Won’t you please be my friend?

In an effort to win back the confidence of the government, I have redoubled my efforts in the social media sphere by setting up a Facebook page unashamedly in the identity of my avatar. This clearly breaches the rules of the social networking site, but I have heard that they are turning a blind eye to SL-related profiles, so hopefully I won’t be deleted.

I currently have a grand total of zero friends, and I’m not exactly sure how I should go about remedying this problem. I guess the Lab would like me to invite all my non-virtual acquaintances over, so that I could introduce them to the joys of the grid, but, in common with most other residents I’m sure, I have a real-life reputation that I don’t want associated with Johnny Staccato, thank you very much. (It’s called Second Life for a reason.)

So I’m reduced to trawling the internet, forlornly appealing for attention. Perhaps not the best way of dispelling the notion that Second Life residents are needy, socially-challenged losers.

I think the problem is that Facebook and Second Life are functional in diametrically opposite ways; the former is useful for integrating our diverse social networks, but the latter is attractive because it allows us to dis-integrate the different strands of our personality. That the Lindens don’t seem to understand this (if they did they wouldn’t be pushing a Facebook strategy, and would have been much quicker to ban alt-linking products like Redzone) is just one more reason to be pessimistic about the future of Second Life.