Web-to-SL Message Board
Rezzible is a Web site building and hosting service that lets you associate a Web site with your identity in the virtual world of Second Life. This is interesting for reasons described below, but more immediately interesting to me is an associated product that lets you put text on a Second Life message board via a Web interface. (It’s the orange sign in the image at left. Both were built by SL resident Barry Walcher.) Dynamic text in Second Life is still a crude affair, and must be accomplished using objects with letter textures already on them instead of any kind of actual text parser. But I like the idea of a message board with a Web-based input channel, so that you can update public, in-world information on the fly. I don’t think there are many other (any other?) apps that do this.
The site-building service is interesting as well, not for its site-building capabilities, but because you sign up for and launch the service (which costs less than US$1 per week) from within Second Life. This means that if I claim that my Rezzible Web site is the Web site of Walker Spaight, you can see that this is true by checking who the administrator is. It’s essentially a way to associate Web-based information — the content of your site — with your SL avatar in a secure fashion, effectively a kind of avatar Verisign service. Again, I don’t think there are many other (any other?) services that allow this. You do sign up for Web-based shopping sites like SLBoutique and SLExchange from within Second Life, but this merely allows you to verify who the two parties of a transaction are, not to put information out there that can be verifiably tied to its source. The same is true in reverse with the message board: only the board’s owner can populate it with text.
This may not have been the intent of the services when Barry launched them, but I think it’s a really useful thing to have around. I’ll be interested to see whether SL users come up with compelling applications for the technology.
Feeds
> Dynamic text in Second Life is still a crude affair, and must be accomplished using objects with letter textures already on them instead of any kind of actual text parser
This isn’t true. It’s perfectly possible to have rich, styled, dynamically created text in Second Life, as I think I’ve shown
:Mark: Thanks for the post. You’re right in that Rezzible uses avatar names to uniquely identify users and verify ownership. The only way people can sign up for Rezzible is in SecondLife, and so we can easily tie their avatar to their account and identify them.
I want to point out that we do allow users to pick their username for our service when they signup. This is because Rezzible account owners can create more than one user for their website… otherwise, we’d just make signup use avatar names like SLExchange does.
:Kisa: Thats interesting, and I’ve seen others that appear to be coming to this same conclusion… http://www.flickr.com/photos/techbologna/302952102/ But we were looking for the way to do this with the least friction. Having to install Quicktime (and hit the media play button) was just a bit too much to ask users to do at this point.
I’d forgotten about Jeff Barr’s stuff, actually. Kisa, I didn’t mean to take away from what you’re up to, and in fact, I didn’t mean that text in SL necessarily _looks_ crude, just that getting it in there in a dynamic way at all is crude from a back-end point of view. The only native support for text is in notecards, and there’s no dynamic way to get text into those. (I.e., the only input method is your keyboard.) There’s also no way to have a single notecard that multiple people can view at once. You can of course view multiple copies of the same notecard, and there are InfoHub-type services. But all of these are crude (operationally, not in appearance) compared to what would be possible via some kind of native support for dynamic text. Or if not crude, then at best kludgy.
now this is cool - will have to hop in and check it out. :-)
> “The only native support for text is in notecards, and there’s no dynamic way to get text into those.”
Ah, true true :( It would be rather good if scripts could *write* to notecards, rather than just using them as configuration files.
Metaverse Technology is proud to present our latest creation, the Six Screen Video Manager! This new innovation will allow you to simultaneously display up to six media elements from outside Second Life!
You simply fill in the URLs for images, video, or text files, that are living somewhere out there on the Internet, and you will see them all displayed at the same time on your screens in Second Life! In one Parcel!
http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=160078
Friend of mine tell me about some statistic information available at this page:
http://www.abetterstart.com/c/2000/counter21.php
However, every time i hit it, it says 404 error, while my friend getting content page.
I don’t think i doing anything wrong, but damn… I just can’t figure what can be done to get this page visible :((((