Suwwy guys, primforge.com was having a short downtime earlier this day, therefore our online services and the SLInside Panel were affected..

Meine schöne Uptime… Naja, nach 300 Tagen braucht soger ein Torrid-proof Gentoo-Linuxrechner mal einen Reboot ^.~
Der Apache war heute vormittag kurzzeitig nicht ansprechbar, daher kam es in den SLInside-Panels zu Fehlermeldungen.

Sincerely,
Your Administress

The spring of hope

You might already have sensed that from the sparse traces in our recent twitter and blog posts. Anyway, Primforge is going virtyoual! We have been planning this for almost a year now, and in the last days, we actually founded the virtyou GmbH, a RL company here in Berlin/Germany, backing up on our work in Second Life and other virtual worlds.

Currently we are active building our company infrastructure, the virtyou Metagrid, and supporting our customers weblin, and theProjectfactory as well as our new clients, theDOgroup and DBC GmbH.

What’s changing?

Um, nothing, and then some. As a group in Second Life, we’ve been having many good ideas regarding media convergence, communication technologies and so on. But we always needed a  customer, an order and a “GO”, to actually investigate time and money into development.

Now, with a backing of some x0.000 US Dollars, we are free in several directions, modeling our ideas of a decent metaverse, both in Second Life and our virtyou Maingrid, and we are still available for our customers, to do the awesome development work we are famous for.

Can I contact you?

• Yes, very much so! :-]
• We are rl-ish available at the bunch of conferences taking place in Berlin in the next weeks, see Upcoming Virtual Worlds meetings in Berlin.
• Log into our new virtyou Maingrid and talk to us in-world.
• Contact us in Second Life: IM Torrid Luna, or Marcuse Bloch.
• Use our Contact form.

Where will it all end?

In his current blog post, Jack Linden decides wisely how to cope with bots:

• Use of Bots to game Traffic will be considered a violation.
• Bots are fine and we totally support their good use inworld, but we will deal with inappropriate use of them.
• Traffic has value as a land metric, and will remain.
• Responsible use of Land Bots is acceptable for now, but overuse will result in further action.

Note, that this is not a technical solution, but rather a guideline to the community, just as I proclaimed on JIRA and slinfo.de back in mid-2008.

On the other hand you could say, they just forbid what they can monitor. (Since of course they can monitor unusual Traffic spikes easily, but it would be much harder to data-mine land sales.)

Anyway, I’m happy with it for now, and my chat bot, and the ZKM project are not threatened, phew.

I just found this in an article by Gary P Hayes, introducing the calculation of the Tweet-GQ (Twitter Gary Quotient):

( ((Following/3)+Followers) x (Followers/Updates) ) / 10

This formula gives Torrid Luna a Tweet-GQ of 9.0, well, OK.^^

Anyway, the Mosaic is awesome, greetings to you, fellow followers!

Get your twitter mosaic here.

I have orbited countless stupid noobs in SL.

But I have never
killed a noob in RL.
Not because there
are no stupid people.

There are no guns.
Not in my life.

Here’s the link to the flickr group.

(of course I haven’t orbited so many guys in SL, it just sounds cool…^^)

Now this is getting interesting. Sirikata is a free and open source Virtual Worlds system, from the Stanford Uni. It’s about to launch in Q1 2009, but the source is already available.

Here are 2 teaser videos, a fly around and a speech on technical details:

Sirikata Architecture from Sirikata on Vimeo.

Sirikata Teaser from Sirikata on Vimeo.

I’m off, trying to compile it. More later.

UPdate: Here is a 3rd video:

Sirikata from a content creator’s point of view from Henrik Bennetsen on Vimeo.

(via Phasinggrace and Raph Koster)

[flickr album=72157614945457767 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

Clare Rees (Linden Lab), Hanno Tietgens (Buero X Media Lab), Allison Dollar (Interactive Television Alliance) Axel Hoehnke (Atlas Publisher)