The Feed, My Second Life, and a corner of SL I think many don't know exists

There's a whole other part of Second Life I knew nothing about. Am I the only one?

I've been sitting here playing with my viewer, looking up official documentation, and reading user groups, but I'm not sure what I'm going to talk about is adequately and clearly explained in any one place. I now suspect a lot of people, maybe the majority of people, have no idea this part of Second Life even exists. I'm still not sure you can see this in-world as I discovered it going through the SL website.

First off, I have the SL website bookmarked in my browser as I visit it on a regular basis to see a list of my friends currently online. Oooo, there's Alice and Fred. I should jump online and say hello!

Secondly, I can easily visit My Second Life, which is SL relating to me: my profile, a list of all friends, settings, and finally, The Feed, although, I'm not sure that is the right term to use to describe it.

In a profile, there is a tab labelled Feed which you can find entries relating to certain activities: pictures you post to your feed, other people's entries you liked, your name changes, etc. Under security, you have the option of hiding this tab from the rest of the world. Other people can open your profile and look at your Feed to see what you've been up to, that is, in-world pictures you've posted.

But let's now talk about My Feed and what part it plays in the bigger picture.

My feed (the tab labelled Following) shows entries from the people I follow. When you become friends, you automatically follow the person. However, you can follow non-friends. My feed is mainly about pictures posted, but people can also make text-only postings. It's quirk, I guess, in the system that you can only post pictures in-world, but you can post text from the SL website.

In my picture example. you see a picture by Iris Okiddo, a person I follow; we are not friends. You see text entries from the SL blogger Inara Pey, also a person I follow; we are not friends.

You will notice there are two tabs: Following and Trending.

Trending comes from anybody on SL. According to my research, once a posting gets two Loves (Like on other social media), it becomes eligible for Trending, a SL-wide feed which is available to everybody. It's curious. My research has shown that SL apparently has around eight hundred thousand active monthly users, and yet, there are only a limited number of names I see in Trending. From this, I have conjectured that only a small number of people are aware of The Feed. And let me repeat I discovered Trending via the SL website. I'm still not sure if you can see this in-world which may go a long way of explaining how The Feed or Your Feed remains an underexploited part of Second Life.

Just this morning, I posted several pictures to My Feed. About an hour later, I discovered that two of my friends had loved (liked) my postings. A short time later, I noticed my pictures were now part of Trending, that is, visible to the rest of the world.

Note the following link which is the URL for my profile on Second Life:

https://my.secondlife.com/hughtoussaint

Now notice this variation of that URL:

https://my.secondlife.com/hughtoussaint/snapshots

This gives you a gallery-like presentation of pictures I've posted in my Feed. You can add snapshots to the URL of any profile and see the gallery. It's surprising. Many people go to Flickr or DeviantART to publish their pictures but Second Life itself already has its own picture system. We can argue about its quality and its organization but it is there.

Final Word
I found it odd but delightful to discover what I think is an underutilized feature of Second Life. In reading an article by Inara Pey from 2015, it would seem that My Secondlife is a sort of half-hearted attempt to add social media features to the SL world. Danger Linden is quoted as saying its usage rate is on the low side and judging by the names I see posting on a regular basis, a very small percentage of the supposed six to eight hundred thousand monthly users, this corner of SL seems all but forgotten except to a select few.

A number of people including myself have supplemented their SL experience by using other platforms like Flickr, DeviantART, and Facebook, to name a few, which offer a more picture-friendly gallery-like display for photographers. While the SL web profile interface does offer "snapshots", there may be merit in looking elsewhere depending on your goals.

Nevertheless, The Feed offers an interesting glimpse into the world of Second Life, allowing you to see other fellow travelers in this virtual fantasyland.


References

Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld: No more improvements planned for my.secondlife.com - June 26/2015
During the Meet the Lindens conversation held at SL12B on Thursday, June 25th which featured Danger Linden, Senior Director, Product, Virtual Worlds and Troy Linden, Senior Producer, a question was asked about the SL feeds – also referred to as my.secondlife.com – and whether they would continue to be developed or enhanced.

Danger Linden was direct and honest in his reply: "That’s a tough one, because I don’t think anyone’s going to like the answer … The short answer is no."

2024-05-07