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  nice powers of 10 flash app
  (tags: animation camera education fun map reference science simulation universe visualization)

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Nic Mitham at the K Zero blog (a marketing and branding company) posted a map a few days ago of all the real-world brands he could find operating in the virtual world of Second Life, and now he’s already posted a new version. Nice work, though tough to keep up. (Interested readers could help by contacting Nic with new finds, I suppose.) If done well, this could become a great resource. Never content to leave well enough alone, though, I thought up two feature suggestions:

• leave the map at a static URL which simply directs people to latest version [UPDATE: A link to Nic’s static map is now available.]
• make the company names into clickable secondlife:// links

Just thought I’d blog it in case people were interested, especially since there was so much interest from corporates at Virtual Worlds 2007. [Originally spotted on JJProjects.]

[A note before we leave you: I’m not taking the week off from blogging because of the Kathy Sierra affair, but I am going to try to mark all my posts today with a message like this, despite the fact that some other people have a blogging boycott on today. I’m not sure a boycott is the right thing for me, but I don’t mind interrupting a few posts for a public service announcement about an insult culture that has run right off the rails. See you soon.]

I had lunch yesterday at Virtual Worlds 2007 with a couple of guys from the U.S. Department of State, who told me the State Department is considering launching an official project within the virtual world of Second Life. Specifically, this would be an initiative of State’s Public Diplomacy wing, which is headed up by Karen Hughes. Before we go any further, I should note that your tax dollars were not used to feed 3pointD; my tasty lobster salad was kindly picked up by a venture capitalist who was also at the table.

Though any State Department project would at first be very small and include no persistent State Department presence (I don’t think State has budgeted any money for SL yet), it sounds like the public diplomacy department (essentially State’s outreach and PR arm) is considering Second Life and virtual worlds in general as a potentially powerful new communications channel, and that if early experiments go well, it could mean an expansion of their activities there. This is potentially a great way to make more information available about the State department, and get more people engaged in the workings of government, which can’t be a bad thing. We don’t really hear enough from most government bodies in a way that’s palatable; one wonders how some longtime SL residents might react, however.

[A note before we go on: I’m not talking the week off from blogging because of the Kathy Sierra affair, but I am going to try to mark all my posts today with a message like this, despite the fact that some other people have a blogging boycott on today. I’m not sure a boycott is the right thing for me, but I don’t mind interrupting a few posts for a public service announcement about an insult culture that has run right off the rails. Now back to our story.] (more…)

• RIM tells developers to have more fun | Crave : The gadget blog
  Blackberry API…for “apps with embedded audio and video, more location-based services, support for better 3D graphics,”
  (tags: RIM API blackberry technology)

I missed the beginning of the remarks by Colin Parris, vice president of digital convergence at IBM Research, because the panels are stacked a bit back-to-back and I was on the one directly before he spoke, but the first half of his presentation consisted of laying out some of the potential benefits of integrating virtual worlds with current business processes. The second half of his remarks consisted of looking at what IBM is doing and planning in the space. I’ve transcribed them pretty well below. (more…)

Gideon Wiis in Second Life (photo by Glitchy)

Gideon May of the team behind Lifecrawler showed up at the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference today with a laptop and a Wii controller that’s he’s begun hacking to control his avatar in the virtual world of Second Life. You can already move your avatar around using the Wii controller’s D-pad with Gideon’s system, and he just needs to find a Radio Shack and buy some hardware and he’s going to try to make avatar navigation a gestural function of the Wii controller — by the metaverse meetup on Friday! Awesome. After that, it’s on to using the force feedback system to indicate collisions, and hack out some alternate controller schemes that would allow a user to navigate their avatar via the keyboard but play games within Second Life by waving the Wiimote around. Neither Glitchy nor I could think of anyone who’s done this before, though it seems so cool and obvious. Let us know if you’re in New York and you want to lend Gideon a hand.

The pre-lunch panel at VW07 was on “platforms and technologies,” moderated by Jerry Paffendorf of the Electric Sheep Company. Unfortunately, I chose to sit upstairs by the coffee, which apparently inspired most of the audience to chat to each other throughout the panel.

