Telling: Like it Is

Changes!

Turn and face the strain...

The new home of Telling: Like it Is.

Friends and subscribers, and especially you who honor me by inclusion on your blogrolls, please change your links. It's a paid service, and I've signed up for a year, so that's where I'll be... none of that "bounce back and forth" jazz whenever Google appears to change its mind.

See you over there!

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or, "Fake War II"

My favorite story by Crap Mariner is a lot longer than 100 words... It takes up most of this post in his blog, from almost exactly a year ago: "How to take a punch".

The latest schoolyard bully turns out to be Google... or people claiming to be working for and speaking for them, with regard to the "permitted identity" doublethink at GooglePlus. This guy may only be a lone nutjob, or he may be another tip of the same iceberg that occasionally sinks avatar accounts on Facebook.

Andrew Bunner - Yesterday 9:59 AM - Public
If you see a person with an obviously fake name, go to their profile and find the "Report Profile" link in the bottom of the left column. Report it as a "Fake Profile". We want Google+ to be place for real people to connect with other real people.

Outside of Google -- and allegedly in Second Life -- there's this guy. I'm not even going to bother quoting him. Whatever...

Turns out my post of last week was pretty much right. Whether or not we were misled by Google back in February, we expected too much from the company who, if they didn't actually invent datamining and targeted advertising, certainly turned it into The Way Thing Are.

And the purges have begun.

I have been a consistent user of Google products since before the first post in this blog, when I installed their Picasa photo editor on my hard drive and began using the associated website to share photos of virtuality. Blogger and Picasa are interlinked, making it extremely easy to insert photos here. That "public policy" blog of theirs from February states, in part:

Pseudonymous. Using a pseudonym has been one of the great benefits of the Internet, because it has enabled people to express themselves freely—they may be in physical danger, looking for help, or have a condition they don’t want people to know about. People in these circumstances may need a consistent identity, but one that is not linked to their offline self. You can use pseudonyms to upload videos in YouTube or post to Blogger.

[emphasis added]

What did they mean, then -- that pseudonymous use is permitted only on those services? Was Picasa omitted intentionally? Does the February statement still mean today what it seemed to? Or, will the announced integration of Blogger and Picasa with Google+ remove the permission to use them pseudonymously?

I'm not waiting to find out the hard way, by being locked out of my own blog and photo collection because my Google profile is avatarian. And I will not succumb to attaching my wallet identity to my avatar's. That's nobody's goddamn business, unless I say so -- least of all the data scavengers who will try to make it, literally, their business.

All my base are belong to me, motherfucker... and I'm going to take my base... elsewhere.

This blog will (if it hasn't already) have its 15,000th visit some time today. It may have a different address before the weekend's done. Once this is posted, I'm going to export the whole thing (153 posts, plus ancillary pages) to an XML file on my hard drive. I'm looking at the option of actually paying (gasp!) for blog hosting service: Squarespace looks pretty nice, and costs less for a year of basic service than two months' tier in InWorldz. I'm going to join Flickr, too... just in case.

I'm not fond of how Mitch Wagner expressed his opinion in this G+ thread, but I do have to agree with his central point, one I've made a few times as well: "If you don't like the rules, don't go there."

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Anyone who reads this blog has probably figured out that I have a great deal of respect and admiration (as well as a bit of envy) for the Oldbies of Second Life. It's a prime reason why I jumped into InWorldz with both pixel feet, too: to be a pioneer in a new world, and leave my mark on it... and yes, to sit back in my rocker a few years from now, boring the young'ns with stories of byegone days and basking in the senescent glow of Oldbiedom.

The history I've uncovered, however, isn't all about pioneers in a new land... it's also about first users/customers of a service that's -- often painfully -- in beta. Second Life made a lot of blunders down blind alleys in its earliest days, mostly while trying to "monetize"... and each time they said "Oops, that didn't work, let's try this instead," someone was trying to hang them for being social engineers as well as money-grubbers.

