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Glitchy points out a short article in the new Business Week about Maple Story, the free side-scrolling MMOG from Korean company Nexon. Two things of interest here: the mag reports that North American players spent $1.6 million in February to buy 600,000 virtual products within MapleStory, so it’s looking like that kind of microtransaction as a revenue stream could work. Also note, however, that in Korea, KartRider, another hugely popular game from Nexon, is seeing concurrency rates that are half what they were two years ago. There’s no English version of KartRider at the moment (though one is coming), so I can’t tell you what that’s down to, but I’d wager it’s an indication Nexon hasn’t kept up with refreshing KartRider’s content as well as it might have. Considering that more and more such casual virtual worlds are soon to hit the market, the indication here is that while there’s certainly an American market for these new revenue models, there will be similar pitfalls to be aware of as well.

FlowPlay is an upcoming virtual world being developed by Derrick Morton, an alum of RealNetworks, which also produced Second Life founder Philip Rosedale. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a good piece on the new world from venture capital reporter John Cook. Pitched at older teenagers, FlowPlay plans to hook people by giving them casual games to play that will earn them virtual currency, much in the manner of Club Penguin. The service will launch this summer, according to the bare-bones FlowPlay Web site, after what sounds like a private alpha that opens in April, according to the article. Morton’s idea to hook members with games is similar to the ideas of Raph Koster, who often speaks about virtual worlds needing more engaging introductions (though little is known about just how his new Areae platform will work. Sounds like things are still in flux at FlowPlay, with decisions as to subscription fees yet to be made, but we look forward to seeing what develops. So add one to the growing list of virtual spaces. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out, and how all these places differentiate themselves. (A 3pointD aside: The only thing that will save most of these places from going bust is some kind of interoperable identity system. And even that might not be enough.)

I’m in the Austin airport on the way back from South by Southwest (my flight of course delayed by snow in New York [and actually, I’m home now]), and I just snapped this vaguely Sesame Street-like picture of the number 18. Not just any 18, though: It’s a Helvetica 18, brought to my attention by a fantastic documentary I saw as part of the SXSW film festival, titled simply Helvetica. The typeface celebrates the 50th anniversary of its design this year, but the film does much more than simply celebrate the typeface — which, if you glance around, you’ll realize has become the ubiquitous choice for “clean” design in the period since the second world war. What’s great about Helvetica (besides the fact that it’s beautifully shot) is that it does a terrific job of illustrating how design shapes our lives and who we are as human beings. And in a remarkably 3pointD twist, the film even winds up talking about Helvetica and design in the context of Web apps like MySpace and how those things contribute to who we are, which is the only reason I even dare blog about it here. (more…)

• PlayStation 3 to take on incurable diseases - Yahoo! News
  eat it, trauma center
  (tags: supercomputers diseases playstation games)

SLeek is a third-party client for the virtual world of Second Life built from the open-source client code released by Linden Lab in January built around code developed in the libSecondLife project. What’s special about it is that it’s a thin client, “useful for situations where you want to be in-world, but don’t want to have the huge overhead of the graphics engine.” I have no idea what this looks like, as I’m still in Austin on my Mac, but it sounds like you can do a small amount of communication and account management but not building, and possibly not more complex interactions with other avatars. I’m not clear from the project page whether rezzing objects in SLeek is possible or not. According to the site: “SLeek has the ability to send and receive chat, send and receive IMs, do people search, teleport, read inventory, write inventory (create and delete folders), follow avatars, and display LL’s web-based login page.” A few of us have been talking for some time about the need for a thin client for SL, and SLeek could be a nice first step in that direction. [UPDATE: Intolerable Ginsburg has posted some screenshots.] (more…)

Lifecrawler is a new service that looks like it will offer residents of the virtual world of Second Life the chance to stream their virtual activities to a Web site, among other things. There’s not a lot of text on the site, so it’s hard to tell exactly how the service will work, but it appears it will offer two components: a window you can drop on your Web site that will stream your SL activities to the Web, and a metrics system that will give you information about visitors to your SL plot of land and what they’ve been getting up to there. All you can do at the moment is sign up for email updates, but it looks like a very interesting service. (more…)

If you dig the suspensful thrills of novelist Dean Koontz, then log in to the virtual world of Second Life tonight at 6:00pm SL Time (9:00pm Eastern), for the premiere of Bantam Dell’s Authors in Second Life series (which we stumbled on last month). Koontz will read from his upcoming book, The Good Guy, then take questions from the audience. (Ask him about Odd Thomas, which sounds like it has more to do with the virtual.) Audience members will also have a chance to win a first edition of The Good Guy, which they’ll receive two weeks before it hits store shelves. (more…)

