Gravatar, or what’s wrong with the web

After posting a remark under one of Torley’s blogs I noticed how, instead of his usual Torley-tinted cube designs, there was now a small square next to my name that said Gravatar. A clickable link. I clicked.

I never heard of Gravatar. I never visited the Gravatar site. I never signed up for it and never asked for it. And yet the first thing I see on that site is that I am “logged in as Laetizia”. My old, Dutch email address was there - now defunct - and it said something about how I can’t change that. The FAQ furthermore told me that they are not deleting accounts “at the moment”. Like Facebook, once they got ya they don’t let go.

What’s up with this? Another fantastic new tool to identify myself everywhere - but these boneheads apparently don’t realize that there are people who use two names. Like an SL and an RL name. These boneheads didn’t realize that an email address changes. That I don’t want to run around with a stack of passwords to log in and out everywhere and change identity and that I was just fine with the way things were, thank you very much.

I don’t know about you but I flip out over this. I want a big red button that says NO, I want an email address of some governmental body which will force them to pull my account, I want to hack into their servers if need be and blow the whole spiel up. If my email address appears on the site of an organization I have never heard of before, the alarm goes off. And if they log me in just like that, two alarms go off. And if on top of that they tell me they do not erase accounts, the damn fire brigade pulls out of the station in my head.

I think it is coupled to WordPress, host to this blog - and Torley’s. And I am mad enough now to pull the whole blog because of it. It’s one thing to force feed me a new gadget with an option to opt out, which is the old Microsoft way. But that was on your computer, not on the internet, and that at least had the option to switch off. Goodbye talking paperclip nonsense. But this blog… first they gave me their 100% off-the-mark “possibly related posts” that I cannot get rid of, and now this!

I was going to start a Real Life themed blog on WordPress. But a) it automatically logged me in as Laetizia which is pointless, and b) now they pull this one on me. So I don’t think it is going to happen.

Gravatar.com collects your email address as part of the gravatar service. We will never rent, sell, or otherwise distribute or make public your email address.

“As part of the gravatar service”. Good thing they don’t run the water supply - they’d be pumping it into your house and flooding you out of your bedroom before you even ordered to have water. As part of their service.

(SL is a trademark of Linden Research, Inc.)

Facebook - the site you cannot leave

It’s like an addiction to some, Facebook, but honestly I never saw the fun in sending virtual hugs to someone or ‘buying’ one of their photos for virtual profit. Furthermore, since I have Facebook I am finding a lot more damaging cookies hidden in my system, and Firefox crashes on me regularily - which hardly ever happened before. And to top it all off, one application (Triumph) sent me an email telling me that that application itself sucks. Someone is messing with things there. So I want out.

Well… those Facebookers have another idea of ‘out’ than I have. It begins when you click ‘deactivate’. You are not going to be cleared out, hell no. You can always come back just by logging in. They’ll send you a reactivation link. There is no option to erase your account. And so, after deactivating, I had to reactivate it again because that irritating stream of whimsical emails just kept coming. So-and-so added me as a friend, someone bought my photo - I had to stop that barrage of timewasters.

First I tried to change my listed email address to a nonexisting one, thinking I’d strike two blows: ridding myself of all that baloney and clearing my real email from the page. Well… those Facebookers didn’t want that to happen. You can change email address but it will only come into effect after a confirmation mail has been sent. And so it has to be a real addy.

Alright. OK. Fine. I just happen to have that flag contest email, residentsflag@hotmail.com, remember? Let them send their crap there. That worked… until I saw my profile. It lists TWO emails now, the flag one and the one I wanted to have removed. Apparently you cannot remove an email from view, once given.

Well then, I manually emptied my friends list, I manually removed all those third-party applications, I manually told them not to send me emails in any event (and you have to do that per event, in the old Windows95 way where every irritating feature was on per default), I manually removed profile photo and photo album, I manually cleared all my personal info… and deactivated again.

And don’t think you can just deactivate. You must give a reason, either from the list or the ‘other’ option, in which case you shall type in some reason or other. The Facebookers do not accept having no reason to quit.

As I said, it’s like an addiction to some, and as a smoker I know a thing or two about addictions. And I do believe that Facebook is making it very hard to kick the habit when they act like this. I really think they should just clear out my profile and everything connected with it if I tell them to, when I tell them to, and that option should be an easy one. It should imply that all emails connected to Facebook and third-party applications thereof stop as well. When you are addicted and trying to stop, the last thing you need is a site that’s pulling you back in all the time.

Mail from the Lab

Dear Laetizia Coronet, Your submission in the Mentor Directory has been removed. This may be because you have submitted a new listing, or because you have requested its removal. You’ve been removed from the Second Life Mentor group.

Of course, this is due to the AR that Mia sent out after our little run-in on April 19th. And of course I did not ‘request’ this, as the automatically generated message says. That mail is about as wrong as can be - as is this whole sorry affair.