Pretty much the most interesting bit of this came at the very end, from Joe Miller, vp for platform and technology development at Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life:

• We’ll be open-sourcing the back end so sims can run anywhere on any machine whether trusted by us or not.
• We’ll be delivering assets in a totally different method that won’t be such a burden on the simulators.
• Very soon we’ll be updating simulators to support multiple versions so that we don’t have to update the entire Grid at once.
• We’ll be using open protocols.
• SL cannot truly succeed as long as one company controls the Grid.

Joe also had a slide showing that SL is going to migrate straight to Havok 4. Eventually.

And now, back to our panel. (more…)

MTV also announced they’d be launching Virtual Pimp My Ride that will let users customize their virtual rides in Virtual Laguna Beach, as well as hold drag races and participate in other aspects of car culture. The world will build out a pretty good piece of Van Nuys as well as a superhighway that will connect VLB with Van Nuys, according to Matt Bostwick giving a keynote at VW07. Bostwick also said LogoWorld, the planned MTV world for lesbian and gay viewers, would be launched shortly as well. More details as they emerge. Just wanted to get the news out.

MTV’s latest addition to their virtual universe — which already includes Virtual Laguna Beach, the Virtual Hills, Nicktropolis and a planned music world, among others — will be a virtual version of MTV Cribs within VLB that will let users own apartments and trick them out more or less as on the television show, according to MTV’s Matt Bostwick, giving a keynote address at Virtual Worlds 2007. Few details were forthcoming, for the moment, but you can imagine what things will be like.

Bostwick also mentioned some current usage numbers for VLB and vHills:
MTV has registered 600,000 registered users in 6 months.
The median age is 20.
Users are 85 percent female, which is almost an exact footprint of the people watching the shows.

Bostwick said the network estimates they’ll have 3 million registered users by the end of the year.

He said 64 precent of users come back multiple times, they visit on average 1.4 times a week for 37 minutes a visit.

Bostwick also went over a couple of other new features being added to MTV’s virtual universe include, including:

• Click-through eCommerce, which will allow users to click through from virtual items in order to buy real-world versions of them.

• Skill ladders that will allow users to bewcome DJs, fashion designers or club promoters.

The first panel at Virtual Worlds 2007 was on Trends and Numbers, a general discussion of where things might be headed in terms of virtual worlds, moderated by Daniel Terdiman of CNET.

Panelists
Chris Collins, aka SL’s Logan Linden of Linden Lab
Joe Laszlo, senior analyst at Jupiter Research
Steve Prentice of Gartner Research
Justin Bovington of Rivers Run Red
Sibley Verbeck, CEO and founder of the Electric Sheep Company

Sibley: We’re at a point of being still extraordinarily undefined. It still only gives you so much value to look at the metrics of where VWs are today, because the activity around them has been largely exploratory. There’s incredible interest in the potential. People are interested, but VWs are not yet a key part of their business. We have a lot of questions, but not yet a lot of answers.

Justin: We’re just at the point where VWs are being defined as their own medium. It’s not its own solution in its own right, but part of a mix of solutions.

Collins: Growth in Second Life membership we’re seeing now is incredible, especially from overseas.

Prentice: We’re pretty much where the Internet was in the mid-90s. People are interested, but they don’t quite know what to do. Describing it as a media channel is probably one of the most accurate ways of doing it. Corporates are starting to understand that this is a channel that needs to be used along with everything else. But they’re still isolated islands. You can’t yet move your avatar or your assets from one world to another, That’s one of the constraints. There’s only one Internet. Once you can move from one to another, the growth you see today will look pretty stagnant. (more…)

Reader Martin Scheffler sends the news that free open-source peer-to-peer virtual world-making platform Croquet has just got a version 1.0 release for its SDK. Nice.

The kit provides developers with a flexible tool to create virtual spaces with built-in networked telephony and a “late-binding object-oriented” programming language that allows multiple users to jointly create, animate or modify 3-D objects and dynamic simulations. Developers can also import and share resources, such as 2-D web applications or multimedia content, from their own systems. Working together across multiple locations, they can change simulations while they are running and work together to create new applications — all in real time.

3pointD would love to hear about any work being done in Croquet. Feel free to send updates to themetaverse [at] gmail [dot] com.

