Lindens announced SLim the other day:
"SLim significantly lowers the barriers between virtual world and real world communication and ensures that Second Life users will always be able to connect to friends, regardless of location or broadband connection. SLim is also a compelling tool for the Second Life enterprise offering, which will enable employees to communicate and collaborate with colleagues meeting inworld without having the Second Life application running.
It looks also a little like, well we gotta announce something at the conference. We use Skype mainly for voice and chat these days as a collaboration tool. It seems that Lindens have reacted to There.com new features announcement and announced this feature at the VW conference in LA. So is LL chasing the "web community" world or the "virtual world" market--or are they really the same thing now?
It is definately a sorta handy thing, but will it just make the virtual world less immersive? Will a freer chat to friends remove another reason to actually log-on? I still think that what makes the virtual world most interesting is the shared experience, so having some person on voice or chat saying "what are you lookin" all the time seems sorta annoying. "Yes, grandma I am dressed like a fox and standing on a giant floating pryamid--really. You should check it out!"
But Vivox is also taking this a step further--by open sourcing the SL voice client and other stuff with their Open Initiative according to their release on business wire "The Vivox Open Initiative will be rolled out in phases. In the first phase, launching today, Vivox will provide the object code for SL Voice, the Second Life voice chat client. By the end of the year, Vivox will open APIs to third party technology providers. Soon thereafter, Vivox will open up source code to the client side SDK."
What might this all mean? Er...more chatting more easy? Chance to be in Open Sim and chat to SL and iPhone friends at same time? Can we build smarter voice responses and engineer them back into the SL client (eek). Seems more like random noise and another example of the principle of universe expansion--this time hitting the metaverse and spreading out the energy of the SL online community.
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Comments
I don't think this is a
Sat, 09/06/2008 - 04:20 — Pavig LokI don't think this is a reaction to there.com finally rationalizing their product a bit - it's worth noting what else is going on in the industry at the moment that might have prompted the rush announcement (more on that later). The reason it came out now is the http://www.virtualworldsexpo.com/ virtual worlds expo... and literally hundreds of announcements, major and minor, have popped up this week.
SLim is only one of THREE serious communications plugins to the SL/opensim environment which were announced on the same day this week. Rivers Run Red had their own enterprize communications and collaboration solution ( http://riversrunred.com/immersive-workspaces/ ). IBM also announced Lotus Sametime integration with Opensim and later the SL grid ( http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/09/ibm-takes-lotus.html ). So chat, whiteboarding and even screen sharing are on the way to hitting SL, using standards which are open enough that they may actually be useful :P
Vivox's voice and communications platform is wider than SL. It's currently used in several other games. What we saw this week was the tip of the iceberg for their platform - as they plan to opensource and allow some of that interoperability which has made developing "use cases" outside the limited SL toolkit difficult. The opening up of the software means we may be able to communicate between different world platforms some day too. Woot!
You'll hear some bad press about it this week as it was rushed to launch to meet the virtual worlds expo deadline. SLim in it's current form is a tech demo - and only works in the laboratory. You can communicate with friends on the grid with it, but it's currently clunky, and you can only communicate with folk using the absolute latest beta client. Most of your SL friends you won't be able to contact... yet.
Oh well... it's good to see the SL platform starting to open up properly. Maybe we'll see much stronger tools available to us before the year is out. Here's hoping.
Personally, I agree that the
Sat, 09/06/2008 - 12:50 — Jessy Harrington (not verified)Personally, I agree that the "shared experience" is important however I don't think this removes that aspect necessarily. Of course it will vary for the individual based on how the individual puts it to use.
What I see though..is a means of communicating when the Second Life viewer simply isn't an option like at work hehe...or any other place where you can't get good enough bandwidth temporarily to fire up sl or if you just want to hop on for a quick second to send someone a messege without the hassle of emailing via some offline messege.
Just my two cents.
XOXO
And what about SLOOG? (only
Sat, 09/06/2008 - 19:26 — Vint FalkenAnd what about SLOOG? (only heard rumours for now)
SLOOG is social bookmarking
Sat, 09/06/2008 - 19:31 — Pavig LokSLOOG is social bookmarking for SL and about a year old... (want a sloog install just search out their office and grab a kiosk).
