows me to do what I need to do, and do it efficently.

Viewer 2.0 was a classic example of how NOT to design a User Interface. The UI design team made invalid assumptions about how Residents used SL, that simply did not fit a majority of your customers. Common tasks took more mouseclicks, or became flat out impossible. Multitasking is almost completely impossible in 2.0, for example. And throwing even more things into that modal sidebar makes no more sense than a Swiss Army Knife with 5,000 blades that is three feet wide, welded to a post. It becomes unusable.

Second Life's Residents, your customers, have an incredibly varried set of needs.

• Some people never do more than one simple task at a time, while others multitask daily.
  
• Some people use Voice and never type, while others can't stand Voice, and exclusively communicate by typing.
  
• Some people build, and need good building tools, while others barely know what a prim is.
  
• Some people want all the real-world info on everyone that they can get, at their fingertips. Others don't want to EVER see real life info on anyone else unless they explicitly hunt for it.
  
• Some people want to use SL for gaming, while others use it for text-heavy roleplaying.
  

Choice... It's incredibly important to user satisfaction. We have diverse needs. Many of those needs are opposites, depending on who you ask. We need the ability to choose what is important to us.

Vtewer 2 took away a lot of choices. It took away a lot of existing functionality. We need options to restore what was lost in that UI change.

Give is that chat focus fix. And while you're at it, give us back a text entry field that moves with the text chat floater. It is impossible to participate in a busy text conversation when the text entry field is welded to the bottom edge of the screen, if you try to place the text chat floater anywhere other than right on top of the lower edge. Try moving your eyes back and forth between what you're typing at the bottom edge, and the 15 posts that came up in the text chat floater at the top edge of the screen, while you were typing. It's a lost cause. Now try that in the 1.2x floater, where the new text chat posts appear right above the floater's text entry field. So much easier, no matter where you want to position that floater!

Definitely, give us the ability to tear off every one of the sidebar's 'tabs' into floaters, with multiple instances allowed for each tab, so we can see multiple people's profiles again. And give us an option to NOT have the sidebar try to grab every function first!

A single UI, with no options, is called "one size fits no one", and is very bad UI design.