Alex Barnett blog

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Virtual social software

I've heard a lot about Second Life, but I admit to being one of the uncool as I've not emersed myself in the virtual world to date.

The latest post by Jeff Barr has piqued my interest though:

"A bunch of people in the Second Life community have been interested in having what they call “HTML on a Prim.” The ubrowser has apparently been used to create a prototype of this feature but to date it has not emerged in a production release of the Second Life client."

In a nut shell, what Jeff has done is into integrate ubrowser into the Second Life environment. Now, *all* this does is allow thumbnails of webpages to render in the virtual world.  But, what Jeff has planned next sounds very interesting:

"So what’s next? I am planning to get some decent land and to start selling Text and Web prims sometime soon. I still need to figure out how to embed self-updating scripts in the objects, design real APIs, and all sorts of fun things."

If understand Jeff correctly, he wants to build a system that will to allow dynamic pages to be rendered as interactive sites, allowing virtual browsing / full user interaction with those sites inside the virtual world.

If this is what Jeff means (is this what you mean Jeff?) then the implications for the Second Life world are potentially profound (and if that's not what he meant, someone should do it). Random / crazy thoughts come to mind:

  • What if you could fully interact with sites and services in that kind of environment, an environment where there are others 'there' with you?
  • What kind of collaboration scenario opportunities would that present?
  • What new kinds of social software would emerge given that kind of context? Co-blogging? Co-tagging? Too easy...what else?
  • What kinds of APIs would be built to allow Second Life 'outsiders' to play and interact with those inside?

The mind boggles....

Posted: Sep 24 2006, 09:57 PM by admin | with 7 comment(s)
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Comments

Jeff Barr said:

Hi Alex,

Thanks for the kind words. At this point I don't know if I will be able to allow actual interaction with the underlying web site -- there are all sorts of very interesting session and state tracking issues to contend with, not to mention the fact that it would be really slow.

I will say that interacting with sites and services inside of Second Life is definitely a reality already. The Jnana Island allows an in-world Avatar to interact with an outside expert system.

As far as co-blogging, there is already at least one in-world blogging tool, a so-called HUD or heads-up-display.

Existing Second Life applications can make HTTP requests to outside servers and can process the results, although there's no XML parser.

There aren't any APIs that go the other way (outside apps calling into the Second Life world) but the folks at http://www.libsecondlife.org/ are reverse engineering the client to server protocol and I believe that it is just a matter of time before they can control the world from outside. This is being done with the knowledge and cooperation of Linden Lab, developers of Second Life.

# September 24, 2006 11:58 PM

Baba said:

Yes, we at libsecondlife are working very hard to make the most of what Linden Lab makes available(wittingly or not) to create a richer Second Life enviroment.  

We are aiming towards a totally independant and open source client.

# September 25, 2006 4:40 AM

Stewart said:

I'm not sure that adding more layers of complexity works, true collaberation exists best when both people share the same environment; however having said that i'd easily imagine amazon producing a space with assistants that could help u choose (real or AI who cares)....

# September 25, 2006 11:39 AM

Jeff Barr said:

Hi Stewart, if you are in Second Life find the Jnana island and take a look at their shopping tools. They use expert systems to help you find the most appropriate product. This would be a "virtual assistant."

# September 25, 2006 2:39 PM

Stewart said:

Thanks Jeff I'll have a look

# September 25, 2006 5:52 PM

admin said:

thanks for the pointers Jeff.

# September 26, 2006 12:26 AM

Dan Brickley said:

As a coder, the things I'd find most useful for building 'social' apps around SL are JSON and XML tools... eg. so I can consume RSS and FOAF docs, or SPARQL responses from database queries...

# November 6, 2006 5:44 PM