3pointD.com

For a long time now, I’ve been waiting for someone to build a Web-based social software app for use within Second Life, something whereby you’d be able to tag a location from within the virtual world, then navigate out to the Web to refine your tags and/or make it part of a group list or what have you. Now, with the advent of http calls that can be made from within SL, someone’s done just that (almost). In SL’s Taco sim [<-- SL link] you can acquire a device called a SLurlmarker, which lets you automatically post a del.icio.us tag containing a Second Life location and linking to a SLurl page that lets you navigate directly to that location from within SL. (Actually, I realize now that http calls aren’t needed for this; it could have been done long ago.)

An open-source project that’s still officially beta, SLurlmarker was created by SL scripters Cienna Rand, Epitaxial Playfair and Arito Cotton. It was still a bit clunky when I was playing around with it the other day, but it definitely works, it’s easy to use, and as of this morning its creators are now confident enough in it to have set up a SLurlmarker vendor in the Taco sim and add it to the list of SLurlmarkler del.icio.us tags.

The device takes the form of an unobtrusive heads-up display with two simple functions. Hit the “Landmark this Place” button and the device opens a del.icio.us Web page pre-seeded with the SL link, a “SLurlmarker” tag, and a tag with the name of the SL region you’re standing in. Add new tags or other information in your Web browser, then just submit the link and return to SL. Hit the “View Places Nearby” button and you’re presented with a list of SLurlmarker tags that are in the same region you’re standing in.

SLurlmarker is still not quite a social software tool; it’s only as powerful as del.icio.us, after all. Spurious SLurlmarker tags could creep in, and you can’t do much to parse the information via traffic or ratings or other factors. But it’s still an exceedingly nice tool, with a good implementation, and begins to get at one important factor that SL is missing almost entirely: search. It would be interesting, though, to see what someone could do with this and the del.icio.us API.

I count only 16 locations that have been SLurlmarkered so far, and some of these look like they may be duplicates, so to all SL residents out there: get SLurlmarking. This is one of those tools that’s more useful the more people use it.