SLOOG became popular with several SL communities but particularly the education community, which spawned salamander - an edu enspired social bookmarking system which fed into a wiki system.
Now there's several SLOOG derivatives. Sloog is actually pretty good - but as it requires a hud to use hasn't been as popular as we might wish it was. SLOOG links are early adopter links (easily gamed? maybe not so much... but not easily known).
SLOOG is deffinitely worth a try tho if you're interested.
There's also Second Messenger
Sun, 09/07/2008 - 03:17 — Jessy Harrington (not verified)There's also Second Messenger (www.roccoangeloni.it/sm/index.php ), which I've been using for a long while and seems to combine both functionality and lower resource usage. It also has a bunch of handy features.
If you really want to cut down even lower on the resource usage and don't mind giving up some of the features... there are other options like sl messenger, and I'm sure many more being developed as we speak.
So it makes me wonder why SLim and why now with so many other similar options already available ?
XOXO
The objective behind SLim is
Sun, 09/07/2008 - 09:00 — Pavig LokThe objective behind SLim is to shift out many of the communication tools used in the SL client to allow them to plug in to non linden systems. The most important non-linden system at the moment is opensim, but there are plenty of others with potential opened up by having SLim available.
Theoretically the infrastructure which supports SLim could be used to create all sorts of gateways in and out of SL technology worlds. One that's been on the cards for several years but never went public is jabber protocol support. Jabber is the IM protocol used by google talk. So SLim is less about SLim itself, and more about tuning up the grid to allow the communication infrastructure to support more channels in and out.
Previously a client that communicated with people in SL had to act very much like the full SL client to connect to the grid. Second Messenger and sleek are effectively (in some ways) just a SL client without the graphics and most of the functionality. That made for some non-optimal design decisions, and irritating quirks you don't want in an IM system. SLim is a proper IM client (of sorts) so does not need so many of the baggage features and can be more robust.
They've had to clean up the grid in order to allow this to happen, and recent updates to the server and firstlook client software has allowed for this cut down communications system. There's a long way to go yet, but it's a good start.
Oopz, I ment Sloodle ... from
Sun, 09/07/2008 - 18:34 — Vint FalkenOopz, I ment Sloodle ... from the avastar:
The 'Sloodle Browser', from the the University of the West of Scotland, is a collaborative tool which allows groups of users in Second Life to finally interact with web pages. It will be unveiled at the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, Florida on September 7.
Currently, web pages viewed in-world are non-interactive as users are unable to click on links. But Sloodle uses a 'Virtual Mouse' which can be shared by a number of users as they discuss web content and follow links as if they were using a regular browser. It also allows users to enter text into forms on web pages.
But nvm, as that's obviously not about 'light weight IM'ing for SL'. Sorry!
I think one of the upsides
Sun, 09/07/2008 - 22:43 — RightAsRain RimbaudI think one of the upsides on SLim is that Linden should still maintain the password log-in only--meaning that a third party would not see your password. Some of the other clients and services always can be worrying about security--if you don't know the publisher it is of course possible to have your password details transmitted (rather easily as well) to someone who could then access your account. I would imagine that this would get some publicity at least and I have not yet heard of anyone getting ripped off yet. But accidents can happen--like here in the UK when someone sent bank account information for millions of people out on DVDs and that got stolen! Bottom line: always know what service your a logging into with your SL id.
Good point RR ... and on that
Tue, 09/09/2008 - 13:14 — Jessy Harrington (not verified)Good point RR ... and on that note...I'm looking forward to SLim.
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o.o
XOXO
anyone using SLim? Wonder
Sun, 10/19/2008 - 22:40 — RightAsRain Rimbaudanyone using SLim? Wonder what "bombshells" are gonna be announced this week as the Virtual World conference in London opens tomorrow.
SLim really was a prototype
Mon, 10/20/2008 - 05:54 — Pavig LokSLim really was a prototype on "launch" - it wasn't finished, and they only leaked it out to have something to handwave at for the last virtual worlds conf. The backbone is there but the UI hasn't been written really (just polished from the engineering version) so we won't see movement on SLim I think till viviox gets around to their part of the bargain opening up the apis and opensourcing their bits (which should happen by the end of the year.)
I'd expect small handwaves at SLim this virtual worlds conference, but my strong feeling is this time the lindies will be announcing something larger on the business model side rather than the tech model side this time around.
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