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?

[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)

Finally published my own pfText.

Ich habe jetzt gut ein Jahr lang versucht, mein Profil bei Yasni einigermassen vernünftig zu gestalten. Yasni.de — das ist eine dieser Personensuchmaschinen, und wenn man als Net personality auf sowas auftaucht (und das Phänomen nicht völlig ignorieren will), versucht man halt, das Profil zu pwnen, und spielt dann deren Spiel, indem man die beliebigen Suchtreffer in eigene und zufällige trennt. Aber es ist eher nervig als sinnvoll.

In Wirklichkeit ist die Idee ja ganz toll, schliesslich definiere ich mich zu einem guten Teil durch das, was ich da im Internetz, auf Twitter, Blog und Foren so von mir gebe oder kommentiere. Warum es also nicht einfach richtig machen?

Fast forward to http://www.myonid.de/: Nachdem ich neulich den Einführungsvortrag auf Ustream.tv von Sebastian Küpers für die gerade anlaufende Beta von MyonID besucht habe, und dann auch tatsächlich das Passwort bei mir eintraf, hat dieser neue Service einen durchweg positiven Eindruck hinterlassen. MyOnID dreht den Spiess um. Man legt erst ein persönliches Profil mit ein paar Stichworten an, und kann dann die von den Suchmaschinen ankommenden Treffer als Favouriten markieren, Kommentare dazu schreiben, und im eigenen Profil anordnen. So entsteht — durch die liebevolle semantische Pflege derjenigen, die sich am besten damit auskennt — ein gewichtetes, gewertetes Profil meiner Netzspuren, schön mit Quellenangaben und eigenen Kommentaren, my On-ID.

Für ganz wichtig dabei halte ich, dass die Profile sich tatsächlich an Menschen richten: Die AGB verbieten ausdrücklich eine automatische Suche in den Profilen (vielleicht sollte man dem auch einfach mit einer passenden /robots.txt Nachdruck verleihen^^), ich als Benutzer kann selber bestimmen, welche meiner persönlichen Daten im Profil für andere einsehbar sind.

Mit so einem super aussehenden und stukturierten Profil macht auch die zweite Hauptfunktion gleich viel mehr Spass: Die eigene Website auf myonid.de fungiert als Single Sign On System für alle Web Services, die OpenID sprechen. Das heisst, ich muss mich nicht mehr bei 20 Webdiensten einzeln anmelden, für jeden ein supersicheres Passwort unter meine Tastatur kleben, sondern ich benutze meine eigene Website als Authentifikation für diese Services.

Für die Zukunft sind ausserdem geplant, dass alle Änderungen im Profil an die aggregierten (von mir freigeschalteten!) Dienste weitergeleitet werden können, wenn also der nächste Umzug ansteht, die Business-Email oder sonstige Lebensumstände sich ändern, reicht es, diese Änderungen an einer Stelle, dem eigenen Profil zu ändern. Auch wenn ich etwas wehmütig an die Zeiten zurückdenken werde, als ich auf Myspace noch 101 Jahre alt war, auf Last.FM hingegen 19 und aus Afghanistan: It’s a good thing.

I never was much of a Mac personality. But even then, back in the days of MacOS 7, when I was still hooked on Atari, Win95, and the early Linux, there was a thing that raised my attention: Hey, is it scriptable? Somehow I heard, and that caught my immediate attention, these fancy windowed apps on the funny looking Mac computers could talk to eachother, share their special abilities, and even perform simple tasks without having a user press the buttons. Wow, scriptable. I decided to be a programmer, and chose the “Glue Language” Perl as my matter of subject. (Glue Language meaning: You can take a part of this Website, stuff it into your database, perform some math on it, and make it a nice looking picture on that Website. One would call that “Mashup” today, minus the fancy standardized interfaces, JSON, XML,  XMLRPC…) Anyway, the Glue: Perl, PHP and Python became, and still is my daily work.

Jump to 2006. I just refrained from a Job as a CTO in a big Cisco Training company, where of course I was doing the Glue stuff, Reading and cleaning the MSSQL backend from the CRM, making the CMS talk different languages, spread on different TLDs, and building a fancy new information system and time schedule for the Cisco instructors.

I found Second Life, dived in, and got immersed. And I found a smutty little pearl of scripting language, called LSL (Linden Scripting Language), taking the role of the glue that  “diese Welt im Innersten zusammenhält” (Goethe, Faust I). For a  second time, in this brave new world, I decided to be a scripter, a glue maker, a mashup puppeteer. With our Primforge group, we did such awesome jobs as exporting Second Life Avatars to the weblin World, build the Gamesload Tower of games, a Career Center for a huge consultants agency, an island for a insurance company, that media center for a Radio station, and much, much more.

Building stuff, interconnecting worlds, paring email or twitter, this employee database, your personal website, and that VoIP service to this fancy new island and collaborational meeting place was my job, and I hope that will always be my job. And of course I’m actively scanning for new worlds to conquer  as part of my daily business life.

I still think that all roads begin in Second Life, the one single commercial world, that has all fancy options, and a broad user base. But then, there is OpenSim, the “Apache of Virtual Worlds” as they call it… Back in 2007 some programmers started to reengineer the answer packets, that come from the Second Life sims, and launched a programming project called Opensim. Just like the basic unit of Second Life, one Opensim Simulator creates the virtual space of 256×256 meters land, you can visit with the normal Second Life Client program. But there’s more: With the Grid Server you can host a huge number of opensims, with a common user base, just like the Second Life world. An with the latest Hypergrid, you can even teleport from one hosted Opensim Grid to another. Hypergrid is a coarse protocol, that doesn’t care too much about the permissions of the different Grids that are connected intertwingulary. But there is OGP, the Open Grid Protocol. The guys that invented OGP (mainly from IBM and Linden Lab) are just trying to put together a standardisation request, to make OGP an official protocol, just like HTTP (running the requests from your browser and the answers from my webserver while you read this text) or SMTP (the protocol that receives and transfers your daily emails).

We will soon launch a server farm of Opensim Machines. And I’m really looking forward to glue this all together, our trails of communication in the flat world, the mobile paths, and the new and old 3D worlds.

The weblin gate in the press:

Currently, it’s not uncommon for a person to have several avatars for various sites, similar to how some people have profiles on more than one social network.

Until now, what happened in a virtual world stayed inside that virtual world, but recently a German company called Weblin created a system that allows Second Life users to transplant a copy of their character into other websites and transport it around the Web.

Already, Facebook and MySpace are working with partner sites to allow their members to use a single profile across a breadth of websites. It’s only a matter of time before experts are talking about the next step and allowing users to use a single avatar across the Web to stroll through Second Life and then traipse through a virtual storefront on another site.

There will be software compatibility and copyright issues to work out, but it’s a conversation that’s bound to come up.

from 2009: The big ideas

(Also testing this flickr album plugin).

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