Marketing man and podcaster Greg Verdino reports that the virtual world of Kaneva, which 3pointD covered in detail recently, is about to go into open beta on Monday, March 19. Get your media ready, kids. Kaneva gives members an apartment where they can upload photos, videos and other content to share in a 3D social environment — as close to a 3D MySpace as I’ve seen. It’s a potentially powerful idea, the ability to be present in the same space with the people who are viewing your content, but it remains to be seen how it takes hold. Two pre-emptive feature requests: (1) At present, you need to upload your content to the Kaneva site, and then link it in the world. I’d love to see the interactive picture frames and televisions in Kaneva be able to pull content directly from Flickr or YouTube. (2) I’d also love to see that content become clickable, so that you could see a photo on an apartment wall and click through to the Web page where it’s taken from. Neither of those things is possible at the moment, but Kaneva hinted to me that something like this might be coming. We’ll see. It’s a very interesting place nonetheless. Feel free to send word of your impressions once you get in next week.

French electro-groovologists Air are bringing their new album, Pocket Symphony, to the virtual pocket world of Second Life, according to a press release. (This is cause for great rejoicing around the offices of 3pointD, where Air is in heavy rotation.) “On the occasion of the release of their fourth album, ‘Pocket Symphony’ [which came out last week], French band Air opens »a listening room in Second Life«. In this 3D rendering of the album’s visual art, you will be able to sample the 12 tracks of Air’s ‘Pocket Symphony’, watch the video of the album’s first single ‘Once Upon a Time’, as well as a short documentary about ‘Pocket Symphony’, get information about the upcoming Pocket Symphony European tour dates, access the band’s weblinks and subscribe to Air’s newsletter.” Sounds like a nice full-function fan site within Second Life. There have been major label projects like this in Second Life for almost a year, but there seems to have been a lull recently. Nice to see them coming back around, as this kind of social media sharing is one of the things a 3D virtual world is best at. I’m still in Texas, so I can’t check it out, but I urge our listeners to dial over to the »Air listening room« and start listening.

Qwaq, a company I blogged about last June, has been planning to “enable a rich ecosystem of interlinked Croquet spaces, that is as easy to navigate and extend as today’s Web.” News from the company yesterday flags its first product, Qwaq Forums, which offer customizable “virtual spaces for real work.” The spaces are built on the peer-to-peer open-source Croquet platform, which was demo’d to great effect last fall to a bunch of metaversal types, but which we haven’t heard much from since. It sounds like Qwaq is a custom build-out of a Croquet implementation, tweaked for the needs of a specific business. It would offer multi-user interactivity, and a persistent 3D work environment. And because of how Croquet handles external applications, it should be relatively easy to drag something like an Excel spreadsheet into a window in Qwaq, and then let anyone in the space edit it. (more…)

Will Wright gave the keynote talk at the Hilton Grand Ballroom on Tuesday, the last day of 2007’s South by Southwest Interactive.

Justin Hall introduces: Will Wright is a famous successful computer game designer. He created SimCity, which mapped birdseye urban planning into millions of minds. Working on a dollhouse for boys he created the Sims, which allowed all of us to manipulate suburban households. Billions of dollars of revenue, putting him in the highest echelons of entertainment. What does a guy like him do for a hobby? He runs the Stupid Fun Club in the East Bay. I visited the club, and the night I was there, there was a video shown of a robot laying on its side in theh street asking for help, and someone had taped the responses of passers-by to what was basically a homeless helpless robot. Then someone handed me a plastic visor and body suit, I put it on in the spirit of the evening, and suddenly this robot was rapid firing ping pong balls at me. I could see in the back of the room Will Wright behind the controls steering and watching and I think wondering how long I would stand there. This idea of experimentation and testing with things, he’s made it possible for all of us to experiment with the systems around us. Now Will Wright is building a simulation of the universe. Wow.

Will Wright (one arm in a sling): All those pictures you just saw [projected on screens before the talk] are from the Hubble. I broke my arm skiing, before you ask. I had way too much coffee today, so I’ll go fast. They asked me to speak here, I decided I’d come and talk about story. Then a week ago I read that I would be demoing Spore, so I’m mashing the two together. (more…)

Venture capitalist and World of Warcraft addict Joi Ito and lifelogger Justin Hall sat down for a conversation together in Room 9C on Monday afternoon at South by Southwest. Ben Cerveny joined them midway. Title of the talk: Online Games: Beyond Play and Fantasy.