The L Word build in the virtual world of Second Life (created by the Electric Sheep Company, sponsors of this blog) has apparently generated quite a following, and is reportedly one of the more successful corporate VW communities in Second Life. Now an interesting thing has happened: Fatty Cardiff, one of the earliest L Word in SL members, has put up a MySpace page for her avatar (including an amusing rap song about the place). According to Electric Sheep Chris Carella, Fatty has been in The L Word in SL from its first or second day, and was founder of the Lesbian Mafia group [UPDATE: see below for a correction], a very large and active user-created group in SL. Fatty is not the first avatar to have a Web-based social networking page, of course, but I love that the in-world L Word community (three times fast) is pushing itself onto the Web in this way. If nothing else, it speaks to the fact that Second Life users want more powerful tools of social networking and self-expression than SL can currently provide. Worlds like Kaneva, Metaversum and Sony’s PS3 home may go further, but based on how those have been described, I’d bet we won’t really be happy until there’s a really deep integration between 3D virtual worlds and some of the social networking services that already exist on the Web, like MySpace and Flickr, to name only two.

Also interesting to note: My discovery chain for this story consisted of a single Twitter update. Nice. (more…)

Virtual Worlds 2007, the new conference that kicks off tomorrow here in New York, has sold out, according to its organizers. Way to go. They’ve also set October 10-11 as the dates for Virtual Worlds Fall (perhaps unfortunately named?), to take place at the San Jose Convention Center out in California. I’m on a panel on the future of virtual worlds on Thursday morning, and I’m looking forward to most of the panels, actually, as the conference seems a cut above the usual fare. If you’re in town, do get in touch, as there should be plenty of hanging out time Thursday evening, and the metaverse meetup Friday night. See you there.

As Jerry notes, Negin and Kimmy’s latest Nerd of the Week has been posted, this one examining the Second Life Nerd in detail, based on interviews conducted at our latest metaverse meetup with all your favorite Second Lifers. (The interviews are actually interesting, FYI.) If you haven’t seen Nerd of the Week, check it out immediately. Negin and Kimmy turn out to be excellent filmmakers, and their short NOTW episodes are definitely worth your while. And if you’re interested in the metaverse meetups themselves, there’s one happening this Friday in Manhattan, open to all. Read more details here. [UPDATE: Added Revver link so Negin and Kimmy can make some coin from this.]

After I saw the I-D Media team in Berlin, I met up with Jeremy Snyder of the Berlin-based Metaversum, which I learned is currently working on a virtual world that will feature Web 2.0 integration that sounds along the lines of what’s being done in Kaneva, though perhaps with some extra features. Metaversum’s world has been in development since July of last year, and currently has about 40 people working on it, Jeremy says. (There’s also a hiring notice on their site.) First, though, the company is building out the social networking piece of things, a service known as Yumondo. This is described as “a Web 2.0 platform that will integrate with the world,” and will feature social networking, photo sharing, collaborative event planning and perhaps some other features that have yet to be decided. Look for that in April or May, with any luck. The world itself will be coming “later this year,” and will integrate with the Yumondo platform. The world will feature user-generated content, but it doesn’t sound like it will be quite as free and flexible as that found in Second Life. (Perhaps more like Sony’s PS3 home service? Remains to be seen.) However, it looks like importing of 3D models may be supported, which would be a nice feature. (more…)

Gideon May, Birgit Frenzel and Dirk Lusebrink (l to r) of I-D Media, the team behind Lifecrawler

Faithful readers may recall the Lifecrawler service I blogged about a couple of weeks ago, which looked like it would give users the chance to put a streaming Second Life window on their Web page. I had the opportunity to meet up with the team behind it while I was in Berlin, and learned a bit more about what’s planned for the service and the company behind it while we hung out surrounded by techie hipsters at the Sankt Oberholz on the edge of Prenzlauerberg. Lifecrawler is the project of a small R&D team within German marketing agency I-D Media who’ve been given more or less free rein to start pushing into the virtual world of Second Life. Though they’re just starting out in the virtual services space, I-D Media plans to leverage the company’s 20-year track record in marketing to bring new and existing clients into the virtual world. Besides the streaming service, the team is also designing a metrics package that will be offered to clients. (more…)

The Virtual Holland being set up by Dutch bankers ING in the virtual world of Second Life is beginning to take shape. It’s just over a month since I blogged the launch, and several recent blog posts are now giving us a peek into what’s going on there. Aleister Kronos (from whom I’ve stolen the pic above) has a bunch of images and a link to a list of resident ventures that have been chosen to populate the area. ING is taking a similar approach to Pontiac’s Motorati project in SL: choosing from among submitted resident projects that aren’t necessarily related directly to ING itself. Nice. (Motorati is one of my favorite corporate projects.) There’s a bit more info at Shaping Thoughts, which is written by an employee of an ING subsidiary, and Scott Weisbord (aka SL’s Theodore Raymond) at Experience Planner has some more images. [Shaping Thoughts also lists some possible ING partners in the project, and has an interesting architectural comparison of ING’s real and virtual builds.]

