3pointD.com

Second Life resident Koz Farina, creator of the very popular BlogHUD tool for blogging from within SL, is developing a system to allow you to cross-post your BlogHUD posts to your account on Twitter, the hot new social site that lets you miniblog along with your friends. Koz is already feeding all BlogHUD posts to a Twitter BlogHUD page. This is just the latest entry into a growing pool of Twitter-to-SL mashups from people like Ordinal Malaprop and Kisa Naumova, among others. And in fact, there’s been a huge flowering of ancillary Twitter apps since the service launched last fall. Why? Because Twitter is incredibly compelling, for a number of reasons. One of the most important, in my opinion, is the almost complete lack of button-based features that Twitter offers to its users. (Although I’d love for someone to build the wish app described at the end of this post.) (more…)

I’ve been looking for an excuse to blog about my new set of Moo.com cards, and Adam Pasick (Reuters’ correspondent in the virtual world of Second Life) provides it: he reports that Moo.com — which makes mini business cards from your Flickr photos — is now offering cards made from screenshots uploaded directly from Second Life. According to Moo’s SL page, you can email your SL snapshots directly from within SL to secondlife[AT]moo.com, and then have Moo’s very cool business cards made from them. Nice. My cards (a few of which can be seen above) are made from the 3pointD pool on Flickr, since I upload all the images that appear on 3pointD to that pool (and because there are often images from outside SL on the blog). The great thing about Moo is that it automatically puts the photo title and a redirect URL on the back of the cards. Love it.

Welcome to Second Life: The Ahern welcome region in March 2004

Electric Sheep Chris Carella reminded me recently of this page full of screenshots taken three years ago, in March 2004, in the virtual world of Second Life, by SL resident Essence Lumin. [Chris found them on virtual architect Lordfly Digeridoo’s redesigned blog.] Essence recorded every one of the 108 sixteen-acre regions that then constituted the world, snapping each from the southeast corner of the sim. A great project that would be impossible today, given the thousands of sims that now make up SL. Instead of trying to duplicate it, I’ve gone and taken screens of half a dozen regions from approximately the same spot. You can check them out below (with historical screens borrowed from Essence), and see how much the world has changed since then. The Ahern welcome area, which appears in the top left of the screenshot above, you’ll have to see for yourself in-world. [Warning: There’s about a dozen screenshots after the jump.] (more…)