3pointD.com

Think you know how to get around everyone’s favorite virtual world? Think again. I missed this a couple of days ago on Philip Torrone’s Make magazine blog, but it seems someone has written an app and plug-in that lets you play World of Warcraft with a wired XBox360 controller. You’ll still need your keyboard to chat, and the controller doesn’t seem to be able to handle more than 12 hotkeys, but it seems a neat, user-driven way to bring console-users into the MMO world. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’s actually tried it out.

One of the oft-overlooked issues that’s going to crop up more and more as the 3pointD world evolves is that of identity. Who are you, in various online contexts, and how can you secure and protect — or make public — the various features of those various identities? There’s no one good solution at the moment, but a number people — including Microsoft and host of others — are working on solutions they hope will become standards, or at least plug into the identity protocol layer that’s being discussed as a necessary addition to the Internet. The subject is too vast to cover in a single blog post, but for more information, you may want to think about showing up to the “grassroots” Internet Identity Workshop being held May 1-3 at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California. (more…)

Second Life’s Blumfield region

The Second Life Herald reports on a residents association in the virtual world of Second Life that seems to be having an impact on the developers behind the world. While Linden Lab, makes of SL, say no policies have been changed as a result of talks with the residents of SL’s Blumfield region, residents see an effect in how SL has managed subsequent experiments in Second Life zoning. (more…)

According to Xinhua, China’s official news agency, a Chinese man last week became the first person in China’s Guangzhou Province to be punished for stealing virtual property. Xinhua reports that 20-year-old Yan Yifan stole passwords at the MMO publisher where he was employed, and used them to sell US$500 worth of virtual goods. He was fined US$617 last year, but appealed his case to a higher court, which eventually upheld the original decision. (more…)

Now that MySpace owner News Corp has begun cleaning up the all-ages social networking site — removing 200,000 profiles recently that contained “objectionable content” that might have scared away potential advertisers — some observers have begun to question whether the service will continue to enjoy the wild popularity it has been met with so far. The site has some 66 million profiles on it, but some feel censorship will lower that number drastically. “Teens and twenty something will likely say “screw it” to News Corp’s attempts at cleanliness and move to other social media spaces or create ones none of us has heard of yet,” says ad-watching blog AdRants. (more…)

Daniel Terdiman over at CNET News.com has a story this morning all about the
Electric Sheep Company, the virtual world services company that is the kind sponsor of this blog. It’s a brief gloss, but interesting — if you like reading about a company working on the bleeding edge of 3pointD. Go. Now.