Virtual Goggles and carbon emissions

I meant to blog this a while back but never got round to it. Carbon Goggles is a novel experiment by Jim Purbrick of Linden Lab that allows people to tag in-world representations of RL objects in such a way that their carbon emission data (pulled dynamically from AMEE) is displayed floating over each object.

The project, which was initially developed during a 24 hour period at the Mashed '08 event in London) uses a HUD (Heads Up Display) that computes where the object is in your field of view, then positions the text to make it look as though it is floating over the object.

The video probably makes things clearer:


Carbon Goggles from Jim Purbrick on Vimeo.

Very clever.

I've been wondering about taking the underlying HUD visualisation software and using it to display Second Friends information (e.g. a RL name) over any avatar in your field of view who happens to be one of your Second Friends.

Twitter and Second Friends

Twitter is mildly borked right now which has interrupted the flow of tweet bubbles from my Second Friends Tweeters. In dealing with their performance problems, the Twitter folks seem to have done two things...

Firstly, they now require HTTP Basic Authentication for all GET requests against 'friends timeline' RSS feeds - up until recently these feeds were openly available to anyone AFAIK. This actually makes sense, and simply mirrors the access control imposed on the Twitter Web site, so I'm not complaining - but it took me a while to realise why my feed requests were always coming back empty.

Secondly, Twitter seems to be throttling back the number of requests that can be made against the RSS feed in any given period, serving an empty feed if you go over the limit. This is somewhat annoying, though understandable, and I think they've always done it to some extent. But the point at which throttling cuts in seems to happen very quickly now. More importantly, I'd prefer them to return some kind of HTTP error code rather than an empty feed - at least then it would be easier to take some kind of sensible action, like backing off for a few minutes.

Whatever... to get round this limitation I've introduced some server-side caching between my in-world 'tweeter' script and the Twitter feed itself (all access to the feed goes via a server-side Perl script in any case). This means that I should never hit the RSS feed more than once every 5 minutes or so - irrespective of how many people use the in-world tweeter.

Again, this is basically a good thing - and the fact I was having problems indicates I had implemented in a slightly sloppy way. Oh well, live and learn. In general, one of the things I'm finding with building SL / Web 2.0 mashups is that you need to think carefully about where HTTP requests are being made, how often they are happening, and what throttling is likely to cut in at what point. Otherwise, you tend to leave something chugging away all hunky dory and come back a few days later to find it malfunctioning in some way.

For most Twitter applications, a delay of up to 5 minutes before seeing a tweet would be unacceptable, but in the case of the Second Friends Tweeter, which is largely a gimmick, I think it is perfectly OK.

Second Friends reaches 1000

I've been AFK for a week or so, on RL holiday, which means I missed the 1000th Second Friends registration.

Looks like second friend number 1000 was Luciftias Neurocam who will be receiving a Second Friends t-shirt in honor of the occasion.

Yes, alright... I know that Second Friends isn't the biggest Social Network evar! But 1000 is a nice round number and deserves to be noticed in some form.

Second Friends tweeter now available

In general, I'm going to try and do better at making my in-world stuff available to other people. To that end, I've made my Second Friends Tweeter available.

This tool takes a modified RSS feed and turns it into a series of bubbles that get blown away in the SL wind.

Out of the box it works with the Second Friends Twitter stream (the latest tweets by people signed up to Second Friends and who have registered their Twitter account) - it could easily be made to work against any RSS feed. The server-side script that I use to process the RSS feed is available here.

Have fun!

Identity crisis?

Wagner James Au has an interesting blog post, Web 2.0 Is The Bridge Between 1st And 2nd Life Identity, suggesting that:

a tremendous level of Second Life activity really takes place within Web 2.0 systems which weren't made with the metaverse in mind. In this mesh of various Internet identities, we reveal different aspects of ourselves on different mediums, depending on the social circles who follow us there. It's a phenomenon we're only beginning to understand, one that Gartner's Adam Sarner dubbed "Generation V" and Botgirl Questi evocatively illustrated on her blog

I left a comment saying that when I recently introduced a limited level of Twitter support into the Second Friends Facebook application I left myself with a small, but very real, identity crisis.
The problem is that I tweet separately as both Andy Powell and Art Fossett and I couldn't work out which one I should link to my Second Friends profile.

It seems to me that the picture is going to get increasingly "confused", especially with expected growth in alternative virtual worlds, alts, etc. There is very little that I do with my first life online identity (email, blog, twitter, etc.) that I don't now also do with my second life online identity and I suspect that this is fairly typical. Art Fossett has a blog, an email account, a Twitter account, and several other outlets. He doesn't have a Facebook page, but only because I chose to surface that particular aspect of his online identity thru the Second Friends Facebook application.

As I join other virtual worlds I anticipate doing so as Art Fossett - at least, that is what I have done to date. I have other virtual world personas - but none of them feel as much a part of me as Art Fossett does. All of which leads one to conclude that Art Fossett is not simply Andy Powell's Second Life avatar but a more general persona which happens to surface most obviously in Second Life currently.

So, back to my dilema about which Twitter account to link to my Second Friends profile... in the end I decided to link my Art Fossett Twitter account to my Second Friends application, figuring that the application is really about linking my Second Life persona(s) to my real life Facebook page - there are other tools for linking in my first life tweets.

Insert cock up

I'm embarrassed :-(. I announced my recent improvements to Second Friends on the SLED list yesterday only to find out today that new registrations haven't been working for a while. Doh :-(

Note to self: when you add fields to a table in a MySQL database, make sure that you also change any code that uses 'insert' to add rows to the table. Otherwise you just get errors about the wrong number of fields and nothing gets updated.

Oh well. As Aldon Hynes noted when I admitted my mistake to the SLED list:

We use Second Life, we're used to backend database problems!

Lol.

Second Friends profile images

One of the original design features of Second Friends was that it would re-use people's in-world profile image as the image displayed on their Facebook profile and in their friends' 'My friends' list. The idea was that as little as possible of the Second Life profile information should be replicated in Facebook.

Linden Lab serves your in-world profile image on the Web at a URL of the form:

http://secondlife.com/services/user/small_image/...jpg

and I currently display this in the Second Friends part of people's Facebook profile.

Unfortunately, the images are served in the wrong aspect ratio and in a form that is not cachable by the browser. To make things worse, there is often a significant delay in the way they are served. I don't know if LL do this to discourage their use in external applications such as Second Friends but whatever the reasoning or rationale, the bottom line is that using them is unreliable.

I've therefore added a feature that allows people to add a URL of an image of their avatar to their Second Friends preferences. Go to the My preferences tab to make use of this. It's up to people to find themselves a place to host the image, but Flickr is an obvious choice.

Second Friends news

I've added a couple of new features to my Second Friends Facebook application...

Firstly, it now offers a My friends' friends feature, allowing you to grow your Second Friends social network by looking for friends of your friends.

Secondly, some limited support for Twitter has been added. If you have a Twitter account, you can now add details about it to Second Friends. This will result in your most recent tweet appearing next to your entry in your friends' My friends list. Similarly, as your friends add this feature, you will start to see their most recent tweets in your My friends list.

In due course, I plan to create an in-world object that will display your friends' tweets to you while you are in Second Life.

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.