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"I'm sorry... will someone please explain human nature to those starry eyed hippies over at Google for me?\u00A0 I'm not sure they read my work over here - or if they read it, they tend to discount it out of hand quite a bit.\nI just happened to be going through my weekend feed items this early morning - something I usually save for after I've had a good night's sleep and a cup of coffee - and an article describing sex in Google's new Lively virtual world bubbled up. The article comes from the Second Life Herald, and describes in very vivid detail what I predicted would happen when I commented on the launch of Lively. Here's what I suggested originally:\n\nChalk it up to Google's blue-sky idealism, but they were under the mistaken impression that if you set down the guidelines from the beginning, you can contradict human base instincts (particularly when your target market is the teenage set. Hormones, anyone?).\nIt's definitely an issue that needs to be addressed by more than making rules against it. Despite those that would say there's something definitely morally broken about having an erotic services section on Craigslist, it serves an important purpose.\u00A0 Sure, most of the services bought and sold through that part of the forum are illegal as hell, but it keeps it from cropping up throughout the rest of the site. This may be a situation where Google need to take the PR hit and create sections for it where it can be segregated out, so that there will be \"safe areas\" on the service.\n\nHere's what's happening now, as documented by Pixeleen Mistral at the Second Life Herald:\n\n\nThe players have other ideas, and have even found a way have virtual sex - using a piece of furniture provided by Google \u2014 the Robot Closet.\n\nAt first blush, the robot closet seems harmless enough, but players soon realized the closet has an animation that causes 4 tentacle-like robot arms to thrust suddenly out of their retracted position, then return to the retracted position. According to reliable sources, Lively players feeling amorously inclined will place a Robot Closet in a secluded chatroom, then position themselves so that the animated arms of the closet appear to thrust from one player into another. Vigorous clicking of the closet follows, to trigger the animation as the avatars pleasure each other.\nOne might wonder if this will result in an increased demand for one of the more esoteric forms of Japanese anime porn - robot tentacle hentai - as pre-teens and teens enjoy some of their first online sexual experiences with robot tentacles courtesy of Google\n\nIt's pretty difficult to see exactly how this whole mechanism works from the image provided, but it isn't completely non sequitur for Pixeleen to mention tentacle hentai as a comparison.\u00A0 Japanese pornography, one could argue, is so extraordinarily bizarre due to the very harsh restrictions on pornography in Japanese culture and law. In other words, repression breeds kink.\nThis all comes very closely following my recent criticisms over the Google Knol initiative. There are a large number of issues with the service ranging from accountability, authenticity to credibility and general SEO concerns. What they all stem from is that Google has in essence created a toolset that's ripe for abuse, and given those with no scruples financial incentive to abuse it.\nIt would be one thing if Google's stance on the well-meaning nature or humanity to be something akin to glass-half-full, but this is so optimistic as to the potential depravity of human behavior that it borders on ignorance.\nOn the Internet, you must imagine all the negative possible uses for your product when you design it for mass consumption. It's one thing if you're designing a tool or bit of software for use with a limited number of folks. If you control the culture, or know the motivations of the folks using your software, you can take shortcuts and assume that they won't be out to break it or use it for means other than for what it was intended.\n\nWhen you're Google, though, you have to know that the whole of the Internet is your market. There is very little Google can do to achieve more marketshare in what they do. They are the Internet's platform. They spend a very large portion of their company's work-hours creating ways to subvert those who would game and pollute their search engine results, and for them to simply assume that they can create a tool for these same folks and they're just magically not going to abuse it because Google thinks they all are really good people at heart is just the height of foolishness.\nWith regard to Lively, Google needs to get serious and look at what not only others have done in similar spaces, but what they do on their own various services to mitigate the effects of sexual and undesirable content from their primarily teen audience.\u00A0 Pixeleen describes and screenshots a number of very vivid sexual discussions with what the inhabitants of Lively think is a 13-year-old girl.\nThis is officially an issue."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/08/03/teen-sex-lively/>