Second Life Avatar Profiles Now Published on Their Own Web Page, Shareable on Facebook & Twitter!

Linden Lab has a new feature for Second Life users that as far as I know has not been announced yet, but is pretty big: Selected details of SL avatar profiles are automatically published to an individual web page, where they're viewable by anyone, and shareable on Facebook and Twitter.

To see your own page, do this: enter https://my.secondlife.com/First.Last into the address bar of your browser, putting your Resident name in place of "First.Last". That's mine screen captured above, and viewable on the web here. As you can see, the page exposes information from your profile's About Me section, your website, SL birthday, payment info status, Second Life groups, and designated Picks. Even more interesting, you can share any profile page (yours and others) on Twitter or Facebook with the click of a button. (I just hit "Like" on the page, and the link popped up on my Facebook profile in seconds.)  Information about your groups and your picks are also exposed on the web in this way.  For example, here's the page to the Free Culture group I founded for Larry Lessig's first appearance in SL.

All in all, it's an extremely good start at integrating Second Life with the rest of the web, especially the largest social media channels. Though it's live now, I'm not sure if this feature has been officially rolled out yet, or if it's still undergoing some tweaks. I suspect many Residents will raise privacy and anonymity concerns about their profile data appearing so seamlessly and shareable on the wider Internet. At the very least, Residents may need to decide how much of their second lives they want to reveal in the categories that are viewable online outside Second Life's walled garden.

Hat tip: Daniel Voyager, whose web profile is here.

Comments

[Chestnut Rau]

I wonder how many people are going to look at their own profile web page and run in world to change the text and images -- like I just did.

[Loki]

for some reason about a month ago my profile picture and info was wiped from my profile, so far i havent had the chance to re-write it.

In regards to the click and post a 'mention' of my second life profile on my twitter and face book ..."whoop-dee-do!" It's not enough!

Im not interested in posting my profile page to strangers who have no idea what Second Life is, i want to post events, places and experiences of interest.

"it's an extremely good start at integrating Second Life with the rest of the web" Yes if this was 2008.

But seeing as this feature has not been made 'official' i wait to see if they ad anything actually useful farmed from Avatar United.

[Ariana Hood]

What Chestnut said.

I couldn't find a way to completely disable the profile publishing to the "my" page. The choice of web publishing should be "opt-in".

Now if you, for some reason, would like not to show your partner information in the web profile, there's a handy link that redirects you to the "Dissolve Partnership" page, which is a major design FAIL.

Hope this gets fixed before rolling it out officially. Not holding my breath, though.

[NeilC]

I don't think there is likely to be a way to opt-out of this - it is the replacement for the existing profile UI as far as I understand it in the upcoming release of the viewer - so when you go to look at a profile or edit your own, it will bring up the browser and take you to that page. Of course right now profiles are 'public' to anyone logged into SL but this takes it a step further and lets anyone or anything including search engines crawl through the profile data...

[Stone Semyorka]

This makes me concerned for the end of the SL tradition of anonymity enjoyed by sooo many residents over the last seven years.

I looked at my profile on the web and everything is there including the main profile descriptive statement and the RL statement and all groups, picks and classifieds.

I’m not embarrassed by anything, but I think a lot of people could decide to abandon SL when word of this gets around.

Just what we need is another excuse for the teetering crowd to fall off the cliff.

Surely LL will have to provide a way to opt out.

[Ghosty Kips]

Already, I have submitted a JIRA. :) The text on my web profile is very incorrect! Soooo ... Vote [WEB-3483] Text from inworld profiles should be transferred to web profiles without changes or edits.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-3483?

[Kenny Panache]

The profile info is public anyway, so having it visible to non-SL users isn't a concern to me. That same non-SL user could very well get an account and see the info anyway. It's free, after all. If there's anything I don't want to be public, I don't put it on my mostly-public profile.
If I wanted to have private info visible on my SL profile, I'd leave my RL identity out of it. A lot of people keep their RL info out of their profiles for this reason.

A general rule of the internet: if it's online, it's public. Always keep that in mind when putting your info where anybody could see it, even if they need to register a free account.

If I were in LL management, I'd have an opt-out function simply to keep the complainers happy, along with the above statements.

