Phase 2 of Second Life’s display names feature went live shortly after phase 1 went live. Second Life surnames have now functionally ceased to exist.
Well, I suppose they sort of exist, for backwards compatibility purposes, but essentially the only surname on offer now is – the rather annoying – “Resident”, and viewers with Display Names support won’t really show you that surname.
New users now essentially sign up with a single first name – now called an ‘account name’.
That’s the name that they log in with (for any pre-Display Names viewer, they have to log in using ‘Resident’ as a surname), and that attaches to their avatar and possessions independently of their Display Name. Since that’s not what you might call ‘expected behaviour’ (if you’re expecting Second Life to behave like many MMOGs do, with regard to names), it’s probably not going to significantly reduce the amount of name-related account abandonment.
On the plus side, the last couple of days has seen a nearly 50% jump in Second Life signups, and median concurrency has risen a few percentage points in the same period. As yet, though, the change to concurrent usage isn’t anything to write home about.
It’s too early to tell if either Project Skylight or Display Names are genuinely having any positive effects on the in-world economy or on user retention.
| Phase 2 of Second Life’s display names feature went live shortly after phase 1 went live. Second Life surnames have now functionally ceased to exist.
Well, I suppose they sort of exist, for backwards compatibility purposes, but essentially the only surname on offer now is - the rather annoying - “Resident”, and viewers with Display Names support won’t really show you that surname.
New users now essentially sign up with a single first name – now called an ‘account name’.
That’s the name that they log in with (for any pre-Display Names viewer, they have to log in using ‘Resident’ as a surname), and that attaches to their avatar and possessions independently of their Display Name. Since that’s not what you might call ‘expected behaviour’ (if you’re expecting Second Life to behave like many MMOGs do, with regard to names), it’s probably not going to significantly reduce the amount of name-related account abandonment.
On the plus side, the last couple of days has seen a nearly 50% jump in Second Life signups, and median concurrency has risen a few percentage points in the same period. As yet, though, the change to concurrent usage isn’t anything to write home about.
It’s too early to tell if either Project Skylight or Display Names are genuinely having any positive effects on the in-world economy or on user retention. | |  | |
Tags: Display Names feature, Opinion, Project Skylight / Second Life Skylight / SL Skylight, Second Life, Virtual Environments and Virtual Worlds
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How many of those signups are people mass-registering their own names… or the names of others to corner the names market?
-ls/cm
The impression I get from the Twitterstream is that the jump in signups is largely oldbies (established accounts, anyway) preserving their good names against “hijacking”.
You could both be right. It’s hard to tell at the moment.
The surge in signups are existing residents grabbing business names etc etc.
That would really seem to indicate that Display Names (as a feature) is having pretty much the opposite to the desirable effect.
Ok… I guess I haven’t been paying attention… you mean a new resident could sign up using my already years-old, premium member name? Am I reading this wrong?
If that’s the case, I call for a mass movevent to sign up using every existing Linden name past and present including Michael, Jack and Phillip. And I am not at all kidding.
Talk about branding they do? When I signed up I was told (and have in the TOS and initial guidelines and info screens) to pick a username that would be uniquely tied to my account and rl information. I’d happily sue them for poaching my hard-worked-for and widely-known BRAND NAME, which has been established independently of SL, to the point of being now a registered alias for banking and tax purposes, as I have detailed for some time now in my own blogs and numerous conversations with people going back over 2 years.
In any case, it does sound like facilitating identity theft. Such an approach would be quite interesting, given the current level of paranoia and legal jousting concerning such issues.
It seems someone is already offering a (paid) service to ban a person from your sim if their display name is the same as someone else’s registered name(s)… sadly, this seems to be another crap coming from display names and the way this new feature was implemented.
Well, you couldn’t sign up as “Philip Linden” – you can’t put a space in an account name under this system. You’d have to pick something like “philiplinden”
@Ricco: I can see the instant problem with that. That if someone registers a name the same as your display name, you’d fall foul of it.
“That would really seem to indicate that Display Names (as a feature) is having pretty much the opposite to the desirable effect.”
Nobody Could Have Predicted.
Whoever made Display Names happen should be out of a job.
The idea of the ban service is that you’d be able to register your name and variations of it in their database, and their radar would ban anyone using those names as their display names. Now, see, I don’t really know if it works, but it has many problems:
1. If someone register “Spartacus”, all people using “Spartacus” as their display names would be banned, except for the person who registered it.
