I believe that the two can coexist. If there is an option to coexist, the anonymity issue must be spoken to or protected. A default of 'opt out' makes sense to me.

Whether this will actually help with retention is something open to speculation. I do not believe that it will help with Second Life retention. Where most social networks tend to fail are by trying to be everything to everyone. Sure, you can study the successes – but you learn a lot more by studying the failures.

The failures actually have a lot in common with the successes.

This is all preemptive for the open sourcing of the server code, anyway. Is it in my interest to help people make money off of my friends? Hmm. :-)

Of course you can do it any other way but the goal here was to make it easier for new people in SL to find somebody they already know. Because of retention, because you usually only stay on social networks/whatevers of you know somebody.

Social Networks usually give you means to look for people you might already know because of retention, because it makes less sense otherwise.

And it has to be easy. Very easy.. Thus telling somebody to please email everybody if they are in SL and want to be their friend is not an easy solution.

So in fact it creates less work because those the possibly matching people are filtered out automatically without you having to do that.

Fair enough. But can't you already do that without all these intricacies already? That is really my point. If you have a website, for example, you can do that. Your first life in your profile within SL also works. Email signatures. There are many, many ways to do this. Adding another way that can have negative results and creates more work for everyone doesn't seem like something I would want.

Frankly, I have an email address book with thousands of names. Do I really want to have to sift through these email addresses and decide who I want to know in a certain environment?

There is a lot to be said for human interaction. Automating human interaction is what is on the table here, from what I can tell. I'm sorry. If I want to know you, I will find you – or I'll email you directly and ask you.

And serendipity is also a nice thing too.

I know that an email address is not a friend. A friend is a friend. That's why I was talking about having privacy controls in place is important. But I personally would like to be found by somebody searching for me. So why not give me the possibility to do so?

An email address is not a friend. Separate the two. An email address associated with a Second Life account may not be the same as a friend. People have alternative Second Life existences.

No, no, there are plenty of things that already work. There is a Facebook/SL app, for example.

From a technical standpoint, I have never found reinventing the wheel worthwhile. From a user standpoint, I think that it diminishes the weight of a connection I have with friends.

And as a human being, I don't like to be thought of as an email address to be harvested. ;-)

The best way to check if your friends are in Second Life is to email them yourself… personally.