Yesterday this 2011 post about Facebook deleting some Facebook accounts named after Second Life avatars went crazy viral on, well, Facebook. Evidently some SL users are worried about their own Facebook accounts getting suspended. So to emphasize a point that's been made often before, let me say it again in bold:
To use Facebook with your SL avatar without violating Facebook's policies against fake names, create a Facebook page named after your avatar, and change your Facebook settings to reflect that.
Basically, here's how it works:
Scroll down to the bottom of your Facebook account and click "Create a Page" on the bottom left. (See screencap above.) Create a Facebook page named after your avatar. Once you've done that, all you have to do is choose to interact in Facebook through your SL avatar:
To do that, you click the gear icon on the top right corner of your account, and select your page/avatar name. (See screencap above.) Since I created a Facebook page for New World Notes, I can choose to "Use Facebook as New World Notes". If I had created a Facebook page for my avatar, I could choose that instead. And there you go.
And I definitely recommend doing so: the official Facebook page for Second Life keeps growing, and now has nearly 315,000 fans. (Up from 300,000 a few months ago.) I often come across SLers claiming that Facebook is anti-Second Life, which is an imminently silly notion for several reasons. The SL userbase on Facebook is too small to warrant much attention from the company in general. (Hello, 315,000 is a tiniest fraction of its 1 billion+ userbase.) For another, one of Facebook's top engineers, a right hand man to Mark Zuckerberg himself, is Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka. (And Cory's brought over about a half dozen other Linden engineers to the Facebook team.) So any scant attention Second Life gets from Facebook's higher ups is more likely to be positive, than negative.
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Considering that practicaly everything I write and post is under my SL name, which might as well also be my "pen name," I'm not worried about my Facebook account.
Posted by: Bixyl Shuftan | Thursday, August 15, 2013 at 12:24 PM
Creating a Facebook page for your avatar doesn't seem like much help to me - the point of pseudonyms are anonymity. At least if I like Second Life on Facebook under my real name, no one knows who I am. I can continue using Second Life like I always have been. If I create a facebook page for Adeon Writer, it's very easy to find out who owns the page.
That defeats the point of pseudonyms in the first place.
Posted by: Adeon Writer | Thursday, August 15, 2013 at 01:14 PM
I strongly recommend everybody to delete their Facebook accounts. The NSA is watching you and the day will come that you regret it big time if you don't stop posting all your stuff online. Stop using American cloud services, e-mail services and social networks. That is the only way we can force them to send their lobbyists to Washington and fix this surveillance mess.
https://prism-break.org/
Posted by: Eric | Thursday, August 15, 2013 at 01:31 PM
This is good advice for people who have blogs and products to promote, and who are already using their real names for the Facebook profiles associated with their Second Life activity.
For the majority of us, however, who just use Facebook for casual, relatively-anonymous social networking, setting up a Facebook page will not fix this problem. You have to have a Facebook profile to set up the page, and if Facebook disables your profile, you won't have access to your page. Also, Facebook pages don't allow interaction with other users the way profiles do. Unless you have a pretty long list of friends under your profile, you won't be able to invite people to your page, and your Second Life friends won't know the page exists. You won't be able to "like" things people post, unless they have their own fan page. It just isn't a practical solution for the casual Facebook user.
Posted by: Savoree LeDesir | Thursday, August 15, 2013 at 02:00 PM
I've been around on the Internet long enough to remember when it was possible to be anonymous, but always traceable at need. Then a certain religious organisation tested the law, revealed how easy it was to legally find the human behind an account, and things have been going downhill ever since.
Incidentally, if you're not a US Citizen you have no protection at all from their Constitution. No freedom of speech, no need for a warrant to snoop on you. I heard what that led to from witnesses: there's a reason Europe takes privacy laws seriously, and such things as Gitmo suggest that the USA is a long way along a very ugly road indeed.
Posted by: Wolf Baginski | Thursday, August 15, 2013 at 02:09 PM
This is what I do. I have a page for my avatar filed as a "Fictional Character. I frequently log in *as* the page and like/comment around other Facebook content related to SL and SL avatars. Yes, if someone wanted to look, I am the admin of the page. But there are admins of other pages out there that are just superfans. You can say for certain I am a superfan of DaveDorm Gaffer!
http://facebook.com/ddgaffer
Posted by: Dave Lowe (Gaffer) | Thursday, August 15, 2013 at 06:24 PM
"the point of pseudonyms are anonymity"
- Exactly, and this is why yes, Facebook IS Second Life hostile.
Its pretty First Life hostile too... as a growing number of people have been finding... seriously invasive... But that's another discussion.
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Friday, August 16, 2013 at 09:29 AM
I've resorted to the "trick" of using a Page for a long time, because, yes, it doesn't violate Facebook's ToS (and you can hide who the administrator is — Facebook's employees will know that, of course, but not the general public).
Facebook's more recent APIs are clever enough to allow a lot of things to be done with Pages, and which work almost exactly in the same way than using a Facebook account with real names & data. For example, Jetpack for WordPress, an add-on by Automattic, includes sharing tools/posting to Facebook which distinguishes between both, and you can do everything as well with a Page. This is by far not the only good example — several online services also allow Pages to be used as Facebook logins — but there is a catch. The vast majority of plugins/online services out there still use the 2005 API, which has no clue about Pages. So this means that the ease of using a Facebook Page as a single registration/login for those services is impossible.
Ironically, Linden Lab, who should know better, and who just finished developing their "Facebook Sharing" tools inside the viewer, also use the old 2005 API. Bummer! There is absolutely nothing that LL has implemented that cannot be done with a Page instead (e.g. sharing locations, status, pictures...). But nooooo they just had to use the old and outdated API! How stupid can that be?
It's impossible to address all the billions of sites out there which still use the old API, and that's why Facebook still supports it. The only way to force them all to change would be by Facebook simply dropping the access to the old API (Google and Yahoo, for similar reasons, are always fond of dropping old APIs...). But until that happens, we'll still be stuck to using 'real' accounts with Facebook, not Pages, to register with all those services out there. Including, to our chagrin, Second Life :-P
Posted by: Gwyneth Llewelyn | Tuesday, November 05, 2013 at 05:56 AM
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