Areae, the start-up virtual world-maker run by veteran MMO developer Raph Koster, is looking for a “senior 3D client engineer” to “lead the development of a cross-platform 3D client” that’s currently planning to use open-source graphics engine OGRE. There had been some doubt as to how 3D Areae was going to be; would it be 2D, isometric 2-1/2 D, 3D, or some combination of those dimensions? Seems Raph wants to go all the way with it, or with some component of it, and hopes to go with OGRE — though according to a post on the OGRE forums, much will depend on finding the right lead dev: “Honestly, we aren’t sure that’s our final solution or not - it’s likely highly dependent on the person we hire. If the perfect person comes along and they have deeper experience with a different engine and want us to switch, we will.” One interesting thing to note about the Help Wanted posting: candidates are invited to “help develop the next generation of online gaming.” I’m not sure if that’s a reference to the fact that Raph sees Areae as primarily a game world (or series of game worlds), or whether it means something else entirely. Interesting that he’s not characterizing it as a non-game world, though. Raph has talked in the past about the fact that social worlds need game-like orientations to them, which is my bet for Areae. That would imply less game and more world, though. Change of course, or just semantic hair-splitting from the 3pointD office of virtual Kremlinology? [Thanks to cw for sending that news!]

The non-profit EnviroLink Network has just launched a cool build that puts geolocated Google Earth-type feeds onto a replica globe in the virtual world of Second Life. Josh Knauer of the EnviroLink blog just sent over the news, and I couldn’t resist blogging it on the spot. The »GeoGlobe in SL« captures KML, GeoRSS and RSS feeds and displays them as miniature SL primitives at the correct location. Zoom in on a prim and you can read the headline and click through to the Web page it’s associated with. (more…)

• Gabbly “chat about any content on the web” - 3pointD
  chat while reading 3pointdizzle
  (tags: chat 3pointd ajax)
• AttentionTrust.org
  downloading now…
  (tags: advertising browser business culture data history identity interent marketing media net personal politics privacy web2.0)
• atten.TV
  um, also downloading now…
  (tags: economy entertainmet social tv web2.0)

• getluky.net » Understanding Avatars, Part 3: Samples
  avatars in the social media space
  (tags: avatar game internet web2.0 identity)

The presentation I gave in Berlin on Thursday was ostensibly on “virtual worlds, media and identity,” but as I’ve been going over it I’m finding it’s extending itself into a small picture of what the next generation of virtual worlds might look like and how we might get there. A lot of it was stuff that’s probably pretty basic to 3pointD readers, but it might be worth going over anyway. And since it marked my first PowerPoint presentation (and hopefully my last), I can even paste in some slides below. (If you want the full set, send me an email.)

I started out by comparing what can be conveyed via traditional communications media, or rather, what tools are at our disposal when we work in various media. In SMS text messaging, of course, we’re very limited in how we communicate (despite the fact that a lot can be communicated via SMS). In instant messaging, we have a little more leeway, and in email yet more. Voice adds a great deal of breadth to the channel, video conferencing expands it further, and of course the broadest channel through we communicate is face to face, since we have access to facial expressions, gestures, proximity and other “messages” at a higher “resolution” than in any of the other media in the chart. I actually thought this would be pretty unremarkable to most people, but more than a few audience members were quite excited to see things arranged like this — which means I’m going to stick with my habit of pointing out the presumably obvious; sorry, guys. (more…)

If you’re reading this, you probably know that I gave a presentation on Friday to the Art Directors Club of Germany here in Berlin. I had written my comments into a long post that also included these more general thoughts on culture and the metaverse, but realized there was too much for any sane person to make it through to the end, so I’ve split them up into two. First, the cultural metaverse of Berlin. Coming soon: Some idle thoughts on next-gen virtual worlds.

