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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.

Sloog allows tagging of locations from within Second Life that can then be browsed or searched on the Web. What I like about Sloog is that it is designed (in both form and function) like any other Web 2.0 site. It’s a cut above most Web-based SL sites, it’s well streamlined and it seems to work. The new beta 2 version fixes a few bugs, introduces avatar-tagging functionality (which hasn’t yet extended itself to the Web), and adds RSS feeds, which is pretty exciting, since that means streams of SL places are going to start showing up on people’s blogs. Get the Sloog HUD »at Sloog HQ«.

TwitterBox is a Second Life client for the wonderful social messaging system Twitter, which lets SL users post and read Twitters from within the virtual world. The terrifically creative Ordinal Malaprop, who’s behind it, has added a really interesting customizable keyword function that allows you to automatically Twitter a TinyURL to the latest post in an RSS feed. Very nice. Get the TwitterBox »at Ordinal Enterprises« in Caledon.

SLateIt is a Digg-like system built by Babbage Linden that lets users tag objects within Second Life and rate them with either a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. SLateIt is still in early development, but it now has a Web page where you can see what’s been rated recently, or most popularly, though things are not quite at the level of Digg yet. It will be interesting to see how widely this catches on. While there’s a crying need for the ability to tag and rate objects within Second Life somehow, those objects also suffer from a particularly bad case of link rot. Get the SlateIt HUD »near Babbage’s kitchen« in Ambleside.

It’s pretty exciting to see these things emerge if only because Second Life exists in a near hopelessly searchable state. The native search function isn’t very good at finding things in any organized fashion, and there’s no way to embed metadata into objects or places in a way that’s easy to organize and/or grab with a search engine. If apps like these can spur users to create that metadata on the Web, Second Life may become a much more useful place to be.