The report goes on to say the problems started "when groups and fanpages became public allowing those guys to make some list of profiles to be harassed on Facebook, taking advantage of a loophole in Facebook’s crowd-sourced moderation process when it comes to banning profiles: if a few dozen members alert Facebook about one profile as being a fake, it is automatically deactivated".

We wonder if this was the sort of emergent behaviour Facebook expected when they embarked on what seems to be an ongoing program of making more and more private information public. As for gangs of griefers in online social media, this must have been expected – look at the history of The Sims Online.

by Idoru Wellman, Herald Education Desk

On January 28, in what may be the first instance of a university course held inside Facebook, Northwestern University Philosophy Professor Peter Ludlow (known to Herald readers as Urizenus Sklar) recently attempted to hold his class, Conceptual Issues in Virtual Worlds, inside the Island Life application on Facebook.  The results were mixed.

Island Life is a fantasy farming game inside Facebook that is somewhat similar to Farmville.  The twist is that that Island Life (currently in beta) is the creation of game developer legend Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies) and it allows people to visit each other and chat on their “islands”.  The game is a bit of a throwback to 2D graphical social platforms like The Sims Online and Habbo Hotel.

Koster’s most recent project had been Metaplace, an attempt to bring virtual world creation to the masses by providing a platform in which people could develop flash based virtual worlds.  The project recently closed down but the bulk of the development team moved with Koster to his Island Life project.

Reached for comment, Ludlow explained that his course is a freshman seminar designed to encourage writing skills, but as Ludlow explains “I couldn’t just assign papers to them; they need to become literate in new communications technologies. Hence, they will be called on to develop projects in virtual worlds, record those projects with machinima, blog about their experiences, give power point presentations about their projects, and write traditional papers.”

According to Ludlow, this particular class session on Island Life was principally used for resolving technical issues such as testing whether his island in Island Life could take the load of 13 students, to get students familiar with Ventrilo (the voice communications program they are using) and to determine whether meaningful conversations are possible in Island Life (in its current form).  In this instance, the topic of conversation was the comparative advantages of Second Life and Island Life with respect to the classroom experience.  Students used a combination of in game chat and Ventrilo voice communication.

Students discuss the advantages of Island Life over Second Life.

Students saw different advantages for Island Life and Second Life (where they had previously held some classes).  On the one hand, Island Life was less “laggy” and less distracting.  On the other hand,  students found the chat program in Island Life to be primitive. 

One problem was that the chat bubbles tended to occlude each other.  Freshman Hanna Golanka, however, saw an advantage to this: “Although the blocking-each-other-out thing wasn't the greatest, the short lifespan of each text bubble meant that in order to pay attention to class, you had to really pay attention every second. I'll be honest – in Second Life there were times I wasn't reading the chat at all, and then would scroll back up and read anything that sounded important.” 

Chat bubble trouble

Golanka also noted that there was a problem of overstimulation in Second Life – particularly in Ludlow’s classroom, which is a mushroom cave under his castle.  She felt that a traditional classroom architecture might be more apt.  “I think the actual atmosphere of Island Life was a better setting. Our characters sat on the logs while in Second Life they danced on mushrooms or built things. In this case, it's actually a negative that Second Life has so many more… options. It would probably be more effective to have class in an empty room or something like a classroom setting, but still, there are just so many possibilities in Second Life that it's hard to sit still (I guess that's what real classes would be like if we weren't taught that we were supposed to stay in our seats).”

Getting distracted in their Second Life "classroom"

While Golanka found Second Life to be the superior platform overall, she chalked up much of this to the fact that Island Life is in early beta.  Indeed according to developer Raph Koster, his development team is just scratching the surface of what can be done with Island Life from a technical point of view. 

According to Ludlow, the interesting feature of Island Life lies in its potential to usher in a new generation of virtual world users. “Island Life, by taking advantage of the Facebook platform, may well be the application that brings robust custom virtual worlds to the masses.  It is flash based and is thus “of the web” and not a foreign body like Second Life, which requires a large client download.  It also piggybacks on the Facebook so it can rapidly acquire users via social networking rather than traditional advertising methods.”

For Ludlow, the real potential of virtual worlds is not really in the classroom experience, but in providing new ways of communicating ideas by immersing people inside of stories and virtual places.  In the future, virtual worlds will be used to communicate messages in a more experiential way.  His goal is to get students started on learning to develop these online experiences to communicate their ideas.  Facebook is important in this equation because it can bring these experiential messages closer to the typical internet user.

And not for nothing, Ludlow notes that having class inside Facebook brings the classroom closer to the students.  “My students are on Facebook during class anyway.  I might as well move the class into Facebook. If you can’t beat them, join them.”

Some people are never satisfied

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

Raph Koster: "We're not talking about overall plans yet… first we learn"

Game god survivors of the Metaplace world's apocalyptic loss of traction – Raph Koster and Tami Baribeau (Cuppycake) – did not perish when the Metaplace world ended January 1st. After the shipwreck of the standalone Metaplace user generated virtual world dream, the MP game gods washed up on the beach in Facebook where they hope to feed themselves by selling cabbage and farming supplies to the 35 million FB players, despite the ever-present threat of avataricide. IslandLife is Raph's new Facebook-embedded game in beta test – but will it be redonkulous?

Hoping to locate the pink spaghetti strap top I bought in the final hours of Metaplace, I joined IslandLife and began farming.