[smiles large]

almost everything stupid LL could do is being done systematically

[Carrie Lexington]

i just checked my profile and some others on my friends list just to see. my profile is there in full, but i noticed that some of the profiles don't display all the information. it showed their sl name, profile pic, and a message saying you must be logged in to sl to view the complete profile. so maybe there is an opt-out function somewhere?

[Molly Montale]

I hope there will be a way to edit which groups and picks are displayed on the first page. Right now the apparent only way to move the groups that you would like to have displayed on the first page is to hide other groups on your in world profile that precede in alphabetical order the ones you want displayed on the first page.
The picks displayed on the first page seem to be the most recent ones created.

[Tateru Nino]

@Ariana For a few years, the viewer let you opt-out of having your profile published on the Web. That option no longer seems to be available.

It's possible the 'show in search' checkbox still handles that, however.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

The big news is web-based profiles also being available in Viewer 2.5 this week.

[Roenik Newell]

I prefer the about.me website.

http://about.me/Roenik

[Ariana Hood]

Thanks Tateru. I haven't been in-world yet after changing my web profile, hope the changes weren't applied to the inworld profile...

I wonder how Imprudence will behave...

[Laetizia Coronet]

I see a strangely stretched picture. Should be the same as on my Twitter account though, which is fairly normal, considering. Hmm.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I'm not opposed to the concept, but it should be opt-in rather than opt-out. That maintains maximum privacy for everybody unless and until they actively choose to share information with the broader online community (and even then, it'd be good to have the option to toggle privacy item-by-item rather than publishing the whole nine yards).

[Laetizia Coronet]

IMPORTANT
If you add /groups, ie. https://my.secondlife.com/philip.linden/groups, you will see the groups someone belongs to.
According to Prokofy Neva and others, THIS INCLUDES HIDDEN GROUPS. Not groups you have hidden, but groups created as hidden.

If you wonder what the problem may be, imagine that you are in a selfhelp group for ex heroin addicts. Do you want everyone to know that? It's out there now and Google has them indexed.

What to do? Being that the Lab moves in sluggish ways, I suggest you LEAVE such groups you do not want to be publicly associated with.

[Senban Babii]

Well they got my birthday wrong for a start.

At least they don't show my hidden groups but that's beside the point.

Once again the Lab is doing everything it possibly can to alienate what remains of the resident population.

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

Great. Now my colleagues will see me in my "Drinky Crow" T-Shirt :)

Like they didn't already.

@Laetizia, am I just dense, but beyond the hidden groups being revealed (and that is a bad thing), why is this causing such a hullaballoo?

[Laetizia Coronet]

I am not sure what problem there is *beyond* it, frankly. I just thought I'd post a warning.

I quickly ended membership of my hidden group Superheroes Without Actual Superpowers ;-)

[Ann Otoole InSL]

@Hitomi Tiponi re: 2.5

You mean for everyone except people running the Windows O/S right? Given the SSL error on Windows that causes nothing web based in the client to show.

[JabbaAabye]

This web-based profiles give some people a perfect way in grabbing, farming, caching info. Not that it *is* harmful.. Still thinking about the ultimate possibilities..

Although.. for you Hamlet, you like the immersion.. the whole Social Connection.. So non bad can be thought of from your side I think...?

[Troy McLuhan]

It's been possible to get some of your profile via the web for quite a while, but the old URL was of the form:

http://world.secondlife.com/resident/a74dd003-6de4-40b5-a5bb-bbc1a97f7eee

where that last bit is just your avatar UUID (key). The old URL still works, but it doesn't have as much information (e.g. it doesn't list your groups).

[Ann Otoole InSL]

OK so the rumored work around is you have to hit the profile website with Microsoft's crappy internet explorer to download the security certificates. What a shameful dependency.

[Stone Semyorka]

There's another JIRA going on about this at:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-24465

with comments at:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/web-3494?

[Senban Babii]

I just checked my profile again for interest. My birthday is now correct and it no longer shows my first life tab. I already went in and set almost all my groups to hidden anyway so that problem was solved.

So in all fairness it does seem as if LL is working to put things right. It would have been better to get things right before letting it into the wild of course but at least someone seems to be doing some work down at the Lab :)

Perhaps one suggestion to improve this though would be to simply indicate whether someone had age-verified? 'The payment info used' doesn't really need to be there so why not replace it with age-verification status?