Web profile

add versioning

As a Second Life Resident, you have a profile that you can customize to share more about yourself. It's completely opt-in and can be a lot of fun to fill out.

As you may know from Q Linden's post announcing Viewer 2.5, this new version of Second Life has profiles stored on the web. The following tips from Torley Linden will help you learn what's changed as Linden Lab continues to evolve how you express your virtual identity. This video covers much of what's below:

There are different paths to view your profile

This hasn't changed from earlier versions, but is worth a refresher. Depending on what you prefer:

Select Me menu > My Profile.
Right-click your avatar and select My Profile.
In the sidebar, click the My Profile button, then click the Profile button.

You can click the Edit Profile button to start customizing.

Fill out your profile to show off your personality

If you've never touched your profile before, you'll see a new Profile Completeness meter. Similar to that found on other sites like OKCupid, this little cue encourages you to tell others more about yourself so you have a better chance of making new friends in Second Life. Simply click each of the links to be taken to what you can do.

A clarification: despite the wording of Upload a Real Life Profile Picture, you don't have to reveal your "first life" face. You could upload your cat, or if your cat is concerned about her privacy, upload your fave fruit. Mine's watermelon. Really, this and everything else is entirely optional if you want to remain private. Speaking of...

Combined privacy settings let you hide from the world

When you view your profile, click the Privacy Settings link at the top. More details are in Q's post.

Yes, this is where the "Hide your groups from other people" option went. Hiding picks is new.

If you want to make your profile the most restrictive, privacy-wise:

Uncheck I want my profile to be available on the web.
Select the rightmost radio buttons — Your groups and Your Picks set to Friends, Your classifieds set to Second Life.

Changes should take place instantly after you click Save, but I've seen comments about buttons not sticking and have personally had to wait awhile for changes to show up. Stay tuned while we continue to work on this.

Social identities extend your profile to the web

Features like this always raise eyebrows, so let me inform you of your powers without coming off as a totally condescending cheerleader: this is completely opt-in. Like just about everything about your profile; people can only learn what you've voluntarily supplied. If you don't give two @#$%s worth about a book of faces or a certain blue bird, you don't have to use this at all. If you do want to promote your other online identities:

When viewing your profile, click Edit Profile button.
Scroll down.
Under Social Identities, select a site from the dropdown and click Add. Each option asks for confirmation from the site using their authentication system.

There's a trash can Remove button next to each entry if you ever do want to opt out.

Yes, if you have multiple Second Life accounts you want to have hooked up to a single account on a social site, you can do that. (I have Torley Linden and an alt connected to my Flickr, which is chock-full of my SL adventures!)

Aggregating identity is becoming pretty common nowadays; there are even certain sites where that's the focus, like about.me. Again, it's up to you to share what you're comfy with. Be informed of your rights, and that goes for other sites like Facebook's Privacy Guide.

Some hyperlinks get automatically detected

As you may have already seen when editing your profile, you can provide a home page. But what if that isn't enough? Type in something beginning with "http://" and it gets recognized as a hyperlink. Some domain conventions, like a link beginning with "www.", is also detected. For example, "www.secondlife.com" is recognized, but alas, "secondlife.com" isn't.

Profile icons in the People sidebar

Looks like this, click it to see their profile without having to right-click or go through another menu:

How do I grant permission to a friend to see when I'm online/see me on the map/edit my objects?

What are you trying to do, turn this into a FAQ? Oh...

This is another thing that's moved from the sidebar to web profiles:

Click the People sidebar tab.
Hover over the friend who you want to enable/disable permissions for and click the profile icon as shown above.
Click Actions and select Set Privacy.

Here, you can set what you want and click Save.

Sorry, there isn't a batch mode for this (some of you oldtimers wistfully remember when you could, like, change 20 at a time). But I agree it'd be useful to have an overview instead of having to hunt each one down, and if you feel this generally works too slowly compared to "the old way", see this bug.

You can upload images with non-square aspect ratios

(Without being squashed.)

Longtime constant readers will recall my many gripes with different in-Viewer aspect ratio sizes. Since these profiles are web-based, that dependency has been removed — although, yes, their in-Viewer usage still appears inconsistent.

After you click Edit Profile, you can click Choose File to select an image from your hard drive. Web-standard formats are supported — which means no TGA, which may be jarring for you used to uploading those into the Viewer, but there are free image converters like FastStone Image Viewer.

Images will initially display square so you'll prolly want to have the focus of attention be in the center, but you can click a web profile image to zoom in and have a closer look. Like those forensic crime shows, "ENHANCE!"

Real Linden Lab employee profiles have a special icon

While display names don't mark the first time some unscrupulous jerks have tried to impersonate real Lindens, I have seen a lot of concerns to that effect. And while we've blacklisted many inappropriate display names, it's also useful to know what can't be faked. Case in point: every real Linden has the following icon in their profile, so even if they've changed their display name to something lucidly colorful, they're the real deal:

Also worth noting: some of you have mentioned a similar thing should be done for Scouts, who are official support belonging to StarTek in a partnership with Linden Lab. Sadly right now, their profiles confusingly show "Resident", but look at their username for the lowdown:

Web links can be opened in-Viewer

Upon clicking an external link in a profile, you'll likely see "A pop-up was prevented from opening." You can choose whether clicking Open pop-up window opens it in the in-Viewer browser or an external browser:

Select Me menu > Preferences.
Click Setup tab.
Select either Use my browser or Use built-in browser.
Click OK to save.

Is that it?

No! Since this is only the first instance of web profiles, there's usability stuff in a sort of "in-between" state that Linden Lab hopes to improve in the future. For example:

Web profiles tend to load slower than old-style sidebar profiles, so there's room for performance increases.
Some stuff hasn't been migrated to the web profile yet — for example, you can't edit a classified in the web profile yet, so the behavior of hopping back and forth is confusing. But there's ideas to integrate better.
Having both a web profile and the sidebar open at the same time takes a lot of screen space, and that could be tightened up too.

Stay tuned for improvements, but right here, right now (like the Fatboy Slim song), the above tips should help you get the most out of web profiles today.