Second Friends security bug - NOT!

At the virtual worlds session in the recent JISC CETIS conference it became clear that some people were of the opinion that Second Friends, my Second Life Facebook application, had a serious security flaw.

This is absolutely not the case and stems, I think, from a problem with another similarly named application (but not Second Life Link either!).

Just setting the record straight...

Second Friends reaches 100

Second Friends has reached its 100th member - i.e. 100 people have successfully added the Second Friends application in Facebook and gone in-world to click on the SF kiosk on Eduserv Island and get their secret key.

To honor this landmark, I've given the 100th member, Chica Digital, a small token of my appreciation - L$500 and an exclusive (well, almost exclusive) t-shirt.

OK, I know it isn't much. I'll work on something better for the 1000th member.

Second Friends

I've recently been working on a Facebook application called Second Friends with the intention of giving people a way of integrating a view of their Second Lives into their Facebook profile.

Thus far, Second Friends is pretty simple. To use it, simply install the application in Facebook, then go in-world to Eduserv Island and touch the Second Friends kiosk. This will give you a secret key. Finally enter your avatar name and the secret key into the Second Friends form in Facebook.

Voila. Your avatar name and image (assuming that you have a profile image in Second Life) will be displayed on your Facebook profile.

Click on the 'My Friends' tab in the application to add a list of all your Facebook friends that are in Second Life (and that have installed the application) to your profile.

That's about it so far.

For future reference, I'm also working on a couple of extra features - neither of which is quite ready yet. Firstly, I want to provide a way of updating your Second Friends 'status' (just like the more general Facebook status but specific to Second Life) from within Second Life. Secondly, I want to allow people to create Second Life notes that can be added to your profile alongside the notes created by your friends. At the moment I'm leaning towards doing this by building on the existing BlogHud facility.

UK Second Life Educators Facebook group

Despite my general mistrust of Facebook groups I've taken the liberty of creating a UK Second Life Educators group.

Please feel free join if you are in the UK and interested in the use of SL in education.