3pointD.com

SL machinima-maker Pierce Portocarrero caught some footage of a protest in the virtual world of Second Life today, held to coincide with the world’s third birthday. The protest was being held to voice some residents’ dissatisfaction with the new registration requirements (or lack thereof) we mentioned earlier today. I haven’t heard the narration on this yet, as I’m still at the Supernova conference, but the footage is engaging, and gives a good idea of what it’s like when a bunch of SL avatars get together for a protest — which is not an unusual thing in itself.

Well, that was an eye-opener. Amazon.com’s Werner Vogels just told the Supernova conference that the shopping site [well, some of its employees, anyway] is considering a move into the virtual world of Second Life. “There is a group of Amazonians in Second Life,” Vogels said, “and we are building a bridge between Amazon Web services and Second Life so you can go into Second Life and actually try things on there and buy them. There are people who want to use Amazon as a platform to buy and sell things in Second Life.” It’s not clear how far along the effort is or how much official support it has in the company ([see below], Vogels was speaking in response to a question from the audience), but it is clear that people at major Web-based retailers and eCommerce portals have begun to look at SL as a commercial platform. Watch out, SLBoutique? Time will tell. Stay tuned for more reports.

[Update:] Vogels, who is VP of worldwide architecture and chief technology officer at Amazon, tells me that there is indeed an “Amazonians” group in SL composed of Amazon employees, and that they are trying to see what it would take to create a Web-services bridge between the virtual world and the shopping site. The effort is not being done under the auspices of the company, he says. (more…)

Lili Cheng of Microsoft, who formerly ran the Social Computing Group there; Tom Ngo, CEO of NextPage; Chris Thomas, chief strategy officer at Intel; Gary Bennitt of Goowy; and Kevin Lynch of Adobe spoke about the future of the desktop at the Supernova conference during a lunchtime roundtable. Much of their discussion revolved around whether data would be centrally stored in future, or stored locally in a number of locations. Interesting privacy and identity issues came up (they start about halfway down this post), and panelists’ remarks also shed some long-term light on how the 3pointD world might become more mobile and distributed, and just how long that might take. (more…)

Machinima-master Paul Marino sends along the news of a machinima piece that’s come under scrutiny by the U.S. House Intelligence Committee recently. “The machinima was held up by ‘experts’ as propaganda and recruiting material for terrorists,” Paul writes. (And there’s video here.) While that doesn’t seem to be what’s actually happening, it’s interesting to consider the possibilties. In fact, what’s far more likely is that virtual worlds would be used by the U.S. government for similar purposes. The government already has an armed forces recruiting tool in the multiplayer first-person shooter game America’s Army, so it’s actually a short step for someone to start trying to win gamers’ hearts and minds through similar means. A number of people involved in virtual worlds have recently been testifying before various congressional and government intelligence bodies, 3pointD hears, and there has even been talk of U.S. government institutions opening an island in the virtual world of Second Life. While I don’t know that any of these discussions have involved machinima, it does seem that there will eventually be a government presence of some sort of another in virtual worlds. That will certainly change the landscape a bit.

The future of wireless and wireless broadband was the subject of a Friday midday panel at the Supernova conference in San Francisco today. The panel was moderated by Om Malik of GigaOm (and for a few more days part of Business 2.0, and featured Clint McClellan of Qualcomm; Juergen Urbanski of FON, “a wifi peer-to-peer grassroots community movement”; Pierre de Vries, a fellow at the Annenberg Center at USC who used to work on wireless technologies at Microsoft; and Selina Lo of Ruckus Wireless. (more…)

If you’re interested in some recent and/or potential promotional uses of Second Life and other virtual worlds, log into SL today at noon SL time for the Avatar-Based Marketing discussion, to take place at Harvard’s Berkman Island [<-- SL link]. Panelists include SL resident Cristiano Midnight of Snapzilla, blogger Tony Walsh (Zero Grace in SL) of Clickable Culture, SL resident Razor Rinkitink (American Apparel’s Director of Web Services, responsible for their recent project in SL), Paul Hemp (Hempman Richard in SL), author of the recent Avatar-Based Marketing article in the Harvard Business Review, and Jerry Paffendorf (SNOOPYbrown Zamboni in SL) of the Electric Sheep Company (sponsor of this blog). Should be an interesting examination of the issues. More information on Jerry’s blog.

Snapzilla, the Flickr-like site for Second Life screenshots, is taking the day off today, as a way to protest recent changes Linden Lab has made to the registration process for SL, changes that allow “complete unrestricted access to Second Life by minor children and destructive users with no accountability and no ability to ban problem users,” according to Snapzilla creator Cristiano Diaz. While the changes to the registration process may in fact be problematic, it’s strange to see one of the most popular SL-related Web-based services take itself off the air for a day in protest — especially on today, the virtual world’s third birthday, when Snapzilla should be a more popular destination than ever, given the number of birthday events going on this week. (more…)