Second Life Profiles to Have Social Networking

Linden Lab has announced that MySpace is being integrated to SL SL user profiles will have a web tab that you can link a personal homepage.

Hi, Kelly!

So, this means another effort to tear down of the artificial barriers between Second Life and the rest of the world. Optional, of course, but the broader picture is the same: SL is not an island to itself, it's part of the Metaverse / Internet.

There are, of course, larger ramifications.

What if MySpace people decide (realize) that it's boring to just sit and browse profiles on the web, and it's much more fun to do it while in a virtual world? Would they then flock to SL, start putting slurls in their MySpace pages, and make the border between MySpace and SL virtually ... virtual?

Oh, I think so, my friends. But how do we sell it to the world?

• llCreateWindow, llOpenWindow and llCloseWindow - allow us scripters to create ways to pop open new, HTML-enabled windows in SL that will allow easy hyperlinking and interfaces.
• Improve SL's overall usability - the attractive thing to many people about MySpace is how easy it is to use. We need to learn more of that and integrate it more into SL to really drive the masses here.
• SL to VRML/X3D standards - allow some way for SL creations to be easily rendered to an online-friendly format, permissions followed. This way, users could have 3-D rendered snippets of their builds on their MySpace pages. We can do it the hard way anyway with free software, so we may as well have a permissive-friendly way to do it.
  
• Linden Lab needs to see the potential and start endorsing the use this way. And Kelly is a great start. Who's next? Torley, I'd imagine?

Oh, and an in-world HTML tool wouldn't hurt, neither, but, hey, we can dream, right?

*grin*