3pointD.com

Geoblogger Dan Catts, now of Yahoo! (via Flickr) reports on his blog that Yahoo! Maps has now added the rest of the world to its satellite imagery, rectifying what was a fairly large gray area (i.e., most of the globe) that it had heretofore left out. More details for developers here.

Wendy Rockett of New American Media writes here about having her Friendster identity “stolen.” In fact, she was cloned, in a practice that’s been going on in virtual worlds like The Sims Online for years: rather than hijack Wendy’s profile by stealing her password, someone created a profile that looked very much like Wendy’s, then simply tried to pass themselves off as the original.

In trying to assume my life, this “Wendy” was making a complete mockery of it. “Wendy” had pictures of me on her site, my approximate age, astrology sign, and meticulous (and correct) details, such as the publisher I worked for in New York before moving to San Francisco. Otherwise, everything else about this “Wendy” was not me. I would never say something as cheesy as, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” My favorite movies are those of indie Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai. Fake Wendy likes the Indiana Jones series.

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Tringo is a game developed by Second Life resident Kermitt Quirk over a Christmas holiday. Combining Bingo and Tetris, the game proved wildly addictive to Second Life residents, who snapped up hundreds of copies of it within the virtual world. Now, a real-world game company has shipped a version of Tringo that can be played on the Game Boy Advance. [LINK] The virtual has played itself right into the real.

Glitchy points out this Forbes magazine story about the cottage industry that’s sprung up on the periphery of MySpace, with people offering to help MySpace users trick out their profiles or giving them tools that let them automate tasks like inviting, accepting and contacting new friends.

Louis Ramos, a freshman at Southern Illinois University, says he has made more than $200,000 since last June by running Pimpmyspace.com [that’s a Forbes typo; it should be Pimpmyspace.org] and Myspaceeditor.org, two Web sites that offer MySpace users free tools to upgrade and spruce up their profiles with colors and images.

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