Invite SL Friends From The World To The Web

Our urbane and innovative friends at the virtual world social network Koinup (a partner to this blog) have a new feature, and if you have an account, it's worth a try:  "Invite SL Friends", which does exactly that-- using some libsecondlife open source code, it logs into your account and displays your Second Life friends list, giving you the option send all (or some) a message from Koinup, and invite them to join.  Caveat avatar: it's still very much a Beta product, and like AjaxLife and other open source projects, it requires you to enter your SL account info into a third party system.  That said, it's the kind of feature I hope to see more of, linking our Second Life identities with various Web 2.0 networks in a seamless way.

Comments

[eggy lippmann]

I'd like to see a feature to let you import your friends from email or other IM apps. Most social networks have it. Second Life is probably the only self-contained social network I belong to.

It doesn't (for whatever mysterious reason) consider itself a social network, or an IM client, and does not seek to implement the features we have grown accustomed to.

It's five or ten years behind the times!
Our profiles are all separate from each other, forcing us to search rather than explore, and nobody knows who our friends are. The "last seen" date is visible only in the group interface, it's kind of crazy.

We don't have pictures/icons in our IM windows, or in the friends list, we can't form contact groups... we can't simply drop a file/asset in the IM window to send it to someone, we have to pull up their profile... I estimate that it would take about a man month to fix most of these, yet LL never really seems to care about the little details that make any software look professional and provide an enjoyable experience.

Also, the whole mapping permission thing is quite a pain in the ass. We went from zero privacy to 100% insurmountable, enforced privacy, instead of simply having what everyone else does, an invisible mode. We have online, awway, busy, but not invisible? But... Why? :)

At some point, LL must realize that innovation is what you do after you've looked at everything else out there, rather than existing in a vacuum. There's a certain set of features that have long become the industry standard for online communication, and SL does not meet that standard. It doesn't meet it for content management or (modular, object-oriented) programming either :)