Virtual worlds in your browser

You probably remember Google’s Lively. It was around for about a year and then Google shelved it. But did you know that they have been working on a browser-based 3D plugin for a while?

It’s called O3D and was posted here last April.

Now there are always things being worked on that never quite make it into day-to-day living, but today’s post on Chrome OS puts the virtual web-in-a-browser a bit closer to a reality.

What does this mean? Maybe websites will have virtual worlds within them?

Imagine amazon.com’s home page as a 3D store you can enter. Maybe go to an aisle of books on Second Life and see that other people are there and strike up a conversation about what books they like.

And what does this mean to things like Second Life? Who knows, there could be many outcomes.

Maybe Linden Lab stays closed off to the rest of the hypergridded world and turns into an AOL type debacle. Certainly with the new SL in a Box, the thought of them staying isolated seems to be the case.

Linden Lab is working on browser-based plugins, but how successful it will be is anyone’s guess.

OpenSim (like our latest venture into Reaction Grid) is built to hypergrid to many other grids. This certainly seems more like a model that all of us understand in regard to real business and the web as we know it today.

The iliveisl team is heavily vested in Second Life, both in money for sims and with our inventories. The money is one thing, and while a large investment, the issue of our inventories are the biggest obstacles for us entering open source grids built with OpenSim.

However, our desire to help business and eLearning has led us to our own OpenSim grid with Reaction Grid. The obstacle of leaving most of your inventory behind is simply outweighed by the possibilities of hypergridded OpenSim worlds.

The politics are much less, the focus sharper, the cost much less, the performance significantly better, and the options seem to be what we had hoped Second Life would have been.

We have three years in Second Life and fortunately all our skills are 100% transferable to an OpenSim grid.

Things change. Second Life has changed. Viable alternatives are appearing.

Google’s O3D may be one of those turning points like Flash was in 1999.

Click to see the video demo on YouTube

reposted from the iliveisl blog

Overreacting Beaver

Wow, talk about service! Reaction Grid has set up our first four sims in a matter of hours. And my big thrill? I can change sim names for free!

A brave new world for this little beaver!

Stay tuned as we discover what we can do (we really only know the Second Life paradigm but are eager to learn and make huge 256 metre tori!).

looks like Ener?

If you thought the world’s largest cocktail napkin was cool (it is a top search term for some odd reason on the iliveisl blog), wait till you see the incredibly amazing giant rotating donut (oh, such talent – how can one beaver have such creative gifts!) =p

Just in case – a torus is a donut shaped prim, so the talent to make one is . . . well, pretty nil! =D

First plans are to actually get there (could be a challenge for this beaver – where is Ener Hax to hold my paw?) =0

And then to create public use spaces just like we have in Second Life! As you may tell, I am a little excited (read: full on spaz mode engaged).

Hey, if you can’t enjoy what you do, then why do it!

i live in simulator lands earns it’s “s” today! =)

Stay tuned . . . .

*hmm, giant donut could be hollowed into a meeting space*

martini time sounds awefully tempting!

reposted from iliveisl’s blog and please note that this blog will be moving to a self-hosted WordPress blog soon

Easy analytic tool

As the driver behind the social networking strategy of the iliveisl estate (Second Life virtual real estate), I look at various analytic tools to measure what are the best “fits” for these efforts. The iliveisl estate has a presence in many social networks, including LinkedIn, Youtube, blip.tv, CafePress, Urban Dictionary, Threadless Tees, Gravatar, Ning networks, Google and Yahoo profiles, various Second Life forums, and so on.

An easy analytic tool to use is grader.com. It’s a nice and easy tool for benchmarking your efforts.

The relatively new Facebook Grader does not have a large dataset yet, but can sill be used to measure your growth from a week to week.

Here we see the Twitter grade for the account updated by Ener Hax, the spokesperson of the social campaign.  Secondly, the Facebook page of Ener Hax for the estate, and lastly the iliveisl blog.

Twitter and Facebook drive traffic to the blog. The blog posts automatically update the Twitter account and that updates the Facebook page.

Why does any of this matter?  How does it apply to eLearning?

Effective social networking is vital if you want to promote your educational efforts and share your lessons learned with the eLearning community. 

Individuals will post comments to our iliveisl blog posts on the Facebook wall and carry on a conversation with each other about our posts. That was a suprising and pleasant discovery.

Second Life keyboard shortcuts

Nice post by DreamWalker, our official scripter for our new venture into Reaction Grid, blogged a great iliveisl post on keyboard shortcuts in Second Life.

http://blog.iliveisl.com/second-life-keyboard-shortcuts/

by ::Prad Prathivi @ Amodica::'s photostream

Social networking for virtual endeavors

Me and my numbers. Actually, “our” numbers. And very nice Ener on your post about me pimping you out* (nice bikini btw). =D

iliveisl blog statistics dropped this week and I should have suspected a possible error on my part. We added Feedburner to our strategy this week as well as changing a few SEO and traffic plugins.

Since we look at multiple traffic indicators such as the stats in Flickr and Blip.tv, as well as things like grader.com, we feel pretty comfortable with the accuracy of any of those numbers. If traffic is a steady 1,000 visitors a day on the blog, you would also expect supporting stats for our sites that point to it to stay steady.

Some of those “organic” indicators are Facebook friend comment activity and Twitter reach (see below).

If blog traffic suddenly goes down and you have not changed your efforts (such as blogging frequency, content, authors) then digging into other stats are warranted. The iliveisl blog is hosted on the bullet-proof servers of Media Temple which come with Urchin statistics.

Once I pulled those numbers, all was right with the world (and actually higher than before the drop – what a geeky world I live in!).

So what does this have to do with Second Life?

Promoting ourselves is obvious, but we also encourage in-world businesses and venues to use the many free social networking tools out there to achieve greater success.

I do consulting for individuals and small businesses in the real world on social networking and use iliveisl as my “living” example. Ener does a great job in-world with encouraging residents to use these tools as well. You can see those efforts with some of the links in the iliveisl blog’s sidebar.

So be smart, don’t let social networking become a “time suck”, and have fun with it (maybe don’t get so obsessed with traffic numbers!). =)

nice chirping Ener!

so this and 4 cents will get you one snapshot isl!

* Look for a possible offering of virtual world space for meetings, functions, and eLearning providers. We host a few corporate meetings on the iliveisl estate for free. However, there is a need from some of our clients to have “tighter” virtual space that is more business-like and less expensive. Enter what Ener mentioned below – Reaction Grid . . . stay tuned.