Yesterday I was going through my old SL links/bookmarks and went to visit ASNers. Apparently the site no longer exists. Not a surprise, but then I became curious what other SLers are using for social media.
I used to have them all – Fakebook, Tweeter, ASN, Plurk, and a few others, but I don’t use them anymore. I suppose I have a love/hate relationship with social media. I love how connected it can make you, but I hate how most of the companies actually work.
I refuse to use Fakebook (see here and here) for SL or RL. I don’t agree with the policies and practices of the company, so I don’t use them. I kept using other sites for awhile, but I ultimately decided that it was too much of a time waster – not enough benefits for the returns I was getting.
I was curious, though, what everyone else is using. Fakebook, Tweeter, Plurk, and Flickr I know, but is there an alternative site out there? I did some searching and found Avatarbook and Onlinker – are there any others I missed?
Now I need to get busy doing stuff to fill it up. 🙂
I have a week break before things get back to normal busy in RL again, so I thought I’d take advantage of the extra time and do some of those things I’ve been meaning to do, but never seem to get around to doing.
Facebook page – check.
New curriculum – check.
Current classes – check.
Dancing – check.
Photography – check.
Social Media Certification – working on it!
I’ve been busily grid hopping to different events (did everything open in October??!!) and I have a ton of boxes to open and sort.
What fun!
I’m trying to finish Octoberville, and then make my way over to the Peatonville Asylum.
And, though I’ve sworn off most gachas, the TAG! gacha event is open, and I have to at least go check it out, right? 😛
AND – I managed to win the Fallen Gods gift from their Fortune Teller machine.
Yesterday was an extremely busy day for me in RL, so much so that I didn’t even have time to post yesterday.
Ack!
After spending some time this morning catching up on things, I think I’m glad I was gone.
I don’t have a Facebook (because I loathe their policies, and also because they wouldn’t accept Feldragonne as a last name, the b*st*rds).
I’ve often considered whether I should join up, and every now and again, the internal debate starts again.
I’d probably get more traffic and more interaction on my blog if I had a FB.
I’ve considered setting up a page rather than a profile, as that would follow their TOS, so I wouldn’t have to worry about the account getting suspended or deleted.
But then I get wind of yet another FB drama and I just think – nope.
SL is a place for me to have fun and do my own thing.
Sometimes it’s lonely, but that’s my own fault for being a platform hermit. 😛
And usually about the time I’m considering trying to be social, I get wind of some kind of drama, and I just – can’t.
I don’t have the time or energy or desire to deal with drama.
However, even with extra groups (and alts in groups), I never have enough for all the shops and stores and events I want to keep up with.
I follow blogs, of course, but not everyone has blogs.
Everyone seems to have a FB.
So, fellow bloggers, dancers, and SLers – is it worth it to have a FB account?
Does it help your blog traffic?
Do you have a page for your avatar/business, or do you have an actual profile and take your chances with getting it deleted if it gets reported?
If you have an account, is it under your actual SL name, or have you made it seem more like a RL name to lessen the chances of deletion?
Does having a different name cause confusion?
I ask because I have trouble myself keeping track of people when names don’t match.
If I know someone in SL as John Smith and their SL profile is John Jones, it gets confusing to me.
What happens when your account gets deleted?
Do you just make a new profile and hope it doesn’t get caught?
I love Twitter, though I’m not all that adept at using it yet.
I constantly forget to tag people (with their @ names), I can never think of a good hashtag for tweets, and I’m still trying to figure out lists.
I use TweetDeck to schedule tweets for my blog (is there a way to do that BEFORE the post is actually published?) and I follow quite a few SL hashtags.
Of all the social media I’m currently using, I think Twitter takes up the least of my time.
It’s easy to skim through and read what I find interesting and skip over the rest.
I can scroll through on my phone whenever I have a few spare minutes and I’m all caught up.
Facebook
I hate Facebook.
With a passion.
I get that it’s a nice tool to stay in touch with people.
But I just. Can’t. Even.
Nope.
I realize that I’m probably costing myself traffic by not having a FB linked to my blog.
I’ll deal.
It’s just not worth the hassle and the worry of getting deleted.
I could set up a page, I suppose, but then I would still have to use Facebook.
After reading these posts, I spend a lot of time on internal debates, on researching related things on the internet, and then the next thing you know, it’s 5 hours later, my butt is asleep, and I realize I forgot to eat lunch.
The other biggest time social media time suck for me is Plurk.
I avoided joining Plurk for a long time, because people told me it was elitist and full of snarky SL people.
I haven’t found that to be true at all.
There is some seriously hilarious shizz going on in Plurk. 😛
I’ve seen pictures of crazy, cannibalistic land-crabs (yet another reason to never go to Florida), watched others install Windows10 (their results were sadly, sometimes not as good as mine), and learned that texture thrashing makes people want to strangle LL.
A lot of the people on Plurk have been in SL forever, so I’m constantly learning something new.
