Lifecrawler Brings Your Second Life to the Web
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.
The streaming window resembles DTV (formerly Destroy Television), a unique avatar created by the Electric Sheep Company’s experimental workshop, Sheep Labs, which streams SL to the Web and from time to time is available for anyone looking at the Web site to control or enter chat lines which are then chatted by the avatar in-world. (The Sheep, as usual, are sponsors of this blog.) While Lifecrawler doesn’t appear to offer that same interactivity, what it does is offer the streaming function as a service. The dates on the Web site are wrong, but the time in the SL window is correct, which leads me to believe that it’s a live feed, not a recording. Amusingly, the avatar on the other end of the feed was logged off for inactivity while I was watching the page (see above), more good evidence that this was live, since who would include something like that in an advertisement for their service?
I like the idea of Lifecrawler a lot, though it remains to be seen (a) what the service will cost, and (b) how the people behind it (who appear to be German design firm I-D Media) will handle scaling. The metrics package, if that’s any good, could be a great boon to SL businesses and corporations with a virtual presence as well.
The Wish App this puts me in mind of, though, is a service that tracks what I’m doing, where I’m going, who I’m meeting, etc., in Second Life. Mark Barrett’s SLStats did something like this at one point, but Barrett backed off several features after residents got annoyed that they were being caught up in other people’s lifelogs. In any case, we look forward to seeing what kind of window Lifecrawler manages to provide into Second Life.
Feeds
If this is in fact a scalable Destroy-TV then this is huge and will allow push SL adoption by internal and external users. The race is now on for companies to provide SL-to-Web streaming services. This announcement may be as important as SL itself, as it is a multiplier of SL itself.
I agree with Alvis, there are some great possibilities with this technology. As a live musician in SL, I often have people that can’t log into SL to catch a gig and have to settle for the audiostream. Being able to send the “video” of the gig out to the web would be incredible.
When one combines this technology with the new audio features to shortly be in SL, there are some incredible things that could be done.
Thanks for posting about this!
Niko
Hi folks, you are so fast, picked us up before we even started. That is ok, because we didn’t want to stay in the dark, but now there were important things still missting. The stream is up an running, first things first we thought. It’s all live and we wanted to make sure you can see it. We haven’t disabled the autologout yet and we can’t be online 24 hours the day, sorry.
“There’s not a lot of text on the site,” yes, therefor we will put a FAQ online in the next 2 days. It should answer at least some of the questions and a little whitepaper describing the technical setup will come a little later when time permits.
The fast blogosphere response came so early, we even haven’t finished proper blog feed setup and subscription forms. The lifecrawler site is powered by the nice radiant CMS, but the feeds are just the default setup. When you subscribed to it, please don’t rely on it. Come back personally in a couple of days and check/subscribe again. And then, email subscriptions, for the first 20 hours the form was posting nowhere, also not into the logfiles(POST request data is never logged). When you were one of the early birds, your sign up might got lost, please consider trying it again. We wont loose it again this time, promised.
back to work for me now. We must put pricing plans and details product descriptions online this week. It won’t destroy national TV, but we will have a free plan also. One last question, is it any worth attending the http://www.virtualworlds2007.com/ later this month in new york? Its a little hard to judge from here, but at least new york is not that far away from berlin.
dirk