Datamining for the win

Glitteractica Cookie doesn't concern me that much, the name is familiar due to a congress hearing and a skit on some American talk show where they poked fun at her, unfairly but still, the name doesn't bother me. Susan T community manager however, linked to Second Life promos, this does concern me.

In his blog post, We're looking for a few good avatars, Slaton Linden looks for people to appeal to the facebook generation and I'm finding this all so painful. The name "Second Life" screams out that it should not be about Real Life, but the relentless pursuit of Facebook consumers means we are now finding more and more peer pressure to share our RL details and it's simply wrong.

This all started with Wallace's infamous blog post, then came the Valentine's hunt where to win the main prize you had to out yourself on Facebook and now we have this.

Look I have no problem with Linden Lab promoting their product on Facebook, it's a sensible advertising option, however let's not try and turn SL into Facebook 3D because that would be so incredibly boring, people feel the value of free expression and exploring avenues in Second Life because it doesn't tie their activities to their RL name, that's why it's called Second Life.

If everything gets tied to our RL selves then we will lose some of the awesome expression and end up being a sanitised world of boring. People need to be able to express themselves, that's what makes it exciting. Viewer 2.0 puts RL right in your face and this is not a happy improvement.

I know, I know, it's all opt in, we don't have to do this but Linden Lab are making it increasingly difficult not to reveal your RL info and I see these competitions and participation events where you need to our yourself on Facebook increasing, I see peer pressure increasing and this won't end well.

The Beeb have been running an excellent documentary series on the interweb: The virtual Revolution, if you live in the UK you can watch this on BBC iplayer. One of the episodes covered "The cost of free" and explained how people don't seem to realise how valuable their information is. When we sign up to these websites, they just want our information, they want to know what we browse for, what we spend money on, they want to target us, datamining for the win but there has to come a point where everyone has our information, they know everything about us, I can't be alone in finding this intrusive and creepy.

There will always be the chaos effect to fall back on to confuse these computer profiles but we need to take a step back from sharing our RL details so freely, people really don't need to know everything about everyone, where's the fun in that? Where's the mystery? Where's the wild conversation? We need to preserve our Second Lives to be exactly that, revealing all this information has the potential to take the fun out of everything and stifle expression.