The day-long conference I spoke at actually turned out to be quite interesting, featuring not only creative professionals from branding, marketing and advertising, but architects and event planners as well, including Ric Birch, who has been organizing the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games since around 1984. I’ll go over some of what was said below, but first, to explain the pic: The event was held at a very nice new arts center here known as RadialSystem V, where in the evening I had the chance to attend a performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in which the chamber orchestra of about 14 pieces had also been choreographed as dancers. One non-musician dancer was also on stage, doing things like sprinkling solo violinist Midori Seiler with snowflakes and autumn foliage when he wasn’t running around in his tighty whities. The musicians mostly walked or sometimes ran around the stage, and though I’m usually not a fan of avant-garde treatments like this, the effect was actually quite captivating, and worked exceedingly well, and a lot of the choreography of the solo dancer was very Beckett-like. The whole thing was conceived by the formidable Sasha Waltz. The space at RadialSystem is very impressive to begin with, being a modern structure built into the remains of an old warehouse or factory building that sits right along the former Berlin Wall on the edge of a canal. The audience loved show, giving the performers something like six or seven curtain calls. (more…)

SecondCast #55 is on the air! Johnny, Lordfly and Torrid are joined by TheDiva Rockin, co-hostess of The-Broad-Cast.com, favorite podcast of oversexed metaversal Jersey girls everywhere, to chat about Twitter, the Second Life Relay For Life, and the international podcasting effort to Bum Rush the Charts, which is going on all day today. This is a coordinated effort by podcasters and listeners to drive a podcast artist to the #1 position in the iTune store “as a demonstration of our reach to Main Street and our purchasing power to Wall Street.” Go buy the song right now — you want to try to buy it while it’s still March 22. [If that link doesn’t work, try this one.] Or if you need more convincing, read on. (more…)

Eduardo Manchon of Panoramio, the very cool geophotography site (another coinage?), sends news that Panoramio recently saw the one-millionth geolocated photo uploaded to the service. [Also reported in Ogle Earth.] What’s so cool about that, besides the fact that it’s a damn big number even for a service that started in October 2005? Well, if you were reading 3pointD last December, you already know that Panoramio, then “still a small site,” according to Eduardo, has been a default layer in Google Earth for the last three months. That means that if you upload a geolocated photo to Panoramio, it will appear on everyone’s Google Earth if they have the Panoramio layer turned on (which it is by default). The question then is, why geotag your photos on Flickr when you can just have them stuck right into Google Earth? (more…)

Scarlett Johansson line on sale in Second Life

Justin Bovington of Rivers Run Red sends word that his company is working with Adidas Reebok to bring Reebok’s Scarlett Johansson clothing line to the virtual world of Second Life. The sporty Scarlett <3s Rbk line (featuring a more stylized heart, to be sure) was designed in concert with the actress, and it sounds like selections are already available in SL's »Reebok« region. “More content will be introduced frequently,” Justin says.

What’s interesting about this to me is the level of sustained commitment it shows on the part of Reebok, which has been kicking around in Second Life since last August. The company apparently feels its Second Life experience has been enough of a success in its first six months to continue its involvement. Is there a strong community growing around the Adidas and Reebok brands in Second Life? No idea. But it seems the company feels there is at least the potential, which is a nice vote of confidence on their part, and another indication that it is not just the geekcore that sees a powerful many-to-many media platform emerging from virtual worlds.

I’ll be blogging as usual for the next few days, but I’ll be doing it from Berlin, where I’m headed this evening to spread the gospel of 3pointD in the form of a talk on virtual worlds I’m to give to a room full of advertising execs, creative directors and other marketing men and women. (Justin Bovington of Rivers Run Red will be there too, it looks like.) Berlin, of course, has some cool metaversal stuff going on lately, and I’m hoping to make contact with some of the people who are hooking it up. If you’re in Berlin and you want to get a coffee or a drink, drop me a line at themetaverse [at] gmail [dot] com, or SMS me on +1-917-749-6185. (I probably won’t have Twitter going on my mobile, just to save on international charges, which are stiff.) I’ve always wanted to go to Berlin, which first capitivated me something like 20 years ago in the form of a book by the artist Jorg Immendorf (on which the sculpture above is based), accompanied by a remarkable poem by the artist and printmaker A.R. Penck. And to my surprise I’ve just found that you can read the entire book online! It doesn’t have anything to do with 3pointD, of course, but it’s one of my favorite books, so I highly recommend it. See you in Berlin.