Ito: I know everyone says this, but we’re going to try to make this as interactive as possible. Justin and I are going to talk about online games and what we can learn from them and things like that. I play World of Warcraft and mess around in Second Life, I think it’s stupid to compare them, it’s like apples and oranges. If you played text MUDs you know MOOs and MUDs split at some point. People who were into furries tended to go toward one, people who went toward the other focused more on gamplay and quests and levels. But it is interesting to compare in terms of what you can learn from them.

I play my WoW videos inside of SL and plan WoW raids in SL. SL is more for simulation for me, I do lots of ritual there, talks and things like that. It’s really not where I build relationships, although different people do that.

Shows a slide of WoW UI. Think all the way back to LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis was saying the whole Internet will eventually be MUDs or MOOs. You can think of WoW as an evolutionary point in interface design. You can think of this as an interface to everything on the Web. You can make add-ons, there’s the Lua language for scripting that you can do. Shows his own more complex HUD with lots of add-ons. Most of the screen is in 2D. There’s all kinds of sophisticated stuff. Sometimes the 3D world is really important, but when I’m engaged in a boss fight it’s like a pilot looking at instruments rather than at terrain. A Lot of the innovation happens in the user community. (more…)

It’s Sunday at 5:00pm in Austin and I’m at the panel: On the Edge of Independent User-Creation in Gamespace

Moderator: Jerry Paffendorf of the Electric Sheep Company
Panelists:
John Bacus of Google
Futurist Jamais Cascio of Open the Future
Raph Koster of Areae

Paffendorf: Imagine being pumped up right now. Welcome. What I work on: My profession is being a futurist in the video gaming and virtual world space. I survey and think ahead about what’s happening with various simulations. I’m actually on staff, which is a nice position, with Electric Sheep Company, about a year old start-up that builds 3D content, experiences and software for virtual worlds that allow users to create content. We work primarily in Second Life. Invites audience to take stage to fill a fourth position on the panel.

In our business, I have a lot of freedom to lead and create public conversations. I define what’s happening in that space as the metaverse, which I do borrow from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Last year I helped to start a research project with the Acceleration Studies Foundation called the Metaverse Roadmap: What is happening between video games, virtual worlds, gemapping and the web? We kind of came up with a definition: 4 components: Virtual worlds. Mirror Worlds. Augmented reality technolgoies bringing virtual activity to physical locations. Lifelogging, having a persistent identity in various sites and things you do, turning yourself into an avatar.

What happens when video games and gamespaces become more like the Web, in that anyone can create their own spaces and games, then connect to those with avatar identity, then we have the real practical immersive virtual world of communities online. (more…)

Overheard at the panel on Avatar-based marketing: “It’s fun, you can sit down, make out with people.” I got most of this panel, including a couple of the audience questions.

Moderator, Tony Walsh of the Clickable Culture blog
Panelists:
Paul Hemp, senior editor Harvard Business Review
Linda Zimmer, CEO of MarCom:Interactive
Eric Gruber of MTV, helped launch Virtual Laguna Beach and vHills
Lauren Wheeler of Three Rings

Hemp posed a question: How does a marketing message aimed at a consumer get refracted when it passes through the intermediary of that user’s avatar? Does the avatar act as a prism that changes in some way a real-world marketer’s messge. While a little conceptual, the question is pretty important. Some would say it’s really a meaningless question because the user behind the avatar has the real-world wallet. What’s the avatar have to do with it? My thought is that the avatar represents something about that consumer that is important. Advertising has always targetted consumers’ alter egos, the smiling happy terrifically popular person just waiting to emerge from the consumer’s psyhce with the help of the consoumnres’s product. Here the marketer doesn’t have to hunt for that, it’s on display in the form of the avatar, and can be segmented, terageted, and help understand the consumer behind it. (more…)

Dan Catt’s mapping panel was a very cool session that was difficult to synthesize at the speed it went by, but I think I got most of what the panelists said. All very 3pointD.

Moderator: Rev. Dan Catt, from Geobloggers.com and Flickr
Panelists:
Tom Carden from Random Etc.
Aaron Straup Cope from Flickr
Jerry Paffendorf from the Electric Sheep Company
Ian White from Urban Mapping Inc.

