Second Friends profile images

One of the original design features of Second Friends was that it would re-use people's in-world profile image as the image displayed on their Facebook profile and in their friends' 'My friends' list. The idea was that as little as possible of the Second Life profile information should be replicated in Facebook.

Linden Lab serves your in-world profile image on the Web at a URL of the form:

http://secondlife.com/services/user/small_image/...jpg

and I currently display this in the Second Friends part of people's Facebook profile.

Unfortunately, the images are served in the wrong aspect ratio and in a form that is not cachable by the browser. To make things worse, there is often a significant delay in the way they are served. I don't know if LL do this to discourage their use in external applications such as Second Friends but whatever the reasoning or rationale, the bottom line is that using them is unreliable.

I've therefore added a feature that allows people to add a URL of an image of their avatar to their Second Friends preferences. Go to the My preferences tab to make use of this. It's up to people to find themselves a place to host the image, but Flickr is an obvious choice.

I am Art

This is me (see right) and this is part of my profile information, now being displayed on a Second Life Web page that is new, as far as I know.

I've known for a while that an avatar's profile image is available on the Web - in fact I display that image as part of the Second Friends Facebook application. But I'd not found this other profile information on the Web before, so I'm guessing that it's new.

Interesting... I don't object to my profile being made visible in this way. But I do wonder what the privacy issues are, if any?

The information has always been available in-world of course but surfacing it on the Web brings new issues with it. Issues around persistence of the information for example - what happens when the Internet Archive start storing this stuff (they haven't, yet!).

This stuff seems to have been rolled out as part of the new, Google-based, search engine that comes with release candidate 1.18.5. See the blog entry and commentary for some of the discussion. However, I found it using this unofficial Web-based search, Nothing official to see here, which is presumably based on the new engine?

The Awful New Search from Second Thoughts gives a nice overview of some of the issues.

Finally, hats off and a big thank you to Mal Burns for a non-stop Twitter stream that seems to pick up everything about everything to do with Second Life.