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"RL names" is an idea whose time has long passed, and it's a foolish and disastrous error on Facebook's part that they insist on users divulging so much data.

Do you really not put money into a bank "owned by avatars with fake names?" Really? The rest of the world does: they sign their paychecks over to "fictional persons' called corporations whose "residences" are a post office box in Delaware. Most atomic-world business is done through "fake names" specifically to *protect* people from liability.

Synthetic worlds take that concept beyond business into every aspect of identity. We *create* who we are, transcending the concept of inherited identity that marked the peasant with his father's name and job, her husband's identity in name and law. Oh, yes, the peasant village assured you that you knew who you were dealing with and their reputation, back for generations - at the cost of stifling change, growth, experimentation, innovation.

That's what you're advocating *for.* It's antiquated and dangerous. Synthetic worlds are to personal freedom what the corporation has been to financial freedom: a step from the shackles of the inherited into the invented.

Facebook, despite its numbers, has some strange ideas that belong in a past century. SL is a market leader, not a follower: by your logic, Linden Labs should be making cars, because there's a huge market for cars and an industry template. That's not how innovation happens! Innovation happens by breaking from the old ways and seizing on the new.

In three years, the conventional wisdom, what "everyone knows," will be that identity unity and transparency is dangerous, outmoded foolishness, and *of course* anyone would manage their identities through avatars, just as they'd do business through and with corporations. LL is a tiny bit out ahead of that trend, not slavishly following a company with an antiquated business model.

Look outside and wave - that's us passing your unitary identity in the fast lane....

--Sophrosyne Stenvaag, http://sophrosyne_sl.livejournal.com