So, while I envy the Oldbies for blazing the social trails and building the first "layer" of cultural artifacts on the Grid, at the same time I'm content to have not lived through the upheaval of Linden Lab's early experiments in overseeing the world. You might also recall that I tried out another closed-beta virtual world scheme with the unfortunate handle of "Project X"... compared to that bunch, the first crop of Lindens were social and marketing geniuses.

What I'm getting to is this: if a service of any kind (not just a virtual world) tells you it's in beta, take them at their word. Expect stumbles and false starts; expect one hand not necessarily to know what the other is doing; expect policy development to lag behind features; expect more bugs in the administration than the code.

Google+ Beta has been live for... what, a week now? And already, there's a problem. With apologies to Opensource Obscure, the problem is superficially about his account being suspended because Google says it violates their community standards, without clearly saying how (perhaps it's the use of "Opensource"?). Peel back a layer, and the problem seems to stem from a certain (intentional?) ambiguity in those standards, as they apply to account names. In my opinion, the problem's true taproot is in unrealistic expectations in the minds of the early adopters.

"Here, finally," it was widely said a mere few days ago, "is the Facebook killer! Surely they will respect our chosen identities, which hundreds of us have used within, and integrated through, other Google services (Gmail, Blogger, Picasa, Reader, etc.) for years!" And, without paying much heed to the failures of both Wave and Buzz, they -- including me -- jumped into Google+ with both pixel feet.

Who promised us that Google would be any more indulgent of avatarian identity than Facebook has been? Or, did we delude ourselves with our own early adopter enthusiasm? Who expected a beta product to work -- and be administered -- right out of the box like a final rollout? Or, did we only see the good half of Google's reputation for product development, and rely on what has been reported as a full year of in-house alpha testing -- while forgetting that the in-house environment had no conception whatsoever of the kind of alternate identity we avatars live by?

No one should need to be reminded of this, but, for the record: Google is a business. It makes money selling advertising space crammed into the "free" services we sign up for. Advertisers want the biggest bang for their buck, which they get with narrowly-targeted placement matched to the aggregated online behaviors of individual users: what they search for, and where from (using Google); which blogs and webpages they read regularly (using Google Analytics, Reader, and Friend Connect); what geolocation and names are tagged in photographs (uploaded to Picasa)...

Get the picture? We all railed loud and long about Facebook's data-mining, and how since avatarian identities foil their plans to aggregate users with purchasing information, they want nothing to do with us. Google is the 800-kiloton gorilla, the originator of the practice, the main reason it's what everyone does now... why did we early adopters of Google+ expect anything different from them?

Meanwhile... from inside Google+, it's beginning to look a little like the spamathon when SL bought Avatars United. I'm being added to circles by genuine friends and acquaintances, of course, but also by complete strangers, and at least one who I deliberately ignore... and there are 500 people in the "suggested" category!  Some of them I know by name and reputation alone, most I've never heard of, and many aren't even avatars!


While I've been slogging through the draft of this post, Honour McMillan has already trumped me, in her usual brilliant tongue-in-cheek style. Go read this, right now: Don't Panic! Avatars do not carry the Plague, Cooties or even the Swine Flu.

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Rizal was one of the first regions to be added when Second Life went from closed to open beta, at the end of March 2003. I first blogged about it last August, and mentioned then that it, as well as Oak Grove, were being rebuilt on Mole Islands dedicated to the tasks. (The Moles, you'll recall, are more officially known as the Linden Department of Public Works.)

Last week, my invaluable colleague Mari McCann IM'd me to say that the Rizal project had been delivered:


It preserves the Hedge Maze from 2003:


... restores the Bumper Boat Blast from 2006:


 ... adds a waterfront:


...a hippo-themed playground:


...and a peaceful forest path:


It also adds hope that another of the LDPW's restoration projects, Oak Grove, will be finished and moved to the main Grid soon (that's it in the upper left corner of the playground photo, with Red Rocks Stage and the tattered remains of Wild West Town).

Since Rizal is right next to my old furry stomping grounds, I strolled around there for a while and found a couple of new things, which can be seen in my online collection.

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