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Glitchy sends along a press release from Skype and IT/telecomms company Comverse Technology about Skype Klonies, the new avatar personalization feature available to Skype users. (Dial it up here.) Like Saul Klein, Skype’s VP of marketing, I’m sure this will be popular. “Recent surveys we conducted show that personalization capabilities are important to the Skype community,” Klein says in the release. What the release doesn’t say is that you have to pay for your Klonie (which didn’t stop me, of course; it was only about $1.25, but for some reason I got charged in euros).

Strangely, my new Skype Klonie has got me thinking about whether VoIP has much of a future as a standalone service. Read on. (more…)

Well, here we are. As I blogged earlier, you can now point Second Life’s in-world Mozilla browser at virtually any Web page you like. So I’m blogging this from within SL as an experiment. The browser is very kludgy, to be sure. Resize the window or click outside it and things seem to break down. Still, there’s great promise here. Big fun coming.

A couple of new pieces of Second Life-related Web functionality (or is that Web-related SL functionality?) caught my eye this morning. The first is a service called httpdb, which provides users with free, persistent out-of-world data storage (up to 250kb per user) that can be accessed by scripts within SL using the new llHTTPRequest function. [Via VTOR.] Data storage within SL is almost totally lacking; data can be stored dynamically in variables or statically in notecards, but both forms are quite unstable. httpdb attempts to solve the problem, at least for small data loads, and looks quite easy to use. A similar service is available from SL resident Carl Omlet.

The second has been kicking around the SL forums for about a week now, but has found a nice easy-to-use form courtesy of SL resident Velox Severine, described at resident Chandra Page’s site. [Also via VTOR.] This one lets you point the new in-world Mozilla browser at pretty much any page on the Web, rather than simply having access to the Linden Lab help page that’s provided as the only native option. (more…)

Those who experienced The Sims Online know how appealing it was for TSO residents to post their real-life details and photos on the Real Sims Online site. Now there’s a similar service for Second Life, in the form of a site called SLProfiles.com, where residents can match their photos of their avatars to photos of themselves in the real world. I’m not sure how long it’s been around, but it’s only got a couple of dozen members at the moment, so it can’t have launched all that long ago. Looks like May 27 was the launch date, actually, according to this forum posting from SL resident Yo Brewster, who put the site together. The site is similar to SLme, although that site is part of the larger Me.com network, and not specifically dedicated to Second Life. Still, despite its noisy interface, SLme, which has been around longer, seems to have more members. (more…)

The video bloggers gathering under the banner of Vloggercon (pronounciation up to you) will also have a presence in the virtual world of Second Life when the meet-up goes off on June 10-11 in San Francisco, according to SL video blogger Tao Takashi, who has also posted a nice video showing off the SL location for the event, the handsome Hipcast conference center in the Shalida sim, which is a project of resident Spin Martin (aka blogger and podcaster Eric Rice). Since the Vloggercon itself is sold out, this should be a nice way for people to attend in parallel and also see some of the videos being shown at the event.

Autodesk is holding a series of free geospatial Webcasts covering things like Autodesk Map 3D and integrating Autodesk products with Google Earth. The first one goes off next Thursday, June 15, with two more coming more or less monthly after that. Perhaps a good resource for mapdevs? You tell us. [via GISuser]