Catt first asked everyone without laptops to stand up and shake their hands in front of them in order to wake up, then groan quietly like a zombie, then louder than the person next to you. Two questions before you sit down: Who objects to swearing, say boo. Those who don’t object to swearing, say Fuck Yeah. (You can imagine which was louder.)

Cope talked about how we tell where things are. Shows a quote from Douglas Coupland’s Shampoo Planet. “History and geography are being thrown away.” Cope: This is wrong.

Cope: Geography helps set the stage for an experience, history gives an experience context and nuance. We have theselocation devices that tell you where things are. I could care less where the nearest Starbucks is. I don’r eally care about driving directions either. But if I’m at a place, I would love to be able to see what came before and have a sense of its history. (more…)

I looked in at the Games + Entertainment Brands panel for a few minutes before I started feeling too rumpled and had to duck out. Here’s what I heard while I was there (some of it was even interesting):

Moderator: Robert Nashak of Yahoo! Games
Panelists:
Charles Merrin, VP NA Games at RealNetworks
Brian Ring, GM Interactive Content at Scope Sevem
Chris Charla, director of business development at Foundation 9 Network

As I arrived, Nashak was mentioning the importance of user-created content in building a brand around a game. Merrin, on the other hand, warned that brands were often wary of user-created content out of fear that it would hurt the image of the brand, and that this would be true for some time.

Charla talked about procedural safeguards. Sony has apparently done a lot of work on their new PS3 home service toward preventing untoward uses of user-generated content. Their Little Big World platform [which introduces something Sony seems to be calling “user-definable gaming”] allows users to create and upload levels, and to vote on other people’s levels. “Butit’s difficult to get swear words in there,” Charla said.

Ring related an experience he’d had recently when moderating a panel with someone from Whyville, who have spent years creating sophisticated technology, including nine proprietary algorithms, to filter all the chat sessions that run through the service.

Nashak: “Whyville is one of my favorite things. It’s basically a tween site for girls pretty much, and for the first time they seeded a product into the world, a Toyota car. It was the first time you could have a car in Whyville. Whyville counted on the nag factor, that girls would talk about it so much that parents would want to buy one for themselves.” He didn’t know whether the initiative had been a success.

Ring also mentioned virtual worlds like Second Life. “What we’re seeing is a lot of these things calling themselves ’social games.’ That’s where I see a big thing happening. That’s where user-generated content has a big role to play.”

Merrin also spoke about Second Life. “It’s incredible what this tapestry allows you to do. It’s almost the brand within the user-generated content, rather than the other way around.”

Nashak: “What you’re going to start seeing is brands taking very seriously that their passionate users want to co-create the brand with them.” He advised brands to “think about creating engines for people to express themselves around brands,” and mentioned Bix.com, a Yahoo! property where users do things like create content for each other. “It’s infinitely scalable because users are creating it, you don’t have to keep feeding in content.”

I came into the panel New Dogs, New Tricks: New Media Goes to the Movies just slightly late, but caught most of it. It looked largely at marketing and promoting films in the new media environment, but didn’t seem to go very far past current services like YouTube and several recent launches represented by the panelists. The MTV rep, however, did venture into the land of new modes of storytelling that new media might make possible.

Moderator: Scott Kirsner from Variety
Panelists:
Rick DeVos from Spout.com:
David Gale of MTV New Media
Scilla Andreen of IndieFlix
Seth Nagel of iKlipz

When I came in, Kirsner was asking about who the new power players would be in the new media space, where long-form downloadable content was concerned.

Rick DeVos from Spout.com didn’t see any big new players in long-form downloadable content. Rick believes in the power of social recommendation and word of mouth to hook up niche filmmakres with niche audiences, which is what Spout is trying to do.

David Gale talked about what he looked at at MTV, which covers everything “from short films to a gaming mechanism. MTV launched the Daily Rage this week, wher the audience can win money in a gamelike mechanism.” They also bought a company recently that takes comic books and graphic novels and turns them into cool new media versions. “There’s a whole opportunity to take what’s been traditional media and turn it into new media. It really opens up another way of telling stories. Film is still its traditional media thing [in terms of MTV’s business]. My division is about taking anything that is not film- or televison-originated and looking at the platform and how you can create things in those mediums.” (more…)

First Screenburn panel, first transcript: Terraforming the Internet, When 3D Models Meet Business Models kicked off at 10:00am Central Time here in Austin, and I got pretty much all of it for your reading pleasuere (thought I ducked out as the audience questions were starting in order to try to find some Internets that actually worked.

