Gridmarker. a slick, addictive new search service for Second Life aims to not only solve the existing problem of Search and social discovery in the Metaverse, but to provide developers with a backbone API for use in their own objects inworld as well as an open source HUD to demonstrate the API's capabilities.
When Sebastian Pedro, who in real life is a research assistant in the brain imaging lab at Columbia University, first told me about Gridmarker, my initial reaction was "Why do we need another social bookmarking app when we already have Sloog?" The answer it seems is simple: Gridmarker is a more comprehensive service. It offers better customization in the form of titles, comments and tags per bookmark and as a result, at least according to Sebastian, is "better prepared for long term growth.". Part of the long term plan is to provide an Amazon-style recommendation engine, "people who visited this spot also visited..." as well as other applications built on the data collected in the folksonomy of user gridmarks.
It's all about the RSS...
Right now though, Gridmarker already has a stack of great features. There are all kinds of feeds to choose from: all gridmarks, gridmarks from a specific user, gridmarks from your watchlist, gridmarks featuring a specific tag, gridmarks from a specific user featuring a specific tag, the list goes on... here are a couple of uses I can think of right off the top of my head for these highly specific feeds:
- Layout a path through a region, or series of regions. Like a guided tour, complete with notes (the comments). You could fairly easily build an object inworld to follow this trail, and indeed I was talking to another developer today about just such an app.
- Drop gridmarks tagged as "metaversed" if you want me to take a look at something (build, service, business etc..). Im subscribed to the feed, and I'd be thrilled to find something in my reader put there for me :)
Watchlists are also potentially very powerful. Like some of the RSS feeds, they do rely on Gridmarker becoming a LOT more popular, but they could be killer. Like del.icio.us (and the backend of Gridmarker is actually built on an open source version of Delicious called Scuttle), you can add users to a collective watchlist, and then subscribe to the feed, giving you a stream of gridmarks from people you find interesting.
Another neat feature is resolution control. Gridmarker, like Sloog, attempts to measure the popularity of an area by counting the amount of times it's been tagged. The difference here is that Gridmarker allows users to increase the range of the search in meters, so you can see other gridmarks in either a very localized space, or a much wider area.
So how will Gridmarker make money? For now Sebastian tells me he's not exactly sure what solution he'll settle on, as increased usage will mean increased costs and the project will have to make money eventually. He did state that any monetary plans in the future would not include any variation on the theme of premium or paid memberships as this would discourage the most import component of the model, the influx of data.
Gridmarker is one of the better apps I've seen recently. It's fairly polished, and has serious potential. In fact, I'd tip it as a major contender in the race to provide better Search within Second Life -- whether it can gain enough traction with users however, remains to be seen.
If you want to follow my Gridmarked hops around the Metaverse, see here on my Gridmarks page, and if you'd like to drop something in my virtual inbox, just tag it as "metaversed", i'd love to see where you think I should be visiting!
