I think this link works. Apparently, if I get enough fans there's a prize: I get to have a page without a whole bunch of squirrelly numbers. Unless I want squirrelly numbers I guess.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dividni-Shostakovich/243285845684004
Now, most people sign up with FB with regular personal accounts, but as probably everyone has heard, FB occasionally trawls through and wipes out SL accounts. Poof. No warning, nothing. But they don't do that with a "page" account, which is what non-people like politicians and corporations use (shut up, Supreme Court!), and one option is to be a fictional character. After all, if you've declared to the public that you're a fiction, they can't exactly ban you for lying. So that's what I chose. (As did Botgirl Questi and various others More Famous Than Me). Hopefully this will make me a less tempting target for Viagra ads, poking, and all the other Facebook-y treats that my RL page gets (which, by the way, I check about once every two months).
The down side turns out to be that I can't "friend" with anyone and they can't "friend" me. All they can do is "like" me. Which is OK, except for the fact that it sucks. In fact, FB removes the search bar from my page! It's lonely being a fiction.
I could've made a page for Split Screen instead, but that seemed like a poor idea since that's not the only thing I do or think about in SL (well, friends of mine may beg to differ!).
I do get notifications about who Likes me. I got a friend to like me, and then discovered that checking who likes me opens up a list of other people who might like me. The weird and worrying thing is that among the couple dozen people in SL I'd never heard of were a couple of my actual SL friends. FB figured that one out instantly. Chills up my spine.
It's starting to look like Google+ may actually be worse for SL, since apparently Google wants to limit profiles to "real people." So far it doesn't sound like they'll even offer an option for being explicitly fictional. Which raises a serious problem: if Google wipes out avatar identity profiles, and those identities maintain blogs, the blogs will be wiped out too. Including this one.
Miso Susanowa has written an excellent blog post on Google's position and its irrationality. She raises a number of points, including marketing ones, but at the very end she mentions another that deeply concerns me. She writes:
This is the Information Revolution: we move outside the established channels because they no longer serve us; we seek our own communities and establish our presence and our reputations by our words and actions; we speak amongst ourselves and we use the tools of a free press to do it, uncontrollable by gatekeepers and sluice-gate operators who seek to stem the flow of community under the guise of commerce. This is the true meaning of "information just wants to be free"; not free as in 'free beer' but free as in 'free to move between people.'So here's the question: is there a right to use pseudonym? If so, would Google violate that right by wiping out accounts? Is being an avatar a freedom of speech issue? I think so. I think everyone in SL ought to think so too.