This flew by me in the run-up to SXSW, but Matt Mihaly caught it: it’s a new brainwave-based controller intended for use in developing computer games, from a company called Emotiv Systems. What’s interesting about this, and what seems to differentiate it from similar systems that have shown up on 3pointD in the past (but which I can’t find at the moment), is that it apparently tracks three discrete areas of brain activity: facial expressions, emotional states, and conscious thoughts. As Matt notes, it remains to be seen how effective this will be, but it’s an exciting prospect. Looking forward to seeing what comes of it.

The nose knows nothing in virtual worlds, but that hasn’t stopped Calvin Klein from launching a virtual version of their new ck IN2U fragrances for men and women in Second Life, according to a press release. The virtual launch accompanies the real-world launch of the same scents today, March 21. Since avatars can’t smell, the virtual perfume bottles will enable SL users to spray each other with bubbles that “initiate dialogue,” as the release puts it — probably requesting the sprayee to engage in a Calvin Klein animation. There will also be “graffiti bottles” available from the Calvin Klein build, put together by Justin Bovington’s Rivers Run Red on their Avalon island in Second Life, where Calvin Klein is holding a L$1 million photography contest to accompany the launch. Finally, if you’re in the UK you’ll be able to click through to a Web site and order a free sample. (more…)

NASA, the U.S. space agency, is getting ready to launch its own exploration into virtual space. NASA’s Learning Technologies arm has issued an intramural call for proposal ideas [UPDATE: now postponed, oddly] for the development of a massively multiplayer online game that is intended to be “the front-end of a larger synthetic environment.” The program is funded to the tune of $1 million a year for fiscal years 2007, 2008 and 2009. [UPDATE: I’ve changed the headline from “earmarks” to “budgets” per Daniel Laughlin’s comment below.] While the call for proposals is internal only, “Each proposing team must include a partner with commercial-quality game development experience. It is expected that this requirement will necessitate partnering with external organizations and that the majority of funding will be used for game development.” [Emphasis added. And thanks to Troy McLuhan of the International Spaceflight Museum in Second Life for sending over the news.]

While the Web page doesn’t say so specifically, NASA is apparently compiling its own list of potential outside developers for the project, and Daniel Laughlin, the contact for the project, is also looking at Second Life as a possible platform. For more information, you can download a PDF of the 16-page CFP. It describes the MMO as an educational project “with the primary goal of engaging young people in NASA’s mission. It also mentions that several projects will be taken on in the first year, and then a single project will be chosen from among those to receive the balance of the funding. So whether you’re an SL developer, a Multiverse world-maker or some other kind of MMOist, strap on your oxygen tanks, and email your space credentials to Daniel.D.Laughlin [at] nasa [dot] gov. Zero-gravity virtual world here we come! What a fantastic project. I love when I get to use the “space” tag on 3pointD. Go, NASA!

Once again, it’s time for another Metaverse Meetup, the more-or-less monthly real-world rendezvous we’ve been putting on in New York for anyone interested in the emerging set of technologies we call the metaverse (and for a few people who didn’t know they were interested but who we’ve press-ganged into attending as well), arranged by Jerry Paffendorf. This one, being held Friday, March 30, comes hot on the heels of the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference, where Jerry and I and a mess of other virtual world luminaries, pundits and devs will be speaking. The location hasn’t quite been pinned down yet, but if possible we’ll hold it at Lit, which is described by the Village Voice as a “cozy den of iniquity on Second Avenue and East 5th Street.” Sounds good to me. The last one was good fun, and these are only growing, plus, a lot of interesting people will be in town for the conference. Not to be missed.

Three services we brought you recently that mash up the virtual world of Second Life and the (also virtual, in its way) World Wide Web, have had new versions released in the last few days. Sloog, TwitterBox, and SLateIt, (originally blogged here, here, and here), are three instances of one of my favorite things: they’re real 3pointD apps that make the 3D world of SL interoperable (to a small extent) with the 2D world of the Web, and in a social, Web 2.0 way. Their initial release was very rough and beta, but now all three have new versions out that have made them easier to use and/or increased their functionality. Excellent news. Full descriptions below. (more…)