Plus, some of them are just plain hysterical.
It’s like all the cute cat videos and funny memes and friends all rolled into one place.
It probably took me twice as long as usual to write this post, because I kept going back to Plurk to check on things.
Plus, everyone uses all these cute gifs, so I have become a gif collector.
Because who knows when you’ll need a good Phil Collins gif, amiright?
😀
If you are on any of these social networks, please add me – I promise not to stalk you. 😛
I find it interesting that Facebook continues to insist that users use their ‘real names,’ when clearly, LOTS of users don’t want to. While it’s certainly Facebook’s right to set their TOS as they want, it seems to be a TOS at odds with many of their ‘real’ users.
I’ll be interested to see if this actually changes anything or not. Same song, different day.
The Hamburg data protection authority is confronting Facebook on its ‘real name policy and telling the social media site that it can’t demand its users to provide them with a photo ID.
The German regulator said that this violates the right to privacy and in a statement (click here to read, in German) could not force users to send them copies of their official identification papers nor could it force them to change their chosen names to real names.
These real name rules have been making things very hard for people who for one reason or another prefer to use a name that is not their official one or one not recognised by Facebook.
Artists, transgender men and women, American natives, people hiding from abusive relationshiips and of course those of us with a virtual identity.
Many of us at one time or another have had our profiles deleted by Facebook because…
I’ve been a bit busy in RL, so I’m trying to catch up on all my reading.
Some interesting tidbits I’ve come across in the last couple of days:
→LL is considering removal of the ‘Restore to Last Position’ function.
Firestorm currently allows this, but not with no-copy items.
This is to keep people from accidentally losing valuable no-copy items.
However, this function is used by a lot of people (including myself!) and I would hate to see it disappear.
FS feels the same and is asking for your help.
Go to their website and leave a comment about how and why you use this feature.
Many members of the dance community have already commented, but every little bit helps!
If they can provide enough use-cases, LL might rethink removing the function.
→I follow New World Notes, and one of their writers posted an article a while ago about watching SL creators work using live-stream service Twitch.
It seems some of these creators have had their accounts suspended for streaming SL, because Twitch does not “permit Adults-Only rated games and games where nudity is the core focus, feature, or goal.”
Arguments about whether SL is a game or not aside, when the hell did nudity become the ‘core focus, feature, or goal’ of SL?
It’s certainly not the goal of my SL.
As someone pointed out in the comments, Twitch has no problem with people streaming violent video games like GTA, but SL is a no-no?
Idiots.
So, if you’re looking for a streaming service, Hitbox (Twitch’s main competitor) will happily oblige. 😀
→On the heels of this information, I came across Strawberry Singh’s Monday Meme (again, late, grrr).
I’ve blogged before about how difficult I find it sometimes to keep up with everything.
I blog, I tweet, I post – there are so many social media platforms it’s overwhelming.
Zed and I had a conversation the other day about how she felt SL was slowly moving out of SL.
Back in the good ‘ol days, when a shop came out with a new item, you would get a group notice and a LM or pic attached.
These days, you get a notice from their subscribo or group. Said notice tells you to go see the item on their Flickr page or their Facebook page.
In addition to notices, people plurk, tweet, and tumblr all over the place.
And since, as Zed pointed out, SL is essentially a fancy chat room, is it becoming unnecessary?
I’ve always had my offline IM’s set to go to my email, so I didn’t miss anything if messages got capped.
Although I resisted for some time, I now have that email accessible on my phone.
I have enough going on at various times that it became more convenient to be able to reply to people as soon as possible.
However, I find that my phone now goes off waaaaayyy too often.
If people come to SL looking for connections, is it unrealistic to think that once those connections are established, then they move outside of SL into RL?
Maybe it’s just the cynic in me speaking, but this is doomed to fail.
First – avatars are already allowed to have a Facebook ‘page.’ With a page, you can call it anything you want – whether it’s for your business (RL or SL), your stage persona, or your SL avatar name.
What people want is to have a Facebook profile using their avatar names (or whatever name they’d like to use).
I’m sure you heard the recent upheaval when several well-known drag queens took the fight over their stage names to Facebook. Facebook agreed to ‘revisit’ their real names policy.
Yeah, right.
Now, I hate Facebook. I’ve stated that several times.
It’s a great tool for communication. I get that. I just don’t agree with their policies, so I don’t use it.
People seem to forget that Facebook is a business. What does it sell?
YOU.
Your personal information – your likes, your dislikes, and whatever other information they can collect about you.
And when you sign up for a Facebook account, you agree to all of this. Including the part that says that you MUST use your RL information.
Sure, you’re free to disregard the rules and set up a profile using a different name if you want.
But that also means you agree that Facebook, if/when they discover that your account is not under your real name, can delete your account with no warning.
No one is forcing you to use Facebook.
If you don’t like their policies, there are plenty of other choices.
