With this feature you list your interests (it even suggests interests based on what other people have put), and you can look up other people who have chosen the same interests. I thought it would be nice to have people contacting me because they have used the new feature and have found me to have similar interests. Then again, I have never done this – I have never specifially used the tool to find someone else with similar interests and then contacted them. I have however glanced at people’s Interests when I view their profile as it’s a quick and easy way to determine if someone has similar interests – common interests are even highlighted.

Has the feature been taken on board by many other people? Keen to answer this question for myself I viewed the profiles of all my friends (which isn’t a lot!) and discovered that 1 in 3 people use the Interests feature. If I’m fair this is more than I expected.

Is the feature used “correctly”? Not always. Interestingly, in addition to how I use the feature which is not in a search capacity but simply something quick and easy to glance at, some people use the feature to make short statements about themselves. Some people do use the feature incorrectly, in that they specify more than one interest in each field, which means the terms can not be compared individually:

I felt at the time that this feature as well as the Feed part of the profiles that was rolled out around the same time made it seem like SL was branching off into a social networking site instead of ‘just being’ a virtual world. I think this is still true, but either way it hasn’t work. The takeup for the Interests feature hasn’t been huge and it hasn’t been made use of as it was intended. As for the Feed section of the profile, I was never a fan of this. I don’t like how it is the first thing you see when you view someone’s profile, especially since it’s not widely used, and that you have to opt out of the feature. The only things I’m used to seeing in anyone’s feed is a list of recent name changes, or passing comments that a week later when they are still prominent have no context. I think the Feed section should, by default, be viewable and used by friends only (unless someone chooses otherwise, if even it’s a feature that should remain.

How to turn off the Feed: You can ‘correct’ the issue with Feed showing first/at all, by altering your Privacy settings (by editing your profile). These are Facebook-style options but by setting Feed to viewable by Nobody in the dropdown, you will remove that tab/section from your profile and thus make the About show first… I think it’s wrong that everyone in SL is “expected” to do this.

The Future: I felt at the time that the Interests feature was lacking in a couple of areas. If you use the feature as intended and search for people based on similar interests, you want those that are online to be displayed at the top of the results and you then want it to be simple to send them an instant message, or perhaps have an integrated option to arrange a meet up. I think this leads on to another reason for the lack of takeup, and that is it’s not felt as being acceptable for strangers, who aren’t in the same sim, to suddenly start talking to you, let alone want to meet up with them inworld – few people accept random Teleport offers.

I think the Interests, and even the Feed feature, have the potential to make Second Life a more sociable place, but such features need to go a little further to avoid being something that isn’t acceptable – encourage us, coax us into interacting more.

And here is an animated version:

Any repeated attempts to login would cause the same.

My first solution was to login on another computer (which worked without fault), move my avatar to another region and log out. Logging back in on the problematic machine was then possible.

This revealed to me that it was something in that region that was causing a problem for that particular computer. To attempt to prevent the problem from occurring again I would be careful where I left my avatar in future before logging out, but this didn’t always work.

Obviously not everyone is fortunate to have access to a second machine to login on, so here is a further fix (not a solution):

You need to enable the “Start at:” box on the login screen to you can specify somewhere other than your problematic Home or Last Location:

The “Start at:” box used to be present by default in older versions of the SL Viewer, but now you have to delve into the settings to get it back:

Go to: Me > Preferences > Advanced > select: Show Advanced Menu > OK

You will then see the Debug menu item:

Go to: Debug > Show Debug Settings

From the drop-down menu select ShowStartLocation, select TRUE, then close the box

Then when you login you can choose a location, “sandbox” should work.

The most annoying part of the initial fault is that any offline messages from friends or worse, item deliveries will have been lost.

Further solutions: I have tried installing updated graphics drivers (usuing the fresh install option) with no improvement. The original error code is supposedly corrected by increasing a time out period in the registry, but Microsoft help pages failed to point me in the right direction, and why this suddenly requires increasing is puzzling (it seems like yet another work-around). I have also upgraded the SL viewer with no change. I also tried clearing the Viewer Cache.

Final Solution: I finally solved the problem by uninstalling the SL Viewer and deleting the following directories from my Windows 7 machine before reinstalling:

1) The SecondLife directory from: C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\

2) The SecondLifeViewer directory from: C:\Program Files (x86)