On Tuesday June 17th, in the run-up to the SL11B events across the grid, the Lab has launched a birthday themed photo contest.
The blog post announcing the contest reads in full:
Starting today, you’re invited to take part in the Second Life: Celebrating Your Second Life Snapshot Contest, in honor of 11th Birthday of Second Life.
Participation is easy – submit your celebratory snapshots from inworld to the contest page on our Official Second Life Facebook Page. Click the contest tab, review the contest information and rules and start sharing. This year you will be able to submit up to one snapshot a day for the duration of the contest. Full rules, submission and voting dates, and details are all on the Facebook page.
Looking for some inspiration for pics? Then drop by Hairy Hippo Fun Land to grab your Limited Edition SL11B Robot Avatar. You can also get your free avatar off the Marketplace.
Browse the SL11B category on the destination guide to see what the community has planned to mark the event inworld.
Don’t forget that the Resident-driven Second Life 11th Birthday Community Celebration starts this coming Sunday the 22nd. Visit their website for the latest information.
You only turn 11 once, and we can’t wait to see what kind of celebrations and fun you create and share!
It is a shame that the Lab once again opt to use Facebook as the medium for a contest; doing so effectively slams the door on the contest for many who might otherwise take part, but who have no wish to be a part of the great Facebook machine.
Given other options are available which are not so controversial, it’s a shame that the Lab doesn’t give thought to them when running contests of this kind. Flickr, for example, would seem to be a suitable alternative. It already has a very large SL community, and establishing a group for competition entries isn’t exactly labour intensive, although ensuring T&Cs are read might be a little harder. People might also be more inclined to sign-up to Flickr if they don’t already have an account.
Of course, Flickr probably doesn’t get the same kind of visibility among non Second Life users that the SL Facebook page gets, but for the sake of encouraging more users to take part in something of this nature, does that really matter?
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
In total agreement with you on this Inara.
When I saw this post by you I was of a mind to enter as I’d really wanted to be part of the SL11B celebrations ………until I realised the WasteBook connection – one less participant now 😦
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Well cannot say it difgferent then that linden lab are a bunch off assholes.
The knew from last year that there are enough people that cannot use facebook or dont want to use it. What are the doing, yes. Makeing the same mistake again and useing facebookm instead own page on own servers.
Sorry for the bad words, but this is Unbelievable that the have 1 year the time to fix the mistake and still make the same. big THUMB down.
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“Assholes” is a harsh term, and not entirely warranted. While Facebook doesn’t like / allow accounts based on avatar identities, there are many people in SL who have no problem linking their identity in a virtual world with their physical identity on Facebook. As such, having the means to use Facebook and upload snaps to their Facebook account is something they welcome.
The problem with running a contest on Facebook is purely the fact that all those who don’t use it due the account policy, or who use it under their physical identity and who don’t want any kind of line drawn between that and their virtual identity, are effectively excluded.
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I agree with Inara, most music venues and Live musics on Sl use Facebook and i guess many others, sadly on my point of view as i refuse to have any connection to it.
And one would think that now that LL viewer allows direct uploads to Flickr, they would take advantage of that.
So one less competitor:(
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There’s a time and a place to utilise the potential extended reach of Facebook. Having a competition such as this related to SL11B is not the right time and it’s certainly not the right place.
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I long ago erased my RL facebook and only have a SL facebook account at this point. I know having a fake name on FB is against its policies, and I know many of my SL friends have been dinged by FB and asked to change their names or lose their accounts. So having said that, would entering such a contest with my SL account open me up to scrutiny, possibly exposing me to people who would report me and force me to change my name? I don’t know, but I would NEVER use my real life identity in any way related to Second Life. This does seem like a big stupid NO NO on Lindens part.
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Since you can submit pictures for their pic-of-the-day though an official Flickr account, I do wonder what is so special about Facebook. Why does there have to be only the one path?
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Visability to non-SL FB users would be a guess from me.
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For some reason the official Second Life Flickr pool page is only visible to logged in Flickr users, which limits the reach.
I can understand the desire to extend reach but I think in this case, it wasn’t the ideal call. However Pete Linden has explained some of the thought process behind this.
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Just posted this over on Ciaran’s blog on this topic as well (apologies for repeating myself), but just wanted to explain a bit. We realize that a number of Second Life users have reservations about using Facebook and other platforms. In this case, we chose to run the contest through our Facebook page simply because we have a tool on our page that facilitates running a contest with all of the legal stuff (technical term) we need in place to run something like this, and we thought it would be of interest to the more than 366,000 followers of the official Second Life page. Our aim certainly isn’t to discourage participation, and we’ll certainly explore alternative ways to run similar contests in the future.
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I don’t think flicker is a viable option as the contest would probably count that as advertising which is against flickers terms of service. While small in games stores can get away with advertising on flicker as there relatively unknown LL is not. LL is a big name company (well maybe not as huge as some other gaming companies but still) and they’d banned, sued, etc. Plus an inability to follow OTHER peoples terms of service wouldn’t bode well for the own
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Your point on advertising is very well made.
The T&Cs could be handled via a link elsewhere, rather than anything actually within the Flickr group someone would have to agree to, so that’s maybe not so much an issue per se in terms of possible conflicts. The problem would seem to be more that as a link, the T&Cs could simply be ignored.
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You used to be able to contact Flickr themselves to create such contests, it would be ok if Flickr approved it.
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Yeah if they approved it I could see that. It’s just something you couldn’t do at random.
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