Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Please Google, may I have my profile back ?

I have started this blog three years ago making use of the name of my Second Life avatar. It is a blog related to my Second Life and directed to secondlifers. I do not think anybody who is not in SL would care about these pages, and almost nobody in SL knows me under any name but Wildstar Beaumont.

In the meanwhile I have been a happy user of GMail, gTalk, Buzz, Google friend connect, Picasa Web Album and other Google services. I have always considered myself a Google fanboy.

A few weeks ago, thanks to the kindness of two fellow secondlifers, who sent me an invitation at the same time, I was able to join Google+, just days after it started.

I did not particularly feel the need of a new social tool, but I was happy to join and interconnect with all the other secondlifers there.

After one week some Google person decided that my profile violated the guidelines, since it was not real and my profile was suspended. Since then I have been unable to join other blogs, to press the like button anyware on the web, to reply to posts and post my own images on Buzz, as I was used to do, to show or modify my icon in gTalk, etc. It was not just Google+. All my experience in the Google ecosystem was marred. Now I am afraid that all the photos that I uploaded into Picasa Web Albums might go soon, since the deep integration between the services.

This because Google decided that Wildstar was not real enough for them. Yet I fail to see how those 2-3 people who read this blog or those (a few more) who like my SL photos would recognize me under any other name. I do have a RL account, I interconnect with people who know the RL me. A few of them are even secondlifers with whom I have exchanged RL information (my and their decision). But even with them it is another kind of experience and relationship. My SL self is Wildstar Beaumont and this is the identity a lot of people are used to interact with me for everything related to Second Life.

Yet Google decided that I was not real, I was fake, I was a potential spammer. I was not worth to network with other human beings. They decided to spoil my internet experience, even in those part I was using with satisfaction before Google+ ...


Please Google, may I have my profile back ?

3 comments:

Serra Anansi said...

I hear you Wildstar, I just wish Google would as well. I was also a Google fangirl and all this has just made me so annoyed. I deactivated everything with Google that used the profile. Maybe someday I will be able to go back to using the Google products that use a profile. Maybe by then I wont want/need to.

Serra Anansi said...

Though now that I think of it... how do you have a blogger account if your profile is disabled?

Wildstar Beaumont said...

the profile has a direct impact on the social services (I am out of G+ and Buzz ..I can no longer use friend connect to join blogs) and gives sme other issues here and there, but all the other services are unaffected (so far ... not sure about the future, since they claim even deeper integration)