Firefox Toolbar for Second Life Users? Legit?
Kitten Fluff has noticed a plugin for Firefox running on your Windows machine that gives you a Second Life-related browser toolbar. While the download page itself gives precious few clues as to why you’d want to use something like this, the toolbar seems to have a ZDNet download page that gives more information. The toolbar apparently comes pre-loaded with interfaces to a number of SL search sites and other SL-related resources. (Description after the jump.) That page only went up five days ago, but I haven’t heard anything about this tool before, which leads me to ask, Is this legit? The keylogging possibilities are too great to get me to download it without more information, which is hard to find — at least in English.
The description on the ZDNet site sounds useful, though:
The SL-US Toolbar is a Web directory toolbar especially for the virtual reality “Second Life” that features all the major Second Life search engines in just one Toolbar. You can search from any website location, without returning [to] a search engine to begin another search. The Toolbar includes also a lot of relevant newsfeeds, links to Second Life communities, tutorials, and ingame links.
If the English sounds broken here, that’s probably because it’s a translation of this page, which is in German. I’d love to know more about who’s behind this, since it sounds like a neat add-on for SL, but until I do I won’t be installing it. (I’m on a Mac 90 percent of the time anyway.) If anyone knows more than I do (which wouldn’t be too hard), feel free to get in touch.
Feeds
I’m on a Mac and I’m using Firefox…
I’ll let you know what I think!
Film at 11…
Well, I downloaded it, install was just as easy as any FF addon. The title is: “SL-Toolbar.EU” even though I asked for “SL-Toolbar.US”
I also tried it on my Windows XP box too, that one also says SL-Toolbar.EU
I did a few searches, and it appears for the most part to do as advertised. There are only 5 SL places to search such: SLX Second411, Second Life, SLQuery, SLDirectory. It also includes a dictionary, yahoo, and a few other places.
The “US” button is a blog headline reader for many of the SL blogs in the US (no mention of BeyondRed.com or 3pointd.com ).
The “Start” links take you to interesting web links, like SLUniverse, Second Live, Torley Lives (strangly, still no BeyondRed.com or 3pointd.com, we need to work on that).
The “Do” button has more links: tools - like Texture Maker; Open Sim and Open SL; Lib Secondlife and LSL Library; etc. (I’m glad BeyondRed.com nor 3pointd.com show up there - that would make us “t00ls”).
“Go” provides various newbie type SLurls, like my favorites: GNUbie store and Yadni’s; as well as various other links like “sandbox (didn’t go there) and Ivory Tower.
There was an “SL Chat” button - took me too a web chat tool. I was the only user, couldn’t say how it worked. I was a little freaked there, thought it might let me chat in SL. HA! Right.
There is a “Radio” tool on the winders version that looks like it would let me tune into some First Life places as well as SL places for audio pleasure, but I didn’t have the right pluggin and got lazy at this point. It looks like it might work. I was disappointed not to find SecondCast not listed.
All and all, I’m not sure if it is handy. It would be great for a newbie, maybe. I’d like to be able to change all the URLs and SLurls associated with it, then it might be handy to people other than newbies who don’t have thier SL URLs and SLurls in order.
My 2 cents.
-Gando Thurston
hi@all,
i’m the creator of the sl-toolbar. thnx for review. you can contact me via the menu next the sl-logo in the toolbar, an easy way for any comments to me ;)
-secondcast was listed in “US” (in future: “News”)
-now you can find 3pointd in “Start”, sorry ;)
-you can add podcasts or radio stations to the radio button
-in future you will find a forum for sl-toolbar-user to post their own ingame-links
the english version is very new (just 50 users) and in future you will find more useful links. the german version is also new but more popular (800 user).
@gando: if you know more sl search engines or essential links you miss feel free to contact me :)
life
www.sl-toolbar.eu
(you can download all versions via this domain)
Just curious: since the viewer has been open sourced, has anyone been working on a Firefox plugin to integrate an SL viewer? I picture it turning any tab into a framed SL viewer when you click on a SLUrl and teleport. Anything like that in the works?