And so, after a year of mentoring, a year of gaining experience in this crazy job, I am no longer a mentor. And eventually this happens to almost all of us, keeping the mentor group as a whole inexperienced and inept. Because sooner or later you are going to lose your cool for a second, and those love spreading hippie idiots of the Lab are going to turn into the police they say they hate, and throw the book at you.

Want my advice? Don’t become a mentor. Don’t become an unpaid worker in the client relations department of the Lab. You get no benefits apart from a laggy party sometimes and a line in Mia’s (and Amber’s, etcetera) profile that says ‘Volunteers Rock!’, which they’ll repeat way too often during their teambuilding efforts - which reminded me of those I attended when I was a forklift driver. I hope you get the picture of the kind of level we’re talking about here. Amateurish doesn’t begin to describe it.

From day one I realised, thanks to this teambuilding thing and the memories which that brought back, that these people are not my friends - they just act as if they are. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’ll be friends with Lindens by becoming a mentor - it’s their job to be friendly and go Woohoo and join in the traditional pie fight. I suspect they are encouraged to put themselves on Facebook as well and be ‘friends’ with everyone. And well, if your goal is to befriend ‘a Linden’ you need to get your head checked anyway - I don’t know about you but I befriend people because I like them as a person.

Don’t become a mentor. Thanks to the example set by people like Mia a lot of mentors act like the police, even amongst themselves in the mentor IM channel, which by now is so strictly policed you can’t ask anything without being attacked by 20 of your colleagues. And because a lot of the mentors act like the police, you won’t get much love from the community either, unless you stay at the orientation islands to help the newest newbies around that impossible build with that impossible HUD.

Despite the obvious flaws and the obvious fakeness of the Lindens’ attitude, I enjoyed being a mentor. I enjoyed my colleagues and the way we used to think about the job, and the way we changed certain things in-world by leading through example. But that mostly came from the Mental Mentors group and not from the official one. And it most certainly did not come from the Lab at all. They just follow automated procedures and send automated mails, as the corporate hotshots that they are.

Perhaps one day they’ll replace Mia and Lexie and Amber with bots. What an improvement that would be - then at least you’d know you’re dealing with a machine.

What’s in a name?

In the real world there is of course more than one Catherine Fitzpatrick - in fact, the first hit of my Google search for that name points to someone of Greenpeace Australia - and I really don’t think it’s the same person who is behind the famous Second Life persona Prokofy Neva. And that’s without expressing any preconceived notions about Neva’s political views. In Second Life there is only one Prokofy Neva - each and every one of our names is unique, even though we do have a Gwyneth Llewelyn and a Gwyneth Llewellyn these days.

Not so on Facebook, of course. Facebook doesn’t rely on the uniqueness of names, simply because names are not unique in the real world. Anyone can open a Facebook account with any name - in fact there’s more than a handful of Catherine Fitzpatricks on this community site. But, again, there’s only one Prokofy Neva. And I don’t think it’s too much of a guess to say that the Prokofy Neva on Facebook is not the Prokofy Neva we all know:

Oh yes, we are sometimes made to believe that griefing in SL is a very interesting phenomenon worth five pages in a magazine once famous and respected (and nerdy) enough to be featured in The Simpsons as one of Lisa’s reads (Homer - with typical acciddental aptness - misreads the name as ‘Weird’). So tell me what’s interesting about taking the whole business of ‘attacking the seriousness of Second Life’ off the world and into the Internet at large? That’s not griefing - that’s stalking, that’s harassment, and that’s sick. That kind of behaviour deserves that feared ride in the FBI party van. Or at least the party van of any of a host of mental institutions.

You can argue that Neva is partly responsible for such pranks - it doesn’t help to shout ‘terrorism’ at the first sight of a lolcube - but isn’t that argument dangerously close to saying that a rape victim ‘asked for it’ by the way she dressed or by being in the place she was in? Neva has the right to call it terrorism, or Communism (another favoured label of his), or Catholicism for all I care. Opinions, however overstated they are, are not invitations to stalking or griefing.

And it raises another question - who has the rights to our Second Life names? I do think that someone who’s been using the name Prokofy Neva for such a long time should have at least some rights to the name, when used in connection with Second Life. I dare say that even I have some rights to the name Laetizia Coronet, being that I have been using it since November of ‘06. But is the use of my name protected in-world? I think not - only the name Linden is, and misusing it makes one a target for disciplinary action.

Maybe the ToS can be read in such a way as to prohibit misuse of names, but I am not sure that if I come across a Prokofy Neva Porn Shop, the Lab would take action. It wouldn’t hurt to have it written in plain English somewhere in the ToS: use of the unique name of other Residents without their consent is prohibited.

Come on, Lindens. After all the protection you’ve granted yourselves it’s time you grant us some.

(Second Life, SL and Linden Lab are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc.)