Moderator: IBM’s John Tolva
Panelists:
Jan D’Allesandro from Meez.com
Eric Rice, Slackstreet Studios
Bill Victor of Halcyon Worlds
Ben Batstone-Cunningham, of Alt-Zoom Studios, who formerly worked for Linden Lab, makers of Second Life

Tolva opened with a question about whether 3D virtual worlds were the next Internet (i.e., a replacement of it), or an appendage to the page-based Internet.

Rice: I don’t believe the page model is going to die. While [virtual worlds are] not by definition purely gaming, it’s certainly in a space where there’s this sense of presence [as in gaming]. It’s like watching a funny movie by yourself or watching it with someone else. The energy of people around you affects your experience. I think it’s another path, but I don’t think it’s a replacement.

Tolva responded that there are page-based communities that represent collaborative space, though that space is not physicalized. What differentiates There.com and Second Life from very social spaces like MySpace.

Rice: It’s that live presence, spatialized, where you can see reactions. (more…)

Well, the Electric Sheep Company’s Jerry Paffendorf starts off his South by Southwest with this years First Geeksleeper of the Year award, for having the presence of mind to snap the shot at left, which shows fellow Sheep Meg McGrath dozing off while the rest of the crew partied on around her. If you’re not familiar with the grand tradition of the geeksleep (as if anyone could have missed this cultural imperative that has swept the nation over the last 12 months), dial on back to geeksleep #1, which was taken by me at last year’s SXSW. What is geeksleeping, I hear you ask? According to the description I posted on Flickr back then, it’s the following:

Geeksleep: (noun) 1. the act of sleeping during a technology conference or while involved in any geek-like activity. 2. sleep performed by anyone who could be described as a geek. (verb) 1. to capture a geeksleeper on camera and post his/her picture to Flickr with the “geeksleep” tag.

Seems Jerry’s new geeksleep hasn’t had a chance to make it into the Geeksleep stream yet, but no matter. Congratulations are due, and you can give them personally if you wander over to the Electric Sheep booth in the Screenburn arcade. Meanwhile, get your geeksleep on. Shouldn’t be hard for the assembled to get at least one more of these a day up on Flickr for the rest of the week. If not, it means you’re not partying hard enough in the evenings.

An anoymous reader just sent me a link to this YouTube video of a replica, built in the virtual world of Second Life, of Apple’s glass cube store on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Keep in mind there were earlier reports of an Apple store in Second Life, but those didn’t show anything half as elaborate as the build on display in the video, which also features fairly high production values for machinima. I’m in Austin at SXSW and can’t get into Second Life very well on this laptop in this hotel, so I can’t go check out what’s at the old location, and there’s no location given for the store in the video. However, the video does end with production credits, and they don’t give any indication of whether or not Apple is actually involved. The video is credited to metaverse services firm AxisVR LLC, which advertises a number of interesting services but doesn’t provide a client list. (I’ve never heard of them before, but that doesn’t mean much.) 3pointD wagers that the new Apple store, which looks very well built out in the video, might have been built out by Apple employees, but hasn’t been approved by Apple’s legal beagles. That or it’s AxisVR spending a lot of time and effort to angle for a highly unlikely contract from Apple. We wonder whether the SL store will be manned 24 hours a day, as the New York location is.

This flew by me as I was getting ready for SXSW, but MTV, which has been roaring ahead with its virtual-world initiative, has announced it will launch a fashion line based on designs by Lauren Conrad, star of Laguna Beach spinoff The Hills. The designs will be made available first in the the Virtual Hills section of Virtual Laguna Beach. “In addition,” according to a press release, “Lauren will develop a real-world fashion line that will be available in high-end boutiques, retail stores and online later this fall.” (more…)

RatePoint, which provides a way for users to rate, share, discuss and connect based on how they rate sites on the Web, will launch a new avatar ratings service for the virtual world of Second Life on Monday, according to a press release. I’ve been talking to the RatePoint crew over the last week or so, and the service seems pretty cool (note that RatePoint is an advertiser on 3pointD at the moment, so take that as you will). I especially like the fact that RatePoint will try to match people with other users who’ve rated avatars similarly — more or less like Last.fm builds a constellation of “neighbors” for you based on similar musical tastes. The question for RatePoint’s Second Life service, though, is how much uptake it will actually see in practice. Ratings systems have been a controversial thing in Second Life, and there hasn’t yet been one that’s been wildly successful. Can RatePoint break the mold? (more…)

