3pointD.com

Just heard from Justin Bovington of Rivers Run Red on the follow-up questions I had about his company’s bringing Swedish social-networking community PlayAhead into Second Life. According to Bovington, Rivers is going ahead with the project while consulting Linden Lab as little as possible. “We’re attempting to do everything we can within the parameters of the current feature set,” Bovington said in an email. “We’re looking at working with the development of the Linden Lab road map. We appreciate that Linden Lab are developing everything they can, as fast as they can.”

Bovington also confirmed that the June launch of the project will be on the main Grid. He added, though, that PlayAhead is looking at the option of a Teen Grid version, depending “on the project and the demands of their user base.” (more…)

It seems that Second Life is about to get its first social-networking mashup — not as a stand-alone app, but as a dedicated service designed to bring the connections made on one social-networking site into the 3D virtual world of Second Life. According to Justin Bovington of SL/RL services company Rivers Run Red (aka Second Life resident Fizik Baskerville), his company is all set for the June launch of a service that will make an integrated Second Life experience available to the 800,000 active users of PlayAhead, a Swedish social-networking site aimed mostly at teenagers. Bovington, whom I spoke with at E3 this week, says the service will integrate various SL grouping and communication tools with the Web-based services of PlayAhead, and will eventually include the ability to pull up PlayAhead profiles in a HUD, plus other nifty widgets that will be made possible by html calls and Web-on-a-prim, once those features arrive in SL. (more…)

3pointD is on the road again today, heading up to San Francisco after an interesting but exhausting time at E3. When we return this weekend, however, look for an exclusive story on a social networking site that’s headed into Second Life. Quite intriguing. . . .

Podcaster John Swords send a link to a cool — if janky — Google Maps mashup that traces the physical route of your Internet connection. Click the Traceroute link to check it out, or read the documentation. “Very old technology and sometimes very inaccurate but still a creative thought,” John writes. Doesn’t seem to always work, either, but worth checking out.