Twitter and Second Life Mesh-up

Today I stumbled across a project that connects Second Life and Twitter called SLTweets. It enables Second Life users to create and send "tweets" within Second Life to twitter.com. While browsing in Second Life the tool appears on the top of the screen of the Second Life Client. It makes it very easy to send "awareness" information to other users. On their website it says:

There are a couple of others that exist, but they lacked the research-based features that we really wanted. For example, the ability to catalogue our finds, research and explore, geo tag, and share the information, on demand, with others who might have the same interests- or to not share it with everyone in the world.













I find that the tagging function makes this tool especially usable. The main use case depicts somebody visiting a place in SL with the urge to communicate its in-world experience to his friends in the real world. So far SLTweet support the following (Source: SLTweets):

• Save Tag's for places you have visited or people you have met. (Ex. /123 tag convention center, nice build, ITE)
• Save private Notes for places you visited, people you have met, shops or builds of interest, products, reminders or any other kind of personal note. (Ex. /123 note Great store, nice products, very low lag)
• Second Life location information is stored for each Tag and Note made from within Second Life enabling you to use our Users Area to view interactive SL Maps of your SL Tags and Notes.

I think within the scope of collaborative work in corporations this "SL-widget" really has potential when it comes to keeping the up-to-date about the work progress of every team member. Within the context of virtual worlds twitter makes sense as a tool to make this status information available to each member outside and inside the virtual platform.

Investments in Virtual Worlds in Q1 2008

The investments in the first quarter of 2008 amount to $ 184 Million (Virtualworldsmanagement) which seems a high number still compared to the investments from Okt. 2006 to 2007 which added up to about $ 1 Billion (VirtualWorldManagement), it is not as high as I would have expected.

Of course nearly all companies are based in California and most of them specialize in gaming or social networking. Second Life gets -like in the past- the biggest piece of cake.

Another interesting link I found was about the origin of second life registrations, where Western Europe comes with 44,5 percent even before North America (37,3 percent).