InWorldz has been working on a new project recently called InWorldz InShape which is a new application that “reads data from the accelerometer on your smart phone to provide the InWorldz virtual world with data on your movements that let us connect your stationary walking, running, or biking in real life with your avatar”.
This sounds awesome for sure and it’s a good way to keep healthy regularly.
Watch the Demo Preview!
Today Linden Lab have published a new SL video showing many big improvements that the lab has introduced during 2013. The video runs for 57 seconds showing many new features and improvements. It’s a really good video for Second Life to highlight 2013 and everyone should watch this I think. I’m sure there will be more new features to come in late 2013 and next year in 2014. I guess we will have to wait and see.
(first 10 seconds)
(after 10 seconds to 56 seconds)
(40 seconds)
(44 seconds)
What SL improvements have you liked this year and what improvements do you want to see introduced in the near future ?
Today Linden Lab has announced SLShare on the official SL blog which is a brand new feature to share content with SL friends on Facebook. This may be a useful feature to have in the viewer instead of logging and sharing things directly from Facebook. SLShare is a “100% opt-in Viewer feature” to share updates, snapshots and check-in SL locations from in-world straight to the Facebook wall which sounds great. In the coming days/weeks this feature will be rolled out to all Second Life residents. Once it’s rolled out it comes with a opt-in feature with default privacy settings and a way of opting out again. This feature will be very similar to https://my.secondlife.com/ which has been very successful over the years.
Can I try this out now ?
SLShare isn’t yet available for everyone, but starting today, a certain percentage of users will begin to be able to access the feature, and we’ll soon rolling it out to everyone.
Check out the new video introduction by Torley Linden for more details…
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UPDATE: On the SL wiki release notes page there is now a download link to try out SLShare on v3.6.7 (281331).
Second Life Share Viewer
In this limited release viewer, we offer a 100% Opt-In way to share status updates, upload photos and check-in to locations in Second Life, to Facebook. Users access this feature via a new floater button found in “Me>>Toolbar Buttons…” called Facebook.
The new floater includes tabs to access the three features along with an “Account” tab to log in and/or connect SL to your Facebook account. You can access the Help page for this floater. For more information on the feature itself, read the Knowledge Base article.
Until this feature reaches the default Release viewer, users must be running this viewer for this feature to be used.
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My snapshots of the new SLShare feature today!
On the homepage of The Verge there is a new interesting article about Second Life written by Chris Stokel-Walker and so far there’s been 157 comments which ranges in views. Most are talking about the layout choices and how they don’t like SL. However the other half are positive and are supporting Second Life. The actual article looks at Second Life during the past ten years mentioning stats and the community that still exists today.
Here are the parts that I found interesting in the article ..
You might not have heard a peep about it since the halcyon days of 2006, but that doesn’t mean Second Life has gone away. Far from it: this past June it celebrated its 10th birthday, and it is still a strong community. A million active users still log on and inhabit the world every month, and 13,000 newbies drop into the community every day to see what Second Life is about. I was one of them, and I found out that just because Second Life is no longer under the glare of the media’s spotlight, it doesn’t mean the culture inside the petri dish isn’t still growing.
In Linden Lab’s vast experiment, the end has no end
When mainstream media outlets touched down in Second Life seven years ago they tended to focus on the strangeness of it all. People were having sex through a game and dressing up as foxes and kittens. The reality, says Tom Boellstorff, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, is more prosaic: “Humans already live many different kinds of life: online is just one more of those kinds of lives.”
“You can do anything in Second Life,” Boellstorff continues, his voice rising in a lilt. “You can do crazy stuff. You can be a ball of light or you can be 500 feet tall, or you can be a child, or a dog, or whatever.”
“We thought of Second Life as complementing your first life,” Hunter Walk, one of the original Linden Lab team members working on the universe from its launch, tells me. It was conceived as a space that gave you a set of choices that were missing from reality. “In your first life you don’t necessarily get to fly. Here you can fly. In your first life you can’t choose what you look like. Here you can choose what you look like — and it’s malleable.”
People come to the Second Life universe for different reasons: some go there to escape their reality and to stretch the boundaries of their lives in ways forbidden by the constraints of their bodies or the norms of society. Some go to meet friends and family; there are some who want to create buildings, paintings, and whole new worlds. And some — big companies and small entrepreneurs — hope to make a living.
Second Life has survived its first 10 years, but every society rises and — inevitably — falls. So what of Linden Lab’s creation? Will people still be living Second Lives in 2023?
What are your views on this article and do you think Second Life will be still online in ten years time ?
Drax recently shared The Drax Files: Episode 11 featuring Dwarfins which is absolutely brilliant and very cute. The episode runs for five minutes and I have to admit that I don’t know either about them so it was good to learn something different in Second Life. Every month Drax creates exciting different ideas for his Drax Files series. It’s really worth subscribing to The Drax Files channel because it’s genius.
Watch The Drax Files: Episode 11 below
Watch previous episodes (1-10) of The Drax Files here. One thing that I would love for Drax to produce is machinimas from OpenSim grids which I’m sure would be a good thing to do. In the mean time I really do love the new episodes of this current season. 😀
Daniel Voyager 