Big red button

There are a couple of big red buttons on Eduserv Island, which are there so that people visiting the island can attract our attention when we are not in-world.

The buttons work, in the sense that an email is sent to us every time someone presses the button.

The buttons don't work, in the sense that we often don't respond. I apologise for that.

Part of the problem is that I have to shut down MS-Office before running the SL client, then wait for SL to start, then find my way to the right place on Eduserv Island. 9 times out of 10 I'm too late and have missed whoever it was pressing the button. I usually end up sending them some kind of lame IM apology :-(. Lately I've given up even doing that much.

My plan is to replace the big red buttons with TwitterBots - in-world devices that will twitter direct to us, allowing us to converse with visitors to the island even when we are not in-world - a kind of SL/RL intercom.

Of course, I/we reserve the right to ignore you via twitter as well! :-)

TwitterBot

I spent some time over the weekend building a TwitterBot, an object that relays any chat it hears on to Twitter and that passes any tweets targeted at it back into Second Life.

You can see the resulting object in the SLashup area on Eduserv Island.

I have a couple more bits of work to do on the code, making it configure itself from a notecard and allowing people to register their Twitter account names with it, then I'll make it all freely available.

To track messages sent from the current TwitterBot on Eduserv Island, you need to follow 'eduservisland' in Twitter. Note that we'll be using this to feed out the discussion in the symposium follow-up meeting to Twitter later today. Again, this will be very experimental.