Farming consists of picking the appropriate tool or crop seed, clicking on the ground and waiting to harvest the crops. It felt more like a waste of time anything else, but I'm willing to put up with a certain amount of grind to get the right clothes for my avatar. Perhaps Raph will add the old Metaplace New You clothes store soon?

the pink spaghetti strap tank top I lost when Metaplace closed January 1

Of course the name of the meta-game on Facebook is viral growth, so IslandLife encourages you to invite friends to "fertilize" your crops by clicking on the ground. You can even visit your IslandLife Facebook e-friend's farms and chat with them in-world, if chatting with friends via the FB chat system was not enough.

This all seems a bit less than totally redonkulous so far, but apparently IslandLife is growing faster than the Raph expected. Everyone got 1000 free coins after growing pains resulted in missing crops and livestock Friday. I imagine this is the sort of problem Linden Lab would like to have, so perhaps the Metaplace move to FB was wise.

While FB farming isn't really doing much for me intellectually, my FB news is constantly updated with e-friend's achievements in other FB embedded games, so there are plenty of people who seem to like this sort of thing. Will the FB  spam from MafiaWars, FarmVille, FishVille, and CopycatVille ever end?

Besides similarities to various Facebook and other flash-based virtual farming games, former Metaplace players will recognize the beer barrels and other artwork. Some Metaplace veterans predicted that IslandLife would end up in Facebook even before the Metaplace world closed, after watching The Metaplace staff working on IslandLife during the final days of standalone Metaplace.

Will many of the 16 million Happy Farming Game players will take up real life farming – or IslandLife?

How well will the former game gods fare when they are forced to live in the Facebook MMO – a world with corrupt gods of it's own?

The sort of sudden game-changing 180 degree turns for which Linden Lab is infamous are also far too common on Facebook. For instance, Mark Zuckerberg recently changed thefundamental rules of FB privacy because he was struck with the divine inspiration that nobody cares about privacy anymore. Driven by an insatiable need for growth, Facebook will do whatever it can get away with to monetize the experience.

Is it only a matter of time before FB embedded games are nerfed or co-opted by the imperious Zuckerberg's need to know everything about everyone? Could running a chat system independent of Facebook prove to be a problem for Metaplace if FB decides that everyone's chat needs to data mined? If Linden Lab has issues with encrypted IM now, will Facebook soon have problems with chat  run inside Metaplace? And if they do, how much leverage will the little fish in the Facebook sea have to resist?

Meanwhile, we can only hope that virtual cabbage will be lucrative enough to keep the Metaplace crew alive while they polish IslandLife and consider their next steps. More interesting than IslandLife itself is what comes next. When I caught up with Raph Koster on his IslandLife farm he was coy when I suggested two options. The first – turn out a series of Facebook embedded games and sell spacebux for the games is obvious – as is the possibility of carrying your spacebux between various Metaplace framework games.

A second approach might be more interesting – provide a Facebook game creation framework to those eager to hop on the FB craze despite the risks – but expect for developers to take a very hard look at their rights and content portability in this scenario. After being wiped out in the Metaplace apocalypse once, developers and players wouldn't want to lose their investments – and tank tops – too often.

condemned to IslandLife – click on the ground to make plants grow – over and over

by Senban Babii

Frightened Facebook users believe avatar hit squads are to blame for mysterious mass disappearances of e-friends from the popular MMO data mining operation social networking website's friends lists this week. Thisreporter can confirm that 45-50 people on her friends listvanished in the night – survivors who contacted the Herald report similar and sometimes far higher account death tolls. The mass account murders were discovered when Facebook players woke Friday morning to discover friends list sadly diminished. Had targetted accounts been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night by hit squads,taken out to a local area of wasteland, and quietly executed? 

It has always been Facebook's policy that an account must be for a real person using real life details. While there have been instances of avataricide in the past reported by Reuters,Facebook has largely allowed the Second Life avatar community to representthemselves on the site, perhaps because Facebook's owners felt it would be foolish that to denythemselves advertising revenue from potentialclicks. Given the bad feeling that many Facebookusers have towards the site's policy changes over the last twelvemonths including a recent privacy policy change, the unexplained account removals could be considered part of a self-destructive trend forFacebook as it continues to disenchant whole swathes of the community,many of whom are now seeking alternatives.

Despite the previous relatively laissez faire attitude, somethingchanged overnight.  Facebook's avatar killers did not allow those being executed time to say final goodbyes to their family and friends.  In thewords of one survivor "It would be nice if they at least let us knowfirst, so we could message our friends and explain".  This sentimentwas echoed by many of those left behind, blinking in the daylight asthey tried to make sense of the night's carnage.

Speculation regarding the mass executions has run wild. 

One theory is that Facebook was merely enforcing its own Terms Of Service,although this makes little sense given that they have largely allowedavatars to act contrary to those terms and have even recently suggestedthat users lie on their profiles, providing fake details to protecttheir privacy. Another theory in circulation is that avatars must be removed because they provide little to nosaleable data – data-mining being one of the many accusations hurled atFacebook in recent years.  Yet another theory is thatFacebook has been removing accounts of people who have created multiplealts, a technique used to gain unfair advantage in the many Facebookgames and apps that spam our walls daily.  Whatever the truth, Facebookisn't talking, preferring instead to simply erase unfortunate avatars fromexistence.

Those of us left face an uncertain future on Facebook.  Will we be thenext to be woken up by a knock on our door before being found with apillowcase on our head in a chalk outline?