I hadn’t realized how heavy a presence 3pointD’s sponsors, the Electric Sheep Company, would have at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference until I read Jerry’s post yesterday describing what they’re doing here. For one thing, they’re going to stream the Screenburn conference-within-a-conference on games and virtual worlds, at which both Jerry and myself are moderating panels, into the virtual world of Second Life. That’s nice stuff for anyone unable to attend, since it’s (relatively) easy to grab a free Second Life account, teleport over to »Sheep Island«, and watch the fun. The Sheep will also have a booth at the Screenburn expo on Saturday and Sunday, where Adam Pasick, the Second Life correspondent for Reuters (a Sheep client) will be conducting some interviews. Check it out.

• Wonderland: Phil Harrison’s Keynote
  Alice took good notes @ Sony’s annoucement of Home
  (tags: sony virtual home games gdc)
• Connections (TV series) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  i would like to see this show.
  (tags: culture documentary tlc)

I’m scurrying around this morning getting what ducks I can in a row before leaving for a 1:35pm JetBlue flight from JFK to Austin and South by Southwest. (I’m in seat 12B; say hi!) Might blog from the airport if I have time, but for now I just want to wave to anyone who’ll be there (or who won’t) and invite you to Twitter me if anything interesting is going on or you just want to meet up for a chat; I’d love to hear from you. As noted previously, I’m moderating a Screenburn panel on Monday at 11:30am on user-created content in online games and virtual worlds, featuring Raph Koster, Betsy Book, Corey Bridges and Reuben Steiger, so of course I’m hoping we get a good crowd for that — and bring your challenging questions. There are a couple of panels I want to check out, as well as Philip Torrone and Limor Fried’s keynote, which promises to be weird and wooly, if I know that pair. But mostly I think I’ll be wandering the halls, hoping to get a few good geeksleeps in, handing out my new Moo cards to anyone who wants one, and looking for interesting people to talk to and maybe even write about. John Swords and I may try to catch a couple of people and revive our short-lived podcast, the Metaverse Sessions, so let us know if you have anything interesting to talk about. Other than that? Who know. See you in Texas.

Okay, my need for a PlayStation 3 just got a lot more urgent. Before you do anything else, watch the trailer above, which just went up on GameTrailers.com after being shown at GDC. It shows a PS3 service from Sony called “home,” which is, yes, a free 3D online space where you’ll be able to customize your avatar and your own private home, hang out with other users there and in various common spaces, stream your media into your virtual pad (as in Kaneva), and chat via voice, emotes, short pre-loaded phrases or with a USB keyboard, as well as hook up with other people and follow them into PS3 games. In terms of pushing the metaverse out to the mainstream, this is pretty huge news. And it’s got a great look to it, too. Many thanks to reader Victor Piñeiro of pure west documentaries for sending along the link.

[UPDATE: Our spies at GDC have filed a few more details, which you can read after the jump.] (more…)

Regular readers know I’ve been making noise lately about an idea factory that would seek to leverage (sorry, Ordinal) the skills of anyone who cared to participate in an effort to create any or all of a list of wish apps that had also been created by the community. As previously noted, I had to miss last Saturday’s jawboning session on the topic, but Bill Ward and a couple of other people who were there have been kind enough to send me some notes about what was discussed (including a fantastic handwritten page, from which I’ve clipped the chart above, which you can view in its entirety on Flickr). I’m going to try to tie all those notes together here into a vision of a metaversal idea factory (which I’m still not convinced shouldn’t be called an idea farm — or insert your good idea for a name here), and will try to keep you posted as things develop. Keep in mind that this is my interpretation of the state of things; it seems a fairly complex undertaking, so I may have gotten a few details out of place. In any case, though, it’s a very cool project which I’d love to see take off. (more…)

I’m going to go ahead and call Sloog the best Web 2.0-style site for the virtual world of Second Life that I’ve seen yet. Sloog lets you tag locations in Second Life, storing them in the Sloog system so you can access them later on the Web. It’s a bit like del.icio.us tagging or Digg-ing virtual places, and it’s not a new function for SL users, but this is the best implementation of it I’ve seen yet. (more…)

According to a press release on the amBX site of UK consumer products company Philips (which features the virtual world of Second Life as the most prominent thing on its home page), Philips has licensed its amBX technology to metaverse services firm Rivers Run Red, which will “produce a dedicated amBX-enabled environment” for Second Life. What’s that? Read on. (more…)

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…)