Being cut off from Second Life once more, the 3rd time today, I have some time for blogging. I must say that the Blog postings of Frank Ambrose really sound postitive, and make transparent what they are working on right now. I don’t want to be in their shoes right now, refactoring a running system with literally hundred thousands of users. And I really appreciate that sort of openness, I just hope it’s not too late…

Much much better than the speech of Philip on Metanomics today, where I first couldn’t login, then tried for almost 15 minutes to get an video stream, and then he talked about nothing, as far as I could understand…

Imagine a world that stretches to the horizon, where trees sway in a virtual breeze that blows across all the simulators. In the far distance you can see an amazing complex city – dozens of flying avatars arc into and out of it. Lights detail the buildings. Your friend drives up to you and gets out of her hover car. You take a snapshot of her and playfully drop it onto the mirror shades of her sunglasses (she can see it the instant you drop it into the world). She asks for some help with the code that drives the car – you click on the fuselage and pop open the script, edit the thrust levels, save, and have her test it. She gives you an earring she is wearing — a jewel lit from within that lights up the detailed tattoo on her cheek. You get on next to her as she heads for an Unsafe area kilometers from the city. You pull out a rifle that you bought, confident that the arms merchant who built it knows her stuff. The roar of the bike’s engine mixes with the wind in your ears as you cruise down into a dark canyon, dodging a bridge that hadn’t been completed the last time you flew this route. This is what you can do today in our game, thanks in large part to the adoption of our server grid.

2003 description of a new, brighter, collaborative and borderless virtual world, called Second Life.

(amazing find by Gwyneth Llewelyn)

I found a nice new project yeasterday: The rezzme:// URI scheme is a method to bookmark virtual places that goes far deeper than the secondlife:// or SLurl system, which both are limited to Second Life.

Usage (examples):

• rezzme://example.net:9000/ (Log into a certain Simulator)

• rezzme://Torrid%20Luna@primforge.org:9009/ (" with a certain Avatar name)
• rezzme://opensim.zurich.ibm.com:9000/zurela/128/34/23 (Go to a special place within this Grid)

Of course, just defining a new URL scheme does nothing yet,  you need a program that understands the URL scheme.  Under http://forge.opensimulator.org/gf/project/rezzme/scmsvn/?action=AccessInfo there’s a protocol handler, written in Python/Qt4, that is able to parse the rezzme-Scheme and bookmark the URLs. It even enables you to define several different clients to open certain adresses with, so if you want to use the Meerkat or Hippo viewer for a certain address, this is no problem.

The handler is available for Win and Linux so far, a Mac version should follow soon. It simply saves the bookmarks and defined clients in 2 files in your home directory, .rezzme.clients and .rezzme.bookmarks. By adding the rezzmy.py program to your Firefox config you will be able to start these clients by simply clicking a Web URL.

Way cool.

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

Not wishing to disappoint, I begin at Wikipedia, and note this intriguing definition of International: ”In American English, “international” is commonly used to signify “outside of the country”.  For the rest of us (non-American English!), the word “international” would describe interactions between two or more Nations as in “an International football match”.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2009/01/02/…review-of-2008-and-a-peep-into-the-future/

(emphasis added by Torrid)

Second Life goes international, or better: US centric SL becomes aware of the “here be dragons” areas. That’s the underlying message of the current post at blog.secondlife.com. Old news, but probably a big surprise for the american folks: most residents are not from USA. Then follows a anecdotic list of interesting “unamerican” projects and sims. How come that reminds me to “hungary is a country??!?“?

Anyway, a nice start into 2009…

And yeah, copypastaing “…” instead of “…” from your M$ Word Processor into an URL is probably not a good idea, I know a handful of RSS libs that will soon bail out…

(Also testing this flickr album plugin).

[flickr album=72157611887920740 num=20 size=Square]

A nice article about our Weblin Gate onVirtual Worlds News. And some more articles on Venturebeat, and one by Grace McDunnough.

It’s amazing that these guys actually understand how useful Weblin is.

(via&thanks: Mal Burns)

[diesen Artikel auf deutsch lesen]

The Primforge group is proud and happy to release the weblin Gate in New Berlin, an avatar teleporter in cooperation with zweitgeist GmbH into the Public.

Weblin — that is small avatars that live on common websites, to chat, surf together with friends, talk about the current news on your page or blog (yes, they are there!), or just be present and greet their visitors on their own page. Since 2006, weblin avatars — created by the Hamburg company zweitgeist — are amongst us. I’m constantly amazed at that parallel cosmos that lives on lots of popular sites, that I surf all day.

June Trenkins ready to become a weblin.

Now you can visit our professional 3D photograph Weblin Paule in New Berlin who simply transforms your fully featured Second Life Avatar into a weblin, and surf the good old WWW with your very own look!

It’s an amazing opportunity for long time Residents of Second Life to take their beloved identity onto the World Wide Web, and a cool new feature for skilled weblin users, to create their unique avatar with all the features, Second Life can give you.

“Win win”, one could say, or just “Best of both worlds”.