Second Life Adding Web to User Profiles
Christian of the Electric Sheep Company sends news that Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, will soon allow users to display Web pages in their in-world profiles. According to this blog post from one Linden developer, a new tab will soon be added to users’ profiles (as seen above) that will load from a URL field. “This feature should make it out sometime after this coming release, and to a public preview before then,” according to the post.
While it’s not Web on a prim (a feature that would allow multiple users to view the same Web page displayed on an object in the world itself), it would allow people to more easily perform Web-based functions from within Second Life. Cookies and password fields may not be supported (either at first or at all), so browsing will be limited in power, but one problem with SL at the moment is the task of disseminating information. Being able to load your profile with information is one kluge for this.
Probably more to the point will simply be the ability to open up to the rest of the virtual world. One feature that’s long been sought by users is an in-world blogging function. Now we have it (or we shortly will). Simply point your profile page at your Weblog, and the world can see what’s on your mind. This is where things really start to become interesting: Until now, avatars have been walking, talking, object-creating inter-actors; with Web on a profile, they’ll become walking, talking, object-creating, inter-acting sources of information. Blogs are arguably what made the Web come alive and helped show us the way toward the future of content creation and consumption; there’s no reason to believe they’ll be any less powerful in Second Life. Wild thought: hundreds or thousands of people each day click on the profile of Avatar X because she’s got the hottest blog in town. People want to bump into her so they can be mentioned in her blog, etc. That could happen now, of course, but having that blog be accessible within the world will give in-world interactions that much more weight. Now here’s hoping Web on a profile isn’t perpetually “two weeks away,” as Web on a prim has been for the past two years.
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The Slow 2D-to-3D Convergence of Second Life…
Second Life users have been itching for the expected seamless integration of the 2D internet with their 3D virtual world, but I’d venture it’s taking much longer than many expected. So far there has been discussion by Linden Lab (see earli…
I did discuss this idea in my blog on December 11, 2005
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2005/12/2006_the_year_o.html
I’m just now noticing the “ratings” portion. Does this mean ratings will be back?
If this feature is as laggy and wonky as F1 is in the client, it won’t get much use. F1 is a show-stopper, it grinds you to an utter halt.
This is enormous news, in my opinion.
>> I’m just now noticing the “ratings” portion. Does this mean ratings will be back?
Part of MySpace. And has no effect on stipends. And is run by an independent company.
But, yeah, Prok, lots of us talked about in-world profiles for ages. I’m glad you were one of the ones who saw the potential and endorsed it.
Yeah. There were people - including me… though I’ve discovered that my threads tend to get disappeared by LL so I’m not going to bother hunting for the one on which I said this: why doesn’t LL have their own MySpace-style social system where residents could set up their own pages and whatnot? From there the integration might have been much tighter.
Most recently I wondered why LL/SL doesn’t integrate with something like Threadless. It’s experiencing some of the same “lost sense of community” that comes with success and I would anticipate that just like SL it will fragment into communities. Those could be aligned. And if there’s one thing SL residents seem to do with enthusiasm is design t-shirts.
There are a lot of simple bits of mendy enhancements which appear as “hacks” at first but are quite bridgey and useful as stepping stones — fishing for features is what I call it, because once you dangle something like a webpage-in-profile, it opens it up to all sorts of great ideas and comments about where it can be taken next. So I’m very much excited about the work Kelly’s done, and is doing.
Another op. I haven’t heard mentioned a lot is a simple weblink button from an inworld Classified to boost its usefulness — perhaps to expanded info about a product, or pointing it to a SL company’s home page, etc. But of course now that we have this, some will ask for replacing static textures in those Classified ads with HTML details!
I’m not understanding — this thingie merely takes you to MySpace where you’ll be required to register and make a MySpace and rate on it over there?
Or will it be an internal SL thing where the ratings are only inside SL, so to speak.
But, yeah, Prok, lots of us talked about in-world profiles for ages. I’m glad you were one of the ones who saw the potential and endorsed it.
What I did is not “think up the idea of having web profiles”. I merely noticed in December 2005 that Lindens had already created something called “publish to web” as a check-off box on the avatar profile. They never said why they put it on there, I figured they were “up to something”.
I noted that people already decorated their avatar profiles with pictures and links and such.
And I blogged it as certifying that the phenomenon of the avatar would now “arrive” and it would be “the year of the avatar”. So I feel I did first coin and use the phrase “year of the avatar”. A little thing, that, but simply worth establishing.
So yeah, you all talked about it because you’re all special and can program it! I merely chronicled it first *shrugs*.