More Cool Location-Based SL Widgetry
After I blogged the location-tracker hacked up for use in Second Life by Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka the other day, Cory sent along a link to a similar service, SLStats [Cory also blogged it, I now see], that was started recently by SL resident Mark Barrett. I’ve also been meaning to look into the new blogHUD built by SL resident Koz Farina, which is currently in alpha. The cool thing about that is that it can be used as a kind of location-tracking device as well.
SLStats comes in the form of a wristwatch, available in Hill Valley Square [<-- SL link] in the Huin sim. Once you register with the service in-world, the watch "watches" where you go, tracking your location as you move around the world, as well as which other avatars you come into contact with. The information is used on the SLStats site to rank most popular regions (among SLStats users, of course), and to track how much time you've spent in-world, which you can view at a link like this one, which tracks Glitchy: http://slstats.com/users/view/Glitchy+Gumshoe.
Unfortunately, the service doesn’t let you extract a list of sims you’ve been to and who much time you spent in each (as Cory’s does), but I imagine that information is easily gotten and just a matter of building in the feature. What would be extra cool is if you could overlay lines on the SL Webmap API so you could see your path around the world. There are all kinds of other cool things that could be done with this information as well, I imagine, and I get the impression Mark is planning more in the near future. He wasn’t in-world when I was this morning, but Jerry spoke with him recently and at least found out that he’s a SecondCast fan. (Go us!)
SLStats is also associated with SLBuzz, which seems to be yet another MySpace-like social networking site for SL residents where you can add friends, blug stuff, etc. I love to see people adding functionality to Second Life, but I have to say, I’m sick to death of filling out online profiles, so I doubt I’ll be using this much. The explosion of social networking and Web 2.0 sites in general in recent months is creating a lot of work for very little return, as far as I can tell, and there’s going to have to be some kind of convergence or implosion fairly soon.
But back to our topic. The blogHUD is an unobtrusive heads-up display that lets you post a blog entry to the blogHUD site via either the chat line or a notecard. At the moment, you can browse recent entries, or see entries by a particular person on the “recent blogHUDers” list or from a place in the “recent places” list. A future version will let you browse blog entries by person, by place, or by person in place, and grab RSS feeds for most of those slices, or so I understand. (Remember, this is still in alpha.)
What I like about the blogHUD is the SLurlPane-like SL Webmap that shows up when you click on a blog entry. (That’s a SLurlPane at the top of the right-hand column here.) As you can see in the pic above, you end up with a close-up shot of the location from which the entry was posted, as was as an SL link that will launch you right there, should you find the entry intriguing enough.
Between this kind of stuff, Cory’s hack, SLurlMarkers and various other things that are in development for SL and the Web, we should see some pretty powerful location-based social software popping out of this primordial virtual ooze. Definitely looking forward to it.
Feeds
I met Mark Barrett inworld last night and am *so* impressed by what he’s building. SL residents have a chance to build an effective lifelog for their avatars years before we’ll get one for our real world activities. As Cory points out in his post and as I recently told the mapping community at Where 2.0, we could see a lot “real world” design problems solved and applications maturing much faster in virtual space that will then be ported over.
Walker, I think it’s funny that every time you blog about one of these kewl new locator thingies you call them “social software” or “location tracking” in a kind of neutral fashion, as if they are merely about people socializing, and you and describe their makers and early adapters as merely tekkies just doing kewl groovy things. That’s all fine to a point. But please analyze deeper:
1) The chief use of any kind of tracking device is to scrape and harvest marketing data — that’s how it will be mainly used, by those with the money and technology to use it, and that will be a justified use of it that tekkies will bless because they need the continued technological development to be funded (and themselves elevated to greater positions of power with funders/developers).
a) the Lindens have secured this angle for their future use by making us sign a TOS that warrants their seizure and use of all data, although of course aggregated.
b) Their third-party site friends, however, aren’t going to be bound by this TOS, and a lot of the data scraped out of SL is manipulated precisely by sites like this most to their advantage and hence the advantage of various commercial interests.
2) If today, you could produce lists of the sims that actually got the most traffic, for what ever reason, or had the presence in them of the hottest avatars, tomorrow, or even this afternoon, you could convert that information to figure out what real estate to buy; what sort of mall to place with what kind of vendors; even what kind of club with what kind of tastes that would also help place vendors
3) You cuold also map the power networks of people, who they associate with, up to and including even information to blackmail them, the outing of alts, etc.
4) A power-mapping on to the world which then, like focusing a magnifiying glass with the sun’s rays on an ant, kills some things that might have lived. That is, the effect of seeing the power uses and power trail blazers with the hours to burn on SL and the funding to buy sims further magnifies the already distorted rich/poor configuration in SL. The world might have developed internall from inside out, so it would have some integrity and something to sustain it, and some kind of membrane, albeit flexible and permeable, to withstand the general Internet onslaught. It won’t be getting that now.
5) If you look at the list of current most-online or most-sim users, most of them are land dealers of the middle-level baron type, people who liquidate and flip especially, like Wrestling Hulka and Sarah Nerd. Now, if Anshe were to agree to sign up to this HUD, you’d see her and ACS filling so many top positions the makers would be forced to make their list top 50 instead of top 10 to avoid appearing to be the new 24/7 All Anshe All the Time news service — but I’ll bet Anshe simply won’t partake in an exercise to allow some tekkie on a third-party site to scrape all her sales data — which is what you track when you track SL’s top businessmen.
6) So, while WOOTING about Columbus discovering the Americas, etc. which is all fine, Walker, you have to also pan out a bit to see the other side of it:
a) the Indians are getting smallpox
b) Spanish colonialist culture is being virally spread and will affect civilization for centuries and sanction the use of torture.
Anyway, I just thought I’d start about three weeks early here in laying down some markers for our Great Debate August 10.
so your solution is… massive regulation of technology?
Community control of technology isn’t ‘massive regulation of technology’, Walker. We can also urge more social responsibility than we’re getting from these completely unaccountable and unthinking third-party sites. We’re supposed to be so ga-ga over the technology, so much in WOOT mode about every little faltering step little Baby Second Life makes in reaching its arms out to walk toward Daddy Internet, that we are never supposed to question or criticize. Why? It’s just people, doing things that people do in RL in old media and old technologies that have their pluses and minuses and normal regulations and debates, too. Why are new media exempt?
Why always leap to extremes? surely you are not one of those wikinistas that say you never met a script you didn’t like!