2. If I believe that the service works right, actually I’ll be paying for something that up to now was being offered for free and should be kept like that: a protection against impersonation.
3. If you join the service, you’ll depend on a 3rd party database, which requires some level of trust. I’m not saying people behind this initiative should not be trusted, but you shouldn’t have to trust a 3rd party something so essential as protection against impersonation.
4. It’s gonna be hard to explain to newbies why they are being banned for using a feature that LL itself allows them to use.
And so on…
My point is not if the service is good or bad, but that the changes in the username and display names are likely producing a great deal of insecurity, and the existence of such a service is probably one of the many evidences of that.
*sigh*
Why does it seem I spend half my on-grid time anymore dealing with whatever assenine thing that the lab has foisted upon us?
Fix the frelling grid for heavens sake, and stop with the thrice damned “features” that nobody requested.
Most of the “Resident” names I’m seeing are obvious jokes, such as “Localhost Resident”. (Not using the current Linden Lab viewer)
“The impression I get from the Twitterstream is that the jump in signups is largely oldbies (established accounts, anyway) preserving their good names against “hijacking”.”
Think I’m missing something. Why would an oldbie need to preserve their good name against hijacking?
How would the hijacking work exactly? I knew display names was a cluster**** waiting to happen but I don’t completely understand the exact technical reasons one would need to preserve their own name. I thought Linden Lab was initially saying oldbies wouldn’t need to do anything to protect against impersonation, etc.
The good news is that all usernames that are just FirstnameLastname Resident, where FirstnameLastname matches an existing account, are locked out. So you don’t have to grab that, at least.
Tateru, this protects existing Lindens, at least. When I was activating mine, one of the folks that popped in right behind me was “tjlinden Resident”.
But yeah, people are grabbing UNs that mean something to their identity. I grabbed the one that corresponded to the login name I’ve used on Unix systems for the last 25 years. A friend grabbed the one that corresponded to her real FirstnameLastname. There were lots of them snapped up in the first few hours.
A better metric will be the rate *next* week.
Solo: What’s M Linden doing these days? DNs are his idea…
@Tonya Actually, I’m pretty sure they weren’t his idea – I don’t think he got much strategic input at all. It would have been a part of his job to communicate and sell the ideas though.
First the Viewer-2 debacle and now this. Good grief, I’m sending my hard-earned US Dollars to idiots? I’m afraid, for me, this a wake-up call on the order of the first magnitude but I won’t fool myself.
People will keep playing and paying because at least for now, SL rules the roost–a position easily squandered and lost over time.
Dare I speculate that we oldbies are the ones who most open our wallets?
“(for any pre-Display Names viewer, they have to log in using ‘Resident’ as a surname)”
That is not true. The wiki has been changed
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Usernames#How_do_I_log_in_with_my_username_if_I.E2.80.99m_using_Viewer_1.23_or_a_third-party_viewer.3F
You can still log old style with the 1.23 viewer. FirstName(space)LastName also works in a single input field (like the log in for the SL blogs)
I am not sure what is mashing the way some old style names are displayed (eg turning Tateru Nino into Tateru.Nino (tateru”dot”nino)) but have a sneaking suspicion that if you value your old style FirstName(space)LastName and the way it appears inworld, or on the blogs, you should probably keep logging in old style, and perhaps not use the display name feature
The advent of DN has turned your Firstname Lastname into firstname.lastname as your username, and if you don’t have a DN set, it’ll use Firstname Lastname for that.
What Tateru was saying is that a user with a new-style username, instead of a Firstname Lastname, must log in as though the username was their Firstname and “Resident” was their Lastname, if that’s what the viewer uses on the login screen. This is exactly correct.
LOL! Tried to register my Nitwacket name – the one I use for machinima – It was available, but I screwed up the captcha (usual on a Mac) and SL ate Nitwacket and now it’s a username “already in use”, so I can’t select it again.
Way to go LL!
(My guess is that SL is going to be reality TV for Facebook. Would that qualify as Winner! in the race to the bottom?)
Pyewacket: Axi Kurmin has written a whole series of blog entries over at Search Engine Watch arguing that exact point. She thinks LL’s investors are focused on tapping into the Facebook phenomenon to the exclusion of anything that, you know, actually works for the existing userbase…