How to Contact SL Residents (When You're Not in SL)

In my opinion, Second Life will not become truly mass market until full cross-platform communication between the client and every other mainstream medium (mobile, web, VoiP) is enabled.  (It's why I was so intrigued by Vivox's upcoming web-to-SL voice app.) Until that happens, there are still numerous ways of contacting SL Residents without having to get to a PC, then download, install, and launch the client. On his blog, translation business owner Peter Stindberg offers several ideas, some I never thought of myself, such as this one via Quaintly Tuquri:

"From my experience, the majority of residents has email accounts for their avatar on Googlemail/Gmail." So he recommends addressing a Resident at GMail with various formulations of their avatar name. "GMail is smart enough to deliver mails to addresses with dot even when it was omitted." More tips here.

Comments

[Skinkie Winkler]

There's a very fine line between being a thorough, consciencious business person, and stalking, and this is walking on that line big time.

Clearly these "business associates" haven't chosen to share this information with you, so one HAS to presume until told otherwise that they do not wish to be contacted by these means by you. To NOT presume that is to totally disrespect that persons right to privacy. If it really is so important that you contact them when they are not logged in to SL then ASK them for alternative means of contact! There are a million legitimate reasons why people would not want to be contacted off-grid, and especially as someone wishing to be respected in business you should not think you are bigger than the need to respect their wishes. If someone I did business with did that to me our business relationship would not be very long-lived.

I personally think that writing a blog post highlighting ways of tracking people by guessing at information they clearly haven't chosen to share with you, is about as security conscious as publically posting instructions on how to make a nuclear bomb - you may know how, many others may know how, but making it publicly available information is just wrong. You just gave a few more stalker-types some good ideas - well done guys!

Not impressed.

[Skinkie Winkler]

The more I think about it, the more outrageous this post is - supposedly respected businessmen in SL are actively encouraging others to seek out undisclosed information about clients and contact them via a means they haven't given you permission to use??? And you think people will still trust your company????

[Hamlet Au]

You make some interesting points, Skinkie, though I don't see anything in Peter's post that advises or encourages stalking. As I said, the real problem is it's difficult to SL to contact fellow Residents unless you're logged into SL.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Since I have limits to the amount of time I spend in SL, I can't hog the machine that runs SL ALL the time, I often have the need to keep in contact out of world. That's why I'm relatively open about my e-mail address. It's in my profile, as is my blog, which also has my e-mail at the very bottom of every page.

But as a far as I can remember nobody has contacted me via e-mail that I haven't already been in contact with via e-mail out of world.

I myself have contacted folks via e-mail addresses they have provided, because others often have the need to be able to reached out of SL as well.

[Chaddington Boomhauer]

The way OpenSim is working on this seems much more exciting. SIP, XMPP, bridging to IRC and other standard protocols seems like a much more pragmatic choice in the long run. One wonders how long we'll have to wait for LL to rip-out vivox and port OpenSims communication code in.

[Samantha Poindexter]

I'm afraid I concur with Miss Winkler in this regard. If you want to e-mail somebody from SL, ask them for their e-mail address. If they're not online, wait till they are. If they don't want to give you an e-mail address, you're out of luck.

My First Life avatar has a fairly common name, and has the obvious derived e-mail address. I'm carpet-bombed every single day by chowderheads who want to get through to other people with that name, and who take Mr. Stindberg's approach of sending an e-mail to that address and hoping it's the right person. Frankly, death by fire ants is too good for such people, but I'd happily settle for imposing that if I could.

This goes beyond bad advice into the realm of actively abusive. Don't encourage it.