the case of Facebook v. SecondLife by Justin

In my experience, I found it much more entertaining to laugh at all of the people that had agreed to friend me, or rather, my fake persona on Facebook than I did with the SecondLife project. I thoroughly enjoyed the few messages I received asking who I was. I feel like I should tell them when the class is over that the profile is just a fraudulent account created to see how social systems coexist on the world wide interwebs, but then again, I probably will not. I managed to “friend” over a hundred people in the Urbana/Champaign region, most, if not all, of whom attend the university. I know that we were supposed to post about this earlier, but it is still entertaining to write about this fake persona.
As I previously stated, I did not enjoy the SecondLife project as much as the former Facebook persona. This is for several reasons. For one, it seems like I’m playing a video game on my computer and I gave up on video games when I came to college. Sure, if somebody busts out GoldenEye or Mario Kart 64 I’ll play it, but seriously, I gave up on video games, so I was really turned off by it. Also, I understand that users on SecondLife may enjoy creating a fully detailed fake persona via image, but I did not. I just chose a standard male model and that was it; I was not motivated to change it. Another reason I didn’t like it was that when I started to explore the area, the system took too long to load. In fact, it took so long, than when it finally finished, I ended up in a pornographic area, one of which was quite graphic and completely unexpected. So, with all of those negative experiences in one session, you can see why I was so turned off by SecondLife.
I did not communicate at all with other users in either Facebook or SecondLife. That said, there is not much difference in my experience in finding others to “talk” to. I guess a major difference is that with Facebook you can just “add” friends without really needing to “explore” your virtual surroundings.